War By Other Means

John Pilger and David Munro examine the policy of First World banks agreeing loans with Third World countries, who are then unable to meet the crippling interest charges.

US Invaded Iraq Because It Wouldn't Have Survived Otherwise

While the US invasion of Iraq about a decade ago was based on public-facing lies about nonexistent weapons arsenals, the underlying reasons for the invasion were much more dire. Iraq had found the US’ Achilles Heel, and would bankrupt the US if not stopped.

When the United States President “Not-a-Crook” Nixon unilaterally declared that the United States would not pay back its loans on August 15, 1971, it sent shockwaves through the financial world. Normally, this would have been a declaration of bankruptcy. Instead, the world seemed to accept Nixon’s statement that the rest of the world could trade their unfulfilled financial claims on the US between them as they pleased, and maybe hope to recover some of it.

This set off the greatest experiment in global economics ever conducted. Some claim that our economy is based on centuries-old principles dating back to the 1600s; that’s factually wrong. The principles under which the global economy operates are merely 40 years old – half of a human lifetime – and there are increasing signs of ponzification, which, if bursting, would be a bubble-burst the likes of which has never been seen.

Before this so-called Nixon Shock, the US Dollar was based on gold. Every U.S. Dollar was an IOU issued by the United States, redeemable for one-thirty-fifth of an ounce of gold at any time.

Regrettably, the war devastated the US Economy. The Vietnam war, that is. As a result, the US did the predictable and stupid thing and just started printing more money to finance the war. Before the war, coverage for the gold-for-dollar debt had been reasonable, but some countries – France, in particular – saw where things were heading. Charles de Gaulle insisted on having the French USD reserves redeemed for gold, as had been promised. This exchange also took place, causing the back-end gold coverage for the dollar to drop from about 50% to about 20%, past the economic breaking point.

Seeing that the US couldn’t possibly pay back its issued IOUs as promised, Nixon decided to… not do that, and just cancelled their validity unilaterally, as has already been stated. This had a number of effects: first, it caused currencies to start floating against each other, rather than all being tied to the dollar which was in turn tied to gold. Second, it allowed the US to start printing dollars like there was no tomorrow, and encouraging other countries to buy as much as they could, to just stockpile US Dollars.

This also happened, and is known as currency reserves. The USD, being the world’s dominant currency, holds two immense advantages of being held in currency reserves: first, each dollar bought and stockpiled in a non-US country is one dollar that gave the US citizens (or government) that purchasing power against other nations for free. (If I print money for fun that you buy with your money, I can use your money to buy your shiny things.) The second is the status of being the world’s international trade currency, meaning that if I want to buy something from you in China, I need to first buy US Dollars with my money, and then exchange those US Dollars for your goods that I want.

These two mechanisms create an external demand for the US Dollar that props up the United States’ grotesque overconsumption and feeds its ridiculously oversized military. (How grotesque is the overconsumption, you ask? The US federal deficit is 50%. For every two dollars the US Government spends, one of them needs to be borrowed from somewhere.) This deficit is absorbed by countries that stockpile an increasing number of US Dollars in their currency reserves, predominantly in east Asia. This group of countries has been derogatorily called ODIC, Organization of Dollar-Importing Countries.

We observe here, that if another currency should begin to threaten the dominance of the USD in key international trade, the currency reserves would be rebalanced to reflect that fact. It would not merely cause less US overconsumption to be absorbed – rebalancing currency reserves would mean that countries started selling USD instead of just not buying, replacing a portion of their USD holdings with something else. Seeing how precarious the US financial situation is, this could well set off a selloff avalanche that would re-balance the USD down to a fraction of today’s value. In economic terms, this is called a “correction”. (I’ve written a previous piece on this that’s easy to read.) Such an avalanche would be the definite end of the United States as a superpower and largely mirror the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was similarly overextended. It would also bring a lot of suffering to the already-overexploited middle and lower economic classes in the US.

So, back to Iraq and the United States invasion. What could Iraq possibly have done from the other side of the planet that warranted a global campaign of lies to build political support for a military invasion that still kills people, one decade later? Why was it rational for the US Administration to spend one trillion or so dollars – more accurately described as “a shitload of money” – on going to war with a small country on the other side of the planet, one that had nothing at all to do with the September 11 attacks? On observing the facts on the table, it was perfectly rational to do so, all the deaths and suffering notwithstanding. It was likely a matter of life and death for the US as a nation:

Iraq had suddenly started selling its oil for Euros instead of for US Dollars.

