Bill Totten's Weblog

Sayonara

2011-02-22T18:17:00.003+09:00

I have moved this blog to http://billtotten.wordpress.com/.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but I hope you will join me at this new address.

Bill Totten

The Coming Misery ...

2011-02-17T09:25:00.001+09:00

... That Big Oil Discusses Behind Closed Doors

by Steve LeVine

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/ (February 14 2011)

http://www.countercurrents.org/ (February 15 2011)

When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

Today, Shell returned with an update {1}. The company said that the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the slide it predicted, but that the clock has begun ticking again. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

In recent weeks, we've heard almost identical energy-consumption projections from ExxonMobil {2}, BP {3} and now Shell: The world will use about forty percent more energy by 2030. The difference is that Exxon and BP more or less just toss out the numbers, while Shell suggests that one might consider running for the hills, oh, sometime around 2016 or 2017 before everyone else shows up. You all can plan to return home around 2030, Shell has said, when the world has come to its senses and adopted all the efficiency and price-signal mechanisms that some forward-thinkers are suggesting now.

There is some optimism in the report, such as descriptions of actions by nations like Japan and Norway and companies like Wal-Mart to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But the United States, for example, has not reversed energy-use practices that helped lead to the Shell scenario, the company says.

I myself tend to believe that, although it looks otherwise at the moment, nations will not put themselves in the collective position of unhappiness described by Shell. For example, there will be an even greater than projected shift to plentiful natural gas, thus tempering Shell's projections. Yet, it's worth reading on to the jump for more about the reports. Meanwhile, for the visual-minded, here is Shell's glossy video presentation {4}.

Shell's 2008 and 2011 reports actually contain two scenarios. The one described above, called "Scramble", is what it projects will happen if the world continues on its current course. A more optimistic version, called "Blueprints", includes a squeeze but far less despair because the world acts to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Shell's latest, 78-page report confirms its previous finding that in just four years, our usual sources of fuel are not going to meet growing global demand, so that there is going to be much switching to dirty coal, plus more use of agricultural-based biofuels.

Specifically, Shell foresees total energy demand - including fuel for transportation, manufacturing, electricity, heat, and so on - rising to the equivalent of about 317 million barrels of oil a day, about 22 percent higher than the approximately 259 million barrels a day consumed last year. In 2030, the number rises another twelve percent, to 358 million barrels a day, in Shell's scenario.

As the earlier report described what happens next, that's not going to be enough energy either, so:

governments react with draconian measures - such as steep and sudden domestic price rises or severe restrictions on personal mobility with accompanying disruptions in value chains and significant economic dislocations. By 2020, the repetition of this volatile three-step pattern in many areas of the energy economy results in a temporary global economic slowdown ... Although change must and does occur, the turnaround takes a decade because large-scale transformations of the energy system are required.

The 2008 report was also interesting in describing the geopolitical result - that "major resource holders are increasingly the rule makers rather than the rule takers. They use their growing prominence in the world to influence international policies, particularly when it comes to matters they insist are internal such as human rights and democratic governance." In other words, no Egypts or Tunisias in the scarce-energy age. No one will object, Shell said, because they will need sweetheart deals with the energy-producing countries in order to obtain what they can and "do not want to rock the energy boat they have just managed to board".

The new report suggests that all is not lost - there are signs, if slow ones, of attention to climate change. Whatever the case, Shell sticks with its prediction that eventually - after about a decade of misery - people come around and decide to act:

High domestic prices and exceptionally demanding standards imposed by governments provoke significant advances in energy efficiency. Eventually, locally developed alternative supplies - biofuels, wind, and thermal solar - also contribute on a much greater scale than before. By 2030, healthy economic growth is restored, with particular vibrancy in the new energy sector that has received a massive stimulus to innovation through this difficult period.

Links:

{1} http://www-static.shell.com/static/aboutshell/downloads/aboutshell/signals_signposts.pdf

{2} http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/files/corporate/energy_outlook_slides.pdf

{3} http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2010_downloads/2030_energy_outlook_booklet.pdf

{4} http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yc5t5xro7RA

http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm

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

Demented Democracy

2011-02-16T09:25:00.001+09:00

by John Kozy

Global Research (February 04 2011)

Ah, democracy, rule by the people, the promised path to just government and the end of tyranny. What ever happened to it?

Finian Cunningham writes,

From 1945 to 1997, there was at least the semblance that the British Labour Party in particular represented the interests of the working and lower middle classes. But under the 'reforming' leadership of Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, 'New Labour' has become indistinguishable from the other main parties in terms of slavishly fawning over big business and the wealthy elite. Prior to the 1997 election, which brought Labour to government, one senior Conservative smugly noted that, in terms of economic policy, there was 'not a cigarette paper between' the Thatcherite Tory Party and Blair's New Labour.

In America, this has been the reality for decades. How many times have the people had to choose between the least evil of two candidates? America has but one political party - the Republicrat.

A recent report in the Guardian goes,

While the US and Britain slide towards oligarchy, the forced elections in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought no good. The west's proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to 'nation-build' these states and hence 'defeat terror'. When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: 'It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote'.

But democracy has taken an even more sinister turn - fraud and the rejection of results.

When Hamas won the election in the Gaza Strip by a large majority the results were rejected by Fatah and the western nations that had previously advocated that very election and had agreed to abide by the result.

The AP reported that

Hassan Turabi, the leader of the Islamic Popular Congress Party, said ... his group would reject the results of [the] vote [in the Sudan] and challenge them in court ... Election observers say the vote fell short of international standards.

The BBC writing on Iran's last election reported that

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ... won some 62.6% of the vote in an election marked by a high turnout of 85%, official figures show. Supporters of pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have cried foul and clashed with riot police in Tehran, despite a ban on public protests.

It was widely reported that the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan was characterized by lack of security, low voter turnout and widespread ballot stuffing, intimidation, and other electoral fraud. Two months later, under heavy US and ally pressure, a second round run-off vote between incumbent President Hamid Karzai and his main rival Abdullah Abdullah was announced for November 7 2009. However, Abdullah announced that he would no longer be participating in the run-off because his demands for changes in the electoral commission had not been met, and a "transparent election is not possible".

When former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiyya list won the election in Iraq by two seats, Nouri Maliki mounted a legal challenge and suggested that six of the winning candidates should be disqualified because of alleged ties to the former Baath government.

And now Paul Craig Roberts writes,

The hypocrisy of the US government is yet again demonstrated in full bore force. The US government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, laid waste to much of the countries including entire villages and towns, and massacred untold numbers of civilians in order "to bring democracy" to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now after days of Egyptians in the streets demanding 'Mubarak must go', the US government remains aligned with its puppet Egyptian ruler, even suggesting that Mubarak, after running a police state for three decades, is the appropriate person to implement democracy in Egypt.

What is one to conclude from all of this? Is it that democracy is wonderful so long as those already in power remain there?

This democratic dementia is the result of a long term trend.

Aristotle, one of the world's deepest thinkers, is often blamed for defining mankind as rational even though he never did. He did, however, consider mankind as rational, and he used that notion in an example when writing about definition, which is, I suspect, the source of the misbelief.

That Aristotle chose to use the word man in this context suggests that the notion of mankind as rational was quite common in classical Greece, so common that no one would question it and sidetrack the discussion about definition. After all, Aristotle was a student of Plato's and Plato's Dialogues provide us with a model of a rational man - Socrates. But most of the characters in the Dialogues are not rational to the extent that Socrates is. They are, however, persuadable when presented with evidence and logical argument. And I suspect that that's what Aristotle means when he writes, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that human beings have a rational principle; he means that human beings are persuadable.

The Greek notion of rationality, however, was quite different from ours. In the phrase "zoon logikon" (animal-rational) "logikon" is not exactly what we mean by "rational". That term, to the Greeks, refers to the power to think and other attributes needed to distinguish humans from all other animals. At least one of these attributes is believing, as, for instance, in the statement man is a believing animal. So to the Greeks, a person whose mind is cluttered with beliefs would be a zoon logikon. The Greeks would have distinguished such a person from a logical person, and at least Plato and Aristotle valued a logical person more highly than the merely rational. Not so today!

Today, at least in America, beliefs, which are often merely unsupportable opinions, seem to be valued higher than knowledge which is based on evidence and supported by logic. So, in a sense, creedal man has replaced rational man. Belief has come to trump knowledge. Mankind has become creedal, ideological.

Ideological groups, however, consist of true believers who cannot be persuaded. When an ideology is adopted, it is as though evidence and logic are no longer needed. The ideology contains an answer to every question, a solution to every problem. Evidence, logic, even truth become irrelevant.

In doing so, however, mankind has divided itself into impersuasible groups that clash with each other. Ordinarily, people consider such groups to be religious. Where their ideologies differ, for instance, Moslems and Christians will never agree. People holding incompatible notions cannot agree. Sooner or later, the result is either a religious war or total separation. But antagonistic groups arise everywhere ideology is used to guide human behavior. Capitalists and Socialists will never agree; Capitalism and Socialism are incompatible ideologies. Neither will Democrats (who truly represent the people) and Republicans (who represent the commercial class) or environmentalists and exploitationists. Every ideology becomes a religion, and every religion has its own solution to every problem. Because mankind has abandoned knowledge for belief, peace on earth has become an impossible dream.

Even logical enterprises like science have become creeds. Just as Christians believe that the second coming will solve all of mankind's problems, many now believe that technology will. But no one knows that; it's a mere belief. When the results of technology are examined, it becomes obvious that technology is at least as harmful as it is beneficial. It, after all, has given mankind weapons of massive destruction which may be used to annihilate everyone. It has also given mankind the means that enable governments to watch everyone. Technology has provided governments with totalitarian tools that are more effective than any mankind has previously known.

Plato and Aristotle surely must have known how important belief was even in the minds of their fellow Greeks and the deleterious effects of it. So, both Plato and Aristotle sought to replace belief in people's minds with knowledge which is what every Platonic dialog does. Plato and Aristotle knew that only when mankind adopts evidence and logic can people become persuasible, and only persuasion can remove the ideological conflicts that divide mankind into antagonistic groups.

Recently, Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair debated the question, Can religion be a force for good in the world? On the one hand, Hitchens stated that we don't need divine permission to know what good action is, but he also stated that we can't rely on people to be innately good. So then what standard do we rely on? He never tells us.

Blair, on the other hand, argued that we shouldn't blame religion solely for the world's problems. So then, what is it about human nature that causes some people, in the name of religious and political systems, to do bad things? This question is also never answered.

Blair admitted that some people have committed evil in the name of religion, but this has been completely outweighed by its goods. Hitchens continually denounced religion as fostering a mentality that makes "good people do unkind things".

The question debated was never resolved because both debaters argue from their beliefs. Each debater talks past the other. But the most interesting part of the debate came when instead of making a closing statement, Blair and Hitchens decided to take one last question: 'Which of your opponent's arguments do you find most convincing?'

Blair answered first. "I think that the most convincing argument is - and the argument that people of faith have got to deal with is actually the argument Christopher has just made - which is that the bad that is done in the name of religion is intrinsically grounded in the scripture of religion. That is the single most difficult argument." He must have had in mind the Torah's exhortations to exterminate whole nations, men, women and children and other similar passages.

Hitchens said: "The remark Tony made that I most agreed with this evening, I'll just hope that doesn't sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no means, as it were, automatically be okay."

In the end, Blair recognized that religious ideologies in the form of scripture contain evil aspects. Hitchens, on the other hand, admits that the elimination of religion alone will not make mankind good.

Both, of course, are true, but both also fail to see that the elimination of belief and its replacement by truth arrived at by evidence and logical argument is the only way to resolve the question, for otherwise, neither side can persuade the other. Without the willingness of people to accept only logical evidence based on fact or agreed upon assumptions, no one will ever persuade anyone of anything. It is this unwillingness based on unquestionable ideologies that makes persuasion impossible.

The topic of this debate could just as well have been either of the following two: Can belief be a force for good in the world? Can ideology be a force for good in the world? And the answer to the original and these two is no. Only knowledge sought and applied in moral ways can effectively be a force for good in the world.

Recently, members of Congress and the President have been at odds over compromising which seems difficult to achieve. The Republicans are willing to accept something the Democrats want only if the Republicans get all of what they want, which is a paradigm case of an ideological conflict. Nothing good can come of it. But nothing good can come from compromise either. Combining some of the beliefs derived from two antagonistic ideologies always results in unworkable policies. For instance, when the right opposes social programs that the left advocates and a compromise occurs in which the right accepts some limited social programs and the left accepts the limitations, the result is inadequate and ineffective policy. The same is true of most of the social problems that afflict America today. All attempted solutions are compromised into ineffectiveness. This won't change until the ideologies are abandoned and problem solving relies on evidence and logic. In all cases religion, in the wide sense of ideology, can never improve mankind's condition.

This addiction to opinion, each person being entitled to his own, and the unwarranted notion that those who fight for their beliefs are "principled" is why democracies teeter between antagonistic belief systems and are unable to resolve any social problems. Each party strives to repeal the policies enacted by the other which paralyzes the political process. The problem is worldwide. Democracy itself is falling into this ideological abyss. When elections are held the losers now routinely reject the outcome yelling "fraud"! Often it leads to demonstrations and violence. When people reject the grounds for persuasion, conflict is the inevitable result. Democracy cannot function when people are not persuasible.

_____

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the US Army during the Korean War, he spent twenty years as a university professor and another twenty years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

To become a Member of Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=section&sectionName=membership

The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.

For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23061

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

Gangs of America

2011-02-15T17:58:00.000+09:00

The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of America

by Ted Nace

Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2003, 2005)

http://www.amazon.com/Gangs-America-Corporate-Disabling-Democracy/dp/1576753190

Chapter Seven. Superpowers: The Corporation Acquires Nine Powerful Attributes (1860-1900)

For better or for worse, we human beings are stuck with the attributes that nature gave us. That doesn't mean we can't imagine new ones - after all, isn't that what comic books are all about? Consider the following top ten items from a Web site entitled "The Top 47 Super Powers You Wish You Had" (www.keepersoflists.org):

1. X-ray vision
2. Invisibility
3. Telepathy
4. Ability to mute people on command
5. Ability to teleport
6. Power to freeze time
7. Ability to fly
8. Superstrength
9. Ability to change the weather
10. Power to make telemarketers quit calling my house

But corporations aren't like us. Because their powers are determined by laws, not by nature, it is possible to engineer them with all sorts of qualities, including some attributes outside the realm of human possibility. In theory, that programming can go either way: society can make corporations stronger by removing restraints and adding new legal powers, or it can make them weaker by doing the reverse. The key lesson is this: corporations are only as powerful as they are legally designed to be.

As the previous chapters described, the engineers of the American political system deliberately created a framework of laws to keep corporations politically weak. That framework was subsequently undermined by the ingenious maneuvers of Tom Scott and other businessmen, lawyers, and sympathetic legislators. So extensive were the changes in the legal framework that the corporation of 1900 was quite different from the corporation of 1860. This chapter summarizes that transformation. As shorthand, I'll call the corporate institution that existed before the Civil War the classic corporation. And I'll call the corporation that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century the modern corporation. Table 7.1 compares these two institutional forms.

Table 7.1 Differences Between the Classic Corporation (Before 1860) and the Modern Corporation (After 1900)

ATTRIBUTE	CLASSIC CORPORATION	MODERN CORPORATION
Birth	Difficult:requires a custom charter issued by a state legislature	Easy: general incorporation charter allows automatic chartering



Life span	Limited terms	No limits

"Shape- shifting"	Corporations not allowed to own stock in other companies; restricted to activities specified in charter	Corporations free to pursue acquisitions and spin-offs




Mobility	Usually restricted to home state	No restrictions
Mobility	Usually restricted to home state	No restrictions

Adaptability	Restricted to activities specified in charter	Allowed to pursue multiple specified lines of business and initiate or acquire new ones at company's discretion





"Conscience"	Actions constrained by shareholder liability and by threat of charter revocation	Fewer constraints due to limited liability, disuse of charter revocation, and tort reforms




"Will"	Managerial action hampered by legal status of minority shareholders and of corporate agents	Legal revisions enable consolidation of management's power




Size	Limited by charter restrictions	Asset limits removed; antitrust laws generally not effective



Constitutional rights	Functional only	Steady acquisition of constitutional rights
Constitutional rights	Functional only	Steady acquisition of constitutional rights

As the table shows, the differences are extensive and highly significant. Indeed, they may be likened to the differences between Star Wars' C-3P0, the fussy, awkward, highly specialized droid who possesses excellent manners but little else, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, a more robust, more focused, faster, more adaptable being.

Change #l: Creating Corporations Gets Easier

By 1902, anyone in the United States could receive a corporate charter merely by filing some papers with the state. The new system was a dramatic change from the incorporation system that existed prior to the Civil War, when charters required specific legislative approval and many contained special provisions unique to that entity.

This new system of automatic approval for new corporate charters, known as general incorporation, had actually first been introduced in the late 1700s as a means to allow churches to receive charters without the need to seek specific approval from the state legislature. The goal was to let churches enjoy the functional benefits provided by corporate ownership of land and property while at the same time avoiding the potential impingement on religious freedom that might have resulted if church charters were subject to the political process.

In 1811, the first general incorporation statute was passed by the state of New York for certain types of business corporations, including manufacturing, textiles, glass, metals, and paint. It allowed companies with capital of up to $100,000 to be automatically incorporated for a life span of up to twenty years. In 1846, New York offered general incorporation to all companies. (See Table 7.2.) But for decades, charters issued under general incorporation laws continued to contain a variety of restrictive clauses, which explains why corporations in states such as New York began fleeing to New Jersey in the 1890s, even though both had general incorporation standards. Though New York began offering general incorporation much earlier, New Jersey was quicker to drop most restrictive features from its law. Only when truly modern-style general incorporation, with no restrictions, was introduced by New Jersey and then by Delaware, West Virginia, and other states, did it become impossible for states to control corporations in the way they had when a customized charter was required for each new corporation.

Table 7.2 The Spread of General Incorporation Requirements in State Constitutions

1846	New York	1864	Nevada	1875	Maryland
1846	Iowa	1864	Louisiana	1876	Colorado
1848	Illinois	1865	Missouri	1876	Texas
1848	Wisconsin	1866	Nebraska	1889	Idaho
1849	California	1867	Alabama	1889	North Dakota
1850	Michigan	1868	North Carolina	1889	South Dakota
1851	Ohio	1868	Georgia	1889	Montana
1851	Maryland	1870	Tennessee	1889	Washington
1851	Indiana	1871	Arkansas	1890	Mississippi
1855	Kansas	1872	West Virginia	1895	Utah
1857	Minnesota	1874	Pennsylvania	1897	Delaware
1857	Oregon	1875	New Jersey	1902	Virginia
*Source: Liggett v. Lee (1933).

Change #2: Corporations Acquire an Unlimited Life Span

The classic corporation was chartered for a limited term and had to apply periodically to have its charter extended - every-six to fifty years, depending on the type of business. After the advent of general incorporation statutes, states gradually began to replace limited terms with perpetual terms; almost half had done so by 1903. Thus, a key difference between the classic corporation and the modern corporation is that the latter, at least in theory, enjoys an unlimited life span. This does not mean that modern corporations can never go bankrupt, or that one corporation can't absorb another. According to a study by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the average Fortune 500 company survives about forty to fifty years before it vanishes, sometimes due to bankruptcy but more often because it is swallowed up by a bigger fish. If we consider the acquisition of one company by another to be a continuation of both companies' lives, the estimates of corporate life spans become significantly longer, especially for the largest corporations. Among the top twenty-five corporations on the Financial Times Global 500 list for 2002, the median age is 113 years. Only six companies among the top twenty-five are younger than fifty (Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Intel, Vodafone Group, Cisco, and Home Depot).

From a social and legal perspective, perpetual existence creates tremendous difficulties in holding corporations accountable for criminal behavior; in addition, it allows corporations to benefit indefinitely from behavior that once was legal but now is not. For example, despite the destruction of the Nazi and the Japanese fascist regimes, a number of German, Japanese, and even American corporations that benefited from the use of slave labor in the 1930s and 1940s can be found on today's Global 500 list, including IBM (#12), Siemens (#57), Daimler-Chrysler (#81), Deutsche Bank (#100), Ford (#157), BMW (#167), Bayer (#175), BASF (#187), Volkswagen (#211), General Motors (#308), Mitsubishi (#380), and Mitsui (#472). IBM bears a particularly heavy historical burden; evidence uncovered by historian Edwin Black describes how IBM's data processing technology helped the Nazi regime implement its genocidal policies.

With many corporations having roots extending back earlier than the American Civil War, it is not surprising that at least one Canadian and seven American companies on the Global 500 list also benefited from the use of slave labor prior to 1865, including American International Group (#11), JP MorganChase (#44), FleetBoston (#109), Lehman Brothers (#283), Union Pacific (#285), Gannett (#212), and Tribune (#327).

The point here is not that corporations that engaged in murderous practices in the past deserve to be smeared by the broad brush of history. Rather, the point is that the legal attribute of indefinite existence makes the corporation truly a different sort of social actor than you or me. For example, when evidence emerged that Kurt Waldheim, former United Nations secretary-general and then president of Austria, had played a leadership role in military units responsible for World War Two atrocities, much of the world responded by ostracizing him, and he did not run for a second presidential term in 1992. In contrast, a corporation such as IBM, whose close involvement with the Nazi regime produced suffering on a vastly larger scale than anything Waldheim could have done, has experienced no lingering reproach other than calls for reparations.

Although perpetual existence allows corporations to outlive their own crimes and atrocities, it also has a very practical benefit in ordinary political and legal affairs. Consider, for example, the antitrust litigation against Microsoft initiated by the United States Justice Department under the administration of Bill Clinton. Such cases usually last at least a decade, often longer, and this gives companies such as Microsoft the chance to roll the dice with a new administration. In Microsoft's case, the Bush administration arrived in time to apply a more lenient philosophy to the case - and the company slipped the noose.

Change #3: Corporations Learn to ShapeShift

As useful as it is, corporate immortality becomes even more potent when used in combination with the modern corporation's ability to morph dramatically in any number of ways. Corporate governance expert Ralph Estes has termed this morphing ability "indefinite entity", which he describes as "the ability to disguise itself, to run and to hide, or to reorganize into a whole new entity ... sell off divisions and subsidiaries, be taken over and absorbed into a different company, or ... rename itself and emerge as, seemingly, a completely different company". Estes cites the example of Drexel Burnham Lambert:

Its image befouled with six felonies plus the legacy of junk bond king Michael Milkin, Drexel used a tax loophole to give itself a whole new identity as the spanking clean New Street Capital Corporation. Drexel, with its felonies, couldn't get a license to run a gambling casino in Puerto Rico it wanted to take over. New Street could - even though it emerged out of Drexel's hide.

Prior to the Civil War the sort of maneuvering described by Estes would have been beyond the capacities of any company. Under the charter system, a classic corporation was not allowed to own stock in another, so both hostile takeovers and spin-offs from one corporation to another were ruled out. Charters tended to be quite specific about the activities that a given corporation was allowed to undertake. In order to go beyond the terms of its charter, a corporation had to return to the state legislature and receive approval for a charter amendment.

By 1900, all those restrictions had vanished. As noted in the previous chapter, the key changes that undermined the antebellum charter system were Tom Scott's innovation of the holding company as a political tool in Pennsylvania in 1871, and the 1889 legislative change in New Jersey that made the holding company an option for any corporation chartered in that state.

By loosening their corporate statutes, New Jersey and the states that mimicked it created a new environment in which, according to historian Lawrence Friedman,

the corporation had torn free of its past - it could be formed almost at will, could do business as it wished, could expand, contract, dissolve.

Change #4: Corporations Gain Mobility

A key feature of the classic corporation was its firm link to the chartering state. That connection was reinforced by a number of factors, including a prohibition on one corporation owning stock in another, and ultra vires, a legal doctrine under which any contract outside the activities permitted in a corporation's charter was considered null and void by the courts. Although ultra vires lingered in theory into the 1930s, judges had mainly abandoned attempting to enforce it by 1900. Of course, once a corporation could both act beyond the legal definitions of its charter and change its legal location to a venue far removed from the communities where it conducted its operations, the ability of states to hold corporations accountable was greatly diminished. Indeed, the ability of corporations to go "venue shopping" encouraged states to compete with each other to create the most permissive corporate atmosphere. For example, when Connecticut's legislatures held the line with strict corporate rules, including a provision requiring that a majority of the board of directors of any company be Connecticut residents, the state "drove from her borders not only foreign enterprises but also her own industries". New Jersey, with a combination of low taxes and loose statutes, became "the favorite state for incorporations". Another corporate favorite was West Virginia, a "Snug Harbor for roaming and piratical corporations", the "tramp and bubble companies of the country".

Change #5: Corporations Become More Adaptable

Charters issued by legislatures prior to the Civil War were quite specific about the activities that a corporation could pursue. Just as states restricted the mobility of corporations, they also made it illegal for a corporation to alter its activities without seeking a change in its charter. After the Civil War, those restrictions were lifted, often a decade or two after the change from special chartering to general incorporation. For example, New York switched fully to general incorporation in 1844, but the statutory change that permitted incorporation "for any lawful purpose" came in 1866. Illinois made the conversion to "any lawful purpose" in 1872, Massachusetts in 1874, Maine in 1876. Other states followed shortly.

The removal of clauses that defined and limited what a company was permitted to do, combined with new rules permitting holding companies, opened the door to the creation of two kinds of corporations that were not permitted under the classic corporation system. One was the conglomerate - a holding company that owns a diversity of companies. The other was the vertically integrated company, which attempts to control the entire life span of a certain product group from production through distribution and retail. Both approaches led to immense, potentially monopolistic corporations.

Change #6: Corporations Shed Their "Conscience" Mechanisms

Science fiction writers who have imagined the introduction of intelligent automatons into society have recognized the need for building at least a rudimentary "conscience" mechanism into robots and androids. Isaac Asimov imagined a solution in which robots were programmed with simple rules, such as, "A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm".
Because corporations are complex systems, in which large numbers of people and machines interact with the real world in myriad ways, it is a difficult challenge to program into them a "conscience" - that is, mechanisms to ensure that human beings aren't trampled. But that does not mean it is impossible, and indeed a major preoccupation of the law is to develop various ways to protect people from being harmed not just by corporations but by institutions in general.

Much of this sort of programming is simply an extension of the legal provisions that protect humans from hurting each other, such as civil and criminal laws. Of course, criminal law never had any teeth in the first place when it came to corporations because of the obvious uselessness of the corporal disincentives that the law has traditionally relied on - flogging, imprisonment, and so forth. Instead, the designers of the classic corporation relied on the limitations contained in corporate charters and on the ultimate sanction of charter revocation. But by around 1875, general incorporation had largely replaced the system of individually issued charters, and charters ceased to provide a means for controlling corporate behavior.

The end of the charter system also marked the full arrival of the doctrine of limited liability, which ended any legal incentive for corporate shareholders to concern themselves with the behavior of the businesses in which they owned an interest. As described in Chapter Five, investors in some British corporations had enjoyed limited liability as early as the 1660s, but limited liability protection as a universal feature did not occur in Britain until 1855. Even then, Parliament required that a company "announce its members' irresponsibility" by appending the phrase "LLC" (limited liability company) to its official name. In America, limited liability was highly controversial prior to the Civil War. For example, in Maine, the law changed back and forth nine times between 1823 and 1857 - between no liability and full liability, depending on whether the Whigs or the Democrats had a majority of the legislature. Between about 1810 and 1860, judges began to develop a doctrine that conferred limited liability on shareholders in the absence of any charter provision to the contrary. Usually, however, charters were not silent. Some required that shareholders be exposed to unlimited liability for debts or legal settlements against a corporation; others required "double liability", which meant that shareholders' exposure was limited to twice the amount of their investment.

Of course, the ultimate effect of shielding stockholders from risk is to shift potential losses onto society at large. Such a shift also occurred in areas of civil law such as the law of torts, as summarized by political scientist Arthur S Miller:

As with constitutional law, so with the private law of contracts, of property, and of torts. Judge-made rules in those fundamental categories had the result of transferring the social costs of private enterprise from the enterprise itself to the workingman or to society at large. Tort law provides apt illustration. Under its doctrines, a person who willfully or negligently harms another's person or property must answer by paying money damages. The analogue of contract, which is a consensual obligation, a tort is a nonconsensual legal obligation. Who, then, bore the costs, in accidents and in deaths, of the new industrialism? Not the businessman. Not the corporation. The worker himself. (Often those workers were children.) And who bore the costs of pollution and other social costs? Society at large. How did this come about? In tort law judges created doctrines of "contributory negligence", "assumption of risk", and the "fellow servant rule", all of which served to insulate the enterprise from liability. By "freely" taking a job, said the judges, the workers "assumed the risk" of any accident that might occur.

Change #7: Unleashing the Corporate Will

In the context of corporate law, legal scholar Paul Vinogradoff has defined will as "the faculty of taking resolves in the midst of conflicting motives; a governing brain and nerves, in the shape of institutions and agents; a capacity for the promotion and the defense of interests by holding property, performing acts in law, and exercising rights of action in courts".

One of the least noted differences between the legal framework of the classic corporation and that of the modern corporation is the relative status of shareholder and management. According to legal historian Gregory Mark, shareholders played a dominant role in the classic corporation, but in the modern corporation a clear trend developed toward managerial supremacy. With managers winning the role of "governing brain", decision making became far more streamlined and definitive, and managers could undertake strategic maneuvers such as mergers and acquisitions without fear of being blocked by a small minority of balking shareholders.

The elevation of the power of management occurred as a result of a variety of legal changes. In 1890, New York became the first state (followed by New Jersey in 1896 and Delaware in 1899) to rescind the common law doctrine known as "the rule of unanimous consent". According to that doctrine, any fundamental change of corporate purposes, especially the sale of corporate assets, required unanimous approval by the shareholders. In practice, the rule of unanimous consent significantly hampered the creation of large corporate conglomerates, at least in cases where ownership of a corporation whose assets were being acquired were widely dispersed. Combined with the removal of restrictions that had been built into the charters of the classic corporation, the elimination of unanimous consent allowed the modern corporation a new degree of nimbleness, even though the size of the largest corporations at the end of the nineteenth century was far beyond that of earlier firms.

Court decisions also served to make shareholders subordinate to managers. A key case was the 1884 decision by the federal district court in Saint Louis involving Jay Gould's Wabash, Saint Louis, and Pacific Railway. Setting a new precedent that dramatically increased the powers of management over shareholders, the court agreed to Gould's request that his representatives be appointed receivers for the railroad company. Prior to that time, prevailing doctrine gave control over bankruptcy proceedings to impartial receivers, who were to balance the interests of stockholders, workers, and creditors. The Saint Louis court's decision, however, affirmed and legally reinforced the control of management over a corporation's fate.

Change #8: Removing Restrictions on Size

In many cases the charters of the classic corporation placed explicit limits on size. For example, the 1818 charter of a Massachusetts company, the Main Flour Mills, limited the total property the corporation might hold to $50,000, of which the land could not exceed $30,000 in value. Most state constitutions also featured limits on the amount of investment capital that a single corporation could control, as shown in Table 7.3.

As we've already seen, many common charter provisions also indirectly limited the size of corporations. Such provisions included restrictions on the activities that a particular corporation could pursue; prohibitions against owning land not directly connected to a company's activities; prohibitions against owning stock in other corporations; geographic restrictions; requirements in some states that excess profits be used to buy back stock, so that eventually stockholders would be eliminated and a corporation in effect would return to public ownership. In addition, the doctrine of unanimous shareholder consent for major decisions such as acquisitions or asset sales provided a brake on rapid conglomeration, because it allowed a small minority of dissident shareholders to block such action. With the modern corporation, all those constraints were lifted, opening the door to the wave of mergers around 1900 described earlier.

Table 7.3 Nineteenth-Century Statutory Limits on Amount of Invested Capital a Single Corporation Could Control

New York until 1881	$2,000,000
New York 1881-1890	$5,000,000
Pennsylvania until 1863	$500,000
Pennsylvania after 1863	$5,000,000
Alabama until 1876	$200,000
Alabama 1876-1896	$1,000,000
Arizona after 1864	$5,000,000
Illinois 1852-1857	$300,000
Illinois after 1857	$1,000,000
Maine 1862-1867	$50,000
Maine 1867-1876	$200,000
Maine 1876-1883	$500,000
Maine 1883-1891	$2,000,000
Maine after 1891	$10,000,000
Vermont	$1,000,000
New Hampshire	$1,000,000
Massachusetts 1851-1855	$200,000
Massachusetts after 1855	$500,000
Michigan 1846-1885	$100,000
Michigan after 1885	$5,000,000

It might be argued that the framework of antitrust laws - beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 and followed by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 and the Celler-Kefauver Act in 1950 - functions to place a ceiling on size. And antitrust legislation has indeed produced occasional results, most notably the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, American Tobacco, also in 1911, and AT&T in 1982. Of course, to deal with the complexity of business, such legislation must be written in broad terms, which means that enforcement and judicial interpretation are both highly subject to political ideology. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s, the Supreme Court viewed the intent of antitrust legislation as incorporating broad goals. These included the traditional goal of curbing monopoly pricing power, but also two key social goals: concern for the viability of locally controlled industries and small businesses, and other social effects, such as undue political influence. Thus, the Warren Court in the 1962 Brown Shoe case blocked the merger of two shoe companies, Brown and Kinney, even though the merger would have given Brown only 5.5 percent of total US shoe production and allowed Brown to move from fourth to third among US shoe companies.

With the arrival of the Burger Court in 1974, followed by the Reagan administration in 1981, judicial and executive antitrust philosophy shifted dramatically. In 1982, the Justice Department relaxed the standards for mergers, citing the need to allow American corporations to compete internationally, especially against large Japanese companies. The head of the Anti-Trust Division, William F Baxter, rejected the idea that large corporations "by virtue of their size have something called economic power".

The result of this more lenient policy on mergers has been a rapidly accelerating trend to concentration. In 1980, there were only three acquisitions larger than $1 billion in value. In 1986, there were thirty-four such mergers. As late as 1992, total US merger activity remained under $100 billion. But in the late 1990s, acquisitions exploded, topping $1 trillion in 1998. In 2000, a single merger - the $166 billion acquisition of Time-Warner by America Online - was larger than the combined value of all mergers and acquisitions in the United States from 1970 through 1977.

By any measure, corporations dominate the world economy, and among the largest corporations, an overwhelming majority are based in Japan and the United States. According to Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, thirty-seven of the top one hundred economies in the world, measured on a value-added basis, are corporations. That analysis, however, may understate their economic clout. A different comparison - of the revenues of corporations and the budgets of governments - finds that sixty-six of the one hundred largest economic entities in the world are corporations; only thirty-four are governments. In 1999, among the top two hundred companies, ranked by sales, fifty-eight Japanese firms accounted for 39 percent of total sales, while fifty-nine US firms accounted for 28 percent of sales. Ranked by market value, however, nineteen of the top twenty five firms worldwide in 2002 were US - based. (See Table 7.4.)

Table 7.4 The Top Twenty-Five Corporations in the World, Ranked by Market Value

1	General Electric	US	372
2	Microsoft	US	327
3	ExxonMobil	US	300
4	Wal-Mart	US	273
5	Citigroup	US	255
6	Pfizer	US	249
7	Intel	US	204
8	British Petroleum	UK	201
9	Johnson & Johnson	US	198
10	Royal Dutch/Shell	Holland/UK	190
11	AIG	US	188
12	IBM	US	179
13	GlaxoSmithKline	UK	145
14	NTT DoCoMo	Japan	138
15	Merck	US	131
16	Coca-Cola	US	130
17	Vodafone Group	US	127
18	SBC	US	125
19	Verizon	US	125
20	Cisco Systems	US	124
21	Procter & Gamble	US	117
22	Novartis	Switzerland	114
23	Home Depot	US	114
24	Philip Morris	US	113
25	Total Fina Elf	France	109
* Source: Global 2002 list, Financial Times (May 13 2002)

Change #9: Corporations Win Constitutional Rights

There can be no doubt that the changes from classic corporation to modern corporation allowed greater business flexibility. For example, as described by historians John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge,

Nowadays, nobody finds it odd that, a century after its foundation, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company makes Post-it notes, or that the world's biggest mobile-phone company, Nokia, used to be in the paper business.

But the same changes that made corporations more flexible in their business operations also made them a far more potent force in the political realm. To make sure that this growing corporate power did not overwhelm the ability of state legislatures to control corporations, it would have made sense in the late nineteenth century for courts to affirm the constitutional authority of those legislatures to regulate corporations as they saw fit. Instead, the opposite took place, as courts systematically developed doctrines that allowed corporations to block unwelcome state laws and taxes.

In England, corporations had never been protected from state action, even when that action was of a highly arbitrary nature. Centuries of English legal tradition had established firmly the principle that corporate charters were revocable and alterable at any time. As described by Ron Harris, a historian of English constitutional law:

The larger the corporation and the more consequential the effects of its activities, the more likely was the State to interfere in its business at one point or another. Incorporation itself was not considered a protectable property right. The State could, at will, withhold an incorporation franchise which, in many cases, was of limited duration. Such withdrawal was not common, but it conformed to the Stuart conception of the constitution, which held that granting and revoking incorporation charters lay within the King's prerogative and discretion. It also conformed to the post-1689 constitutional settlement which made the Parliament supreme and, as such, free to enact and repeal incorporation acts, according to changing circumstances or majorities.

Although 1886 is universally considered the year in which corporations won their first constitutional right - in the Santa Clara decision, already mentioned in Chapter One - as early as 1819 the Supreme Court had begun to establish a legal status for corporations in America that exceeded the traditional legal status enjoyed by corporations in England. The case that marked the first departure from the principle of corporate subordination to the will of the state was the 1819 case Dartmouth College vs New Hampshire. Encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, among others, New Hampshire had enacted legislation converting Dartmouth College from a private college into a public one. Jefferson had written to the governor, "The idea that institutions, established for the use of the nation, cannot be touched or modified ... may perhaps be a salutory provision against the abuses of a monarch, but it is most absurd against the nation itself". To make a corporate charter sacrosanct, said Jefferson, would amount to a belief that "the earth belongs to the dead, and not to the living".

Seeking to block New Hampshire from making the college public, Dartmouth's trustees went to court, arguing that the 1769 charter between the college and King George qualified as a contract entitled to protection under the contract clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 10), which prohibits states from "impairing the obligations of contracts". The New Hampshire Superior Court agreed with the state. "These trustees are the servants of the public", declared the court, "and the servant is not to resist the will of his master, in a matter that concerns that master alone".

The trustees then appealed to the US Supreme Court, where they had better luck. They were represented by the most renowned attorney of the day, Daniel Webster, a moving speaker. Though it was not recorded, Webster's oratory - "It is ... a small college, and yet there are those who love it" - aroused such emotion that some members of the audience were said to have fainted, and Chief Justice John Marshall openly wept.

In its decision, the Court agreed with the trustees of Dartmouth that the charter they had received from King George in 1769 should be considered a contract protected by the Constitution. This decision, Justice Story later wrote, was intended to protect the rights of property owners against "the passions of the popular doctrines of the day".

Dartmouth cut two ways. In practical terms, legislatures quickly figured out how to get around the problem. They added a new clause to charters stating that the state reserved the right of revocation. Moreover, the ruling included a clear statement by Justice Marshall that corporations remained subordinate to state power. Marshall wrote that the corporation is an "artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law". On the other hand, the case marked the beginning of a long process by which the Supreme Court steadily elevated the legal status of corporations above anything that had previously existed in Anglo-American law. Thus, it opened the door for a steady erosion of state sovereignty over corporations, allowing them to begin to carve out a legal zone of immunity from state legislatures.

By 1860, that process was still in its infancy. Most notably, corporations failed to win protection as "citizens" under the Comity Clause (Article IV, Section 2), which states: "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States". That strategy was turned down by the Supreme Court in the 1839 Bank of Augusta decision. The 1844 Louisville, Cincinnati decision did give corporations the right to seek review of state laws in federal courts. But until the late 1870s, the attitudes of judges toward corporations remained consistent with revolutionary era wariness of corporate power.

By 1900, the prevailing judicial philosophy had shifted dramatically. A new generation of judges had embraced the corporation as the engine of American economic progress, and a series of cases had been decided giving corporations the right to challenge state legislation under the Fourteenth Amendment and federal legislation under the Fifth Amendment. The following chapters examine this shift, including the role played by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, and they look more closely at the twists and turns of the Santa Clara decision, the strange case that gave corporations their first constitutional right.

http://jayhanson.us/Gangs_2.pdf

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

Gangs of America by Ted Nace

2011-02-15T09:25:00.001+09:00

Nace has done a great job of assembling the history of how corporations gained control our political system. If you want to know what happened, buy his book and read it. Here is a snip from the introduction.
-- Jay Hanson

Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of America (2003, 2005) by Ted Nace http://www.amazon.com/Gangs-America-Corporate-Disabling-Democracy/dp/1576753190

On the morning of August 2 2002, millions of Americans turned on their TVs to see an unusual spectacle: a high-level corporate executive in handcuffs, being paraded by law enforcement officials in front of the news media. The executive was Scott Sullivan, chief financial officer of the telecommunications firm WorldCom. Along with fellow executive David Myers, Sullivan was charged with hiding $3.85 billion in company expenses, conspiring to commit securities fraud, and filing false information with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The combined maximum penalties from the charges were sixty-five years. In response to the arrests, Attorney General John Ashcroft told reporters, "Corporate executives who cheat investors, steal savings, and squander pensions will meet the judgment they fear and the punishment they deserve".

Now consider a different crime, committed by the leadership of General Motors together with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, B F Phillips Petroleum, and Mac Manufacturing. In 1936, the five companies formed National City Lines, a holding company that proceeded to buy electric trolley lines and tear up the tracks in cities across the nation. Each time it destroyed a local trolley system, National City would license the rights to operate a new system to a local franchisee, under the stipulation that the system convert to diesel-powered General Motors buses.

By 1949, more than one hundred electric transit systems in forty-five cities had been torn up and converted. In April of that year, a federal jury convicted GM and the other firms of conspiracy to commit antitrust violations. But the penalty turned out to be negligible. The judge set the fine at $5,000 for each company. H C Grossman, treasurer of General Motors and a key player in the scheme, was fined one dollar. After the conviction, the companies went back to purchasing transit systems, removing electric trolley lines, and replacing them with buses. By 1955, 88 percent of the country's electric streetcar network was gone.

Both the Scott Sullivan case and the National City Lines case fit the traditional definition of crime: laws were broken, the legal system intervened. But the second case suggests that the larger the crime, the more the boundaries between "crime" and "business as usual" begin to blur. As Atlanta mayor and former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young once said, "Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it".

Young may have overstated things a bit, but the observation encapsulates a basic truth about American society. Business does tend to get its way, acting by means of a nebulous force known as "corporate power" that drives much of what happens in both the public and private spheres. But there are a few details to work out. What is the nature of this power? Exactly how does it work? Does the law instantly conform to the needs and wants of those one hundred businessmen? What happens when corporate America finds its wishes thwarted by constitutional barriers? Who decides what is "public" and what is "private"? Who defines the nature of "crime" versus "business as usual"?

In order to answer such questions, one challenge is merely to begin seeing a phenomenon that surrounds us so completely and continuously. I've spent most of my working life in the corporate world, founding and running a company that publishes how-to books about computers. In that world the corporation is the air you breathe. There is no questioning whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. It just is. Nor is there any thought about where the corporation - this particular institutional form - comes from. You assume that corporations have always been a natural part of the American system of "democracy and free enterprise". But even as I pursued my business, questions lurked in the back of my mind, some of which had been triggered as early as my high school years.

I grew up in southwestern North Dakota, and my first summer job was building trails in the Badlands for the US Forest Service. One day, I learned that a large energy corporation had applied to strip-mine a spot called the Burning Coal Vein, a rugged area where at night deep fissures emitted a glow caused by smoldering veins of coal, ignited long ago by lightning strikes or prairie fires. Along the hillsides, columnar junipers reminiscent of the trees in Van Gogh's "Starry Night" stood like silent watchers draped in tunics. Piles of scoria - brilliant red, orange, and purple ceramic shards - covered the ground, the metamorphosed products of shale baked by the intense underground heat. It was like being in an immortal potter's workshop, where every footstep made a tinkling sound as the scoria broke under your feet. That someone could dare propose destroying a place of such beauty in exchange for a few thousand tons of low-grade coal stunned me. But, of course, the entity planning the mine wasn't a someone but a something - a corporation. Although people in the company may well have cared, the corporation itself didn't.

After college, I started working as a community organizer for a group of farmers and ranchers in North Dakota who were opposed to a vast expansion of strip-mining being proposed by a number of large companies. The shadow cast by these corporations across farms and ranches was not just a metaphorical one. The machines used in strip mines are quite literally of an awesome physical scale. When I saw Jurassic Park I experienced a feeling of deja vu - it reminded me of being in a strip mine. To extract the coal underneath millions of acres of productive farmland and ranchland, the mining companies have to peel away the overlying layers of plant-nurturing soil, water-bearing aquifers, and rock. The peeling is done by immense, crane-like earth-eaters called draglines, which soar into the air the length of a football field. Like long-necked dinosaurs, the draglines make their way slowly amid ridges of rubble. Using tooth-edged buckets large enough to hold three Greyhound buses, they perform a drop-drag-lift-swivel maneuver, dropping the giant bucket, dragging it until it overflows, then suddenly jerking tons of dirt and rock high into the air, swiveling with surprising grace, and finally dumping the load onto the spoil piles. Especially at night, when intense lights illuminate the machinery and the rubble, the impression is hair-raising - a specter of monsters feeding upon the earth. And then you remember that the rubble being moved and dumped had been someone's pasture, favorite hillside, or alfalfa field. Reclamation? The companies promised that they would restore the land, but given the semiarid conditions, the fragility of the soil, and the complexities of such critical factors as hydrology and salinity, such assurances rang hollow.

You couldn't help but be affected by the courage of the families who carried on a daily existence next to the mines. I recall sitting in the kitchen of a wheat farmer named Werner Benfit and his elderly mother Anna, looking out at the advancing edge of North American Coal Company's Indian Head Mine near Zap, an ordinary town except for its Dr Seussian name. Even though the towering spoil piles of the mine had come literally to the edge of the Benfits' property, chain-smoking Werner never lost his sense of humor. Anna brought out a plate of cookies and Werner told about the "suit" from North American Coal who had recently paid a visit. The executive had told Anna that she could name any price in the world for her land. "I don't know about that", replied Anna, "but do you think you could move your spoil pile back a little ways so the rocks stop rolling onto my lawn"?

My boss was a genial Norwegian-American rancher named Randolph Nodland. Randolph had spent years fighting a company called Nokota, which had surreptitiously acquired the mining rights to thousands of acres of land and now threatened a number of farms and ranches with the possibility of an immense strip mine and an accompanying synthetic fuels plant.

One summer evening, as Randolph and I passed the time over pitchers of beer in the Shamrock Bar downstairs from our small office, he told me about a funeral he had attended the previous week at his local country church, Vang Lutheran. Flowers had been brought by the family of the deceased, but as Randolph took his place in the pews, a particularly large bouquet caught his eye. On a card the inscription read: "With deepest sympathies, Nokota, Inc".

The memory of the funeral raised a mixture of emotions, which passed like prairie clouds across Randolph's weathered face - disgust, anger, amusement. The funeral bouquet was just one of a variety of "personal" gestures by the company, including congratulatory cards sent to graduating high school seniors, booths at local fairs, and sponsorship of sports teams, all designed to ingratiate Nokota Inc. with the local community.

This particular gesture, though, crossed the line, and I knew Randolph would make sure the story of the grotesque social miscue made the rounds. In relating the encounter with the bouquet, the mere raising of an eyebrow would be enough to define and convey the insult - and having delivered that cue himself, Randolph could be assured that the message would pass from person to person. Such is the nature of a rural community.

But it occurred to me that Nokota's weird social gesture also stood for something else. In a curious way, the ineptness of the funeral bouquet dramatized the mindless persistence that only a corporation can sustain. Randolph's own energies, along with the combined energies of all his neighbors, were ultimately limited. In contrast, the energies of the corporation had no clear bottom. Maybe all the public relations activities of the company weren't really about making Nokota popular.

Maybe they were simply a way of saying, "We're here, we won't go away, get used to it". You can laugh at or hate a corporation, you can turn it into an object of contempt. You may experience it as a tenacious foe, you can get mad at it one day and ignore it the next. Nothing you may feel or do really matters, because in the end there is no getting around the fact that you are not fighting a normal opponent - your opponent is simply nobody. As Baron Thurlow said some three centuries ago,

Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?

From the inside, the view is different. I've repeatedly been struck by the paradox that even the most destructive corporations are populated by friendly, caring people. Sure, there are exceptions to that - corrupt companies, companies with poisonous internal cultures, even companies that ought to be classified as instances of organized crime. But in general, far more harm is caused by corporations acting in ways that are utterly legal and that seem, from the perspective of those inside the corporation, to be perfectly appropriate. Quite obviously, if corporations do harm, it is not because the people inside them lack souls. Rather, it's because the company as a whole, like any organization, is a complex entity that acts according to its own autonomous set of motives and dynamics.

http://jayhanson.us/gangsofAmerica.pdf

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

America 2.0

2011-02-14T17:35:00.000+09:00

From Private Greed to Public Service

by Jay Hanson (October 06 2009)

with minor revisions on January 11 2010

This paper is the culmination of almost twenty years of study - working almost full time - to understand why our civilization is self-destructing. My brevity here is not due to my lack of understanding or scholarship.

Link to high resolution image: http://jayhanson.us/AmericaSchematic.html

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1776

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.
-- James Madison, Federalist #57, 1787

Abstract

The "bad news" is that "peak oil" marks the beginning of the end of capitalism and market politics because many decades of declining "net energy" {1} will result in many decades of declining economic activity. And since capitalism can't run backwards, a new method of distributing goods and services must be found. The "good news" is that our "price system" is fantastically inefficient! Americans could be wasting something like two billion tonnes (metric tons) of oil equivalent energy per year!!

In order to avoid anarchy, rebellion, civil war and global nuclear conflict, Americans must force a fundamental change in our political environment. We can keep the same political structures and people, but we must totally eliminate corporate-special interests from our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence. These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking now is the political will. I call this adjustment of our political environment "America 2.0".

The reason that America 2.0 is so important and should be implemented as the first in a series of many political reforms is because it's "constitutional politics" (politics that changes politics). The modification that I am proposing would fundamentally alter the nature of politics in America.

To achieve America 2.0, we must first separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to actually address and solve societal problems rather than merely catering to corporate interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods and services directly. This would allow most adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the goods and services they need to enjoy life.

America 2.0 is based on the biological principle that organisms respond to environmental cues. If one changes an organism's environmental cues, then one also changes an organism's behavior. If the voting public and political decision-makers only receive cues designed to mitigate our crisis, then all choices they make will be aimed at mitigating that crisis. This is an extremely simple way to implement a science-based government.

After America 2.0 has been implemented, all the choices made by elected officials will be, by best calculations, "good" for the public. Officials will decide among a selection of public "goods". Corporations will become the public utilities that they were before 1860.

Preface

To the free man, the country is a collection of individuals who compose it ... He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
-- Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

We may well call it 'the tragedy of the commons', using the word 'tragedy' as the philosopher Whitehead used it: 'The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.'
-- Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

The criterion of "profit" has shaped our political decisions since the founding of our country, but now that we are facing peak oil, new "scientific systems" criteria must replace "profit" or our civilization will "collapse" {2} like so many others have throughout history.

In order for America to survive this crisis, a moderate, "doable" modification to our political environment is required. This paper does not attempt to describe a complete system to replace state-sponsored capitalism and market politics. My modest goal here is to show a way forward which could avoid the worst.

The Bad News

"Net Energy Cliff" Which Leads to The End of Capitalism
http://jayhanson.us/Murphy.html

Our present "business-as-usual" model, which requires endless economic growth and endless job creation, is no longer physically possible. Here's why:

1. Business-as-usual depends upon jobs and markets to distribute goods and services.

2. Economic growth and increasing job availability require increasing net energy.

3. Net energy correlates with peak oil and both are expected to decrease for decades. See the "Net Hubbert Curve" in David Murphy's graph above and read footnote {3}.

4. Decades of decreasing net energy will cause job opportunities to decrease for decades because less and less energy will be available for economic development.

5. Globally, millions of new workers enter the job market each year, but job availability is expected to decline by millions of positions each year. Eventually, the projected high unemployment among young men will cause catastrophic political failures similar to those that led to Hitler's takeover of German democracy. Therefore, business-as-usual is no longer a viable method of distributing goods and services and a new method must be found - and soon!

Historians will say that "peak oil" marked the end of the second free trade episode. If we don't abandon capitalism now, we will be forced into another global war over resources:

By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, world commodity prices were the central reality in the lives of millions of Continental peasants; the repercussions of the London money market were daily noted by businessmen all over the world; and governments discussed plans for the future in light of the situation on the world capital markets. Only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the race. Because this system needed peace in order to function, the balance of power was made to serve it. Take this economic system away and the peace interest would disappear from politics ... By the end of the seventies the free trade episode (1846 to 1879) was at an end ... The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.
-- Karl Polanyi

The Good News: The Market is Fantastically Inefficient

Yes, that is correct: The "market system" is fantastically inefficient! {4} Our present way of distributing goods and services wastes enormous amounts of natural resources, but gigantic resource savings are possible. As an illustration, let's make a rough estimate of per capita food energy requirements and current waste:

If we wanted our government to distribute food directly instead of using the market, how much energy would be required to produce and deliver provisions to each and every American?

Adults need about 3,000 nutritional calories of food each day. Let's allow 30,000 calories to produce and another 3,000 calories to deliver food to every American. That's a total of 36,000 calories per day.

Just how much energy did the American "price system" actually consume? In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 231,008 calories per day, so 231,008 minus 36,000 equals 195,008 calories wasted each day. This simple calculation suggests that Americans could be wasting something like two billion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! {5} That's far more oil wasted than all the oil produced in the Middle East!

If we change a few of our founding beliefs and assumptions - and reorganize politically - more than enough energy remains to mitigate the worst.

Founded on Tragic Assumptions

The United States was founded on several assumptions. A key assumption, which led to several others, was that "the sum of individual interests" was equivalent to "the common interest". In practical terms, this meant:

1. Individuals know best how to solve their own problems.

2. Government should promote economic growth to create jobs so that individuals can solve their own problems.

3. The best way for government to promote economic growth is to ask business leaders what can be done to help them make more money. That's why today, lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our unqualified elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do!

Today, we know that our founders were fundamentally wrong on this point. The lesson of "The Tragedy of the Commons" {6} is that "the sum of individual interests" is not "the common interest". In his classic, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968), Garrett Hardin illustrated why freedom in the commons brings ruin to all:

Visualize a pasture as a system that is open to everyone. The "carrying capacity" {7} of this pasture is ten animals. Ten herdsmen are each grazing one animal to fatten up for market. In other words, the ten animals are now consuming all the grass that the pasture can produce.

Harry (one of the herdsmen) will add one more animal to the pasture if he can make a profit. He subtracts the original cost of the new animal from the expected sales price of the fattened animal and then considers the cost of the food. Adding one more animal will mean less food for each of the present animals, but since Harry only has only one-tenth of the herd, he has to pay only one-tenth of the cost. Harry decides to exploit the commons and the other herdsmen, so he adds an animal and takes a profit.

Shrinking profit margins force the other herdsmen either to go out of business or continue the exploitation by adding more animals. This process of mutual exploitation continues until overgrazing and erosion destroy the pasture system, and all the herdsmen are driven out of business.

Most importantly, Hardin illustrates the critical flaw of freedom in the commons: all participants need to agree to conserve the commons, but any one can force the destruction of the commons. Although Hardin describes exploitation by humans in an unregulated public pasture, his commons and "grass" principle fit our entire society.

Private property is inextricably part of our commons because it is part of our life support and social systems. Owners alter the properties of our life support and social systems when they alter their land to "make a profit" - for example, when they cover land with corn or concrete.

Neighborhoods, cities and states are commons in the sense that no one is denied entry. Anyone may enter and lay claim to the common resources. One can compare profits to Hardin's "grass" when any number of corporations - from anywhere in the world - drive down profits by competing with local businesses for customers.

One can see wages as Hardin's "grass" when any number of workers - from anywhere in the world - can enter our community and drive down wages by competing with local workers for jobs. People themselves even become commons when they are exploited (are made the best use of) by other people and corporations. Everywhere one looks, one sees The Tragedy of the Commons. There is no technical solution to the problem of the commons, but governments can act to limit access to the commons, at which time they are no longer commons.

In the private-money based political system we have in America, everything (including people) becomes the commons because money is political power, and all political decisions are reduced to economic ones. In other words, we effectively have no political system, only an economic system - everything is for sale. Thus, America is presently one big commons that will be exploited until it is destroyed.

America 2.0: The Essence

I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Thomas Jefferson, along with James Madison worked assiduously to have an Eleventh Amendment included into our nation's original Bill of Rights. This proposed Amendment would have prohibited 'monopolies in commerce'. The amendment would have made it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, or to give money to politicians, or to otherwise try to influence elections. Corporations would be chartered by the states for the primary purpose of 'serving the public good'. Corporations would possess the legal status not of natural persons but rather of 'artificial persons'. This means that they would have only those legal attributes which the state saw fit to grant to them. They would not; and indeed could not possess the same bundle of rights which actual flesh and blood persons enjoy. Under this proposed amendment neither the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, nor any provision of that document would protect the artificial entities known of as corporations.
-- Dr Michael P Byron {8}

In order to prevent collapse on the downside of the net energy curve, Americans must force corporate-special interests completely out of our political environment. A careful review of the progressive assault on laissez faire constitutionalism and neoclassical economics, from the 1880s through the 1930s, explains how this can be done legally and without violence {9}. These early progressives showed how we can save our country. All that is lacking now is the political will. I call this adjustment of our political environment "America 2.0".

The modification that I am proposing could reduce natural resource consumption by something like ninety percent and greatly reduce, or possibly eliminate, civil violence caused by the inevitable post-peak-oil-economic collapse.

Our present method of distributing goods and services works something like this:

* Our government loans money to banks, so bankers can operate businesses (which require buildings, computers, furniture, lights, air conditioning, employees, commuting, et cetera).

* The bankers then lend money to other businesses, like restaurants, real estate developers, et cetera (which also require buildings, computers, commuters, advertising, accountants, et cetera).

* So the employees of these restaurants, real estate developers, et cetera. can buy a car and drive to the store (with even more buildings, computers, commuters, et cetera).

* Just to buy a loaf of bread!

The "price system" has to be the most inefficient organization possible!

Why not simply have government pay someone to pick up that loaf of bread at the bakery and deliver it to the consumer? This is a form of distribution that would eliminate the banks, most of the other businesses, and all the stores. Most Americans would no longer need a car to commute to work or run to the store! However, some private businesses that provide critical services would still be operated but at our government's direction.

We could use the same efficient method of distribution for everything that Americans really "need". Shoppers would order provisions online, in the same way that Amazon or Netflix works now, and then their orders would be delivered the next day. And a medical care caravan could regularly drive through neighborhoods, filling teeth, giving checkups, and so on.

But first we must separate and isolate our political system from our economic system so that government can begin to actually address and solve societal problems rather than merely catering to corporate interests. The second step is to retire most working American citizens with an annuity sufficient for health and happiness, {10} as government begins to eliminate the current enormous waste of vital resources by delivering goods and services directly. This would allow most adults to stay at home with their families but still receive the goods and services they need to enjoy life.

Unless something is done now to prevent it, America will face anarchy, rebellion, and civil war on the downside of the net energy cliff. In order to maintain public order, the state must do one thing: take corporate-special interests totally out of politics. {11}

The urgency, necessity, and practicality of this proposal should be apparent to all sectors of society if they could be brought to understand how our social systems are depleting our physical systems. I am convinced that if Americans were given the honest science and engineering behind what needs to be done, the vast majority would willingly make a peaceful transition to a "sustainable retreat".

Besides wanting to sell their ephemeral products and services to an unsuspecting public, corporate-special interests also want to prevent the state from solving social pathologies because they can profit from treating the symptoms. These special interests can do no better because they are machines programmed to create profits! {12}

All corporate-special interests - even universities, charities, and churches - depend on perpetual economic growth for their budgets, but the laws of thermodynamics tell us that perpetual economic growth is physically impossible. Therefore, all corporate-special interests must be removed from the political environment.

The first simple step is to remove the "personhood" Constitutional protections from corporations, which could probably be done by the President acting alone, via his "police powers". Certainly it could be done by the Supreme Court or Congress if they had the political will to do so. Once corporations are firmly under democratic control - in essence, "public utilities" - the federal government can begin correcting the abuses of capitalism as gracefully as possible. We want to preserve and include the great achievements of capitalism while removing its pathologies.