The United States invaded three years later, which was about the necessary time to build public global opinion (based on false pretexts, also technically known as “lies”, about weapons stockpiles) for a full-scale ground invasion. It also had considerable help from the lack of nuance following the September 11 attacks in 2001 in pushing aggression against a country that was unrelated to those attacks.

Predictably, after the invasion was over, one of the very first actions taken by the interim US-led administration was to revert to selling oil in US Dollars instead, closing the circle and ending the imminent threat to the United States’ existence as a superpower.

Obviously, it could be asked why I’m bringing this up now. I’ll be following up with articles related to this topic – but it has to do with bitcoin, the yuan, Iran and its similar position, and the overall global financial crisis bubble. Hint: Iran is already selling oil in yuan and is moving ahead with a Euro-based stock exchange in Tehran.

Via: "Falkvinge"

"Congress Is The Biggest Threat To America's Economy"

“Something has gone terribly wrong,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, “when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress.”

... a fundamental ideological chasm between the majority of lawmakers and an empowered group of Congressional Republicans — fueled by some Tea Party victories in both chambers in 2010 — has made it more difficult than ever to reach fiscal and budgetary compromises.

Each fight has left Democrats and Republicans both more distrustful and wary of working together, each in search of a voter mandate to push its vision to the fore. In some ways, that dynamic has come full circle.

In 2011, right after their big midterm victory, Republicans were able to push Democrats out of their comfort zone on spending, using short-term measures to keep the government open and the debt ceiling as weapons against the Obama administration. After the 2012 election, Democrats are using that same strategy to tear Republicans from their orthodoxy on taxes, and the Republicans’ pain is evident.

As a result, members of both parties have become increasingly addicted to short-term solutions to long-term problems, cobbling together two- and three-month bills and short-term extensions to fight over again and again until the string has run out on many major pressing issues.

Also, a change in the way this Congress does business — the elimination of home-state earmarks that once greased so many Congressional deals — and the escalating use of the Senate filibuster to prevent debate on even routine legislation have further hamstrung lawmakers in their efforts to get anything done.

“This is one of the lowest points of the U.S. Senate,” Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, remarked as she ticked off what she said were other nadirs in a long Senate career. “This is what we’re doing to ourselves.”

Via: "The New York Times"

Model For Colonizing Nations (National Destruction)

From The Banksters Handbook

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” –Nineteenth century Nēhilawē (Cree) proverb

This video by ex-IMF John Perkins aka Economic Hitman explains what happens when national leaders refuse to bow to the Banksters:

Model for Colonizing Nations (National Destruction) used repeatedly by Banksters around the World: Argentina, Iraq, Lybia, Serbia, Greece, South-America, etc. etc. Today, all nations have been placed on notice.  Today it’s Ghaddafi (he was a brute but now the Lybians have gone through hell and will go through worse just like the Iraqis), tomorrow it can be anybody anywhere, or everybody everywhere… 

Their Model for National Destruction uses Orwellian Newspeak and works something like this:

1.  The Global Power Mafia start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change” and brand it a “Rogue State”

2.  Then, they arm, train, finance local and foreign mercenaries/ terrorists through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Drug Cartels and call them “Freedom Fighters”

3.  Then, they stage mock UN Security Council Resolutions that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians and they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”.

4.  Then, they spread flagrant lies through their media monopolies and paid journalists, and call it “International Community’s concern expressed by the Western Media”.

5.  Then, they invade and control the target country and call it ”Liberation” (poor Libya is in this stage right now)

6.  Then, when the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “The kind of democracy we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton said of Egypt on 22-March-2011)

7.      Finally, they steal appetizing oil reserves and all resources and call it “Foreign Investment and Reconstruction”

8.      Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, used to destroy whole countries in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights” and “free trade”.  They use utmost force and violence to achieve their ends.  “What did you say…?  That you don’t want to be liberated and democratized?”  “Then take this Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Berlin, Dresden, Bagdad, and Basra…”   “Take that Vietnam, Tokyo, Gaza, Kabul, Pakistan, Tripoli, Belgrade, Egypt, El Salvador and Grenada…”  “And that, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Africa…”   Always bombing people to smithereens…  Of course, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights” and “free trade”.

Fictitious Capital

Max Keiser interviews Michael Hudson from Michael-Hudson.com. He talks about the fictitious capital; what it is? And who is pushing it? 

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

Twilight Of The Elites: America After Meritocracy

How Wall Street and other major institutions, from Congress to the Catholic Church to Major League Baseball, have been crippled by corruption and incompetence.

Call It Democracy

Padded with power here they come

International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity

By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

North, south, east, west
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

By Bruce Cockburn

How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy

Post by "Sayf Maslul"


By "Bill Moyers"

Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government. Also, Peter Edelman on fighting U.S.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice?