What follows are six political steps, listed in order of priority, that are designed to mitigate the societal disruptions of the net energy cliff:

1. Remove the "personhood" Constitutional protections from corporations.

2. Make it a federal crime for corporations to advocate anything (including, but not limited to, advertising) in the mass media.

3. Make it a federal crime for anyone employed by a corporation to lobby elected or appointed officials directly or indirectly.

4. Mandate public financing for elections.

5. Assemble teams of the country's best and brightest medical doctors, scientists, engineers and other thinkers - but no representatives of religious groups, economists, or other corporate-special interests - to recommend public policy. (We do not need a Manhattan Project for economics - on how to save the corporations and their outrageous profits; we need a Manhattan Project on how the country can survive the net energy cliff!)

6. Encourage public debate on proposed changes.

(Number 5 above is the key difference that I am advocating. Public policy recommendations would come from medical doctors, engineers and scientists who are looking at the entire system instead of from a room full of fat salesman trying to sell worthless shit to an unsuspecting public. It's based on the recognition that if one changes the environment in which political decisions are made, one changes the political decisions.)

National Goal

The "goal" of our society should be to make our citizens healthy and happy while using as few natural resources as possible (especially energy). The methods needed to attain this goal can be determined by teams of medical doctors, scientists and engineers. Capitalism should be dismantled as gracefully as possible and any natural resources that are not required health and happiness, should left to nature.

With modern technology, probably less than five percent of the population could produce all the goods we really "need". A certain number of qualified "producers" could be selected by a peer group to produce for five years. The rest can stay home and sleep, sing, dance, paint, read, write, pray, play, do minor repairs, work in the garden, and practice birth control.

Self-Determination

Any number of alternative cultural, ethnic or religious communities could be established by popular vote. Religious communities could have public prayer in their schools, prohibit booze, allow no television to corrupt their kids, wear uniforms, whatever. Hippies could establish communities where free sex was the norm. Writers or painters could establish communities where bad taste would be against the law. Ethnic communities could be established to preserve language and customs. If residents didn't like the rules in a particular community, they could move to another religious, cultural, or ethnic community of their choosing.

In short, the one big freedom that individuals would have to give up would be the freedom to destroy the commons (in its broadest sense). Couples would be allowed only one child. And in return, they would be given a guaranteed income for life and the freedom to live almost any way they choose.

Tactics

"Mob in the Square in Romania" Which Led to the End of Communism http://jayhanson.us/America_mob.gif

The changes I am proposing can be accomplished without rewriting our Constitution or violence. The two quotes at the end suggest tactics that worked for the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements. Sign-carrying activists should fill the streets of DC, "like the mob in the square in Romania" {13}, until the city is gridlocked. Activists should just stay there until the powers-that-be concede.

I expect that organizing this movement will take a few years. It's asking a lot. It can't happen overnight. We know that with "cliffing" net energy, our society is just going to keep getting worse and worse until something big changes.

Let's hope the "big change" is something "progressive" instead of a new "President For Life", who has a "prayer breakfast" every morning where he makes up lists of "evildoers" that are to be rounded up and shot. (That's still my most-likely scenario. We came close with "W".)

No progress is possible until we can get the corporate-special interests - all of them - out of our politics and out of the mass media! - Jay - http://jayhanson.us http://www.dieoff.com

You don't communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue ... It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen - in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication ... No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation ... To attempt to operate on a good-will basis rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced.
-- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971)

The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement. They sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side - if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they're the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.
-- William Greider, Who Will Tell The People (1993)

'Capitalism' is a money-based political system which creates dissatisfaction, while converting natural resources into garbage, in exchange for IOUs, which will be worthless when the oil peaks and the country goes up in flames.
-- Jay Hanson

Notes:

{1} Life on Earth is "political" http://jayhanson.us/p1.html and conforms to universal thermodynamic laws. We mine our minerals and fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. The deeper we dig, the greater the minimum energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible fuels and minerals are mined first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to mine and refine poorer and poorer quality resources. New technologies can, on a short-term basis, decrease energy costs, but neither technology nor "prices" can repeal the laws of thermodynamics:

* The hematite ore of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota contained sixty percent iron. But now it is depleted and society must use lower-quality taconite ore that has an iron content of about 25 percent.

* The average energy content of a pound of coal dug in the US has dropped fourteen percent since 1955.

* In the 1930s, a barrel of oil invested in finding, drilling and pumping could yield about one hundred barrels. By the 1970s, that number had dropped to about twenty-five barrels. Within a couple of years, that number will become one for one. At that point, even if the price of oil reaches $500 a barrel, it wouldn't be logical to look for new oil in the US because it would consume more energy than it would recover. Decreasing net energy sets up a positive feedback loop: since oil is used directly or indirectly in everything, as the energy costs of oil increase, the energy costs of everything else increase too - including other forms of energy. For example, oil provides about fifty percent of the fuel used in coal extraction.

Every day, about 85 million barrels of oil are burnt: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption . Every day, less oil exists on planet Earth than the day before. The handwriting is on the wall: "capitalism" is running out of energy! Here is a small, silent animation which will illustrate the "net energy" principle: http://jayhanson.us/oil.html .

Imagine having a motor scooter with a five-gallon tank, but the nearest gas station is six gallons away. You cannot fill your tank with trips to the gas station because you burn more than you can bring back - it's impossible for you to cover your overhead (the size of your bankroll and the price of the gas are irrelevant). You might as well put your scooter up on blocks because you are "out of gas" - forever. It's the same with the American economy: if we must spend more than one unit of energy to produce enough goods and services to buy one unit of energy, it will be impossible for us to cover our overhead. At that point, America's economic machine is "out of gas" - forever. More on energy basics at http://dieoff.org/page175.htm .

{2} http://dieoff.org/page134.htm

{3} David Murphy's graph is an "educated guess" to illustrate the point that net energy falls faster than gross energy. Precision here is impossible because the data is not available. His Oil Drum piece can be found at http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5500 .

{4} Although economists claim the market is "efficient", they actually mean "efficient allocation" of money - not the "efficient use" of materials. "Economic efficiency" is completely different than "materials efficiency".

{5} Here is an oversimplified example to give us an idea of how incredibly inefficient the "price system" really is. Suppose that the only thing Americans had to do was to eat. How much energy would be required to feed them?

In 2006, Americans consumed about 334,600,000 Btu per capita, per year: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee1c.xls . This converts to about 84,317,785 nutritional calories equivalent per year: http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm or 84,317,785 / 365 = 231,008 calories per day. But adults only require something like 3,000 calories of food energy per day to survive, so it seems we, very roughly, waste something like 231,008 - 3,000 = 228,008 calories per day, per capita.

Studies show that food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. So we will allow ten calories of energy to grow and process each calorie of food delivered, so 3,000 * 10 = 30,000 calories per day is required to keep an adult alive. Thus, 228,008 - 30,000 = approximately 198,008 calories are still being wasted each and every day, by every American.

Let's allow the equivalent of 3,000 nutritional calories (about one tenth gallon of gas) per day, per capita to collect and deliver food and water to each and every household in the country, so 198,008 - 3,000 = 195,008 calories equivalent wasted per day, per capita in the US.

The estimated population of America on September 22 2009 was 307,511,668: http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html . So 195,008 *307,511,668 * 365 = 21,887,999,529,837,200 nutritional calories wasted every year in the US, or 2,188,799,953 tonnes - over two billion tonnes - of oil equivalent are wasted each year in the US feeding people! In 2006, oil production in the Middle East was only 1,221,900,000 tonnes: http://tinyurl.com/mfwndm .

Every year, the "price system" in the United States, wastes almost a billion tonnes more oil than is produced in the Middle East! Obviously, there is more to life than eating, but equally-obviously, the price system is the most inefficient organization in human history!

Excel spreadsheet: http://jayhanson.us/America.xls

High resolution image: http://jayhanson.us/America_xls.htm

{6} http://tinyurl.com/ycg7wss

{7} An environment's "carrying capacity" is its maximum persistently supportable load (Catton 1986). If the load exceeds capacity, then the environment is damaged and carrying capacity is reduced. http://dieoff.org/page74.htm

{8} http://tinyurl.com/c28c87

Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of America (2003, 2005) http://www.amazon.com/Gangs-America-Corporate-Disabling-Democracy/dp/1576753190

http://jayhanson.us/gangsofAmerica.pdf
http://jayhanson.us/Gangs_2.pdf

Differences Between the Classic Corporation (Before 1860) and the Modern Corporation (After 1900):

Birth
< 1860: Difficult: requires a custom charter issued by a state legislature
> 1900: Easy: general incorporation charter allows automatic chartering

Life Span
< 1860: Limited term
> 1900: No limits

"Shape Shifting"
< 1860: Corporations not allowed to own stock in other companies; restricted to activities specified in charter
> 1900: Corporations free to pursue acquisitions and spin-offs;

Mobility
< 1860: Usually restricted to home state
> 1900: No restrictions

Adaptability
< 1860: Restricted to activities specified in charter
> 1900: Allowed to pursue multiple specified lines of business and initiate or acquire new ones at company's discretion

"Conscience"
< 1860: Actions constrained by shareholder liability and by threat of charter revocation
> 1900: Fewer constraints due to limited liability, disuse of charter revocation, and tort reforms

"Will"
< 1860: Managerial action hampered by legal status of minority shareholders and of corporate agents
> 1900: Legal revisions enable consolidation of management's power

Size
< 1860: Limited by charter restrictions
> 1900: Asset limits removed; antitrust laws generally not effective

Constitutional Rights
< 1860: Functional only
> 1900: Steady acquisition of constitutional rights

Here are some organizations, books, and web resources that share the same goal - ending corporate governance: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ReadingLinks.html

This timeline of corporate personhood (the gain and loss of rights and powers) is particularly interesting: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ToPRaP.html

{9} The "Progressives" are still making constitutional changes. See Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution - And Why We Need It More Than Ever (2006) http://www.amazon.com/Second-Bill-Rights-Unfinished-Revolution dp/0465083331 .

* In 1900, it was clear that the Constitution permitted racial segregation. By 1970, it was universally agreed that racial segregation was forbidden.

* In 1960, the Constitution permitted sex discrimination. By 1990, it was clear that sex discrimination was almost always forbidden.

* In 1930, the Constitution allowed government to suppress political dissent if it had a bad or dangerous tendency. By 1970, it was clear that the government could almost never suppress political dissent.

* In 1910, the Constitution prohibited maximum hour and minimum wage laws. By 1940, it was clear that the Constitution permitted maximum hour and minimum wage laws.

* In 1960, it was clear that the Constitution allowed government to regulate commercial speech, which was not protected by the free speech principle. By 2000, it was clear that the Constitution generally did not allow government to regulate commercial speech unless it was false or misleading.

* In 1970, it would have been preposterous to argue that the Constitution protected the right to engage in homosexual sodomy. In 1987, it was well settled that the Constitution did not protect that right. By 2004, it was clear that the Constitution did protect the right to engage in homosexual sodomy. More in http://jayhanson.us/fortyAcresAndAMule.pdf

http://jayhanson.us/FDR2.pdf
http://jayhanson.us/theMythOfLaissezFaire.pdf

Barbra H Fried, The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement (Harvard University Press,1998)
http://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Assault-Laissez-Faire-Economics/dp/0674775279

Edward N Kearny, Thurman Arnold, Social Critic: The Satirical Challenge to Orthodoxy http://jayhanson.us/thurmanArnoldSocialCritic.pdf

Thurman W Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (Yale University Press 1937), Chapter VIII: The Personification of Corporation
http://jayhanson.us/thePersonificationOfCorporation.pdf

Robert H Nelson, Reaching or Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991)
http://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Heaven-Earth-Theological-Economics/dp/0847676641

http://jayhanson.us/gospelOfEfficiency.pdf
http://jayhanson.us/haleAll.pdf

{10} Human health and happiness are the products of our biology and environment.

{11} In order to understand why people act as they do, at a minimum, one must understand "politics" among social animals. See http://jayhanson.us/p1.html

{12} http://jayhanson.us/c1.html

{13} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_of_1989

_____

This paper is hereby placed in the public domain and may be reprinted without further permission.

Jay Hanson (October 06 2009)

This file is archived at http://jayhanson.us/america.htm

A "no flash" version designed to copy and paste into an email is at http://jayhanson.us/americaNF.htm

A "no graphics" version is at http://jayhanson.us/americaNG.htm

A pdf version is at http://jayhanson.us/america.pdf

A word version is at http://jayhanson.us/america.doc

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

Can the Earth Survive Overshoot and Collapse?

2011-02-14T09:25:00.000+09:00

by Wendy Moyer

http://ezinearticles.com/ (February 11 2011)

Ecologists are saying that the Earth is in an "overshoot and collapse" mode. Our forests are shrinking, our soil is eroding, and our water tables are falling. In addition, throughout the world the number of heat waves that can decimate crops is increasing, fisheries are collapsing, deserts are expanding, rangelands are deteriorating, and coral reefs are dying.

Our glaciers are melting, which is causing our seas to rise. Consequently more powerful storms are arising and species are disappearing. And because we've been so dependent on oil for so long the supply of oil is shrinking.

Although many people have been aware of these destructive ecological trends and - some have even been reversed at local levels - none of them has been globally reversed.

In the past the demand for resources on local levels has exceeded the sustainable yields of natural systems. There's nothing new about that. However, what has been happening at an accelerated pace is that, for the first time, demand is exceeding supply on a global level.

Our forests are shrinking virtually everywhere around the world while on every continent our grasslands deteriorate. Carbon dioxide emissions are above carbon dioxide fixation throughout the world and many countries are seeing their water tables fall.

According to a report by the Global Footprint Network, mankind's demands surpassed the Earth's regenerative capacity for the first time around 1980. And since then the demand has been accelerating the consumption of the world's natural assets. This has all set the stage for the decline and potentially for the ultimate collapse of our ecosystem.

What Is "Overshoot and Collapse"?

A well known example of "overshoot and collapse" began in 1944. At that time 29 reindeer were introduced to a remote island in the Bering Sea. Nineteen men were stationed on Saint Matthew Island at that time.

When World War Two ended the following year the base closed and the men were evacuated from the island. Then, in 1957, David Kline from the US Fish and Wildlife Service visited the island and found that the original population of 29 reindeer had grown to 1,350. And they all were thriving on the four-inch thick mat of lichen covering the one hundred twenty eight square foot island.

Because there were no predators the reindeer population continued to explode.

It continued to grow until 1963, when there were 6,000 reindeer on the island.

Kline returned to Saint Matthew Island three years later. When he arrived he found that almost all of the reindeer had perished. There was very little lichen and reindeer skeletons covered the island. Now there were only 41 female reindeer and one male. There were no fawns. The reindeer population was dying.

By 1980 they were all gone.

Like those reindeer, the worldwide growth of population is over consuming the Earth's natural resources.

However, there still is hope. For example, since 1970 a small scale dairy producer relying almost exclusively on crop residue as a source of feed has multiplied its production more than four times. India has recently overtaken the US as the world's leading producer of milk.

And in China a sophisticated ecologically sound crop polyculture has made that country the first in the world whose fish farm output has exceeded its oceanic catch.

http://www.countercurrents.org/moyer110211.htm

http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-The-Earth-Survive-Overshoot-And-Collapse?&id=5746126

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

Egypt's Warning: Are You Listening?

2011-02-13T21:28:00.002+09:00

by Chris Martenson
http://www.chrismartenson.com/ (February 09 2011)
http://www.countercurrents.org/ (February 12 2011)

One day, a fruit and vegetable seller was arrested in Tunisia, sparking social unrest, and a few weeks later the government of Egypt was set to topple.
Such is the nature of complex, chaotic, and unpredictable systems. The stresses build for years and years, and nothing really seems to be happening, but then everything suddenly changes. Egypt is therefore emblematic of what we might expect in any complex system in which pressures are building, such as the US Treasury market.
Can events in complex systems ever be predicted? No ... and yes. No, because the precise timing and details can never be predicted. Yes, because we can be certain that anything that is unsustainable will someday cease to continue and things that are horribly imbalanced will someday topple. We can also be certain that the change, when it comes, will be rather sudden and abrupt, rather than gentle and linear.
That is, we can easily predict that a complex system will shift, and that it will probably do so rapidly, but not exactly when or by how much.
How unbalanced was Egypt? Very.
Here are a few quite relevant statistics about Egypt (hat tip to an email from reader Mark O, with credit to Dr John Coulter) to which I have added a few items:

The relentless math:

Population 1960: 27.8 million
Population 2008: 81.7 million
Current population growth rate: 2% per annum (a 35-year doubling rate)
Population in 2046 after another doubling: 164 million
Rainfall average over whole country: about 2 inches per year
Highest rainfall region: Alexandria, 7.9 inches per year
Arable land (almost entirely in the Nile Valley): 3%
Arable land per capita: 0.04 Ha (400 square meter)
Arable land per capita in 2043: 0.02 Ha
Food imports: 40% of requirements
Grain imports: 60% of requirements
Net oil exports: Began falling in 1997, went negative in 2007
Oil production peaked in 1996
Cost of oil rising steeply
Cost of oil and food tightly linked
The future of Egypt will be shaped by these few biophysical facts - a relentless form of math that is hardly unique to Egypt, by the way - and it matters very little who is in power. Given the choice, I would not want to live there, nor in any other country that has fostered or permitted such reckless population growth beyond what the country itself can sustain.
The interesting part is that these facts have been in plain view for decades, building into economic and social pressures that were suddenly unleashed in a wave of social and political unrest. How was it that such obvious things escaped notice for so long before they suddenly reared up into plain view? Instead of being a surprising exception to the rule, we should instead brace ourselves against the idea that this is just the way things tend to work.
Back to the main story. Without persistent (and rising) food imports, Egypt cannot feed itself. It has managed to cover up the shortfall by having enough oil to export, but, like every country, their oil reserves are finite and eventually they'll face a day of reckoning.
The oil situation in Egypt has only very recently become an enormous and unavoidable issue.
The monthly peak occurred in December 1996 (the yearly peak was also 1996), and oil production is now down some thirty percent since then.
Egypt's Oil Production (Total)
http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u132/Egypt_Oil_Production.jpg/

While it's good to have plenty of production, what really matters to a nation that imports so much of its basic living items are exports.
Of course, there are two things that typically chew on a nation's oil exports: falling production and rising internal consumption. With both of these dynamics in play, Egypt's exports have been getting mauled, not by one, but by two exponential functions:
Petroleum Net Exports/Imports
http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u132/Egypt_net_oil_Exports.jpg/
Source: EIA {1}
The green circle marks the date when Egypt hit its peak of petroleum production in 1996, and the blue circle and arrow marks when exports had fallen by fifty percent, just six years after peak production.
The gap between those two events, six years, is a very short amount of time to adjust to the new reality - too short, as it turns out. Such is the nature of a double exponential working against you.
Note: For the energy purists, this chart from the Energy Information Agency (EIA) misrepresents things somewhat. Egypt's domestic oil consumption and production are virtually identical right now, but Egypt has the largest oil refining sector in Africa, which skews their petroleum imports to the negative side. But whether Egypt became a new petroleum importer this year or in 2007 is essentially a historical blink, and the story told by the trajectory of the chart is little changed by small matters of timing.
Any country that has to import both oil and food is living on borrowed time. It was only a matter of time before something gave way, and apparently that time is now.
Hillary Clinton actually spoke something approximating the truth about this fact recently, although she was referring to the entire region, but nonetheless, it was an unusual moment of clarity for the US political structure:
Hillary Clinton: Middle East facing 'perfect storm' {2}

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the Middle East is facing a "perfect storm" of unrest and nations must embrace democratic change.
Speaking in Munich, Mrs Clinton said the status quo in the region was "simply not sustainable". "The region is being battered by a perfect storm of powerful trends.
"This is what has driven demonstrators into the streets of Tunis, Cairo, and cities throughout the region. The status quo is simply not sustainable."
She said that with water shortages and oil running out, governments may be able to hold back the tide of change for a short while but not for long.

Water shortages and oil running out? I'd decode those ideas for you, but they speak for themselves. Food and fuel are running out. The irony here is that she may as well have been speaking about the United States, Japan, or any number of countries across the globe, but any admission of biophysical limits is a good start, I suppose.
Editorially, it's not at all clear to me how the poorly defined concept of 'democratic change' will really change the equation much, as limits are immune to which 'ism' you happen to be running, but I am sure there are some in Washington DC who think ideology can trump reality. Regardless, I am somewhat surprised to see such obvious truths about water and oil being spoken by a senior US representative; it was unclear to me that anyone at that level had any awareness of these subjects at all.
My intent here is not to point out the future difficulties that Egypt faces, no matter who is charge, but to use the change that happened there as emblematic of what we might expect elsewhere, especially in the financial markets.
Egypt simply reminds us that anything that is unsustainable will someday change. It is an emblem for the world.
With abundant energy and food, we are treated to expansive and stable economies in which everyone stands a chance of gaining. Not that everyone will, mind you, but the possibility is there In an energy-constrained world, what was formerly possible is no longer do-able, things don't work right, and there seem to be persistent shortages of everything from growth, to money, to food, to goodwill. What used to work doesn't. It is at these points that the prior stresses and imbalances are most likely to snap and suddenly change the world.
These are the very sorts of changes that are coming to the rest of the world. Perhaps to a country or financial market near you. Are you ready?
In Part Two of this report, our just-released Guide to Navigating the Coming Crisis {3}, we analyze how the same systemic breakages in Egypt will likely manifest in the United States (and other countries). Also, for the first time ever, we have summarized the entire 'method' by which we make sense of the world. This method has allowed us to both grow our wealth and sleep better at night. Yes, there are troubling events afoot in the world, but an accurate diagnosis goes a very long way towards relieving the stresses that can cloud good decision-making and narrow one's field of view. We not only give you the information you need; we give you our best tools so that you can fashion them into the right actions that make sense for you.
Click {3} to read the Guide to Navigating the Coming Crisis (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
Links:
{1} http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/country_energy_data.cfm?fips=EG/

{2} http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12372983/

{3} http://www.chrismartenson.com/martensonreport/guide-to-navigating-coming-crisis/

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/egypts-warning-are-you-listening/52575/

http://www.countercurrents.org/martenson120211.htm/

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

Dignity, Bread and Liberty

2011-02-13T09:16:00.001+09:00

The Start of Peak Food Revolutions

by Mike Small

Opendemocracy.net (February 04 2011)

countercurrents.org (February 11 2011)

"What has changed the placid Egyptian population into a boiling mass of revolt?" Goes the not-so-subtle sub-text of much corporate media coverage. First the supposed quietism of the Egyptian people is over-stated, there have been other strikes and protests in recent years. As recently as 2008 Egyptians rioted over bread prices {1}. Second they are hardly a boiling mass, in fact the remarkable feature of the events in Tahir Square and across the country was the peacefulness, civic organisation and dignity of hundreds of thousands of people demanding change. But the short answer to the question 'what made it all kick-off?' is: bread, not twitter. It's not an RSS feed they're after: 'Dignity Bread & Liberty' is the slogan.

The western media may be obsessing with social media but believe me this isn't the thing you are focusing on if you don't have enough to eat. Egypt, as the world's largest wheat importer, is reliant on countries like Russia and Pakistan for its food supply. American writer Danny Schechter puts it well: "Yes, the tens of thousands in the streets demanding the ouster of the cruel Mubarek regime are there now pressing for their right to make a political choice, but they are being driven by an economic disaster that has sent unemployment skyrocketing and food prices climbing".

Prices in Egypt are up seventeen percent because of a worldwide surge in commodity prices that has many factors, but speculation on Wall Street and big banks is a key one. The European Commission yesterday {2} published a new version of a report on commodities, which acknowledged a link between speculation and price increases. A previous version of this report argued that there was no evidence of such link, but this clashed with Sarkozy's agenda for the G20. Hence, Michael Barnier redrafted the report.

Meanwhile, writing in Les Echos {3}, French economist Francois Bourguignon calls into question a number of received wisdoms on commodities prices: volatility is no higher today compared with the 1970s or the 1980s; the massive entry of index funds on commodities markets has not increased prices; the volatility of agricultural prices is mostly due to unanticipated variations in market fundamentals, such as climate, costs, and demand.

But whether it's climate, speculations and spivs {4} (or a lethal combination) the fact is that people are out in the streets not just to assert their demands for a democracy, but by their need to eat.

Nouriel Roubini - who was among the first to predict the financial crisis and was dubbed a Cassandra for his troubles in 2005 - urges us not just to look at the crowds in Cairo, but what is motivating them now, after years of silence and repression?

He agrees that the dramatic rise in energy and food prices has become a major global threat and a leading factor that has gone largely unreported in the coverage of events in Egypt.

If we take Roubini's advice and look at underlying motives or para-economics we can see deeper issues. Is it too speculative to see the 25 January revolt as the first food revolution as fuelled by peak oil? Oil prices affect food prices when you have a petro-chemical food economy.

Egypt's not unique in all this. World food prices hit a new record high in January after rising for a seventh consecutive month, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said today (Februry 03 2011), warning the poor would be hit hardest.

The FAO Food Price Index {5}, which monitors monthly price changes for a basket of commodities, averaged 231 points in January - up 3.4 percent from December and its highest level since FAO started measuring food prices in 1990.

None of this is new. In 2008 food riots swept across Africa with protests in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. In most of West Africa the price of food has risen by fifty percent. Nor is this a phenomenon closed to 'poor helpless Africa'. In the USA there was a 41% surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over six months in 2008.

As we stand in solidarity with the Egyptian people, we should also not allow this crisis in food democracy to be allowed to become a trojan horse for westernised 'solutions' to hunger. Food Sovereignty is required not food security or the bogus techno-fix of GM. This is a political problem reflecting an unsustainable global food system ill-equipped to withstands the difficulties of climate change and collapsing institutions of governance.

_____

Mike Small is founder of the Fife Diet project {6}, Europe's largest local food initiative and writes on food and climate justice issues and problems of elite rule. He is co-editor of Bella Caledonia {7}.

This article is published by Mike Small and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence {8}. You may republish it with attribution for non-commercial purposes following the Creative Commons guidelines. For other queries about reuse, click {9}. Some articles on this site are published under different terms. No images on the site or in articles may be re-used without permission unless specifically licensed under Creative Commons.

Links:

{1} http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2787714/Egyptians-riot-over-bread-crisis.html

{2} http://www.lefigaro.fr/matieres-premieres/2011/02/01/04012-20110201ARTFIG00709-bruxelles-admet-le-role-de-la-speculation-sur-les-prix.php

{3} http://www.lesechos.fr/economie-politique/france/actu/0201117182455-sous-la-volatilite-des-prix-agricoles.htm

{4} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivs_%28film%29

{5} http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/world-food-prices-hit-record/

{6} http://www.fifediet.co.uk/

{7} http://bellacaledonia.wordpress.com/

{8} http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

{9} http://www.opendemocracy.net/about/syndication

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/mike-small/dignity-bread-and-liberty-start-of-peak-food-revolutions

http://www.countercurrents.org/small110211.htm

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

A World of Hunger Again

2011-02-12T20:40:00.000+09:00

Editorial

The Japan Times (February 12 2011)

Once again, world food stocks are looking precarious. As Mr Michael Richardson detailed in these pages on February 3, prices are soaring for basic food products and the prospect of hunger, starvation and unrest are rising as well. There are several reasons for this spike in prices, but weather - and climate change - is the most important. It will be difficult if not impossible to insulate food production from weather-related problems in the short term, but steps can be taken to insulate prices from their impact.

According to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report issued earlier this month, the seventh consecutive month of food price increases pushed world food prices to record levels last month. The FAO price index, which tracks a basket of 55 food commodities, rose 3.4 percent in January, taking prices to their highest level since tracking began in 1990. Over the past year, the index price of corn has risen 52 percent, wheat 49 percent, and soybeans 28 percent. Ominously, stocks are low and the trend is expected to continue. In total, world food prices rose 25 percent in 2010, forcing countries to spend an estimated $1 trillion on imports - as much as twenty percent more than the year before.

Fortunately for Asia, where rice is a staple food, production and national buffer stocks are rising. According to the FAO, the region's rice harvest in 2010 is expected to reach a record 627 million tons, a 2.1 percent increase over production in 2009. But experts warn that production is not keeping pace with population growth and upward pressure on prices will persist.

There are several factors behind the steadily rising prices. One explanation blames speculators who are exploiting rising liquidity to bet on rising commodity prices. The human cost of those bets - hunger, starvation, civil unrest - is irrelevant to them. French President Nicolas Sarkozy charges those speculators with "extortion and pillaging" and has promised that he will use his term in the chair of the G20 to fix the problem.

A second cause of the spike in food prices is rising demand. Populations increase and even those that are leveling off are shifting demand to meat, which requires more grain for production. At the same time, crop yields are decreasing as agricultural resources are depleted. Another factor is the growing popularity of biofuels, which adds to the demand for - and prices of - some agricultural products.

The most important cause is weather and climate. Shifting weather patterns and extreme weather events are wrecking havoc on harvests. Heavy rains in Australia have decimated that country's wheat harvest, pushing prices of that staple higher. Droughts and fires in Russia and Ukraine did similar damage to those countries' wheat harvests. Equally severe weather took chunks out of harvests in Canada, Brazil and Argentina.

And things could get worse. This week, the FAO warned that China faces similar conditions with its agricultural regions set to experience the worst drought in over half a century. China usually does not attract a lot of attention in this area, but it is in fact the world's largest wheat producer. Most Chinese production is consumed internally and the prospect of domestic shortages means that a government that is hypersensitive to any hint of domestic unrest will turn to international markets to make up the shortfall. With nearly $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, Beijing can feed its people at any price even if its determination to do so prices other nations out of the market.

Global warming is creating extreme conditions - yes, even the heavy snows of this year can be attributed to global warming - which damages harvests and drives up prices. In fact, it does not take actual shortages, but just their prospect, to raise prices. The human cost of higher prices is unmistakable. Rising food prices were responsible for riots in over thirty countries in 2008. The recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt has roots in food shortages, among other factors. For families in developing countries, food can consume fifty to 75 percent of household income. Rising prices force them to choose between food and medication or fuel. As some staples become more expensive, families choose lower quality goods, or sometimes are forced to go without. In each case, the result is declining nutrition and even hunger.

Dealing with climate change will take time. More immediately, governments can do more to rein in the speculation that leads to artificial price inflation. More transparency can be introduced to trading and international reserves can be used as buffers when shortages appear. In 2009, developed nations promised to provide more than $20 billion to aid agriculture in developing countries; $6 billion of that total was intended for a food security fund at the World Bank. Less than $1 billion of those pledges has been paid.

Staple-producing countries must also ensure that their products get to global markets. Export restrictions, like those imposed during the 2008 food crisis, cut international supplies while flooding local markets, thus reducing local prices and the incentive to produce. Of course, creating markets for agriculture producers in developing countries would encourage production there. But that requires global trade reform - and that, like global warming, is a much longer-term project.

The Japan Times: Saturday, February 12 2011

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/ed20110212a1.html

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

The Anti-Social Network

2011-02-12T08:49:00.003+09:00

By helping other people look happy, Facebook is making us sad.

by Libby Copeland

Slate.com (January 26 2011)

There are countless ways to make yourself feel lousy. Here's one more, according to research out of Stanford: Assume you're alone in your unhappiness.

"Misery Has More Company Than People Think", a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin {1}, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a PhD student in Stanford's psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were - and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. "They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life", he told me.

The human habit of overestimating other people's happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu:

If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.

But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan's research doesn't look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature. And women - an especially unhappy bunch of late - may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

In one of the Stanford studies, Jordan and his fellow researchers asked eighty freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. Time and again, the subjects underestimated how many negative experiences ("had a distressing fight", "felt sad because they missed people") their peers were having. They also overestimated how much fun ("going out with friends", "attending parties") these same peers were having. In another study, the researchers found a sample of 140 Stanford students unable to accurately gauge others' happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they were close to - friends, roommates and people they were dating.

And in a third study, the researchers found that the more students underestimated others' negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely and brooding over their own miseries. This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.

As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one's assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn't make the cut, either. {2} The site's very design - the presence of a "Like" button, without a corresponding "Hate" button - reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring. (No one will "Like" your update that the new puppy died, but they may "Like" your report that the little guy was brave up until the end.)

Any parent who has posted photos and videos of her child on Facebook is keenly aware of the resulting disconnect from reality, the way chronicling parenthood this way creates a story line of delightfully misspoken words, adorably worn hats, dancing, blown kisses. Tearful falls and tantrums are rarely recorded, nor are the stretches of pure, mind-blowing tedium. We protect ourselves, and our kids, this way; happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not. But in the process, we wind up contributing to the illusion that kids are all joy, no effort.

Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character", one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together (2011). Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety", and suggests that the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. (The book's broader theory is that technology, despite its promises of social connectivity, actually makes us lonelier by preventing true intimacy.)

Facebook oneupsmanship may have particular implications for women. As Meghan O'Rourke has noted here in Slate {3}, women's happiness has been at an all-time low in recent years. O'Rourke {4} and two University of Pennsylvania economists who have studied the male-female happiness gap argue that women's collective discontent may be due to too much choice and second-guessing - unforeseen fallout, they speculate, of the way our roles have evolved over the last half-century. As the economists put it, "The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood in believing that one's life is not measuring up".

If you're already inclined to compare your own decisions to those of other women and to find yours wanting, believing that others are happier with their choices than they actually are is likely to increase your own sense of inadequacy. And women may be particularly susceptible to the Facebook illusion. For one thing, the site is inhabited by more women than men, and women users tend to be more active on the site, as Forbes has reported {5}. According to a recent study out of the University of Texas at Austin {6}, while men are more likely to use the site to share items related to the news or current events, women tend to use it to engage in personal communication (posting photos, sharing content "related to friends and family"). This may make it especially hard for women to avoid comparisons that make them miserable. (Last fall, for example, the Washington Post ran a piece about the difficulties of infertile women {7} in shielding themselves from the Facebook crowings of pregnant friends.)

Jordan, who is now a postdoctoral fellow studying social psychology at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, suggests we might do well to consider Facebook profiles as something akin to the airbrushed photos on the covers of women's magazine. No, you will never have those thighs, because nobody has those thighs. You will never be as consistently happy as your Facebook friends, because nobody is that happy. So remember Montesquieu, and, if you're feeling particularly down, use Facebook for its most exalted purpose: finding fat exes.

Links:

{1} "Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Others' Negative Emotions" by Alexander H Jordan, Stanford University http://psp.sagepub.com/content/37/1/120.abstract

{2} "A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's sorrow" by Ian Shapira, Washington Post (December 09 2010) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/facebook-story-mothers-joy-familys-sorrow.html?hpid=topnews

{3} "Women Are More Unhappy Than Ever" by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate.com (May 20 2009) http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/women-are-more-unhappy-ever

{4} "Desperate Feminist Wives - Why wanting equality makes women unhappy" by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate.com (March 06 2006) and "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2009, 1:2, 190?225 http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/pol.1.2.190 http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Paradox%20of%20declining%20female%20happiness.pdf

{5} "What Men And Women Are Doing On Facebook" by Jenna Goudreau, Forbes.com (April 26 2010) http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/26/popular-social-networking-sites-forbes-woman-time-facebook-twitter_print.html

{6} "Got Facebook? Investigating What's Social About Social Media" by S Craig Watkins and H Erin Lee, University of Texas (November 18 2010) http://www.theyoungandthedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/watkins_lee_facebookstudy-nov-18.pdf ]

{7} "Infertile couples cope with prolific Facebook friends" by Ian Shapira, Washington Post (October 25 2010) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/24/AR2010102402642.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2282620/

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

Rethinking Electricity

2011-02-11T21:02:00.002+09:00

by Darlene Heckman

solari.com (February 10 2011)

Virtually all of your electronics are sucking up energy even if they're turned off or not being used. Some of the biggest culprits include your TV, computer, and printer. Even your electric toothbrush is drawing energy when it's plugged in and sitting idle.

The easiest (and most obvious) thing you can do is get up right now and unplug whatever you're not using.

Remove chargers from the wall when you're not charging. Your cell phone charger, iPod charger, laptop charger, et cetera keeps drawing electricity even if your phone, Ipod, laptop, et cetera isn't charging.

Use a smart strip for your computer accessories. These work really well when it's not feasible to unplug your devices.

This is just a few suggestions to help get a handle on usage. Listed below are articles that can aid in the next step to managing your electric usage and bill.

Back in the "Good Ol Days" when we did not have all the conveniences of modern day technology, our ancestors showed a will of creativity and resilience.

If we could all just apply one application to our daily lives that was a way of life for them, we would all contribute to saving energy and maybe even take a step to self reliance.

So, try a cook out one night a week, use candles to light the decks and walk ways. Have a camp fire, invite family and friends over for a evening of visiting. Put up clothes lines and air dry your clothes.

My list could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. We must take the first step to becoming less dependent on man-made power and look to ways we can be more self-sufficient.

A few interesting appliances that are non electric offered in the Lehman's catalog:

Water-Powered Multifunction Clock

Every year, billions of conventional dry cell batteries are discarded. Recycling their waste is not only expensive but often inadequate, resulting in hazardous pollution. This combination clock, timer, thermometer and alarm runs on one of the most common, harmless things around - water. It's simply the most uniquely powered product on the market today!

Solar Powered Attic Fan

Reduce heating and cooling costs. A new product with applications in any climate. All you need is sunshine.

Chamber Olive Oil Lamp

Olive oil is 99% pure renewable fuel, so it produces no smoke or odor and can't aggravate allergies. Safe since it can't catch on fire if tipped over. These simple lamps will burn any green, renewable fuel like olive oil, vegetable oil, or liquid fat or grease. Olive oil lamps, or fat lamps, have been around since the days of the Vikings, and with good reason: they are safe, bright and very simple to use.

Domestic Gas Refrigerators

The Dometic is perfect for campgrounds, lodges, cabins, and remote houses or cottages. Back-up when the power is out for long periods of time.

The following articles can help you gain control over your electrical usage:

"Seven Ways To Reduce Home Electricity Consumption", SayEducate (June 05 2008)
http://www.sayeducate.com/2008/06/05/7-ways-to-reduce-home-electricity-consumption/

"What's Wasting Energy in Your Home Right Now", Yahoo Green (October 09 2008)
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/the_conscious_consumer/4/what-s-wasting-energy-in-your-home-right-now.html

"How to Reduce Vampire Power", Yahoo Green (October 09 2008)
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/huddlergreenhome/17/how-to-reduce-vampire-power.html

Lehman's Non-Electric Catalog
http://www.lehmans.com/store/util/free_catalog_signup

"Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Assessments", Energy Savers
http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/energy_audits/index.cfm/mytopic=11170

http://solari.com/blog/?p=10331

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

Overcoming Systems Stupidity

2011-02-11T09:01:00.000+09:00

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 02 2011)

Readers of mine with sufficiently long memories may be wondering if the evening news somehow accidentally got swapped for archived footage of a performance of that durable Sixties folk number The Merry Minuet {1}, with its lines about rioting in Africa and global mayhem in general. Certainly that was the thought that occurred to me as news from Egypt and Tunisia jostled the Category Five cyclone (we'd say "hurricane" on this side of the planet) that just walloped Australia, and the far more modest but still impressive winter storm that's sweeping across America as I write this.

Looked at in isolation, each of these stories are business as usual. Political turmoil in Third World nations is common enough, and big storms are a fact of life in Australia as well as the United States. Still, it's exactly that habit of looking at news stories in isolation that fosters the blindness to history as it's happening that I've discussed here repeatedly. Remember that the world is a whole system and put the news into context accordingly, and troubling patterns appear.

Let's start with the revolution in Tunisia and the ongoing turmoil in Egypt. Behind the explosion of popular resentments that's putting once-secure governments at risk is the simple fact that in both countries, and across the Third World more generally, people are having an increasingly hard time getting enough to eat as food prices climb past records set during the last spike in 2008. Plenty of factors feed into the surge in food costs, but one major factor is a string of failed harvests in some of the world's important grain-producing regions, which in turn has been caused by increasingly unstable weather. Pundits in the US media talk earnestly about the end of an era of cheap food, but what that means in practice is that over a growing fraction of the world, incomes are failing to keep pace with food costs, and as the number of hungry and desperate people grows, so does the pressure toward political explosions.

The context of this week's two big storms is just as easily missed from media reports. For more than a decade now, the insurance industry has been warning that the annual cost of weather-related disasters has been rising at a dramatic rate - fast enough, according to a study released early last decade, that it will equal the gross domestic product of the entire planet by 2060. (Take a moment to think through the implications of that little detail; if the entire economic output of the world has to go to make up for repairing the costs of weather-related disasters, what about the other things economies are supposed to provide?) Here again, there are plenty of factors feeding into that soaring economic burden, but the destabilization of the world's climate is one major factor. Whether or not dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year from our tailpipes and smokestacks is the sole cause of this destabilization is really beside the point; if you happen to be sitting next to a sleeping grizzly bear, the fact that the bear may have its own reasons for waking up in a bad mood is not a good argument in favor of poking it repeatedly with a stick.

Now of course the American way of life, and more generally the way of life common to most of the world's industrial nations, might best be described as an elaborate arrangement to poke nature's sleeping bears with as many sticks as possible. The business-as-usual end of the green movement has been insisting for decades that we can stop doing that and still maintain something like a modern industrial society, but whether or not their elaborate schemes for doing this could work at all - a complicated question I don't propose to address here - the political will needed to do anything of the kind went AWOL at the end of the Seventies and hasn't been seen since. Thus the most likely future ahead of us is one in which sleeping bears keep being poked with sticks, and increasingly often rouse themselves to bash in a head or two: in less metaphoric terms, that is, a future in which increasingly unstable climates load additional burdens on the global economy and drive a rising tide of political unrest that will probably not remain restricted to comfortably distant continents.

The fact that we don't normally put the events of the day into their proper contexts, and draw such logical conclusions from them as the inadvisability of poking bears with sticks, has a context of its own. It can be credited to the simple fact that Americans are stupid about systems.

There's really no gentler way to put it. Week after week, I can count on fielding at least one comment insisting that my post is just plain wrong because science, technology, progress, the free market, the space brothers, or some other convenient deus ex machina - you name it, somebody's probably invoked it in an email to me - will allow Americans to continue to extract an ever-increasing supply of energy and raw materials from a finite planet without ever running short, and find places to dump the correspondingly rising tide of waste somewhere or other without having it turn up again to give us problems. Now of course it's possible that some of that comes from bloggers-for-hire pushing the agenda of some corporate or political pressure group - there's a lot of that online these days - but the illogic is pervasive enough in our culture that I suspect a lot of it comes from ordinary Americans who basically haven't yet noticed that the world isn't flat.

Watch what passes for political and economic debate in America these days and you can count on hearing much the same thing. Take "sustainable growth", the mantra of a large fraction of the business-as-usual end of the green movement already mentioned. Even the most elementary grasp of systems theory makes it instantly clear that there's no meaningful sense of the adjective "sustainable" that can cohabit with any meaningful sense of the noun "growth". In a system - any system, anywhere - growth is always unsustainable. Some systems have internal limits that cut in at a certain point and stop growth before it becomes pathological, while some rely on external limits, but the limits are always there, and those who think there are no limits to a given pattern of growth are deluding themselves. Mind you, such delusions are always popular - the tech-stock and real estate bubbles that enlivened economic life in the United States during the last decade and a bit are good examples - but the consequences, when growth crashes into the limits that nobody saw coming, are rarely pleasant.

The fixation on the fantasy of perpetual growth is only one of the system-related stupidities that infest contemporary American public life, though it's arguably the most egregious. I've commented before in this blog about the way that popular attitudes assume that raw materials appear out of Santa Claus' sleigh when wanted and then simply "go away" when we're done with them. For a good example, consider the way that the American livestock industry pumps animals full of chemicals that make them gain weight at an unnatural pace, and then feeds meat from those animals to people. Does anybody wonder whether these same chemicals, stored up in animal tissues and thus inserted into the human food chain, might have anything to do with the fact that Americans are gaining weight at an unnatural pace? Surely you jest.

A basic grasp of systems thinking would make it easier to get past follies of that sort, but that same grasp would also make it impossible to pretend that Americans can go on living their current lifestyles much longer. That's an important reason why systems thinking was dropped like a hot rock in the early 1980s and why, outside of a narrow range of practical applications where it remains essential, it's been shut out of the collective conversation of our society ever since.

For the aspiring green wizard, on the other hand, there are few habits of thought more important than thinking in terms of whole systems. Most of what we've been talking about for the last eight months, when it hasn't been strictly practical in nature, has been oriented toward systems thinking, and a great deal of the practical material is simply the application of a systems approach to some aspect of working with nature. The practical instructions in the weeks and months ahead, as we turn to conservation and homebuilt alternative energy systems, will be even more dependent on having a clear sense of the way whole systems work. The one real limiting factor is that it's a bit of a challenge to recommend a good clear nontechnical guide to systems thinking to those of you who are working through the Green Wizard program in earnest.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody in the Seventies or early Eighties wrote such a textbook. A truly magnificent book on the subject was already in circulation then, and indeed it had a burst of popularity during those years; the one complicating factor is that very few people seem to have realized then, and even fewer realize now, that the book in question is in fact an introductory textbook of systems thinking.

The book we're discussing? Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching.

The Tao Te Ching has been translated into English more often than any other book, and the title has received nearly an equal diversity of renderings. I'm convinced that most of this diversity comes out of our own culture's stupidity about systems, for when it's approached from a systems perspective the title - and indeed the book - becomes immediately clear. Tao comes from a verb meaning "to lead forth", and in ancient times took on a range of related meanings - "path", "method", "teaching", "art". The word that most closely captures its meaning, and not incidentally comes from a similar root, is "process". Te is used for the character, nature, or "insistent particularity" of any given thing; "wholeness" or "integrity" are good English equivalents. Ching is "authoritative text", perhaps equivalent to "classic" or "scripture" in English, though the capitalized "Book" captures the flavor as well as anything. "The Book of Integral Process" is a good translation of the title.

Replace the early Chinese philosophical terminology with equivalent terms from systems theory and the point of the text becomes equally clear. Here's Chapter One:

A process as described is not the process as it exists;

The terms used to describe it are not the things they describe.

That which evades description is the wholeness of the system;

The act of description is merely a listing of its parts.

Without intentionality, you can experience the whole system;

With intentionality, you can comprehend its effects.

These two approach the same reality in different ways,

And the result appears confusing;

But accepting the apparent confusion

Gives access to the whole system.

It would be useful if somebody were to do a complete translation of the Tao Te Ching in systems language one of these days - though in saying that, I get the uncomfortable feeling that it's probably going to be me. In the meantime, prospective Green Wizards could do worse than to pick up any of the existing translations that suit their tastes, and try to think through the eighty-one short chapters of the book as guides to working with whole systems.

While you're at it, I'd like to ask that you try a slightly more practical experiment in systems thinking, which leads straight to the theme of next week's post. Using pen and paper, make a list of the ways that heat comes into your home during the winter months, when it's colder outside than inside, and then make a corresponding list of the ways that heat leaves your home during those same months. Make both lists as complete as possible; those of my readers who've downloaded the Master Conservers handouts from the Cultural Conservers Foundation website can certainly use the home survey handout as a guide.

Finally, I'm pleased to announce that my forthcoming book The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered is available for preorders from the publisher at a twenty percent discount {2}, and will be on bookstore shelves in June of this year. Longtime readers will recognize many of the concepts in this book from their first appearance in essays posted on The Archdruid Report, and quite a few of the arguments have been improved as a result of discussions here. Many thanks to all!

_____

John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America {3} and the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2008), The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World (2009), and the forthcoming The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara.

If you enjoy reading this blog, you might want to check out Star's Reach, his blog/novel of the deindustrial future {4}. Set four centuries after the decline and fall of our civilization, it uses the tools of narrative fiction to explore the future our choices today are shaping for our descendants tomorrow.

Links:

{1} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiuUqRc4vME

{2} http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4093

{3} http://www.aoda.org/

{4} http://starsreach.blogspot.com/

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/02/overcoming-systems-stupidity.html

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

Food bubble collapse threatens ...

2011-02-10T21:41:00.001+09:00

... survival of human civilization

by Mike Adams, Editor of Natural News

naturalnews.com (January 18 2011)

Note: The original version of this article contains many links to further sources of information. Please see URL at end.

The following article originally ran on NaturalNews in 2008 but was shifted over to Counterthink.com which ultimately got replaced with political cartoons. In light of today's sudden attention on the food bubble and the possible collapse of human civilization as described by author and environmentalist Lester Brown, it seems highly relevant to bring this article back.

After all, we were talking about the coming food bubble five years ago, long before most people were aware any such thing existed. In this article, in fact, you'll see that in 2008 I wrote, "... humanity is just one crop season away from mass starvation".

Today, in 2011, a news headline about Lester Brown's book says, "World is 'one poor harvest' from chaos, new book warns".

Sound familiar? What Lester Brown's book is warning about in 2011 is the same thing NaturalNews has been writing about for several years, even before 2008. (Of course, other authors have been warning about this for decades, so it's an idea that has been around a while.) Here's the full article I wrote in 2008, with a few edits and updates. It seems like mainstream consciousness is finally ready to accept this idea - an idea that seemed "radical" just three years ago. Suddenly, it now makes sense to enough people that a popular environmentalist like Lester Brown is receiving a lot of acceptance for stating it. That's a good sign, of course: The sooner we all wake up to the reality of the coming food bubble, the better off we'll be.

The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population

It was one of the dumbest "green" ideas ever proposed: Convert millions of acres of cropland into fields for growing ethanol from corn, then burn fossil fuels to harvest the ethanol, expending more energy to extract the fuel than you get from the fuel itself! Meanwhile, sit back and proclaim you've achieved a monumental green victory all while unleashing a dangerous spike in global food prices that's causing a ripple effect of food shortages and rationing around the world.

I think politicians need to spend less time bragging about their latest greenwashing schemes and more time studying The Law of Unintended Consequences. Because while growing fuel on cropland initially sounds like a great idea, any honest assessment of the total impact leads you to the inescapable conclusion that biofuels are largely a government-sponsored scam. With a few exceptions (see below), biofuels produce no net increase in energy output, and they cause food shortages while creating strong economic incentives for the destruction of the very rainforests we desperately need to stabilize the oxygen content of the atmosphere.

And now we're just starting to see the early signs of the economic and social insanity that has been unleashed by this foolish pursuit of biofuels around the world: Food rationing in Sam's Club stores in the US, rapidly-rising prices on bread, rice and corn, and price spikes at cafeterias and restaurants that depend on these staple ingredients. The price of rice has tripled globally, unleashing riots in Haiti and Bangladesh, and the United Nations has issued warnings that millions of people around the world now face starvation because they can't afford to buy food. Americans are even starting to hoard food once again, after years of avoiding basic preparedness measures. (One benefit to all this, however, is that farmers are actually getting paid decent prices for their crops now, after years of operating on the verge of bankruptcy ...)

Most biofuel efforts are a sham

Not all of these price spikes are due to the conversion of croplands to biofuel fields, but much of it is. As a result, it's suddenly becoming obvious to nearly everyone that the pursuit of biofuels, as currently structured, is a grand greenwashing hoax. It doesn't produce more fuel than it consumes, and it drives up food prices, too.

Of course, there are biofuels programs that really do work. The growing and harvesting of sugar cane in Brazil, for example, provides an eight to one return on energy investment. But even that pursuit is tarnished by claims of unsafe work environments and massive environmental pollution (the sugar cane fields are burned before being harvested, a process that releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment).

The only truly promising biofuels technology available today is based on microalgae. Feed carbon dioxide to a vat of algae, and you can produce biofuels cheaply and responsibly, without destroying the environment. But these programs are only experimental. Nobody is producing biofuels on a large scale from algae farms (not yet, anyway).

And that leaves the great American breadbasket: The corn and wheat fields. It is here that food is now being displaced by crops grown for biofuels processing. So where a farmer used to grow corn as a food source, he's now growing it to sell to a biofuel processing facility which turns the corn into ethanol. Obviously, the laws of economics come into play here, meaning that every bushel of corn used for biofuels production is one less bushel of corn available for food. Factor in the laws of supply and demand, and you can see that the more crops we use for biofuels, the higher the prices will rise for food.

Politicians, it seems, have no understanding of economics. They need to study the basics as they are presented in Henry Hazlitt's Book, Economics in One Lesson, which is a Libertarian-oriented guide that explains basic economics to anyone willing to learn. Economics is focused on the study of human behavior ... or more precisely, consumer choice. Now, it seems, consumers are about to be faced with a choice they never wanted to have to make: Should I buy fuel, or food?

In other words: Do I want to drive my car, or do I want to eat?

You can have fuel or food, but not both

Under a biofuels-focused agricultural policy, the same limited resources (soil, sunlight and water, essentially) can be used for only one thing at a time. You can't use the corn twice, obviously (you can't eat the corn and process it for biofuels at the same time), so you've got to make a choice: Will you grow the corn for fuel, or for food?

The more you grow for fuel, of course, the less food you have, and that drives up food prices. But if you swing back the other way and grow more corn for food to ease food prices, the fuel prices go up. Trying to solve both problems at once is a bit like trying to pick up a wet watermelon seed with your fingers: It keeps slipping from your grasp.

One thing that has become abundantly clear in all this is that the era of cheap food and cheap fuel is over. I've written about this on NaturalNews, where I use the term "food bubble" to describe the most recent era of cheap food. As it turns out, cheap food is only made possible by cheap oil, and with oil now approaching $120 a barrel (a price that virtually no one thought possible just two years ago), food prices are simultaneously skyrocketing. (Modern farming practices use a lot of fossil fuel. So does transporting food across the country or around the world. Eat local, folks!)

Add to this the fact that global climate change is already underway, altering weather patterns and creating floods, droughts and other agricultural calamities, and you start to get the picture of just how bad things might get. That's not even to mention the very serious problem of collapsing honeybee populations due to a mysterious condition called colony collapse disorder that's devastating honeybee populations across North America. Honeybees, in case you didn't know, pollinate plants that represent about thirty percent of all the calories consumed by Americans. That's about one out of every three bites of your dinner, and it all depends on the "free" work performed by honeybees - bees who are apparently going on strike by refusing to keep working for us.

Prepare for mass global starvation

So, to repeat, the food bubble is now starting to implode. What does it all mean? It means that as these economic and climate realities unfold, our world is facing massive starvation and food shortages. The first place this will be felt is in poor developing nations. It is there that people live on the edge of economic livelihood, where even a twenty percent rise in the price of basic food staples can put desperately-needed calories out of reach of tens of millions of families. If something is not done to rescue these people from their plight, they will starve to death.

Wealthy nations like America, Canada, the UK, and others will be able to absorb the price increases, so you won't see mass starvation in North America any time soon (unless, of course, all the honeybees die, in which case prepare to start chewing your shoelaces ...), but it will lead to significant increases in the cost of living, annoying consumers and reducing the amount of money available for other purchases (like vacations, cars, fuel, et cetera). That, of course, will put downward pressure on the national economy.

But what we're seeing right now, folks, is just a small foreshadowing of events to come in the next couple of decades. Think about it: If these minor climate changes and foolish biofuels policies are already unleashing alarming rises in food prices, just imagine what we'll see when Peak Oil kicks in and global oil supplies really start to dwindle. When gasoline is $10 a gallon in the US, how expensive will food be around the world? The answer, of course, is that it will triple or quadruple the current price. And that means many more people will starve.

Fossil fuels, of course, aren't the only limiting factor threatening future food supplies on our planet: There's also fossil water. That's water from underground aquifers that's being pumped up to the surface to water crops where it's lost to evaporation. Countries like India and China are depending heavily on fossil water to irrigate their crops, and not surprisingly, the water levels in those aquifers are dropping steadily. In a few more years (as little as five years in some cases), that water will simply run dry, and the crops that were once irrigated to feed a nation will dry up and turn to dust. Mass starvation will only take a few months to kick in. Think North Korea after a season of floods. Perhaps 95% of humanity is just one crop season away from mass starvation.

The carrying capacity of planet Earth has reached its apex

The truth about all this, folks, is that the resources on our planet can only support a limited population, and I think we've over-populated the planet to a point where we're wiping out non-renewable resources at an alarming rate. This means a population correction is due. When there are too many people consuming too much food, using up too much water and burning too much oil, you can get away with a rapid expansion for a little while (a few decades, perhaps), but eventually reality kicks in and there's a global population correction that brings the population size back down to levels that can be sustained on the planet.

It's not a pretty picture. We're talking about the loss of a billion human lives, perhaps more. This is what's coming. It's as predictable as the laws of gravity. When you over-populate a planet and use up all the resources, the population eventually finds itself in a resource panic, and mass death ensues.

You can observe the same thing with colonies of bacteria on a nutrient-rich petri dish: They will expand at an accelerating rate, multiplying their numbers until there's no more food left in the petri dish, and then they will experience a massive die-off. You might say that human beings are smarter than bacteria, and that's true, but as current events are clearly demonstrating, they're not much wiser! They still doom themselves to the same stupid fate by refusing to look at the long-term implications of their actions.

Humans are really good at making babies and eating food, but they're terrible at thinking even ten years ahead about the implications of their present-day decisions. That's why the global population control masterminds call people "feeders and breeders", by the way. Those are the two things human beings do extremely well: Fornicate and clean their plate. (Not necessarily in that order, though ...)

The throwaway economy

The economies of our world have, sadly, been based on economic models that strongly encourage this kind of consumption and growth. We live in a "throwaway economy", where people are encouraged to consume and expend as much as possible. No corporation makes money teaching people how to use less. And so we've pushed for aggressive expansion since the 1950s: Build more, eat more, consume more. We've turned farm lands into housing tracts, and rainforests into biofuel fields. We've over-fished the oceans, over-farmed the soils and over-extended ourselves to the point where a population correction is inevitable. We, the human race, have painted ourselves into a desperate corner, and the simple fact of the matter is that unless we quickly discover some new energy technology that provides the world with cheap, plentiful energy, we are headed straight towards a global population implosion that will leave a billion or more people dead.

And biofuels, of course, are no answer for this problem. You cannot grow enough corn to solve the problems of an expansionist, imperialistic race of beings (that's us) who have taken over the planet much like a tumor, wiped out countless species, destroyed huge swaths of natural rainforests, poisoned the oceans and rivers, polluted the skies and, at every opportunity, betrayed the very Earth that has given us a home in the first place. Humans can betray Mother Nature for a while, but in the end, we will pay a dear price for our own arrogance, greed and lack of vision. The human race is being sent back to kindergarten, where it needs to learn some basic lessons about living in harmony with the planet. Lessons like: Don't use up all the resources in a few generations. Don't think you're smarter than nature. And never forget how much Mother Nature does for us all for free! Like pollinating the crops, producing oxygen, cleaning the air, water, et cetera. Read the book Mycelium Running (2005) to learn more ...

In time, we will either learn these lessons, or we will perish. It's really as simple as that. And all these suddenly-popular "save the planet" efforts we've seen by corporations recently are just a joke. We can't save the planet. What we're trying to save here is human civilization. The very idea that we think we can "save the planet" is arrogant all by itself. All we can do is respect the planet and find ways to live with it as polite guests living on a generous host.

Whether humans survive the next hundred years or not, planet Earth certainly will. And frankly, the planet will do much better without us. With humans gone, the Earth would quickly be restored to a vibrant, pristine state, full of life and abundance. The Earth doesn't need us, folks. But we, of course, certainly need the Earth. The real question is this: Can we learn to play nice and treat the Earth with respect? If not, we won't be around much longer to worry about it.

Nature needs to be respected and protected

One final thought: I am an advocate of the idea that Mother Nature needs to be granted legal standing. I believe that humans do not automatically "own" nature, and that we cannot simply cut down forests, bulldoze mountainsides, fish the oceans, build dams and engage in other highly disruptive activities without first considering the consequences. Nature is not ours to own or destroy. We, as the guests on this planet, have no right to simply assume ownership over other living systems on this planet and exploit them for our own financial gain. The "destroy and consume" model of free market enterprise is simply not sustainable, folks. It does not lead us to a happy future; it leads to our own destruction.

Or, put another way, over the last hundred years or so, mankind has committed countless acts of violence against nature. It has pursued a policy of committing atrocities against Mother Nature - a kind of genocide against anything non-human (animals, plants, fish, et cetera). Humans have proven themselves to be, by far, the most violent and destructive life forms to ever exist on this planet. And yet paired with that violence, humans are an infant species, with little or no foresight, with virtually no ability to see the future implications of their own actions. We are, in a sense, the dumbest intelligent creatures ever to walk the face of this Earth.