On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy.  Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

Meanwhile, for anyone who wants to understand why, in one of the richest nations in the world, so many poor people are teetering on the edge, author and advocate Peter Edelman talks about continuing efforts to fight poverty, and what it will take to keep the needs of poor people on the American political agenda. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and faculty director of Georgetown University’s Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy, Edelman’s new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.

The Future Of The USA (3)

The Breakdown Of The US Socio-Political Fabric

Excerpt GEAB N°60
(December 16, 2011) -
Courtesy Of "Leap 2020 EU"

The breakdown of the United States’ socio-economic and socio-political tissue is a phenomenon that started some forty years ago. In previous GEAB issues, we emphasized the importance of the breakdown of the 1970s turning point in the US dynamic: end of the fixed link between the Dollar and gold, defeat in the Vietnam War, "impeachment" of President Nixon, the last period of great inventions / US scientific adventures (the conquest of space, Internet...), etc...

Comparison of the development of US investments in equipment and software and employment growth (1960-2011) - Source: ZeroHedge, 11/2011

One particular aspect seems strategically important and crucial to the coming period: the collapse of the education system (1). In simple terms, LEAP/E2020 estimates that the change in the 1970s to an education system based on student assessment via multiple choice questions, from primary school to university, has generated a far-reaching and lasting weakening of the education of US generations under the age of 40 today. At the same time, it has accentuated the establishment of a two-speed education system, alienating the country's social elite from the middle class even further, because of the rising costs of access to quality education. Finally, the all-out marketing (2), combined with online or home education, has dealt a fatal blow to any consistency or general requirement for quality in the US education system (3).

In general, without being responsible for the situation, those less than forty years old in the United States are much less well educated and less socially integrated (4) than their elders. This has consequences, of course, on their "employability", their ability to act in a world where globalization is everywhere and requires varied knowledge (such as languages, history and geography, for example), their ability to relay, in practice, talk of the country’s re-industrialization, or the need to address the country’s scientific (5) and technological challenges (6), even the country’s military capabilities (7).

It also generates a decline in the quality of democratic life and political discourse because the citizen is less able to distinguish between lies and truth, between information and spin, between competence and demagoguery (8).The Republican primaries for the 2012 presidential election is a case study on the subject as Marc Pitzke outlined in the Spiegel of 01/12/2011 with the headline about the competing candidates: “a club of liars, demagogues and ignorants”. It is unlikely that such a "club" would have constituted the candidates for the primary of one of the two parties thirty or forty years ago. The breakdown of the country’s democratic and political fabric is well under way, particularly because of this generational "dumbing-down of education" started in the 1970s.

This development, coupled with the very unequal impact of the current depression which, like any crisis, affects the weakest the most rapidly, increases the fragmentation of the United States’ population’s identity. The illusion that the election of a black president in the United States would help the integration of African-Americans was quickly dissipated. And instead, the crisis shows that Blacks and Latinos are most affected (9). If African-Americans seem to be starting a return to their "historical territories" in the South of the country (10), Latinos in turn continue to take control of the entire South-West of the United States. In this area, there is now a real war, brought by drug traffickers. On both sides of the US-Mexico border, killing, corruption, trafficking is growing, strengthening each other’s identity reflexes, and pushing for the adoption of increasingly severe laws against illegal immigrants.

The decrease in the number of available jobs thus generates a real war for "jobs" between different communities. If the socio-political fabric is breaking up, it’s also due to the collapse in the quality of the country's infrastructure (11): bridges, roads, railways, airports, dikes, dams, nuclear power plants, pipelines... need more than USD 2 trillion just to be repaired (without any new investment) (12). But everyone knows that such funding is impossible to get from a locked-down Congress and from a high deficit budget. This isn’t new either, but as with anything, the passage of time doesn’t help, quite the contrary.

Sale of new one family homes in the US (1960-2011) (in thousands) - Sources: FRED / US Dept of Commerce, 11/2011

Since 2006 LEAP/E2020 has highlighted this dire infrastructure situation and its very serious medium-term consequences for the country’s economy and social fabric. Six years have passed and in 2016 it will be ten years: long enough for bridges in poor condition to collapse or leaking pipelines to eventually explode. People tend to get used to the poor state of things thinking, little by little, that it's their normal state... until the day they break completely. As regards infrastructure, we believe that the period 2012-2016 will see such a development.