We can land a man on the moon, but we can't even prevent our own rainforests from being clear-cut by soybean farmers and cattle ranchers. We can develop high-tech medicines, but we can't even recognize the more powerful medicines found in a simple dandelion plant. We can create amazing computers and televisions and internet technologies that beam information across the globe at the speed of light, but we pollute those information pathways with corporate ads for useless stuff and dangerous medicines that only make our fellow humans beings less enlightened. We are capable of so much, and yet we have accomplished so little. We are, by any honest assessment, a race of little children, running around the planet with far too much power and not nearly enough maturity. We're like a band of infants with flamethrowers.

Frankly, we don't deserve this planet, and Mother Nature is about to take it away from us. It's time for us to either grow up, or perish.

http://www.naturalnews.com/031044_food_bubble_collapse.html#ixzz1DYYZAklq

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

The Mummy's Tomb

2011-02-10T08:33:00.001+09:00

by James Howard Kunstler

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

kunstler.com (February 07 2010)

... President Mubarak has about as much chance of sticking around his presidential palace another fortnight as a bluebottle fly has of conducting the next Easter mass at the Vatican.

-- Last week's Clusterfuck Nation blog

Oh well, poor call there. It seems that the College of Cardinals actually located an eager bluebottle fly named Franci Vafanculo in Naples and is having him fitted for vestments. The Latin instruction isn't going as well as hoped, but he can always just stand there and buzz. Most people's thoughts are on the ham dinner that follows, anyway.

Meanwhile, and speaking of hams, down in the Ancient Kingdom of the Nile, another curious transformation is taking place: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is metamorphosing from a flesh-and-blood pharaoh into that most enduring of Old World personalities, a mummy, to be entombed in the presidential palace for all time with his entourage of scribes, police captains, publicity managers, and boatloads of bejeweled scimitars laid upon him by fellow satraps and potentates of the region over the many years of his natural reign.

Mubarak-as-mummy will be much more comprehensible to his American auditors in the White House and Department of State, since the only things that Americans really seem to understand these days, or even care about, are matters supernatural. The regrettable piece of the story is that Mubarak didn't turn into vampire or a zombie, two existential conditions that we are now the world's experts in as we feast daily on the material remnants of our own empire.

Case in point: the Superbowl halftime show. My Gawd, what a farrago of auto-erotic triumphalism tarted up in the raiment of techno-grandiosity. The renowned Black Eyed Peas vocal krew descended on cables from the ethers of Cowboys Stadium stuffed into carapace-like costumes that lit them up like robotic waterbugs while something like a thousand worshipful myrmidons in LED-rigged suits capered about the pulsating stage like bits of discarded CGI FX from the latest installment of the Tron saga. Message: this is a nation so dangerously intoxicated on fumes from the arson of its own culture that it will soon melt down into a smoldering puddle of techno-narcissistic glop. Our bread and circus hijinks (or, should I say, Nacho and Fuhball), make the late Romans' antics look like a simple summer evening at the frog pond. In fact, nothing would make me happier in 2011 than the coming-true of the threatened NFL "lock-out" - except maybe if Senator Jim DeMint (Republican, South Carolina) were nabbed in flagrante delicto at a Super-8 Motel with a nineteen-year-old sheet-rocker of the undocumented persuasion. For that, I would definitely open the bottle of Lambrusco that somebody left at my Christmas party.

Back in Cairo, events have momentarily devolved to a standoff between the mummy's minions and a lot of people who are, apparently, just sick of the old grinding status quo that had Mubarak-Ho-Tep funneling the endless fruits of their miserable labors into the vaults of banks here, there, and everywhere. The Web is notoriously shifty where facts are concerned, of course, but somewhere in The Cloud I saw the mummy's ill-gotten family fortune estimated at around $50 billion. That's a lot of tana leaves, any way you cut it, and of all possible outcomes in the script-factory, recovering the loot would seem the least likely scenario.

More interesting to watch right now are the peculiar gyrations of the US Government, which is acting a bit like a victim of Tourette Syndrome, with various figures up to the president himself emitting strange blurted squawks that resemble policy pronouncements but lack both conviction and official sanction. What it adds up to are the rather painful exertions of a world power that has lost its power to affect events in the world. I imagine that leaders in other nations - and even their rivals for leadership beyond the levers of power - have not failed to notice the American impotence over Egypt. But then, to me it's not so much different than watching the US government's ineffectual dealings with its own affairs, especially the ones involving money. Virtually everything about them is false, dishonest, mendacious, and ruinous.

The Middle East gives every sign of blowing up into widespread disorder these coming weeks and months. We hear other little splurts and wheezes from the media sidelines to the effect that all this hugger-mugger could end up expressing itself at the US gas pumps - the only touch-point in American life where reality meets perception. To put it a little more bluntly, you kind of wonder when the people around the region might really start blowing stuff up. Revolution, once started, is rather like the insidious invasion of water through the eaves of a house when the ice-dams build up (as they are doing now all over the northeastern US). Seeps appear here and there on the junctions between the wall and ceiling, and before you know it an electric circuit inside the wall starts sparking, and that's all she wrote for your house. Water within, water without, first the flood, the fire next time ...

But perhaps I wax a little too theoretical. As the week begins here, with all the smoke and confetti cleared from Texas Stadium, there is one sole dominating truth that really matters: the stock market only goes up.

_____

Mr Kunstler's biography is at http://kunstler.com/bio.html.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/state-of-suspension.html

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

Catastrophic Weather Events ...

2011-02-09T20:35:00.000+09:00

... Are Becoming the New Normal.

Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?

by Bill McKibben

AlterNet (February 02 2011)

If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.

Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine - between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as "probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect" Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.

Meanwhile, along the shore of Queensland in Australia, the vast cyclone Yasi was sweeping ashore; though the storm hit at low tide, the country's weather service warned that "the impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations", especially since its torrential rains are now falling on ground already flooded from earlier storms. Here's how Queensland premier Anna Bligh addressed her people before the storm hit: "We know that the long hours ahead of you are going to be the hardest that you face. We will be thinking of you every minute of every hour between now and daylight and we hope that you can feel our thoughts, that you will take strength from the fact that we are keeping you close and in our hearts."

Welcome to our planet, circa 2011 - a planet that, like some unruly adolescent, has decided to test the boundaries. For two centuries now we've been burning coal and oil and gas and thus pouring carbon into the atmosphere; for two decades now we've been ignoring the increasingly impassioned pleas of scientists that this is a Bad Idea. And now we're getting pinched.

Oh, there have been snowstorms before, and cyclones - our planet has always produced extreme events. But by definition extreme events are supposed to be rare, and all of a sudden they're not. In 2010 nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records (itself a record!) and when the mercury hit 128 in early June along the Indus, the entire continent of Asia set a new all-time temperature mark. Russia caught on fire; Pakistan drowned. Munich Re, the biggest insurance company on earth, summed up the annus horribilis last month with this clinical phrase: "the high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change".

You don't need a PhD to understand what's happening. That carbon we've poured into the air traps more of the sun's heat near the planet. And that extra energy expresses itself in a thousand ways, from melting ice to powering storms. Since warm air can hold more water vapor than cold, it's not surprising that the atmosphere is four percent moister than it was forty years ago. That "four percent extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms", said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the government's National Center for Atmospheric Research. It loads the dice for record rain and snow. Yesterday the Midwest and Queensland crapped out.

The point I'm trying to make is: chemistry and physics work. We don't just live in a suburb, or in a free-market democracy; we live on an earth that has certain rules. Physics and chemistry don't care what John Boehner thinks, they're unmoved by what will make Barack Obama's re-election easier. More carbon means more heat means more trouble - and the trouble has barely begun. So far we've raised the temperature of the planet about a degree, which has been enough to melt the Arctic. The consensus prediction for the century is that without dramatic action to stem the use of fossil fuel - far more quickly than is politically or economically convenient - we'll see temperatures climb five degrees this century. Given that one degree melts the Arctic, just how lucky are we feeling?

So far, of course, we haven't taken that dramatic action - just the opposite. The president didn't even mention global warming in his State of the Union address. He did promise some research into new technologies, which will help down the line - but we'll only be in a position to make use of it if we get started right now with the technology we've already got. And that requires, above all, putting a serious price on carbon. We use fossil fuel because it's cheap, and it's cheap because Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal get to use the atmosphere as open sewer to dump their waste for free. And today you can see the results of that particular business model from outer space.

Overcoming that will require a movement - a movement that is slowly beginning to build. In 2008 a few of us started from scratch to build a campaign with an unlikely moniker: we called in 350.org, because a month earlier this particular planet's foremost climatologist, James Hansen, had declared that we now knew how much carbon in the atmosphere was too much. Any value higher than 350 parts per million, he said, was "not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted". That's troubling news, because right now the atmosphere above Chicago and Cairns and wherever you happen to be is about 390 parts per million carbon dioxide. In other words, too much.

At the time, some of our environmentalist friends said that science was too complicated for most people to get - that the only way to talk about these issues was to simplify them. But we thought people could understand, just as we understand when a doctor tells us our cholesterol is too high. We may not know everything about the lipid system, but we know what 'too high' means - it means we better change our diet, take our pill, lace up our sneakers. And indeed 350.org has now coordinated almost 15,000 demonstrations in 188 countries, what Foreign Policy magazine called 'the largest ever coordinated global rally" about any issue.

That's just a start, of course, and so far not enough to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise humans have ever engaged in. So we'll keep building, and hoping others will join us. But the good news is simple: more and more of this planet's inhabitants are remembering that they actually live on a planet.

We've been able to forget that fact for the last ten thousand years, the period of remarkable climatic stability that underwrote the rise of civilization. But we won't be able to forget it much longer. Days like yesterday will keep slapping us upside the head, until we take it in. The third rock from the sun is a very different place than it used to be.

_____

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010).

2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149774/

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

Warning for Rapidly Rising Oil Prices

2011-02-09T09:10:00.001+09:00

by Kjell Aleklett, ASPO President

aleklett.wordpress.com (February 05 2011)

http://www.dn.se/images/2011/02/04/13-olja.jpg

About ten days ago Lasse Sward from Dagens Nyheter [Sweden's widest circulation broadsheet newspaper] rang me to discuss oil. We had a very interesting conversation for around two hours. Today, Saturday, I can read how well he understood our conversation. The electronic version of the article has the headline "Strongly rising oil prices" and what we see is that Brent crude has passed $100 per barrel. The unrest in Egypt is certainly contributing to the price rise but there are other factors that are also driving the price. I am pleased with how Lasse Sward has reported our discussion.

Sward has also interviewed the managing director of the Swedish Petroleum Institute Ulf Svahn. Svahn cannot understand why the price is rising and cites that a large reserve production capacity of six million barrels per day currently exists compared to reserve capacity of two million barrels per day three years ago. I strongly doubt those reserve production capacity figures. According to our and the IEA's calculations, production in those oilfields that were in production three years ago has declined by twelve million barrels per day. To see growth in reserve production capacity from two up to six million barrels per day would require the oil industry to have brought on line new production capacity of (12 + 4) = sixteen million barrels per day during the past three years which is not the case. Rather, the decline in price after 2007 meant that many projects were postponed.

What happened since 2008 is that ethanol production has increased markedly and ethanol can replace gasoline but not diesel production. That means that there is greater pressure on diesel production and we can expect that the price of diesel will rise, which it is currently doing (see graph in DN) . The oil price has now risen so high that the US economy is beginning to experience problems and if the price approaches $150 per barrel it is very likely that the world economy will slow again. What is certain is that without the ethanol as a part of our fuel supply for transport we would already be there. Currently it is alcohol that is lifting the spirits of the world economy!

_____

Kjell Aleklett is Professor in Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Global Energy Systems Group (former Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group) at Uppsala University.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 5th 2011 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Dagsaktuellt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/varning-for-rusande-oljepriser/

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

Facebook leaps into future ...

2011-02-08T23:29:00.000+09:00

... as smartphones prepare to get smarter

Technology firms are on the brink of innovations that will transform our personal and professional lives

by Jemima Kiss

The Observer (January 16 2011)

Alvin Toffler, the prophet of the digital revolution, wrote in his seminal book Future Shock in 1970: "Dealing with the future, it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be 100% right".

Toffler compared the futurologist's role to that of the ancient mapmakers, approximating the danger and promise of an unknown world.

As technology redefines and remaps our world virtually, the consumer firms driving its development are the new mapmakers. Companies like Facebook are feverishly searching the potential of interaction on the web. So far, that has primarily meant entering text into a search box - dipping into a pool for the fish we know we want. Google, which has a ninety per cent share of the UK search market, has already built a $197 billion business on the back of advertising {1} related to those text searches.

So far, so profitable. But the next generation of the web, so Facebook wants us to believe, will be navigated through our social graph, our network of contacts and friends; it will be their recommendations that will prompt us to dip into the water. Though the social web is well established, the business model around it is not. This is the new horizon. And the volume and reach of data produced by Facebook's users - and the promise of the future of the social web - has investors so excited that they have just valued the company at $50 billion. Toffler was on to something.

Where is Facebook taking us? For now its priority is to keep growing its nascent advertising revenues ($2 billion last year, by one estimate) and its user numbers, put at 633 million monthly users globally for October, according to comScore. But it is also laying the foundations for some powerful ways of extending the site. Last August it introduced Places, which allows users to share their location with friends, and in December announced that photo uploads would soon be scanned with facial recognition technology.

Already, one-third of Facebook's traffic is generated by mobile, and as these devices become ubiquitous we will become less reliant on a fixed screen. Often described as the next generation of the web, mobile's real breakthrough has been the success of apps {2} in the past two-and-a-half-years. Not only are these devices always on and always with us, but they offer more forms of interaction than desktop computers, including movement sensitivity, camera and a web connection.

These location features provide the platform and possibility of a world that, not so long ago would have belonged in an ambitious work of science fiction. Augmented reality ("AR") is a technique of overlaying information on an image of the real world, usually through our phone's camera. Despite the current clunky incarnations, augmented reality may well become the principal way that the digital world is presented to us. Freed from screens, information will float, contextually, accompanying the user and imparting - probably via a pair of augmented reality glasses - the time of the next bus, messages from a friend in a nearby pub, or a local match from your dating site. Everything you do now at your desktop will be superimposed in real time in the world around you.

Claire Boonstra, co-founder of the Netherlands-based augmented reality mobile app Layar{1}, believes this type of interaction between the real world and the world of information will become a mass medium. "Augmented reality is in a similar position to the earliest years of television, where shows were just radio with an image attached", she said. "By 2015 augmented reality glasses will be mass market, so you won't walk around holding your phone up to things. With one gesture, you could show that you like a pair of shoes you see someone wearing and could buy them online. And you could switch on the sun on a rainy day. It's totally immersive."

Layar's general manager, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, says that ultimately this technology will become invisible, and suggests our own vision could be augmented. "The computer at Bletchley Park [Tommy Flowers's Colossus computer] was the size of a room, yet now there are computers in every hotel room door. It shows how far we have to explore. Brainwaves are interpretable, but that is far off. Instead, next year there could be an iPad with a binary interface; you don't have to touch to turn the page, you just have to think about it".

Lens-FitzGerald anticipates Facebook moving into the AR space, though Layar already enables this by integrating with Facebook Places. Where AR meets commerce, he says, "every moment could be turned into a buying moment", with everything we see potentially one gesture away from a purchase, every note of enthusiasm or disdain recorded by a marketing database and every street pre-loaded with a thousand opportunities to advertise something we've recently searched for, looked at or even thought about. Facebook already holds swaths of that information about us and serving discreet targeted ads at the side of our profiles is just the beginning.

Whether Facebook will be the company to fully exploit that future is up for debate. Lens-FitzGerald believes the company is at its peak and that its greatest period of innovation is over. "Like Google five years ago and Microsoft at the end of the 1990s, Facebook is coming close to the point where they have too much to protect to truly innovate. It's a natural progression for monolithic companies", he said. "The next thing will be more about location, context and time - a service that helps you navigate their information".

Spencer Hyman won't call time on Facebook yet. He spent three years wrangling with music recommendation as chief operating officer at music site Last.fm, and left in 2009 for ArtFinder, a visual recognition tool for artworks that is to launch soon. Facebook's power, he says, lies in tips from friends and contacts. "We haven't seen the start of what recommendation can do. Searching Google tells you what you already know you want. And automated recommendation, like Amazon, is accurate but not that compelling, because you don't know who's recommended it. And then there's personal recommendation - the most powerful recommendation you can have. We're eight to ten times more likely to buy based on personal recommendation, yet Facebook has barely switched on those tools yet."

Hyman thinks gaming will play an important role in exploring the potential of technologies like augmented reality, building interest in the medium while mapping out what is possible and popular. The commercial applications come later, as needs emerge. Already, one app for the visually impaired in the US uses optical recognition to help people identify the value of different dollar bills, which are all the same size. Facial recognition, which is being rolled out by Facebook to identify the 8.1 million photographs uploaded every hour, will seem uncomfortable to many - especially, as Hyman points out, when border police can assess whether you spend time with anyone on a wanted list.

Late last year the FBI director, Robert Mueller, toured Silicon Valley's big name firms to ask them to install back doors in their software to aid intelligence gathering and law enforcement. As Stanford University visiting scholar Evgeny Morozov recently explained, that appears to vindicate the decision by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to require all public institutions to replace proprietary software with open-source alternatives by 2015.

The more mainstream the web becomes, the harder it will be to disguise anything, or hide anything. This has profound implications for a generation growing up online, where every youthful indiscretion will be catalogued and recalled on demand. But it is expected that we will become more sophisticated in how we prioritise and manage information and will also take advantage of powerful tools that help us filter and process everything from email to electronic bank statements and travel plans.

Conversely, as technology permeates every aspect of our lives, disconnecting will become a luxury. Boutique hotels already proudly advertise their lack of Wi-Fi; the brave new connected world could offer weeks in a technology dead zone, no hyper-targeted visualised advertising, no voice connection - not one glowing, hovering reminder of our dwindling bank balance as we slump over the hotel bar. If we are wise, those dead zones will extend to areas of our schools, homes and workplaces dedicated to focused thought and reflection, or long-form writing, free from digital detritus.

Ten years ago, many of us were uncomfortable being overheard on a mobile phone. In another ten years we will have overcome our sensitivity to video calling in public, or talking to an automated service. There are clear practical benefits in using voice instead of text entry - not least while walking - but voice recognition has wider implications.

Amit Singal, a Google fellow, has been following the development of the web for twenty years. He talks breathlessly about the potential for the developing world, where mobile is already well established as the primary means of accessing the web. Voice search and translate means an African could access information on malaria or an Indian could find information about agriculture - but by using their voice and their native language, and having the results translated back to them in near real time. "From a device they can pull out of their pocket, every citizen in the world can access the power of hundreds of thousands of computers in the cloud. That's incredibly exciting."

"Aided by tools like search and the mobile revolution that happened in parallel, the web has become an endlessly open channel where people share ideas and information", he said. "That has the power to enrich people's lives and I'm very excited about where this world is headed".

Links:

{1} http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/advertising

{2} http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/apps

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/16/facebook-future-smartphones-social-media?intcmp=239

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

The Twitter Revolution Must Die

2011-02-08T08:12:00.001+09:00

by Ulises A Mejias

blog.ulisesmejias.com (January 30 2011)

http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/alg_gas_canister-300x167.jpg

Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?

That's probably because folks who don't know anything about "branding" insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people died in the long struggle (1910 to 1920) to overthrow a despotic government and bring about reform. But why shouldn't we re-name the revolution not after a nation or its people, but after the "social media" that had such a great impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic camera? Even better, let's name the revolution not after the medium itself, but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones!

My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things, the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity. I agree with Jillian York when she says:

... I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight. But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi - or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause - by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.

Granted, as Joss Hands points out, there appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are primarily responsible for igniting the uprisings in question. But that hasn't stopped the internet intelligentsia from engaging in lengthy arguments about the role that technology is playing in these historic developments. One camp, comprised of people like Clay Shirky, seem to make allowances for what Cory Doctorow calls the "internet's special power to connect and liberate". On the other side, authors like Ethan Zuckerman, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have proposed that while digital media can play a role in organizing social movements, it cannot be counted on to build lasting alliances, or even protect net activists once authorities start using the same tools to crack down on dissent.

Both sides are, perhaps, engaging in a bit of technological determinism - one by embellishing the agency of technology, the other by diminishing it. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and philosophers of technology settled the dispute of whether technology shapes society (technological determinism) or society shapes technology (cultural materialism) a while ago: the fact is that technology and society mutually and continually determine each other.

So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy.

To elaborate, the discourse of a social media revolution is a form of self-focused empathy in which we imagine the other (in this case, a Muslim other) to be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a depoliticized instant in our own becoming. What a strong affirmation of ourselves it is to believe that people engaged in a desperate struggle for human dignity are using the same Web 2.0 products we are using! That we are able to form this empathy largely on the basis of consumerism demonstrates the extent to which we have bought into the notion that democracy is a by-product of media products for self-expression, and that the corporations that create such media products would never side with governments against their own people.

It is time to abandon this fantasy, and to realize that although the internet's original architecture encouraged openness, it is becoming increasingly privatized and centralized. While it is true that an internet controlled by a handful of media conglomerates can still be used to promote democracy (as people are doing in Tunisia, Egypt, and all over the world), we need to reconsider the role that social media corporations like Facebook and Twitter will play in these struggles.

The clearest way to understand this role is to simply look at the past and current role that corporations have played in "facilitating" democracy elsewhere. Consider the above image of the tear gas canister fired against Egyptians demanding democracy. The can is labeled Made in USA.

But surely it would be a gross calumny to suggest that information and communication technologies ("ICT") are on the same level as tear gas, right? Well, perhaps not. Today, our exports encompass not only weapons of war and riot control used to keep in power corrupt leaders, but tools of internet surveillance like Narusinsight, produced by a subsidiary of Boeing and used by the Egyptian government to track down and "disappear" dissidents.

Even without citing examples of specific Web companies that have aided governments in the surveillance and persecution of their citizens (Jillian York documents some of these examples), my point is simply that the emerging market structure of the internet is threatening its potential to be used by people as a tool for democracy. The more monopolies (a market structure characterized by a single seller) control access and infrastructure, and the more monopsonies (a market structure characterized by a single buyer) control aggregation and distribution of user-generated content, the easier it is going to be for authorities to pull the plug, as just happened in Egypt.

I'm reminded of the first so-called Internet Revolution. Almost a hundred years after the original Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation launched an uprising in southern Mexico to try to address some of the injustices that the first revolution didn't fix, and that remain unsolved to this day. But back in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos and the rest of the EZLN didn't have Facebook profiles, or use Twitter to communicate or organize. Maybe their movement would have been more effective if they had. Or maybe it managed to stay alive because of the decentralized nature of the networks the EZLN and their supporters used.

My point is this: as digital networks grow and become more centralized and privatized, they increase opportunities for participation, but they also increase inequality, and make it easier for authorities to control them.

Thus, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to continue the struggle after the network has been shut off. In fact, the struggle is going to be against those who own and control the network. If the fight can't continue without Facebook and Twitter, then it is doomed. But I suspect the people of Iran, Tunisia and Egypt (unlike us) already know this, out of sheer necessity.

_____

Ulises A Mejias is assistant professor at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. His book, The Limits of Nodes: Unmapping the Digital Network, is under review by publishers.

http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2011/01/30/the-twitter-revolution-must-die/

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

Monsanto: Democracy's Terminator Gene

2011-02-07T23:23:00.000+09:00

Obama Greenlights GE Alfalfa

by Khristopher Flack

CounterPunch (February 02 2011)

As we watch millions of Tunisians, Egyptians, and Yemenis organize and challenge their respective dictators, many of us will be thankful that such oppression and turmoil don't exist in our country. Yet the Department of Agriculture's decision on Thursday to approve the planting of genetically modified alfalfa should give us all reason to question the state of our democracy as well.

Genetically modified alfalfa doesn't sound as important as "the economy", "healthcare", or "jobs". Yet our fourth largest crop, a major feed for dairy cows, has a direct impact on the quality of our milk. By allowing Monsanto to freely modify something so crucial, but so unfamiliar, the Department of Agriculture is facilitating the quiet modification of the American diet without popular consent or notice. More importantly, the company receiving free reign over our food supply is a predatory one, one that collaborates with cigarette companies, makes bestselling pesticides like Roundup - which the alfalfa is bred to resist - and runs small organic farmers out of business by suing them for using patented GM seeds that entered their fields on the wind.

But the greater danger isn't posed to dairy consumers, or even to organic farmers whose fields face contamination. Free societies are built on the awareness of an informed public that has the power to exercise free choice. Genetically modified foods are, by their very nature, against the idea of free choice. They are engineered to replicate a chosen result in our food, regardless of the will of nature, farmers, or consumers, who are all forced to take submissive roles in the food chain. And so, in endorsing the planting of GM alfalfa, the Department of Agriculture has endorsed the denial of free choice on several levels, the least of which is the disregard for public participation during the process.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that "the decision reached [Thursday] is a reflection of our commitment to choice and trust".

The problem is, he's right.

In fact, as long as our federal government permits one company to disseminate a product that assumes the role of the public, we are enjoying a fictional quality of life that's fundamentally worse than that experienced under any dictator. The evil of authoritarian regimes in other countries comes from the publicity of their restrictions on information and choice; the people in those countries are mostly aware of their oppression. In the United States, we've incubated a model of corporate influence so veiled that anyone who doesn't commit their life to investigation even knows their democratic privileges are being muzzled or that their everyday diet is being chemically altered. It's one thing to outwardly discourage the public from rebelling, but it's much more criminal to craft a business plan that keeps the public from knowing there's a reason to rebel, and to build a product into that plan that prevents objection, should the public ever come to its senses.

A true democracy would assign certain people to understand these details and defend the public interest. Yet it's difficult to expect protection when the people in those positions, like Michael Taylor, the FDA's Deputy Commissioner for Foods, in charge of food labeling and food safety, are former Monsanto executives. But there is one last line of defense that we should all expect the best from.

President Obama devoted several minutes of his State of the Union address to outlining why we need to become more innovative in technology, science, and industry to keep up with China and India. Monsanto's genetically engineered foods are an ample example of the direction of biotech innovation in this country. We as a people should be more concerned with reinventing our relationship to our government and focus instead on catching up to the proud, insistent spirit of the Tunisians, Egyptians and Yemenis who have remembered that their countries wouldn't exist without them, who have remembered their duty to hold their government accountable in no passive way. Unless we do the same, and refuse to be part of focus groups we did not sign up for, our democracy will follow the course of another Monsanto product, the so-called Terminator gene, which kills plants after one growing season, without producing additional seed. The worst part is, we might not notice the difference.

_____

Khristopher Flack is a freelance writer and Farm-to-School Coordinator in northern Vermont. He manages Green Mountain Farm Direct, a regional food distributor focusing on locally grown foods.

http://www.counterpunch.org/flack02022011.html

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

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2011-02-07T07:24:00.000+09:00

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr

The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

Note: The original version of this contains links to many other sources of information. See URL at the end.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial "brain". "Dave, my mind is going", HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going - so far as I can tell - but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory", Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking". But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances - literary types, most of them - many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader", he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, that is I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print", he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore", he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a UK educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity", hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems That they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking - perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read", says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008). "We are how we read". Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information". Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter - a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom", the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his "'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper".

"You are right", Nietzsche replied, "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts". Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A Kittler , Nietzsche's prose "changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style".

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that's not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic". Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. "The brain", according to Olds, "has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions".

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies" -the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities - we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization (1934), the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock "disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences". The "abstract framework of divided time" became "the point of reference for both action and thought".

The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976), the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments "remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality". In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating "like clockwork". Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers". But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that's what we're seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net's influence doesn't end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the "shortcuts" would give harried readers a quick "taste" of the day's news, sparing them the "less efficient" method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives - or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts - as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there's been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant's machinists. With the approval of Midvale's owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions - an "algorithm", we might say today - for how each worker should work. Midvale's employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory's productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor's tight industrial choreography - his "system", as he liked to call it - was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), was to identify and adopt, for every job, the "one best method" of work and thereby to effect "the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts". Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. "In the past the man has been first", he declared; "in the future the system must be first".

Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the "one best method" - the perfect algorithm - to carry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as "knowledge work".

Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, California - the Googleplex - is the Internet's high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is "a company that's founded around the science of measurement", and it is striving to "systematize everything" it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It seeks to develop "the perfect search engine", which it defines as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want". In Google's view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can "access" and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people - or smarter", Page said in a speech a few years back. "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence". In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, "Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off". Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is "really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale".

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt's words, "to solve problems that have never been solved before", and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn't Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we'd all "be better off" if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web - the more links we click and pages we view - the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link - the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I'm just a worrywart. Just as there's a tendency to glorify technological progress, there's a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato's Phaedrus (370 BC), Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue's characters, "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful". And because they would be able to "receive a quantity of information without proper instruction", they would "be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant". They would be "filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom". Socrates wasn't wrong - the new technology did often have the effects he feared - but he was shortsighted. He couldn't foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men "less studious" and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, "Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient". But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content", we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what's at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available'.

As we are drained of our "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance", Foreman concluded, we risk turning into "'pancake people' - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut - "I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid" - and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

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

It's Not Radical Islam ...

2011-02-06T23:06:00.001+09:00

... That Worries The US

It's Independence

by Noam Chomsky

Guardian.co.uk (February 05 2011)

The nature of any regime USA backs in the Arab world is secondary to control. Subjects are ignored until they break their chains

'The Arab world is on fire', al-Jazeera reported last week, while throughout the region, western allies "are quickly losing their influence". The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator's brutal police.

Observers compared it to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989, but there are important differences. Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep to the well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up to a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless properly tamed.

One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained its support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the east European dictators, until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his overthrow while the past was erased. That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It may be under way in the case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try to ensure a successor regime will not veer far from the approved path. The current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist General Omar Suleiman, just named Egypt's vice-president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the intelligence services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as the dictator himself.

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan's dictators and President Reagan's favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).

"The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control", says Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. "With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground".

Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.

The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against "a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems", ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their venality. So said US ambassador Robert Godec in a July 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks.

Therefore to some observers the WikiLeaks "documents should create a comforting feeling among the American public that officials aren't asleep at the switch" - indeed, that the cables are so supportive of US policies that it is almost as if Obama is leaking them himself (or so Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The National Interest.)

"America should give Assange a medal", says a headline in the Financial Times, where Gideon Rachman writes: "America's foreign policy comes across as principled, intelligent and pragmatic ... the public position taken by the US on any given issue is usually the private position as well".

In this view, WikiLeaks undermines "conspiracy theorists" who question the noble motives Washington proclaims.

Godec's cable supports these judgments - at least if we look no further. If we do, as foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes reports in Foreign Policy in Focus, we find that, with Godec's information in hand, Washington provided $12 million in military aid to Tunisia. As it happens, Tunisia was one of only five foreign beneficiaries: Israel (routinely); the two Middle East dictatorships Egypt and Jordan; and Colombia, which has long had the worst human-rights record and the most US military aid in the hemisphere.

Heilbrunn's exhibit A is Arab support for US policies targeting Iran, revealed by leaked cables. Rachman too seizes on this example, as did the media generally, hailing these encouraging revelations. The reactions illustrate how profound is the contempt for democracy in the educated culture.

Unmentioned is what the population thinks - easily discovered. According to polls released by the Brookings Institution in August, some Arabs agree with Washington and western commentators that Iran is a threat: ten percent. In contrast, they regard the US and Israel as the major threats (77%; 88%).

Arab opinion is so hostile to Washington's policies that a majority (57%) think regional security would be enhanced if Iran had nuclear weapons. Still, "there is nothing wrong, everything is under control" (as Muasher describes the prevailing fantasy). The dictators support us. Their subjects can be ignored - unless they break their chains, and then policy must be adjusted.

Other leaks also appear to lend support to the enthusiastic judgments about Washington's nobility. In July 2009, Hugo Llorens, US ambassador to Honduras, informed Washington of an embassy investigation of "legal and constitutional issues surrounding the 28 June forced removal of President Manuel 'Mel' Zelaya".

The embassy concluded that "there is no doubt that the military, supreme court and national congress conspired on 28 June in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the executive branch". Very admirable, except that President Obama proceeded to break with almost all of Latin America and Europe by supporting the coup regime and dismissing subsequent atrocities.

Perhaps the most remarkable WikiLeaks revelations have to do with Pakistan, reviewed by foreign policy analyst Fred Branfman in Truthdig.

The cables reveal that the US embassy is well aware that Washington's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan not only intensifies rampant anti-Americanism but also "risks destabilising the Pakistani state" and even raises a threat of the ultimate nightmare: that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Again, the revelations "should create a comforting feeling ... that officials are not asleep at the switch" (Heilbrunn's words) - while Washington marches stalwartly toward disaster.

(c) 2011 Noam Chomsky

http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky050211.htm

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

The Great American Firewall

2011-02-06T06:56:00.001+09:00

Why the Net is Poised to Become a Global Weapon of Mass Deception

by Elliot D Cohen, PhD

buzzflash.com (May 01 2006)

Hindsight is often touted as better than foresight, yet such a truism should not blind us to an imminent threat before it happens. Like someone who takes up with an abusive mate and rationalizes the threat to life and limb until the battering leaves undeniable, indelible scars, there are good reasons right now to expect the worst when it comes to the survival of the free Internet. Now unfolding is a legal-political-corporate plot for turning a vibrant, democratic Internet into a global web of corporate and government deceit. The tell-tale signs exist but as in domestic abuse, the perpetrators (federal government and a small group of interconnected, powerful telecom and mainstream media monopolies) have done their utmost to keep it hidden behind closed doors.

Under the veil of a virtual mainstream media blackout, on June 27 2005, the United States Supreme Court granted giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon the legal right to dominate and control the Internet. It ruled that broadband Internet was an information service like cable TV rather than an interactive telecommunication service like the telephone (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs Brand X Internet Services). This gave these behemoths the green light to exclude Independent Service Providers (ISPs) from using their pipes, thereby laying the foundation for a corporate dominated and controlled Internet. Succinctly, in controlling the conduit of communication across the Internet, these companies now had acquired the legal right to control the content {*}. Moreover, in writing this decision, the Court also left the door open for telephone companies like ATT to control telephone modem connectivity to the Internet. As a result, just three weeks after the decision was handed down, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seized the opportunity to grant this right, effectively ushering in the beginning of the end of free-access Internet.

{*} See "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, And Why Corporate News Censored the Story" at http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/07/con05238.html

The Supreme Court ultimately rested its decision on its own Chevron ruling which held that courts should defer to government agencies, such as the FCC on matters of statutory interpretation so long as the statute in question was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable. Despite the fact that there was unambiguous, prior precedent for considering the Internet to be a telecommunication service rather than an information service (AT&T Corporation vs Portland); and despite the fact that treating an interactive service such as the Internet like a one-way, cable TV station defied rationality, it still deferred to the FCC, which sought to interpret the Internet as an information service.

Brand X has now set the legal stage for a further maneuver in the dismal saga of the declining free Internet. Now in Congress, under extreme pressure by telecom lobbies, is a pending house bill introduced by Congressman Joe Barton (Republican, Texas) entitled the "Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006". This Act includes a "Title II - Enforcement of Broadband Policy Statement" that states the FCC "shall have exclusive authority to adjudicate any complaint alleging a violation of the broadband policy statement or the principles incorporated therein". With the passage of this provision the FCC would no longer have to rely on Chevron to attain deference. Instead, it would be given a blank check to enforce its own mandates. This would mean that courts would have scant authority to challenge and overturn its decisions.

Unfortunately, the FCC harbors a political bias that makes granting it this authority dangerous. Under the direction of former FCC Chair Michael Powell, and now under its current chair, Kevin Martin, the FCC has moved toward increased deregulation of telecom and media companies, and there is now little reason to expect that this trend will reverse. The consequence is the thickening of the plot to increase corporate control of the Internet.

Presently, behemoth telecom corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are poised to set up toll booths on the Internet. According to this plan, only content providers with deep pockets would be given optimum Internet connectivity. This would leave the rest of the Internet community running slowly or not at all. The net result would be the demise of Internet neutrality. No longer would all of us have an equal voice within the freest and most comprehensive democratic forum ever devised by humankind. This would accordingly be yet a further maneuver in the gradual dismantling of the free, democratic Internet.

Indisputably, the Internet is currently on a path of becoming an extension of the corporate media, owned and operated by a few giant corporations that control the information Americans receive. This erosive trend threatens to infect the Internet just as it has radio, broadcast, and cable TV. The transition, however, has not been politically benign. Rather, big money has teamed with neoconservative politics to usher in an age in which quid pro quo between mainstream media corporations and government largely define what Americans see and hear.

Nor is this trend as regards the Internet without chilling precedent in other nations marred with dictatorship, notably China. There, a "Great Firewall" has been erected by the Chinese government around its Internet. Accordingly, sights considered "subversive" - which is anything of which it disapproves - are slowed down and/or phased out. The recent cooperation of Google with the Chinese government in creating Google.cn, a government-censored version of itself, is an instructive example of how corporate power can yield to the authority holding the purse strings.

If there is no disruption of current trends, the Internet will predictably fall in line with a rigid program of censorship that will fundamentally devour the free spirit with which the Internet was conceived. This has been a net born of a free, interactive, democratic mission, not a profit-maximizing vehicle of corporations. It is not surprising therefore that under the auspices of the latter, in concert with a government with an insatiable appetite for power, which has the ability to regulate these corporations out of existence, the Internet would undergo an identity crisis. It is a blatant fallacy to suppose that profit maximization equates to democracy. To the contrary, in the present corporate context it equates to the marginalizing of any perspectives that are not cost effective.

In 1997, a neoconservative think tank emerged called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Its main mission has been to promote corporate globalization and the increase in US military dominance throughout the world. This includes defeating all regimes opposed to US corporate interests. In its blueprint of what would be required for the transition, it stressed the necessity of government control of the Internet. In one of its documents entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000), the PNAC stated,

as with space, access to and use of cyberspace and the Internet are emerging elements in global commerce, politics and power. Any nation wishing to assert itself globally must take account of this other new "global commons".

Speaking of "cyber-war" it stated:

Although ... the role of the Defense Department in establishing "control", or even what "security" on the Internet means, requires a consideration of a host of legal, moral and political issues, there nonetheless will remain an imperative to be able to deny America and its allies' enemies the ability to disrupt or paralyze either the military's or the commercial sector's computer networks. Conversely, an offensive capability could offer America's military and political leaders an invaluable tool in disabling an adversary in a decisive manner.

It is mind boggling to think what the terms "control" and "security" might portend for a militaristic government bent on defeating its "enemy". If this seems a stretch from the current political climate, then it is worth noting that those who have formally endorsed the mission of the PNAC include familiar figures in the Bush Administration - Vice President Dick Cheney; former Chief Advisor to the Vice President I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Junior; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and former Deputy Secretary of Defense and current President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, to name just some.

From this point in time, in light of the aforementioned legal, political, and corporate realities, it is not difficult to envision the broad stages in transforming the Net into a vehicle of world domination:

Corporatize -- Sanitize --> Propagandize --> Militarize (Turn the Net into a Weapon of Mass Deception) --> Globalize (Enclose the world inside one Great American Firewall).

The further down this slippery slope we travel, the less chance there will be of turning back!

_____

Elliot D Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/05/con06169.html

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

Dissent Will Find a Way

2011-02-05T17:54:00.000+09:00

Twittering the Revolution

by Peter Lee

CounterPunch (February 02 2011)

Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin has an interesting article on how the US State Department has been working energetically with Twitter, Facebook, Google et al to keep the information pipelines open in Tunisia and Egypt.

The Tunisian government responded by hacking massive amounts of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail accounts and targeted other sites where protestors were convening or communicating.

Facebook contacted the State Department soon thereafter, another State Department official told The Cable, asking for assistance and to help coordinate the response. Facebook then created an encrypted option for accessing the site from Tunisia .

In addition to encouraging technical workarounds, the State Department effort includes jawboning Ben Ali and Mubarak to back off on information control.

Rogin writes:

... the State Department convoked the Tunisian ambassador in Washington to complain about the government's tactics.

In the case of Tunisia, the State Department mixed a strategy of working with companies and third party groups with a series of private and public communications between the Obama administration and the government of now-ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

...

State Department officials told The Cable that their efforts paid off, given that Ben Ali - before stepping down - said that he "heard the Tunisian people" and removed the blocks on the Internet and social media sites, although he had never cut off the entire country from communication.

I'm sure that Ben Ali, with the wreckage of his regime crashing down around his head, appreciated taking the time out to discuss his social media policy with the United States.

At least he could jet to exile with the consolation that he would not be remembered as the despot who was too mean to Twitter and Facebook.

Mubarak, on the other hand, will have to deal with the shame of having presided over "the worst shutdown in Internet history".

The situation is rather awkward for the State Department.

After all, Ben Ali and Mubarak were US allies. Helping their opponents evade information controls in order to overthrow their governments is a rather un-allied thing to do.

In Rogin's article, the State Department makes two rather unconvincing arguments:

1. Hey, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are American companies whose business should not be disrupted!

As Rogin's source put it, "These tactics were used against American companies, so we have equities on multiple fronts".

It's not particularly persuasive to say that the US State Department needed to work actively to abrogate the sovereignty of these two countries in order maintain the usual volume of tweets, eyeballs, and clickthroughs from Tunisia and Egypt on behalf of American corporate entities

2. Hey, these networking services didn't overthrow the government by themselves!

The State Department official said that while technology was an accelerant for the protests and a way for the protesters to get unvarnished information, it did not spur the movement.

With all due respect, that's bullshit.

It happens that I believe that dissent will find a way to communicate and organize: pancakes at the fall of the Yuan dynasty, pamphlets during the American revolution, chapatis in India during the Sepoy Rebellion, cassette tapes in Iran at the fall of the Shah.

Sooner or later.

Well, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made it sooner.

The events in Egypt and Tunisia illustrated an American strategy: the US State Department views free communication as a strategic weapon against authoritarian adversaries whose governments are vulnerable to organized popular dissent.

Ever since the State Department intervened during protests by the Iranian Green movement in June 2009, convincing Twitter to postpone maintenance so opposition protestors could communicate, the US government has been ramping up its worldwide effort to set up a network of organizations that could circumvent crackdowns on Internet and cell phone technologies by foreign governments. That effort faced its first two major tests over the last few weeks and the State Department has been working with private companies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions to activate this network and put it to use in real time.

"Our mission is to provide a lifeline of protection when people get in trouble through a range of support for the activists and the people on the ground", Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor ("DRL") Michael Posner said in an interview on Friday with The Cable. "I think there will be an increase in contacts on several levels in the coming days and weeks".

Even before the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, the State Department was working to drastically increase its activities with the internet freedom organizations, many of them using State Department funding provided through a grant program administered by DRL. This month, State announced it would spend another $30 million on this project.

For Posner, the drive to create an "open platform" for Internet communications is part of the overall drive to protect the universal rights the administration has been trumpeting in recent days and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out in her speech on Internet Freedom.

Rather ironically, the first successful instances of the policy were classic cases of blowback, taking down two American allies in the Middle East while Iran and China are taking notes on the sidelines.

Rather significantly, the State Department has doubled down.

Ben Ali and Mubarak are history anyway; and their demise can serve a useful demonstration of the power of the information-freedom death star.

The anxieties of the Saudis and King Hussein of Jordan are apparently an acceptable price to pay for declaring to the Iranian and Chinese leaders - and their citizens - that America will continue to apply its ingenuity, energy, and advantages to promote information freedom openly and covertly to apply potentially destabilizing pressure against these regimes.

China is rather anxiously scrubbing the Chinese Internet of stories and comments that emphasize the popular mass-movement character of the risings in Tunisia and Egypt. Published reports focus instead on local chaos and the efforts of the Chinese government to evacuate Chinese nationals.

Global Times took the bit in its teeth and weighed in with a "color revolutions are bad" editorial; the rest of the official media appears to be doing its best to ignore the issue and possible consequences for China.

However, Hu Jintao probably isn't packing his bags for Switzerland just yet. The Chinese government seems to have enough wealth, time, and legitimacy to apply itself to the serious problems of corruption, income inequality, and the fundamental pig-headedness of one-party states when it comes to managing and channeling dissent.

Also, China has an important advantage.

It has the US as an unmistakable, threatening adversary that serves as a focus for patriotic and nationalistic sentiment.

This probably puts China in a better situation than the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, which have - all information freedom triumphalism aside - found the US as an equivocal, ultimately fatal ally.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the US is all for information freedom - as long as it isn't Wikileaks. In other words, The Truth Shall Set You Free ... Unless It's My Truth.

_____

Peter Lee edits China Hand.

http://www.counterpunch.org/lee02022011.html

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

Lifeboats: A Memoir

2011-02-05T08:16:00.000+09:00

by Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov (January 07 2011)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSeazUjYmwI/AAAAAAAABVo/fkzCau2-IpM/s1600/coab11alberthorses_sm.jpg

[This is a guest post by Albert, whose amazing erudition and experience gives him the right to tell just about anyone to sit down, shut up and listen - although he is far too nice to actually say that. But I am not, so I will: sit down, shut up and listen.]

During the early days of The Farm, 1971-1973, we learned a number of lessons that will be useful again now that a rapid petrocollapse scenario is likely to come to pass. The Farm spiritual community emerged from a fifty-bus caravan of 320 Haight-Ashbury refugees fleeing hard drugs, exploitation and counterculture tourism. After a year on the road the gypsy vagabonds pooled inheritances and purchased 1050 acres (450 hectares) of land eighty miles (130 km) from Nashville. It was US$70 per acre.

The Farm grew to a standing population of well over 1000, with twenty satellite centers, then, in the early 1980s, declined and decollectivized, bringing its population to under 200. Since then it has experienced something of a renaissance, finding new popularity amongst permaculturists, ecovillagers, and roving students. But let's begin at the beginning, when our group landed in Tennessee.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSea95zrkYI/AAAAAAAABVs/QcFa_28ZJSg/s1600/coab11busfarm.jpg

Living in remodeled school buses was quite an adequate introduction to "roughing it", especially for those of us who had never gone camping as children. The "honey pot" latrine bucket, mosquito-proof backpacker tents, canteens, flashlights, storm lanterns, and two-burner Coleman stoves were familiar to the pioneer settlers by the time they first stepped off the bus.

The land itself was barren of amenities save a small log cabin, a horse barn and a line shack, and so the first order of business was setting up facilities for bathing, sanitation, kitchen and sleeping. I'll skip over the organizational aspects here because they would require a lengthier and more nuanced discussion; suffice it to say that circumnavigating North America in a fifty-bus caravan required a degree of organization similar to running a rock-and-roll band tour. That's enough organization to get you started in designing and constructing a settlement, although perhaps not enough to keep it intact for very long.

For pumped water, an engine was lifted from a Volkswagen Bug and set on blocks in a springhouse. A well-used and rusting 5700 liter (1500 gallon) water tower was purchased for scrap value, repaired and erected atop a hill above the springhouse. This required minor welding and auto mechanics, as well as a continuous supply of petrol. Some years later, when power lines came in, the VW engine and springhouse were replaced with a submersible pump and well. Today it would have been built with photovoltaics or wind power, but such technology, while already available in the 1970s, was well beyond the reach of a community that subsisted on average per capita cash income of US$1 per day for its first thirteen years.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSebOHymFHI/AAAAAAAABVw/Q5YrXBiObaE/s1600/coab11ladels.jpg

After the first winter, a second, larger water tower was erected near a 100 meter (300 foot) well with good aquifer recharge. The tower was salvaged from a railroad company for a purchase price of US$1, but moving and erecting the tower and tank required a crane. From the towers, water was delivered to homes in twenty liter (five gallon) jugs by horse wagon.

While the buses provided initial shelter, with more than six residents per bus on average, after eight to twelve months of living on the road most people wanted to get out into better housing, as quickly as possible. At the time, the government of the State of Tennessee held monthly auctions of surplus property, and Korean War vintage army tents could be bought for as little as US$15. These formed the basis of our first foray into home construction. With salvaged materials from construction sites and dumpsters, they morphed into "touses and hents". Going into a partnership with a nearby sawmill allowed us to add some beautiful timber-frame buildings and D-frames. Common buildings such as the community kitchen, motor pool, canning & freezing, print shop, clinic and school sprang almost entirely from salvaged materials. Scraping mortar off cement blocks and straightening nails become well-practiced skills.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSegmd5kNjI/AAAAAAAABWI/xQXkmopD2oI/s1600/coab11schoolbrickcleaning.jpg

There was limited electricity to the site, and for an entire decade almost all of our electricity came from twelve-volt DC systems powered by car batteries. Initially the batteries were charged by switching them through vehicles every day, but full discharge cycles make for short battery life, so after trying novel methods of pedal power, bamboo wind generators and other wacky ideas, most houses went to a "trickle charge" system - a long copper cable run through the trees to a central power center that took its electrons from Tennessee Valley Authority (although we always sent them back in the next nanosecond).

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSebdGbcWnI/AAAAAAAABV0/ksxym-AfCds/s1600/coab11food-prep-building.jpg

At one of these power centers, where we did our canning and freezing, we erected walk-in coolers and freezers. Refrigeration was a necessity that is as difficult to avoid as it is to achieve. A few of the buses came with propane-powered fridges and they were a blessing. Most of the households relied on a system of five-gallon (twenty liter) buckets that rotated to the walk-in coolers and freezers near the cannery. Buckets with tight lids were obtained from dumpsters behind the McDonalds in town. The other essential item was a Flexible Flyer wooden wagon with slatted sides. If you couldn't get your parents to give one of those to their grandchildren for Christmas, the next best thing was to weld a bike trailer or pushcart to get your buckets to the neighborhood cooler.

Buckets were also employed to carry diapers and laundry to a communal laundromat, which was set up near another trickle-charge node. Salvaged coin-op equipment was purchased in bulk, the coin slots replaced with toggle switches, and a large diaper rinse and centrifuge babe-manure extractor installed. The grey- and black-water flowed to a constructed wetlands and rainbird, creating what today, forty years later, are some of the richest soils on the property.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSeg0gt8cEI/AAAAAAAABWM/REGmfKMx_Bw/s1600/patchwork-house.jpg

Communal unisex showering facilities were constructed in places with good supplies of water and a way to heat it: downhill from the original water tower; beside Canning & Freezing and the Farm Store; at the Farm School and print shop.

A flour mill took over the tack room in the horse barn. Initially we used a small stone mill to grind corn meal. Later we bought a larger, three-break steel feed mill and set it up in the line shack, connected to three-phase AC power. Arrayed around the roller mill were Clipper seed cleaners, sifters, a coffee roaster, an oat huller, and bagging racks. Within a year the mill was churning out a ton per day of wheat, corn, soy and buckwheat flours, pastry flours, corn meal, grits, groats, mixed cereals and porridges, horse feed, soy nuts, popcorn, coffee, and peanut butter.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSebqDX9GYI/AAAAAAAABV4/3DJaQZGQGyM/s1600/coab11Ma-Bell.jpg

Transportation and communications were priorities, because our sustainability depended on commerce, and without good transportation and communications any attempts to create a business would have been hampered. Bear in mind that for the first thirteen years the experiment was communal, meaning shared purse. Just as many societies throughout history, we have found that in times of difficulty a reversion to communal economics provides greater survival advantages than the exercise of individuated private property rights. After achieving stability, most drop the communal form in order to stimulate greater enterprise. This was the path taken by Amana, Oneida, many kibbutzim, The Farm, the People's Republic of China, and, now, Cuba.

Any group that can cross the country in thirty-year-old school buses will learn something about automotive mechanics. Our motor pool and junkyard became one of the technology hubs for The Farm, a place where anything from a hay rake to a fire truck could be machined and rebuilt, nearly from scratch.

The first two teams of horses, black Belgians and white Percherons, were acquired from neighboring Old Order Amish. They laughed at our feeble attempts, as vegans, to replace leather harness with more hippy-kosher canvas and Naugahide. "How'd you raise that nauga?" they'd ask. Interesting koan!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSehwaDpUVI/AAAAAAAABWQ/FuaTa75noHU/s1600/coab11timberhouse.jpg

Communication was accomplished through a rapid succession of home and business devices. The log cabin became the business center with two phone lines. On US$1 per person per day, personal long distance charges were unaffordable, but one of our caravaners was an Eagle Scout with a ham radio merit badge, and he made a radio shack in the horse barn and began training ham radio operators to staff an amateur band Farm Net. Before the Internet I was WB4LXJ.

A twelve-volt telephone system was installed to link every bus, tent, home and business. The dial tone was replaced with a Grateful Dead or reggae melody or a public service announcement (1000 jars of catsup planned today, canners needed; line at the laundry is now ninety minutes; bean shucking and banjo at horse barn 7 pm). The dial itself was replaced with a pushbutton that you used for Morse code to signal where you were calling. Four shorts meant "all points". It was a party line, but there was a second carrier band, the "Hot Line", used for emergencies. A toggle switch flipped you over to that band where an operator was always on call, sitting at a phone console to summon fire, police and ambulance and to assume management of the emergency. This pre-dated most emergency telephone services.

Emergencies were taken seriously, and fire marshals, gate and patrol security, and emergency medical responders were treated as actual jobs from the very beginning. Each became more sophisticated as the body of experience grew. Naive hippies learned to adjust to the rigors of self-reliance, which could sometimes be terrifying, such as when a kerosene lamp tips over in a canvas tent, the Ku-Klux-Klan rides up to the front gate or a deputy sheriff wanders into the marijuana patch while hunting deer.

Finding additional uses for the copper wires we passed through the treetops, we sent a TV signal through the phone lines, and could download direct network feeds from a twelve-foot (3.7 meter) dish made of pine 2x4s and chicken wire. We watched the Watergate hearings that way. We produced our own shows, too, sent from the Bandland Studio tent to twelve-volt TVs in tents and buses. If you were within thirty feet of the phone line, you could pick up the signal on channel three. We watched Greenpeace work out its chess moves with the Spanish Navy in real time, using a slo-scan ham TV transmitter installed on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior, sort of a proto-Animal-Planet pilot.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSeexa-VP7I/AAAAAAAABWE/JBAozhdr25U/s1600/coab11welding.jpg

Eventually, when CB radios became popular, we were able to install them in our vehicles and interface them with the ham radio and "Beatnik Bell" phone system. Free international calls became possible. Our "Extra Class" hams grew in proficiency and could link to satellites, monitor police, military and secret service sidebands, and bounce audio, digital and TV signals around the world to an expanding Farm Net.

A weekly newspaper, Amazing Tales of Real Life, began coming out of the print shop, along with a host of do-it-yourself books that turned into a brand. A brisk traffic in daily visitors, more than a hundred some days, required tour crews and a large hostel tent, but also supplied nearly free labor for the fields.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSeb98BaLuI/AAAAAAAABV8/wqdaCq29VIs/s1600/coab11picnic-table.jpg

From the very first arrival of the buses and through the first five years a community dining facility was an essential efficiency, and one of the main reasons that living could be so cheap. Milk was made from soybeans, which became tofu, mayonnaise, yogurt, sour cream and ice cream. Soybeans were also made into coffee, tempeh, soysage (from okara), soyburgers and stroganoffs. A bushel of dry soybeans (35 liters) cost US$3 (US$7 today). The protein needs (with all eight essential amino acids in good proportion) for a hard-laboring farm worker can be supplied on less than a pound (450 grams) per day, rehydrated and made into gourmet vegan cuisine. Thinking of storing food for emergencies? Include soybeans.

Tracing back down memory lane to my experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned, dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and cornbread with pickled japapenos; guitars and song around a fire under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world; community.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/TSecK6LCiOI/AAAAAAAABWA/J4NPDogGiqk/s1600/coab11meditation.jpg

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/01/lifeboats-memoir.html

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

Inflation Is So Much Worse ...

2011-02-04T22:08:00.002+09:00

... Than We're Told

by Thomas H Greco

Beyond Money (January 27 2011)

Chris Martenson, author of Crash Course, in this recent article (see below), provides an update on his analysis of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and argues that the world is in for big trouble.

He says,

... fiscal and inflationary train-wrecks are the most probable outcome for the US - and, by extension, the globe.

I agree.

One point needs to be clarified. When speaking about inflation, one must distinguish between currency inflation and price inflation. Price inflation or cost of living can be affected by a number of causes, but the usual and primary cause is currency inflation, that is the debasement of a currency by the monetary authorities by creating money on an unsound basis.

The recent policies of "quantitative easing" followed by the Federal Reserve amount to counterfeiting US dollars under color of law. The ultimate effect will be to steal the value of your savings and the destruction of the middle class.

http://beyondmoney.net/2011/01/27/chris-martenson-inflation-is-so-much-worse-than-were-told/

Inflation Is So Much Worse Than We're Told

by Chris Martenson

chrismartenson.com (January 25 2011)

Inflation is actually much higher than what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) claims it is; something that purchasers of college tuition, pharmaceuticals, or health insurance know all too well.

To give the BLS some credit, they must try and estimate a single rate of inflation that applies to everyone equally. But that is a completely impossible task. An octogenarian living in Seattle on a meager pension and taking lots of prescription medications will have a totally different inflation experience than an eighteen year old living in their parent's basement eating Ramen noodles.

But even after spotting the BLS some slack, there are some enormous and glaring errors in their methods that render the official inflation measure hopelessly - and dangerously - inaccurate.

In this article, I am going to reveal how US inflation numbers are badly understated, how this practice short-changes institutions and fixed-income individuals alike, and why this means fiscal and inflationary train-wrecks are the most probable outcome for the US - and, by extension, the globe.

Why This is Important

As a refresher, inflation in the US is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in a measure called the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. It is used by the Federal Reserve to justify its money printing policies, by the federal government to calculate cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for the entitlement programs (for example, Social Security), and to set the interest rate on inflation-adjusted bonds known as TIPS. Indirectly, the CPI influences interest rates, the stock market, and a host of salary and pension negotiations each year. If the CPI is too low, even by a single percent, the impact is in hundreds of billions of dollars.

And from a financial planning standpoint, the impact is just as dire. If you are putting away money for a child for college, the rate of inflation you apply to the tuition has an enormous impact on the amounts you'd need to put away. In eighteen years, a current $40,000 per year tuition will become $66,000 per year at a three percent rate of inflation, but $107,000 per year at a six percent rate of inflation. The same logic and results apply to retirement planning.

Further, the cost estimates surrounding the current health-care debate in the US are founded on inflation projections that draw upon prior CPI readings for their baselines.

It is vitally important that our assessment of inflation be as accurate as possible.

Unfortunately, the CPI understates inflation, which is much higher (worse) than we're told.

Understanding exactly how this is accomplished will help clear your mind and lead to more certainty in your decisions.

Caveat Emptor

Every country fights its last battle, and in the US, unlike Europe, the prior enemy was deflation, which ravaged the land in the 1930s.

Seeking to avoid that fate repeating itself, the US Federal Reserve routinely justifies the continuation of its massive money printing experiment (which goes by the all-too-fancy title "Quantitative Easing") by citing an apparently low rate of inflation, as provided by the BLS.

Here's a recent example of such justification at work:

Recent data show consumer price inflation continuing to trend downward. For the twelve months ending in November ... inflation excluding the relatively volatile food and energy components - which tends to be a better gauge of underlying inflation trends - was only 0.8 percent, down from 1.7 percent a year earlier and from about 2.5 percent in 2007, the year before the recession began. {1}

A 0.8% yearly rate of inflation (ex food and energy, of course) that is trending downwards certainly makes inflation sound like a non-issue and supports the idea of dangerous deflation lurking nearby.

Indeed, the Fed is right, after subtracting out the items that are most responsible for keeping everybody alive and comfortable (food and energy), the rate of inflation as reported by the BLS seems to be locked in a mortal tailspin ... as long as you only look at the narrow range marked by the red line below {2}:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u14865/IISMWTWT_CPI_-_Monthly_rate_of_Change.jpg

Well, the average person would be well within their rights to wonder what all the fuss is even about. After all, inflation is now within 0.06% of its ten-year average, and unless you are calculating the trajectory of a newly launched Mars probe, 0.06% is not really that big of a deal. But the Fed is terrified of it.

Backing up this view is the BLS, which provided us with these data for December 2010 {3}:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u14865/IISMWTWT_BLS_CPI_Claims.jpg

According to the BLS, the average household experienced an exceedingly tame rate of inflation of only 1.5% between December 2009 and December 2010. That is, what used to take $100 to buy in 2009 requires $101.50 in 2010; only a dollar-fifty more. Once we strip out food and energy, the cost index plummets, requiring only eighty cents more than a year ago to buy the same basket of goods and services.

The only problem with this view is that it is utterly, provably, and demonstrably wrong.

I can reveal how with one relatively simple example.

[Note to any journalists reading this. My standing offer to you is this: I will spend as much time as you wish going through this data if you feel that understanding it more completely will help your current or future reporting on the issue.]

Health Insurance and the CPI

As I mentioned in the Crash Course chapter on inflation {4}, there are three major statistical 'tricks' that the BLS imposes on the Consumer Price Index. They are hedonics, which tries to account for improving quality in products over time, substitution, which is the act of switching to lower-cost items when prices surge on preferred items, and weighting.

For less-than satisfactory reasons, the BLS only weights healthcare at 6.5% of the CPI, although it represents 17.6% of the total GDP. That's a big problem, because healthcare is the biggest and most consistent source of inflation over the years.

[Note: This next section has been extensively edited from its original content to reflect new understandings and information. See comments below for the context for these changes. Briefly, based on a conversation with a BLS employee I had incorrectly assumed that 'health insurance' reflected the total cost of health insurance. It does not. It is only meant to reflect changes in the retained earnings ratio of health insurance companies. I truly dislike making errors and seek to correct them publicly and completely whenever they occur.]

Medical care as a CPI component rather oddly excludes all government expenditures for healthcare (primarily Medicare and Medicaid) and does not count the rising costs of health insurance to businesses. After subtracting out these expenditures only 6.5% remains from the 17.6%. {5}

http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u14865/IISMWTWT_1-6-2011_3-16-05_PMCPI_HC_WEighting.jpg

It turns out that in its attempt to capture health insurance the BLS splits it into two cost streams, one which goes towards paying for health care and the other which goes to the insurance companies. The first cost stream is allocated to the medical care components listed above while the insurance company component is contained within the 'health insurance' subcategory. But it's all done by what is described as an 'indirect method'.

Here's the official explanation

The weights in the CPI do not include employer-paid health insurance premiums or tax-funded health care such as Medicare Part A and Medicaid. Currently, the index employs an indirect method for measuring price changes for health insurance premiums.

Under this indirect method, the medical care index will not be affected by changes in policy characteristics, such as modifications to policy benefits and utilization changes. The approach implicitly assumes that the level of service from individual carriers is strictly a function of benefits paid. {6}

By this method, the rising costs of medical care should feed into rising health insurance costs, which will then be captured in the medical care CPI. Also, we might note that the part in bold implies that changes to insurance policies such as rising deductibles and copays, both very significant portions of the current experience for most people, will, perversely, cause the CPI for medical care to drop because less money will be registered as going towards medical services and commodities. You pay the same amount to the health care company for insurance, but less is paid out because you have to shoulder a bigger portion via deductibles and co-pays and, presto!, less money is recorded as being paid out and so inflation is apparently less. I still need to vet that thought process with the BLS to be sure I've got it right, but the way things are worded, that's the only way I can interpret it.

The cost of health insurance itself, has apparently been steadily falling for the past three years something that will be news to anyone whose premium's have vaulted up {7}:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u14865/IISMWTWT_CPI_Health_Insurance_Price_Index.jpg

Because most private health costs are paid by insurance claims, it stands to reason that the medical care CPI should track the rise in health insurance over the years. That is, if the methodology for tracking health insurance costs works, and those costs are properly allocated into the CPI, then both should give roughly the same answer over time.

But they do not.

Where the CPI for medical care purports a 52% increase over the 1999 to 2009 time period, health insurance premiums have risen by 131%:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/files/u4/CPI_vs_Health_Ins.jpg

In just those two errors, underweighting healthcare and the inexplicable gap between health insurance increases and the medical care CPI, by my calculations the BLS is understating inflation by at least three percent, and possibly more.

[end of modified content]

If three percent does not strike you as a lot, go back and re-read the example about college tuition I provided in the sixth paragraph of this article.

Conclusion (to Part I)

For the reasons above, inflation is much higher than proclaimed. Yet we are being told, on a near-daily basis, that the massive money printing and deficit spending activities of the Federal Reserve and federal government, respectively, are not stoking inflation. At least, 'not yet'. Since the Fed uses the CPI as a key indicator in its decision making, the big risk here is that Bernanke will not begin to turn the wheel on the monetary supertanker until after it is too late.

Anybody engaging in any form of long-term financial planning - be they individuals, pension trustees, or budget setters - needs to be aware of the flaws and limitations of the official US inflation measure.

All COLA increases based on the CPI are too low. Any health care policy analyses that rely on the CPI (which is most) will vastly underestimate the true costs and are doomed to trap the nation in a regime of rapidly rising costs and deficits.

We are risking much by systematically understating inflation including our reputation, market confidence, and even the dollar itself.

Part II of this report {8} digs much more deeply into this material and - important for both for individual and professional investors - lays out my predicted scenario for how this will all result in a systemic financial breakdown. Assets classes for inflation protection are also discussed.

Links:

{1} http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/bernanke20110107a.htm

{2} http://bls.gov/cpi/#data

{3} http://bls.gov/cpi/#data

{4} http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-10-inflation

{5} ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiri2009.txt

{6} http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifact4.htm

{7} http://bls.gov/cpi/#data

{8} http://www.chrismartenson.com/martensonreport/inflation-so-much-worse-were-told-full-report

_____

Copyright 2006-2010, ChrisMartenson.com (CMAL LLC). All rights reserved.

Published on Chris Martenson (http://www.chrismartenson.com)

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/inflation-so-much-worse-were-told/51631

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

What Lies behind Egypt's Problems?

2011-02-04T07:29:00.001+09:00

How do they affect others?

by gailtheactuary

ourfiniteworld.com (January 29 2011)

We have all been reading about Egypt in the newspapers, and wonder what is behind their problems. Let me offer a few insights.

At least part of Egypt's problem is the fact that in the past the government has threatened to reduce food subsidies {1}. Now it is planning to hold food subsidies level and raise energy subsidies {2}, but it is not clear that the dollar amount of subsidy will be enough. The government is taking steps to make food and energy affordable for most, but there is worry that the steps being taken will not be enough.

Egypt's Declining Financial Situation

There is a good reason why one might expect Egypt to start running into problems with energy and food subsidies. Its own financial situation is declining at the same time that the cost of food imports is soaring. If we look at a graph of Egyptian oil imports, exports, and consumption (using a graph from Energy Export Databrowser {3}, which graphs BP Statistical Data), we find that Egypt's oil use has been rising rapidly, at the same time the amount extracted each year is declining.

Figure 1. Egypt's oil production, consumption, and exports
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/oil-production-exports-databrowser.png?w=448&h=321

Starting about 2010 or 2011, Egypt will change from an oil exporting nation to an oil importing nation, if there are imports available on the world market. The catch is that Egypt isn't the only one with declining oil production - world oil production has been approximately flat since 2005, and the countries that produce the oil are using more and more of it themselves. The result is that there is less oil available for export, even as countries like Egypt need more.

The oil that Egypt exports provides funds for the subsidies that it offers, so reduced exports mean less funds are available for subsidies. Egypt has recently been able to ramp up natural gas exports, and these exports have allowed subsidies to remain in place.

Figure 2. Egypt's natural gas production, consumption, and exports
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/egypt_natural-gas_consumption_exports.png?w=448&h=312

If a person looks closely at the green portion of the graph, natural gas exports have been fairly flat since 2005. It sounds like they can be expected to remain relatively flat, too, because according to the US Energy Information Administration {4}:

Given increasing domestic demand, combined with popular pressures in recent years against LNG and gas export contracts (particularly with Israel), the oil minister declared in mid-2008 that no new gas export contracts would be made.

So Egypt is still getting some export revenue from hydrocarbons (and just as importantly, tax revenue related to the export revenue), but the natural gas amount is likely close to flat, and the amount from oil exports has gone to zero. Egypt subsidizes both oil and natural gas sales internally, so it is likely that the government is not getting much revenue related to be portion that is used for internal consumption. In fact, it may very well be a net loser on the part that is used internally because of its subsidies - revenue on exports is supposed to make up the difference. If Egypt needs to actually purchase oil from abroad in the future, its expenses can be expected to go up significantly.

Other Budget Pressures

Based on information from the CIA World Fact Book {5}, Egypt was already significantly overspending its revenue in 2009 (the last year available), with revenues of $46.82 billion and expenditures of $64.19 billion. For 2010, the Factbook reports government debt amounting to 80.5% of GDP, putting its debt level far above that of most other African and Arab nations.

If Egypt's oil production is down, follow-on industries like refining and chemical products are likely down as well, making it difficult to increase revenues from these sources, or to obtain additional taxes related to the spending of workers in these industries. The Suez Canal is one of Egypt's sources of revenues, but with world oil exports down, revenues from it are likely dropping as well.

Cutbacks in oil production and in Suez Canal transport can be expected to exacerbate unemployment problems. The Egyptian unemployment rate was listed at 9.7% in 2010 by the CIA World Factbook.

Egypt has a history of a fairly egalitarian approach to distribution of income. In 2001, the CIA Factbook lists its GINI coefficient as 34.4%, which is near that of the United Kingdom, and much better than, say, that of the US. But in recent years, the CIA Factbook says

Cairo from 2004 to 2008 aggressively pursued economic reforms to attract foreign investment and facilitate GDP growth.

These economic reforms likely raised the income of some people, but not of everyone, creating a wider gap between the rich and poor. This may lie behind reports of concerns by the poor that they are falling farther behind economically. With the county's history of a more even income distribution and the recent rise in food prices, this rising income inequality may be becoming more of an issue.

Need for Food Imports

Egypt's population has been growing rapidly (estimated at two percent per year by the CIA World Fact Book - about three children per woman), but the population is concentrated in a narrow strip along the Nile River. (Graph from Population Databrowser {6}.)

Figure 3. Egypt's population growth since 1950
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/egypt_databrowser_population.png?w=384&h=371

As population grows, the amount of land needed for housing and businesses rises, and the amount of land for agriculture falls. So Egypt can produce less of its own food, as time goes on.

Egypt is reported to be the world's largest importer of wheat. In 2010, the oil minister stated that Egypt imports forty percent of its food {7}, and sixty percent of its wheat. The problem this year is that world wheat production is down (at least in part due to weather problems in Russia) so world exports are down:

Figure 4. World wheat production and world wheat exports
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/world-wheat-harvest-and-exports.png?w=448&h=270

A longer term problem, though, is that world wheat production has not been growing to keep up with growing world population. Part of this lack of growth may be competition from biofuels. Part of the lack of growth also relates to the fact that the "green revolution" improvements (adding irrigation and fertilizer) are mostly behind us. While irrigation and fertilizer greatly improved production at the time of the change, gains in production since 1990 have been much smaller.

The cost of imported food, particularly wheat, has risen, partly because of the relatively smaller harvest, and partly because the cost of production and transport is rising because of rising oil prices. Figure 5 shows the close relationship food prices and oil prices. The Food Price Index {8} used in this graph is the FAO's Food Price Index related to food for export; Brent oil prices are spot prices from the EIA.

Figure 5. World food price trend is similar to Brent oil price trend.
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/world-food-index-vs-brent-oil-price.png?w=448&h=269

With oil prices higher now (because world production is close to flat, and as countries come out of recession, they want more), food prices of all types are higher as well. Oil is used directly in the production of grain and indirectly in storage and transit, so its cost becomes important.

The higher food prices contribute to the overall inflation problem that Egypt already had. In 2010, the CIA Factbook estimated the inflation rate to be 12.8%. Since wages don't always rise to match inflation rates, inflationary pressures have no doubt put more pressure on the government to increase subsidies, at a time it cannot really afford to do so.

Impact on the Rest of the World

Why does everyone else respond so strongly to Egypt's problems?

One reason is that other Arab countries are also feeling some of the same pressures. Food prices are rising everywhere. Many low income people spend in excess of fifty percent of their income for food, so a rise in food costs becomes a real issue. People have come to depend on oil and food subsidies. If they are taken away, or not raised sufficiently to compensate for the higher costs of imports, it is a real problem.

Oil prices seem to be affected as well. If the Suez Canal should be closed because of disruptions, it could affect oil transit, particularly to Europe. According to the EIA {9}:

An estimated 1.0 million barrels per day of crude oil and refined petroleum products flowed northbound through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea in 2009, while 0.8 million barrels per day travelled southbound into the Red Sea.

The amounts being transported through the Suez canal are now likely down a little from these amounts in 2011, because of reduced imports and exports worldwide, but they are still substantial. Europe's oil imports are about ten million barrels a day of oil, according to Energy Export Data Browser (using BP's data). If all of the amounts that flowed northbound went to Europe, they would amount to about ten percent of Europe's imports, or about seven percent of Europe's consumption. In fact, some of these exports go farther–in particular to the US, or to Canada, so the amount in question is probably lower than this relative to Europe's consumption, say four or five percent. But even a small shortfall is a problem, in a world that needs oil for transport, food production, heating, and many other uses.

The inability to send products southbound through the Suez Canal is likely to also be a problem. Part of what Europe does is refine oil, keep the products it needs, and send other products to customers elsewhere. The whole system is set up assuming close to "just-in-time" production and delivery. While there is some storage capability, after a few days or weeks the system is likely to start running into problems. Those in need of the refined products being sent southward through the Suez Canal will be in need of them, and Europe will have excess supply. Of course, it is possible to use longer shipping routes, but this uses more oil for shipping and takes longer, so is more expensive. There is also a time-delay when the new system is put in place.

All of these problems (relating to both north and south-bound oil traveling through the Suez) can be worked around, but there could be a period of disruption for a while, as supplies begin traveling a longer route.

Links:

{1} http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/8288934/Why-Egypts-government-is-stockpiling-food.html

{2} http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidZAWYA20110126082251/Egypt%20expects%20to%20up%20energy%20subsidies,%20maintain%20food%20subsidies

{3} http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/

{4} http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Egypt/NaturalGas.html

{5} https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/eg.html

{6} http://mazamascience.com/Population/IDB/

{7} http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/minister-egypt-imports-40-its-food

{8} http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en/

{9} http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/world_oil_transit_chokepoints/Suez.html

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/01/29/whats-behind-egypts-problems/

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

The Power That Remains

2011-02-03T19:26:00.000+09:00

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (January 26 2010)

The passing of fitness icon Jack Lalanne, who died last Sunday at the age of 96, called up a modest flurry of tributes and retrospectives in the media, and a great many of these made a point I don't think their authors had in mind. If I'd tried to dream up an imaginary example of the way our culture's obsessions distort our sense of history, I doubt I could have managed anything half so telling.

Not, you understand, that Lalanne's life and achievements didn't deserve the attention the media gave them, or indeed a good deal more than they're likely to get. If the value of an exercise system is best measured by the long-term health and strength of its chief promoter, which seems fair enough, Lalanne is hard to beat, given that he was still doing strength feats in his nineties that would put most of today's muscular twentysomethings to shame. Nor were these achievements the result of the gimmickry that so often catapults people to their fifteen minutes of fame; Lalanne's feats as well as his career as a fitness teacher were achieved the old-fashioned way, through the unfaddish combination of sound practical advice, hard work, and a cheerful and consistent willingness to walk his own talk.

No, the thing that made the media tributes so striking is the extraordinary way that they edited Lalanne right out of his actual historical context. Stories in print and electronic media alike called Lalanne a pioneer, the man who first taught Americans to exercise. It's no discredit to the man to point out that he was nothing of the kind. Lalanne was, rather, one of the very last great figures in what was once a huge and influential movement in American culture, and has now been systematically erased from our collective memory.

The phrase that was standard before that erasure took place was "physical culture". From the 1870s until the Second World War, across the English-speaking world and in many other countries as well, those words conjured up much the same imagery that the current Lalanne retrospectives put back into circulation, however briefly, in the imagination of our time: a genial blend of robust exercise, healthy eating, spectacular feats of strength, and more or less colorful showmanship. Against a background of Victorian ladies doffing their corsets to swing Indian clubs, young men stripped to the waist hefting kettlebells full of lead shot, and circus strongmen challenging all comers to match them lift for lift, scores of figures now forgotten made their names into household bywords: Eugen Sandow, whose impressive exploits and even more impressive physique first made weightlifting fashionable in the Western world; Genevieve Stebbins, who taught exercise to three generations of American girls around the turn of the last century; Joseph Greenstein aka "The Mighty Atom", the diminutive Polish-American strongman whose signature trick was tying a #2 iron horseshoe into an overhand knot with his bare hands, and many more - among them, and far from the least, Jack Lalanne.

It takes only the briefest bout of research, especially in the age of the internet, to uncover all this and put Lalanne into his proper context. Why, then, the distortion of history, reminiscent of nothing so much as those Politburo photos from Stalin-era Russia from which former members were so studiously erased? Why, for that matter, is it a fairly safe bet that when Jane Fonda passes away, the media will briefly if lavishly praise her as the pioneer who taught America to exercise, and pretend that Jack Lalanne never existed?

There are at least three reasons, and all of them are relevant to the wider project of this blog.

The first, a point discussed here tolerably often, is the contemporary American obsession with fantasies of progress. We don't like to think about the fact that by and large, Americans these days are weaker, less healthy, and less capable than their great-grandparents. When we do think about that, we like to frame it in a narrative that turns it into a brand new problem ready for some clever solution or other - that is to say, another opportunity for progress. Now it so happens that declining health and fitness in industrial societies has been a recognized issue since the nineteenth century, the physical culture movement emerged as a response to that issue, and what we are pleased to call cultural progress since that time has undercut the response and made the situation significantly worse, but this doesn't fit the sort of historical narrative most of us prefer. The tacit amputation of the past is a neat solution to that difficulty.

The second reason, which is closely related to the first, is that from its beginning, the physical culture movement took a critical stance toward the products of industry and the lifestyles made possible by the extravagant use of fossil fuels. That expressed itself in a great many obvious ways - Jack Lalanne's trademark habit of teaching people to exercise using simple household items instead of expensive apparatus, and his insistence on leaving most industrially processed foods out of the diet, are classic examples - but it also ran right down to the root assumptions of the whole movement. The core idiom of modern industrial society, after all, is the replacement of human capacities with gaudy technological crutches; we buy cars as substitutes for feet, televisions as substitutes for imagination, and so on.

Physical culture focused instead on developing the innate, extraordinary capacities hardwired into the human individual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a great many people were deeply concerned about the consequences of human dependence on an industrial technostructure, that was an exhilarating prospect, and it's no accident that the most famous stunts of the more colorful physical culturists very often took the form of an unassisted human body accomplishing some feat usually left to machines. These days most of us have surrendered to the technostructure so completely that we try to avoid thinking of the downside of that surrender, and spectacles that astonished and delighted our great-grandparents make today's audiences uncomfortable and bored. How many people would turn out nowadays to watch the Mighty Atom tie horseshoes into knots? We've all seen fancier things done with computer-generated imagery, and CGI allows us to avoid the awkward and quite explicit subtext of the Mighty Atom's demonstrations, which was that anybody who was willing to do the necessary work could accomplish the same thing - or, for that matter, very nearly anything else.

That brings up the third reason why Jack Lalanne had to be presented as a unique, eccentric, and therefore harmless figure, rather than the last major public exponent of a movement that invited everyone's participation. His accomplishments, like those of the great physical culturists before him, depended on something utterly unmentionable in contemporary industrial culture. It's more strictly tabooed than sex or death or the total dependence of today's middle-class American lifestyles on Third World slave labor. Yes, we're talking about self-discipline.

It's an interesting wrinkle of history that imperial societies in decline normally fear what's left of their virtues far more than they fear their vices. James Francis' useful 1994 study Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World {1} chronicles how Rome's rulers found the reasoned self-discipline taught by Stoic and Platonic philosophies an unendurable challenge to their authority. You can find similar conflicts in the history of imperial China, the Muslim world, or, really, wherever the decline of imperial states is well enough documented. The reason behind these conflicts is simple enough: people who are ruled by their passions and appetites can be ruled just as efficiently by any political system willing to pander to those things, while those who control themselves can't reliably be controlled by anyone else. Thus the Roman government regularly sent Rome's philosophers into exile, failing Chinese dynasties praised Confucius to the skies while doing away with anybody who took his teachings too seriously, and modern America uses every trick in the media's book to marginalize those who remind us that the life of a channel-surfing couch potato might not express the highest potentials of our humanity.

The taboo on self-discipline in contemporary America is all the more intriguing because just at the moment, sadomasochism has become the hottest new fad on the American left. Connoisseurs of the return of the repressed have much to appreciate in the spectacle of a subculture that claims to place an absolute value on human equality, but is busily getting its rocks off by acting out fantasies in which male dominance and female submission are far and away the most popular themes. Still, I suspect that part of what set this fad in motion is an inchoate but widespread sense that there are whole worlds of human possibility that can't be reached by drifting along aimlessly and doing whatever seems easiest at the moment. Those who have that sense and are unable to conceive of self-mastery inevitably seek masters elsewhere; we will be very fortunate indeed if that quest goes no further than latex lingerie and a fashion for wearing leather collars.

However that process works out, though, Jack Lalanne and the movement that gave him his context have another lesson to teach that will be of key importance in the decades to come. The replacement of human capacities with technological crutches that provides industrial society with its central idiom depends utterly on the ability of industrial society to keep itself fueled with the energy resources that keep those crutches powered, supplied with spare parts, and replaced when they break down. As we move further into the twilight space beyond the world peak of conventional petroleum production, the ability to keep those resources flowing as abundantly as current expectations demand is coming into question. Those nations with the power to push their way to the head of the petroleum feeding trough are doing so with even more alacrity than before, while those shoved back to the end of the line are increasingly facing crippling energy shortages. Within nations, those classes and pressure groups with a similar preponderance of power are behaving in much the same way, with similar results.

The instinctive response to these struggles is generally to get right down there into the mud-wrestling pit and fight for a share. A more effective strategy, though, might well take the opposite tack. When a resource is depleting and no plausible replacement for it is in sight, staying dependent on that resource is a fool's game; even if you win this round, sooner or later you're going to lose, and time that could have been spent learning to function without the resource has been wasted floundering around in the mud. Phase out your dependence on the resource before you have to do so, recognizing that the actual requirements of human existence are quite modest and can be met in many different ways, and you put yourself in a much better position for the future.

Over the weeks to come, as this blog returns to the nitty gritty of the Green Wizards project, we'll be discussing various ways to cut back on dependence on fossil fuels and the goods and services they provide. Much of the material to be covered in the posts to come will involve tools and devices of various kinds - most of them cheap, many of them suited to basement-workshop manufacture, all of them means toward a certain degree of independence from the vagaries of an industrial civilization that faces a rising spiral of crises and an increasing lack of ability to provide its inhabitants with the goods and services they have become used to getting from it. Still, it's too often forgotten that the vast majority of the energy and technology most of us use each day goes to provide support of various kinds for an individual human body and mind. If that body and mind require less support from outside their own boundaries, there's less need for the energy and technology in the first place. When every other source of power runs short, that's the power that remains.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you ought to break out the Indian clubs and kettlebells and download a couple of old physical culture manuals off the internet, or for that matter pick up an old Jack Lalanne book or two, though I certainly wouldn't discourage anybody who chooses to do this; there's a certain definite attraction, after all, in the prospect of reaching one's nineties with the kind of physique and vitality that most thirty-year-olds only dream about. What it means, rather, is that a certain capacity to cope with physical challenges, take over responsibility for your own health, and get by comfortably in most situations without a great deal of technological assistance, are all useful items in the toolkit of anyone who hopes to face the difficult years ahead with any degree of efficiency and grace. How you choose to pursue that is up to you, but however you do it, if you do it, I suspect that Sandow, Stebbins, the Mighty Atom, and all their sturdy peers - Jack Lalanne very much among them - would be pleased.

_____

John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America {2} and the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2008), The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World (2009), and the forthcoming The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara.

If you enjoy reading this blog, you might want to check out Star's Reach, his blog/novel of the deindustrial future {3}. Set four centuries after the decline and fall of our civilization, it uses the tools of narrative fiction to explore the future our choices today are shaping for our descendants tomorrow.

Links:

{1} http://www.amazon.com/Subversive-Virtue-Asceticism-Authority-Second-Century/dp/0271034254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296697840&sr=8-1

{2} http://www.aoda.org/

{3} http://starsreach.blogspot.com/

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/power-that-remains.html

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

Will Computer Virus Stuxnet Sow ...

2011-02-03T10:02:00.000+09:00

... Not Only Destruction, But Death?

by Russ Wellen

Last week, in the Nation, Eric Alterman hailed Stuxnet, the computer virus that struck Iran's Russian-built reactor at Bushehr.

Now that a "number of technological challenges and difficulties" have beset Iran's program, Moshe Yaalon, Israel's minister of strategic affairs, explains, Iran's nuclear timetable has been "postponed". This development ought to be a cause for joy among all people outside the Iranian leadership's [foot-in-mouth alert - RW] anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying circles. A military attack, whether American or Israeli, might have postponed the timetable as well, but at a horrific cost in human and strategic terms ... The Stuxnet worm has helped to save the world from the horrific consequences [of Iran developing nuclear weapons and attacking Israel - RW].

Fellow Nation writer Robert Dreyfuss responded:

... make no mistake, unleashing a computer worm against a country whose leaders have committed no aggressive act against either the United States or Iran's neighbors is an act of war.

But is Stuxnet the neat, clean computer-killing machine that does no harm to humans - sort of the opposite of a neutron bomb? Dreyfuss again:

... a worm - once created - can take on a life of its own. It can infect unintended locations, as Stuxnet already has, and even spread uncontrollably. And it can be copied and engineered by others, for other purposes. It's like biological warfare: once uncorked, there's no putting the germs back in the bottle.

Last week we wrote about a Reuters article in which Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO, was quoted "This virus, which is very toxic, very dangerous, could have very serious implications", he said, describing the virus's impact as being like explosive mines.

"These 'mines' could lead to a new Chernobyl", he said, referring to the 1986 nuclear accident at a plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

Because of the role Russia played in constructing Bushehr, Rogozin was just fear-mongering to get the West to back off, right? Uh, maybe not. Yesterday the Associated Press reported that, according to "a foreign intelligence report", with

... control systems disabled by the virus, the reactor would have the force of a "small nuclear bomb" ... "The minimum possible damage would be a meltdown of the reactor ... However, external damage and massive environmental destruction could also occur ... similar to the Chernobyl disaster".

But then the AP quotes German cybersecurity expert Ralph Langner, "who has led research into Stuxnet's effects on the Siemens equipment running Iran's nuclear programs":

Bottom line: A thermonuclear explosion cannot be triggered by something like Stuxnet.

Whatever the case - warning: dueling cliches ahead - it's still uncharted waters and the West is playing with fire.

http://www.fpif.org/blog/will_computer_virus_stuxnet_sow_not_only_destruction_but_death?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FPIF+%28Foreign+Policy+In+Focus+%28All+News%29%29

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

How Protests in the Middle East ...

2011-02-02T11:08:00.000+09:00

... Could Choke Our Oil Addiction

by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change

AlterNet (January 31 2011)

Gasoline prices have been rising this winter in the US, even though we are well outside the summer driving season with its traditionally highest price level. Among the reasons for today's higher gasoline and crude oil prices is the high demand for heating oil during this extra cold winter, as heating oil in some northern parts of the world is a life-and-death commodity. This can put some pressure on gasoline supplies as refineries might attempt to maximize heating oil output, although refining requires producing a constant balance of light, medium and heavy products, at fairly high utilization of capacity.

Crude oil prices have been moving toward the $100 per barrel mark. The actual price for crude and petroleum products is much higher in some nations due to subsidies (direct and hidden), keeping prices artificially low. But the official price of oil seems on the way to break the $147 per barrel record from July 2008. Whether the emerging economic powerhouses China and India are the main reason for higher oil prices is academic, when the whole world is affected by developments in price and supply anywhere.

The stability of countries such as Egypt and other Arab states has been proven illusory. When the right geopolitical event in the Persian Gulf - perhaps connected to the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni trends now in play - interrupts oil supplies by as much as ten percent or more of global demand, the effect on the oil market may well be as if Hubbert's peak oil bell curve became a cliff that we have already jumped off.

A revolution in Saudi Arabia has been my favorite example for years, in terms of illustrating what can spark a return to the 1970s' skyrocketing oil prices, panic buying and hoarding. As grocery shelves will be emptied in a few days when a major oil supply crunch hits, as the late Matt Simmons reminded us, what difference does it make how many billions of barrels of crude are really off Brazil's coast?

Now, when people didn't expect it but should have, we see that Arab peoples have indeed been chafing under dictatorship for decades. Arabs, as in most places, have been biding their time for liberation. Whether certain regions can soon attain it is another matter, when many have far outstripped their besieged ecosystems' carrying capacities. In Middle Eastern countries the water and soil situations are generally poor and getting worse. Food shortage and food riots can flow from ecological deterioration, especially as new weather patterns (or non-patterns) have been increasingly disruptive for agriculture. This is one argument for activists in Arab lands to remember there is no liberation or equality on a dead planet.

Although the Egyptian uprising or revolution is hundreds of miles removed from the Persian Gulf, where eighteen percent of the world's total trade in crude its shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, a common spirit of rebellion has spread in the region. It can take a sharp anti-American or anti-corporate turn and thus affect oil exports to the US. In Saudi Arabia where the monarchy is extremely repressive, demonstrators have dared come out of the woodwork after Tunisians sent their dictator packing. International emphasis on military security in the region has been on huge ships and the Persian Gulf itself, but numerous facilities on land in Arab countries and nearby nations are vulnerable to attack and closure. Also, the Suez Canal sees one million barrels of oil pass through each day from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

(Source for figures: Energy Information Agency, US Department of Energy)

The number of separate but linked oil facilities, extent of damage, or days of closure do not have to conform to some arithmetic model for there to be a massive reaction in the world oil market. The perception of supply shortage, with real instances affecting deliveries, is what drives oil prices on the world market, much as the stock market sometimes has a herd mentality. So far we are talking about what most observers would consider a temporary oil supply disruption resulting in a price spike. However, if the disruption and spike are strong enough, severe effects can shut down much of the global economy and simultaneously stop much local activity. Petrocollapse - the exacerbated and lasting failure of the world oil market to meet demand, and the paralysis and collapse of most of the economy's infrastructure relying on petroleum - does not need to follow a formula or specific pattern of oil industry breakdown or a certain depletion schedule of oil reserves. We will only be sure when petrocollapse hits. Because peak oil has been attained, we can say that the petrocollapse process has begun and just needs a catalyst to tip the whole economy and trigger famine on a scale as large as some future climate disaster.

I don't believe the "Transition Town" or less-known "Stair-case slow collapse /catabolic" viewpoints take into account adequately the extreme vulnerability of and to the oil market. The Transition Town and Stair-case adherents' views, hopes, dreams and assumptions may actually refer to social change from civilization collapse, when they may think they are referring to the post-peak oil downslope, or vice versa. But this may make no difference as events may accelerate, and collapse and die-off throw theory and wishes out the window.

In my oil analysis career at Lundberg Survey, we accurately predicted the Second Oil Shock based on our finding that in March 1979 there would be a nine percent shortfall of gasoline for US demand. It was a time of billions fewer humans and rising oil production (extraction). The world also seemed poised to follow through with stringent conservation and development of alternative fuels. After Jimmy Carter's failure to catch fire with those strategies, energy efficiency actually reversed direction with the SUV phenomenon. But any slight per capita gains, had they been consistently in the right direction for conservation, are offset anyway by growth, while efficiencies paradoxically end up adding to more consumption.

Since 1979, aggregate energy demand has not been tamed in the least, and growth of the global oil infrastructure has dangerously proliferated. Peak oil extraction happened worldwide around 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, although "peak" is not a single year due to the advent of nonconventional crudes and biofuels over time. Peak oil is the main reason we are living in very different "oil times" since 1979: growth of crude supply has turned a corner, starting downward. Compared to past years, even conventional crude (light, sweet, easily extracted) - besides unconventional and expensive, extra-polluting oil replacements - is far more expensive to exploit, with lower net energy obtained for newer fields.

Petrocollapse will not be limited to the US, as we shall see when dominoes fall. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

The popular faith in renewable and other alternative fuels to "save us" from dwindling oil reserves or from a loss of Middle Eastern or OPEC oil ought to be shattered prior to the rude and crude awakening from a significant supply crunch. The alternatives are not ready on a large scale, and generally only provide electricity rather than liquid fuels or petrochemicals or other materials. We will only wake up en masse when chaos starts to rapidly unfold - as if it hasn't already.

One is constantly cautioned to never conclude on a sour note. So I will point to the silver lining of collapse as a liberator far more fundamental than regime change. This is because basic relationships in society will be radically altered by extreme lifestyle change brought about by the loss of petroleum and by having to painfully face the recent separation from natural cycles that modern technological societies have "achieved".

The US is still thought to be the richest country in the world, but increasingly this fact requires the caveat of a greater and greater gap between the rich and poor:

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world. In contrast, Tunisia is far better off, ranked the 62nd most unequal country. Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal. And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country! And inequality in the US has soared in the last couple of years.

The New York Times published on January 31 that in Egypt "long-simmering resentments have burst into open class warfare". As poor as the Arab peoples are who are rioting and replacing regimes, and as important as this is for Arabs and all people under oppression, it is even more urgent for US citizens to focus on questioning their own circumstances vis-a-vis petroleum dependence. Fossil fuels do not make us safer or healthier. Besides getting soft from sitting in our cars, before the television and under the influence of many pharmaceutical drugs made from fossil fuels, US citizens seem to still want to believe all is more or less well. As to energy, many still believe "They will think of something". But some of us would rather "Imagine" and create now a radically more liberating and equitable world and way of living, as John Lennon did with his song of that name.

_____

Jan Lundberg is founder of Culture Change and was an oil industry analyst at Lundberg Survey before joining the grassroots environmental movement in 1988.

(c) 2011 Culture Change All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149741/

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

The Machines Change ...

2011-02-01T21:57:00.001+09:00

... the Work Remains the Same

by Robert Jensen

newleftproject.org (January 10 2011)

When I first got involved in left/radical political organizing in the 1990s, I don't recall any of us referring to our efforts as "phone activism" or calling ourselves "fax activists". A friend who started organizing in the early 1960s assured me that he never heard the term "mimeograph activism" in those days. We used telephones, fax machines, and mimeographs in our organizing work, but the machines didn't define our work and we didn't spend a lot of time arguing about the implications of using them.

Today the terms "online activism" and "internet activist" are common, as are discussions about the positive and negative effects of computer-mediated communication ("CMC") on left/progressive political organizing (See interview with Joss Hands on "Activism in a Digital Culture"). Is CMC so dramatically different, or is the left simply caught up in the larger culture's obsession with life online? I will start with observations that likely are not controversial, and then step back to frame the question in ways that may not be widely accepted.

Two basic points:

First, CMC makes possible the distribution of information to a larger number of people at lower financial cost than previous technologies (though the ecological cost of a communication technology that creates highly toxic e-waste and consumes enormous amounts of energy may make this technology prohibitively expensive in the long run) and allows for easier and faster feedback from the recipients of that information.

Second, while the technology is too new for definitive assertions, there is a seductive quality to CMC that leads some groups and individuals to spend too much of their time and resources online, even when there's ample reason to suspect that expense of energy isn't productive.

Two corollary cautions:

First, political information is not political action. Being able to distribute more information more widely more quickly does not automatically lead to people acting on that information. The information must be presented in ways that lead people to believe they should act, and there must be vehicles for that action.

Second, what appears to be wasting time online is not always a waste of time. Just as we solidify bonds with people face-to-face by chatting about the mundane aspects of our lives, we sometimes do that online. Political organizing - like all of life - includes such interaction.

So, it's true that the things we do with a computer online are often like the things we do, or did, with telephone calls, faxes, and mimeographs; the question is how to most effectively apportion our time, energy, and resources on these machines as part of a larger organizing strategy. In that sense, deciding whether to focus on an email or a door-knocking campaign is a straightforward calculation about resources and the likely outcomes of using those resources in different ways.

It's also true that we should be more critically self-reflective about our use of computers for political organizing, lest we be seduced by how productive we imagine we are being online simply because of the speed and reach of CMC. Because an email campaign can reach more people quickly, we are tempted to believe it will lead to the more effective outcomes, though the patient work of door-knocking may yield better long-term results if it builds deeper support that endures.

As our organizing tools change rapidly, these calculations of the likely success of different tactics are not always easy to make, but they are relatively simple questions to formulate. Much more vexing are questions about the complex changes in the world in which we are organizing. We like to say the internet has changed everything, perhaps in as dramatic a fashion as the printing press changed the act of reading. But the world of the 15th century was not changing at anything like the speed that the world is changing today. We need to think about the "everything" in which our email messages are bouncing around. We need to be clearer about the scale of the problems we face, the scope of the changes necessary to address the problems, and the time available to us for creating meaningful change. To illustrate these issues, I'll talk about the state of the ecosphere.

Scale of the problems

For many years activists focused on "environmental problems", offering ways that humans could adjust the way we live to cope with problems of dirty air, dirty water, and dirty land. The assumption behind those projects was that an environment consistent with long-term human flourishing was possible within existing economic, social, and political systems.

That assumption was wrong, and evidence continues to pile up that the ecosphere cannot sustain billions of people when even a fraction of them live at First-World levels. Look at any crucial measure of the health of our ecosphere - groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity - and the news is bad and getting worse. And we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of oil with no viable replacement fuels. And we can't forget global warming and climate instability. Add all that up and it's not a pretty picture, especially when we abandon the technological fundamentalism of the culture and stop believing in fantasy quick fixes for deeply rooted problems.

Our troubles are not the result of the bad behavior within the systems in which we live but of the systems themselves. We have to go to the root and acknowledge that human attempts to control and dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.

Scope of the changes

So, we either abandon the industrial model of development based on the concentrated energy in fossil fuels or we face a significant human die-off in a grim future that is within view. Abandoning that industrial model means a sudden shift in human living arrangements that would be unprecedented in history. We have to redefine what it means to live a good life, dramatically lowering our energy use and reducing our expectations about the material goods we consume.

That means that we not only won't be getting a new flat-screen television, but that we won't be amusing ourselves with new Hollywood movies and TV. It means not only that we won't be able to buy an SUV, but that we won't be using cars for routine personal transportation. It means a whole lot less of everything, and such changes in living arrangements are impossible within capitalism. While capitalism is not the only unsustainable economic system in history, it is the system that structures the global economy today, and it has to be scrapped. If a transition to a sustainable economy is possible, it also means we will have to abandon the nation-state as the primary unit of political organization and find functional political systems at a much lower level.

These changes in economic, social, and political systems mean significant changes in how we understand the nature of the self, the relationship to other humans, and the human place in the larger living world. When we redefine what it means to live a good life, we will be defining what it means to be human.

Time available

No one can predict the trajectory of a full-scale ecological collapse, in part because it is complex beyond human understanding and in part because how we act in the present can affect that trajectory. But even without the capacity to predict with precision, we have to make our best guesses to guide our choices in organizing. The best-case scenario is that we have a few decades to accomplish these changes. The worst-case scenario is that we are past the point of no return and that the systems in place will exhaust the ecosphere's capacity to sustain human life as we know it before we can adjust.

If ecological collapse is either coming soon or already in motion, then traditional organizing strategies may be obsolete. The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn't time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world. There is no reason to assume that the non-human world will wait while we slowly come to terms with all this; the ecosphere isn't going to conform to our timetable.

Where this leaves us

Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me:

(1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and

(2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it.

When I offer such as assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don't feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I'm taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.

As a result, I have recommitted to local organizing that aims mainly to strengthen institutions and networks on the ground where I live, rooted in a belief that those local connections will be more important than ever in coming decades. At the same time, I try to maintain and extend connections to like-minded people around the world, hoping that those connections can contribute to the possibility of coordinated global action. In short, I am trying to become more tribal and more universal at the same time, recognizing there is no guarantee that of a smooth transition or success in the long run.

In these efforts, I engage in a considerable amount of computer-mediated communication. Whenever it's feasible, I favor direct human communication in face-to-face settings, on the assumption that local networks will be strengthened by such communication in ways that CMC cannot foster. I also use CMC to reach out beyond the local, both to learn about global initiatives and to contribute to such initiatives. I try to take advantage of the opportunities offered by CMC without being seduced by illusions of easy organizing through the send button.

So, a summary that likely isn't controversial: These days almost all left/radical organizers will communicate online, but the social justice and ecological sustainability at the heart of left/radical politics isn't going to be achieved online.

It's tempting to leave the discussion at that level, but the questions about scale/scope/time aren't addressed by that easy summary. With a larger focus, the trouble with CMC - with all the time and effort it takes to learn new programs, keep up with the constant changes on the internet, think about the role of the virtual world in real-world politics - is that it keeps us stuck in the past.

That may seem paradoxical; we're used to talking about the people who don't embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn't the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology. If the changes outlined above are an unavoidable part of our future, then we would be well advised to start weaning ourselves from the high-energy/high-technology world, not only in our personal lives but in our organizing as well. That doesn't mean immediately abandoning all the gadgets we use, but rather always realizing that our efforts to make the most effective use of the gadgets in the short term shouldn't crowd out the long-term planning for a dramatically different world.

That different world may well impose changes on us before we have been able to face them ourselves. Novelist/poet/critic Wendell Berry captures this when he writes,

We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to 'need'. I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.

The task is daunting, but it is our task nonetheless. Berry is not optimistic about the future, but he concludes with our charge:

Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

When we lack answers to difficult questions - or even a way to imagine finding answers - it's easy to put the questions aside. Better, I think, to let the questions continually disturb us.

Every time I touch the keyboard of my laptop to write an essay that will be posted on a web site, which I will send to editors via email, my thoughts are troubled.

_____

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, one of the partners in the community center "5604 Manor", http://5604manor.org/. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002).

Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film "Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing", which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Information about the film, distributed by the Media Education Foundation, and an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_machines_change_the_work_remains_the_same/

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

What Would Aristotle Do?

2011-02-01T08:11:00.000+09:00

by Elliot D Cohen

Psychology Today (October 24 2010)

Did you know that The Department of Defense has an ongoing research project to remote control soldier's emotions and tolerance for stress? A soldier who didn't display fear in dangerous situations and didn't experience fatigue, would make a better fighting machine. And what better way to turn a human being into a mere machine devoid of personal freedom and autonomy. In a world that is under total surveillance, there is not likely to be much we could call freedom. Freedom to speak or think would be freedom to speak or think what the authorities permit.

In my new book, Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project (2010), I detail the ways in which our personal privacy has been and continues to be eroded and how we are now heading toward a brave new world of total information awareness and control.

Now afoot is an interconnected web of trends toward greater and greater modes of control, which will predictably advance with the advent of new technologies and the loosening of constitutional safeguards against the abridgment of privacy. Accordingly, what is needed now more than ever before in the history of humankind is a vigilant, well organized, grass roots effort to stem this malignant tide before it is too late.

Steadily escalating is the program of warrantless wiretapping of millions of American's personal, electronic communications, which began under the Bush administration. This mass dragnet of personal email messages, phone calls, and Internet searches is now being done with a virtual blank check from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) courts, which were originally created in 1978 to assure that, in gathering foreign intelligence, the government would not abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The Obama administration has blocked law suits against telecom companies such as AT&T for assisting the National Security Agency in this mass dragnet of electronic communications; and it has also sealed up the ability of American citizens to seek redress by suing the federal government, even if it can be shown that such wiretaps had been unlawfully conducted.

The Obama administration has just announced its intention to make it easier to wiretap Internet communications that use encryption such as Blackberry transmissions, social networks like Facebook, and direct peer to peer transmissions like Skype. The Justice Department is also now seeking to get a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling prohibiting the clandestine planting of GPS tracking devices on people's cars without a warrant.

Congress has recently reauthorized the most invasive provisions of the US Patriot Act. Pursuant to this Act, in the course of conducting a terrorism investigation, if a federal agent discovers evidence implicating a person in a crime, this information can be admissible in convicting the individual of that crime. Thus, if a person is under surveillance by the FBI and if it is discovered therein that this person is growing or possesses marijuana, then this information can be used to secure a criminal conviction, even though the information was acquired without probable cause. What is more, pursuant to the Patriot Act, the FBI agent would not need a warrant to conduct the terrorist investigation through which the incriminating information was acquired.

Amid such thin and ever diminishing legal protections, as surveillance technologies continue to be developed and expanded, we can expect increasingly greater and greater abridgments of privacy.

Consider, for example, how the Transportation Security Agency has recently advanced beyond the use of metal detection devices, baggage scanners, and physical searches. After an unsuccessful attempt by a would-be terrorist to ignite a bomb in Times Square, the Obama administration has stepped up use of body scanners at airports, which electronically undress people, exposing even their genitals. This may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Defense Department is presently developing a new generation of scanning technology that can scan brains. Given the evisceration of Fourth Amendment protections, what legal safeguards are left to prevent government from taking its national security interests to the next level of requiring all air travelers to have their brains scanned for "suspicious" thoughts before boarding their flights? Changes of such magnitude do not happen overnight but occur incrementally. Once we give up our right to privacy regarding our bodies, it is that much easier to do the same regarding our minds.

In public places such as a city street Americans have been well advised not to expect privacy. However, in their own homes, Americans have always enjoyed a right to privacy. Unfortunately, the public/private distinction has already begun to be dismantled. A global positioning (GPS) device on your car over weeks, months, or years can paint an elaborate profile of you - whether you are having an affair, how often you frequent the local tavern, what people you visit, what political gatherings you attend, what congregation to which you belong, how often you attend services, and so on.

Radio frequency Identification (RFID) tracking devices placed on the things you buy are also a potential goldmine of private information about you; and it may be only a matter of time before these items come complete with both RFID and GPS tracking capabilities.

Most of us have also become increasingly aware of the presence of surveillance cameras on the nation's roadways as well as city streets. These surveillance cameras have also found their way into facilities such as banks and other "sensitive", privately owned properties. While some of these cameras are unmanned, others run live feeds that are monitored 24-7 by law enforcement. Such cameras are also plugged into a network of federal databases such as the FBI's biometric database, and, through use of special biometric identifiers (including facial recognition software), can integrate this data with the live feeds from these video surveillance cameras.

Technologies now also exist that can "see" through walls. Without the need for warrants, the hunt for terrorists can literally end up in your bedroom.

Did you know that Thomson Reuters, which controls Reuter's News Service, now also maintains a massive data warehouse consisting of the personal information of millions of Americans? This includes health, credit card, and banking records, and virtually all other online, personal data. Military contractors such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) supply data mining software to government agencies such as the NSA, which enables these agencies to analyze the information in this massive database, including integrating it with other personal data such as email and phone conversations, web sites you have visited, and Internet searches you have conducted.

Did you consider that the software, which integrates and parses through this massive web of information, is prone to yielding false positives? In other words, by some fluke, you can end up on a government watch list, or worse, branded an "unprivileged enemy belligerent", taken into custody, and given "enhanced interrogated". It is no longer a matter of thinking you have nothing to hide when everyone is now considered a terrorist suspect.

As detailed in Mass Surveillance and State Control, these and other technological, social, political, legal, financial, and economic factors key into an integrated web of emerging state controls, which are part of an even larger picture. This larger picture includes the changing politico-corporate landscape of media and telecommunication companies with an insatiable appetite for increasing their bottom lines through military contracts, relaxed Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulations, the granting of mergers, corporate tax breaks, and other forms of incentives for cooperating with the prevailing government authority.

This larger picture also includes a "war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been used to justify ever increasing levels of state surveillance; a revolving door between government officers and military contractors; a current trend toward control of both content and conduit of the Internet (the gutting of "net neutrality") by behemoth companies such as Comcast; and a transnational quest for political and economic power and control.

Unfortunately, the prognosis for the survival of the free world is quite bleak if the stated trends are not stopped very soon. It is the ever constant creep of a culture of control that presents the most insidious danger. As we begin to accept increasingly greater and greater restrictions on our civil liberties, the technology to further abridge these liberties continues to expand and lead the way to even greater abridgements. This process is subtle and we are not likely to notice that our freedom is gone until it is too late, or maybe not even then. In the end, we may consider ourselves a "free" people but have little understanding of what that even means.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Elliot%20D.%20Cohen

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

Darwin Was Right

2011-01-31T20:57:00.000+09:00

We are descended from monkeys. There is no other explanation.

by Fred Reed

Information Clearing House (January 13 2010)

Pondering Whither America, I reflected on a story, probably apocryphal but which I am going to believe because I like it, about catching monkeys. Tribesmen somewhere craft a heavy pot with a hole in it large enough that a monkey could insert an open hand, but not withdraw a closed fist. They then put monkey food in the pot. The monkey reaches in, grabs the food and, refusing to let go when the hunters approach, is caught and eaten.

Here we have our politics in a paragraph. The American national monkey can't let go. The party is over, boys and girls, but we aren't going to adapt.

For example: When people recently found that they could no longer afford the SUVs, the McMansions, the buying of absurdities in a frenzy of competitive consumerism, they just put it on the credit card. The monkey can't let go. And now they are screwed.

Same-same domestic policy. The US has played War-on-Drugs for half a century, with no results but to make drugs an integral part of the economy. The evils engendered are great. Yet the monkey can't let go.

It is [known] internationally that the monkey principle really bites. The country is well on its way to being a merely regional power militarily, economically, and diplomatically. Short of a miracle, short of a conceivable but unlikely catastrophe in China, Americans will soon be medium potatoes. There is nothing we can do about it, but we will bankrupt ourselves trying. We can't let go.

If you look beyond the Reader's Digest patriotism of Fox News, and the high-school cheerleading of little Sarah Palin, if you look beyond the national borders, all of this is obvious.

By Chinese standards, America is a small country, having a quarter of its population. Their economy grows at close to double digits. Yes, it may slow down, or it may not. Short of unforeseen disaster, the question is not whether but when the Chinese economy will dwarf the American economy. Tell me why this is not true.

All power springs from economic power. While America decays, plays, and sucks its thumb, China invests. Everywhere. There is nothing unprincipled in this. It is just intelligent commerce.

Do not underestimate these people of the epicanthic fold. I have lived among the Chinese, in Taiwan years ago. I liked them, and still do. I know them to be smart, disciplined, studious, practical - as well as nationalistic and very racially conscious. No, we do not think these attitudes proper. It doesn't matter what we think.

Note that China has that perfect government, an intelligent dictatorship concerned with advancing the country. The American government consists of self-interested lobbies and Wall Street looters. China is run by engineers, America by lawyers. Watch.

The US is midway through an inexorable suicide. If a country does not manufacture things, it does not have an economy, and manufacturing has fled American shores. Ship-building, steel, consumer electronics, railroads: gone. You may think your HP laptop is an American product, but in all likelihood every component was made overseas and it was assembled in Taiwan.

The country as a whole, as always, looks inwards and doesn't understand, doesn't know what stirs without. Communism no longer protects America from Chinese competition.

America is the world's greatest debtor nation, China the greatest creditor. We cannot possibly repay what we owe, so we must either default or inflate. If another choice exists, I am unaware of it. And yet the government spends, spends, spends, and borrows, borrows, borrows. No one is in charge. No one cares. All line their own pockets. Wait.

Rationally, this would seem a good time to let go of unaffordable luxuries. But no. The US continues to buy things it can't pay for, to play roles it can no longer maintain, because it pains the national vanity no longer to be the biggest kid on the block. The monkey can't let go.

The millstone around the American neck is the Pentagon. The direct cost alone of feeding the military contractors is almost mortal to a sinking economy: $720 billion this year, plus another $120 billion requested for the unending wars, plus huge black programs, the Veterans Administration, and so on. A trillion wilting green ones, call it. The more perceptive note the opportunity cost of wasting so much engineering talent, so much money for research and development, on martial zoom-wowees.

China, Russia, the Moslem world, Latin America and all the rest who detest the US must be enjoying the spectacle. Spend on, spend on, oh round-eyed fools ...

Vanity. We do not garrison South Korea because Pyong Yang may send its troops across our common border into Arkansas. We do it because we think it our birthright to rule the world. The monkey cannot let go.

Our practical choice is between retracting the military or going down hard. But we cannot retract. Once you have made your economy dependent on huge unproductive expendititures, there is no quitting. It might seem wise for example to reduce the military rolls by the 30,000 troops in South Korea. But they would simply increase the rate of unemployment, already dangeorusly high. Since most of the military contributes nothing to the defense of the United States, releasing all unneeded soldiers into joblessness would probably precipitate an armed rebellion.

There is worse. Towns spring up around large bases to supply the troops and their families. Close the bases, and the towns die. Closing Camp Lejeune would kill Jacksonville; Fort Bragg, Fayetteville; Fort Hood, Killeen. Further, huge companies - Lockheed-Martin, much of Boeing, and dozens of others - being unable to compete in the civilian economy, have become obligate military suppliers. Cut their big programs and you unemploy tens of thousands for whom there are no civilian jobs.

The federal bureaucracy is much the same, employing vast numbers yet producing nothing. Politicians drone about wanting "smaller government". How? Eliminate the Departments of Education, or Housing and Urban Development, or Commerce - and where do the people go?

We can pretend that the current recession is temporary, and not a manifestation of dying opulence, just as a fading beauty can pile on the make-up and hope that men don't notice. We can spend while others grow, buy their goods on credit - for a little while longer. The monkey cahttp://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
n't let go.

And any who say that we ought to put our house in order and come to terms with reality? They will be said to Hate America. Well and good, until the bill comes due.

Visit Fred's blog at http://www.fredoneverything.net/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27254.htm

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

The year of living dangerously

2011-01-31T08:42:00.002+09:00

Rising commodity prices and extreme weather events threaten global stability

by Michael Klare

Le Monde diplomatique (January 25 2011)

Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: the prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world.

It's not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could be the year of living dangerously - and so could 2012, 2013, and on into the future. Add to the soaring cost of the grains that keep so many impoverished people alive a comparable rise in oil prices - again nearing levels not seen since the peak months of 2008 - and you can already hear the first rumblings about the tenuous economic recovery being in danger of imminent collapse. Think of those rising energy prices as adding further fuel to global discontent.

Already, combined with staggering levels of youth unemployment and a deep mistrust of autocratic, repressive governments, food prices have sparked riots in Algeria and mass protests in Tunisia that, to the surprise of the world, ousted long-time dictator President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his corrupt extended family. And many of the social stresses evident in those two countries are present across the Middle East and elsewhere. No one can predict where the next explosion will occur, but with food prices still climbing and other economic pressures mounting, more upheavals appear inevitable. These may be the first resource revolts to catch our attention, but they won't be the last.

Put simply, global consumption patterns are now beginning to challenge the planet's natural resource limits. Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well. With them goes an urge for a more American-style life. Not surprisingly, the demand for basic commodities is significantly on the rise, even as supplies in many instances are shrinking. At the same time, climate change, itself a product of unbridled energy use, is adding to the pressure on supplies, and speculators are betting on a situation trending progressively worse. Add these together and the road ahead appears increasingly rocky.

Breadbaskets without bread

Let's begin with food, the most important and volatile of these commodities. Food prices declined in October 2008 after the onset of the global financial crisis, but that seems to have been an anomaly. The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. (In that index, based on a "bundle" of food staples, a baseline of 100 represents average prices in 2002-2004.) In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels.

As 2011 begins, food experts fear that, within months, prices for key staples will climb above the 2008 threshold and stay there, causing extreme hardship for poor people around the world. "We are at a very high level", said a worried Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO. "These levels in the previous episode led to problems and riots across the worl".

Of particular concern to Abbassian and his colleagues is the rising cost of corn, rice, and wheat, the staple crops of billions in many of the poorest countries. According to the FAO, by the end of 2010 international corn and wheat prices were already approaching their 2008 peak levels (about $260 and $340 per metric ton, respectively).

Analysts attribute the rise in grain prices to growing demand in both developed and developing nations, along with a number of cataclysmic weather-related events and speculation by investors. An extreme drought and fierce fires last summer destroyed a large percentage of the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine, while heavy flooding in India and the inundation of twenty percent of Pakistan damaged significant parts of the grain output of those countries. At the same time, unusually hot and dry weather suppressed production in a number of other key farming areas.

What makes the picture look so worrisome today are indications that the severity and frequency of extreme weather events appear to be on the rise. In the past few weeks alone, several such events point the way to serious supply problems ahead. Most significant has been the unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Australia that put an area more than twice the size of California largely underwater, significantly disrupting wheat cultivation there. Australia is one of the world's leading wheat producers. Unusually dry conditions in the American Midwest and Argentina have also hinted at future problems in grain and corn output. It's still too early to predict the size of this year's grain and corn harvests, but many analysts are warning of a shortfall in supplies, along with sky-high prices.

Mainstream analysts and government officials are loathe to attribute this traffic jam of extreme weather events to global warming. Huge variations in rainfall can be normal, especially in places like Australia that are susceptible to El Nino/La Nina ocean-temperature oscillations, and politicians are fearful of assuming responsibility for a problem as massive as climate change. But climate change theory has long suggested that the warming trend - 2010 tied 2005 for the warmest year on record and nine of the ten warmest years have come in the last decade - will be accompanied by an increase in the frequency and severity of storms. It's hard to escape the conclusion that recent events, including those Australian floods, are tied to rising global temperatures.

The energy crisis returns

Soaring food prices are being driven as well by speculative investments and the rising price of oil. Partly in response to the diminishing value of the dollar, some investors are sinking their money into food futures (along with gold and silver) as a speculative hedge. At the same time, the price of oil is edging toward the $100 mark, making it increasingly profitable for farmers to switch from growing corn for human consumption to growing it for the manufacture of ethanol, which in turn reduces the amount of farm acreage devoted to staples. Oil would have to fall below $50 per barrel to make the cultivation of corn as a food product competitive with ethanol production - and that's not likely to happen. So even if more corn is produced this year, less will be available for food purposes and the price of what remains is bound to rise.

The precipitous rise in oil prices has startled the experts. Not so long ago, the US Department of Energy (DoE) was projecting a price range of $70 to $80 per barrel in 2011, but as the year began oil was already trading above $90 a barrel and some analysts predict that it will reach $100 before the year is out. A few are even talking about the $150 barrel and gas prices at the pump of $4 or more. If prices climb above $100, global consumer spending could take another nosedive.

"Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy", says Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA). "The oil import bills are becoming a threat to the economic recovery".

As with food, the rising cost of oil is a product of growing demand, insufficient supplies, and speculative investments. According to the most recent projections from the IEA, daily global oil consumption in 2011 will average 87.4 million barrels, an increase of about two million barrels from the first quarter of 2010. Much of the extra demand is coming from China, where a newly-minted middle class is buying automobiles at a record clip, as well as from the United States, where previously cautious consumers are slowly returning to pre-2008 driving habits.

At a time when the oil industry is experiencing declining rates of output at many existing oil fields and finding it ever more difficult to add production, even two million extra barrels per day can be a daunting challenge (and greater demand is expected in the coming years). In the United States, for example, much hope was placed in oil exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Alaska, but in the wake of the BP disaster, this seems like a forlorn prospect. Production in Mexico and the North Sea, two bright spots of recent years, is facing a sharp decline, while other key producers, including those in the Middle East, are struggling to maintain current output levels at existing fields.

Many energy analysts believe that the world is at (or will soon reach) peak oil - the moment when global petroleum output achieves a maximum sustainable daily rate and begins a long-term, irreversible decline. Others contend that higher levels of output are still possible. Whatever the truth of the matter, at this moment the oil industry is finding it increasingly difficult, and ever more costly, to boost output above current levels. This, combined with insatiable demand, is driving prices skyward.

Under these circumstances, speculators are again being drawn into the oil market as a rare sure bet. Such speculators helped push oil prices to a record $147 per barrel back in 2008, but fled the market when prices crashed as the American economy headed to a meltdown. Now, they're coming back. "Hedge funds and private investors are buying up financial instruments tied to the price of crude, and thereby helping push up oil prices", the Wall Street Journal reported in late December.

Most analysts are expecting a price surge this spring or summer when American motorists hit the road. "We will have a spring rally that will take us to between $3.10 and $3.50 a gallon for gasoline at service stations in the United States", predicted Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service.

The rising price of gas will, in turn, hurt consumers just as they show signs of opening their wallets again. No less worrisome, oil-importing countries like the United States, Japan, and many in Europe will face soaring bills for fuel imports, further enfeebling economies already suffering from profound weakness.

According to some calculations, oil prices added another $72 billion to America's mammoth balance-of-payments deficit last year. Europe had to cough up an additional $70 billion for imported oil and Japan $27 billion. "It is a very telling story", says the IEA's Fatih Birol of recent oil-price data. "2010 rang the first alarm bells and 2011 price levels could bring us to the same financial crisis times that we saw in 2008".

Rising food prices leading to riots, protests, and revolts, mounting oil prices, mammoth worldwide unemployment, and a collapsed recovery - it looks like the perfect set of preconditions for a global tsunami of instability and turmoil. Events in Algeria and Tunisia give us just an inkling of what this maelstrom might look like, but where and how it will next erupt, and in what form, is anyone's guess. A single guarantee: we haven't seen the last of resource revolts which, in the coming years, could reach an intensity we scarcely imagine today.

_____

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (2008).

More by Michael Klare at http://mondediplo.com/_Michael-T-Klare_

(c) Le Monde diplomatique - all right reserved

http://mondediplo.com/openpage/the-year-of-living-dangerously

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