Inter-community tensions, breakdown of social cohesion, political demagoguery, massive "dumbing-down of education", lack of jobs, rapid rise in poverty (13),... it all leads to a very predictable development that marked the 2011 "Black Friday; sales: the pictures not only showed the whole world an aberrant level of violence on what’s supposed to be a day of sales (dead, gun shots, fist fights, riots...) (14) , but Black Friday 2011 is especially remarkable for a product that has experienced the largest increase in sales compared to 2010 (+32% (15)): firearms.

What could such a phenomenon be the sign of in a country that already has more than 200 million firearms in circulation? LEAP/E2020 believes that this is one more sign that the American public is preparing for the worst, and preparing for it more and more (16). In terms of collective psychology, there are self-sustaining phenomena. The fear of a development in the crisis towards violence is also fuelled by budget cuts in the police and the feeling that the increase in the number of poor will constitute a growing threat to the wealthy (17).

We have already discussed the social impact that will generate the new series of bank failures in 2012. Thus, from 2013, we believe that uncontrolled violence will break out because of all the constraints set out in this anticipation. Incidentally, that will be one of the arguments used to search for a "savior" able to restore law and order: a general-sheriff.

Finally, we won’t examine the geopolitical situation of the United States for this period here. We have already, in GEAB N°59, anticipated the US military withdrawal from continental Europe for 2017, adding more analyses on the progression of US military presence in the world. Remember that we do not anticipate a major conflict initiated by the United States for the period in question. In fact, the country no longer has the political, fiscal, diplomatic, and soon military means, to embark on such an adventure. As we do not expect direct aggression against the United States from another country, this option seems irrelevant to us for anticipating the events of the 2012-2016 period.

This will not prevent "clashes", sometimes violent, taking place between the United States and countries like Iran (18), China, Russia... but they will likely be infra-conflicting in nature (software and hardware attacks, spying, sabotage...). The current attempt by the Obama administration to trigger a mini Cold War with China (19) will fail for two reasons:

. it is only meant for an electoral aim of giving credibility to Obama’s stature as a statesman a year from the elections (20)
. it’s the fact of a penniless country who “threatens his banker” (a banker who is better armed), which can’t go very far.

Comparison between Venezuelan oil exports to the US and China (MBD) - Source: Wall Street Journal, 11/2011

Last but not least, we consider that 2013/2015 will be a period that is likely to see the constitutional order of the United States upset by events. Internal tensions in the country, outside pressures and the degree of distrust even hatred of the different communities between each other (ethnic, social, religious...) will make the unfolding of the process created more than two hundred years by the country’s Founding Fathers all the more difficult. Like the United Kingdom and France, the United States’ political structure and institutional system are amongst the oldest in operation. Far from being a term guarantee it is, in a time of great historical transition, rather a major handicap, as the bearer of obsolescence (21).

Moreover, for about two years, the debate on the country's Constitution in the United States has opened. It was previously a taboo subject: the Constitution, the sacred text, was not questionable unless being an "anti-American". Today, whether to return to the spirit of the founders or the letter of the text, both considered lost (an argument particularly of the TP), or conversely to adapt it to the twenty first century (a more leftist argument, an OWS trend), the debate exists. And in private conversations, this topic, unthinkable only three or four years ago, is authorized.

In the medium and long term, it’s a good thing to allow the country to evolve and adapt (22), but in the short term, it reflects the growing confusion of public opinion and the always increasingly dangerous fragility of the ruling elite. This combination is traditionally conducive to a calling into question of the institutional order, once there are severe shocks to the collective psyche. And, as we anticipate, it’s not shocks we’re going to be short of in the next five years; in an ungovernable and insolvent country.

--------
Notes: 

(1) Source: NPR, 16/03/2010

(2) Degree quality is not reliably controlled. Source: New York Times, 22/11/2011

(3) As for the "elite universities" and the perennial argument that they are the best in the world, we refer to our 2007 anticipation published in GEAB N°18: "The value of international academic degrees: What choices to make today to have an international degree which is still valid in ten to twenty years?;. Four years later, this analysis seems to have gained even more credibility. And it ties in with other studies like that published on 26/10/2011 by the excellent website criseusa under the heading: "The crisis and higher education in the United States: Misconceptions about the parsimony of intelligence in the United States".

(4) This aspect covers two things: those of less advantaged backgrounds, which now includes most of the middle class, have met with increasing difficulties in finding places for their children at the best universities. This phenomenon is, of course, strongly reinforced by the crisis which has seen registration fee increase and income fall. This reduces the social diversity of the country's future elite. And conversely, the country is deprived of multiple skills by breaking this social ladder that is education. The United States is not the only Western country to be met with such developments. But, along with the United Kingdom, it’s the only one to be as hard hit by this trend and for as long.

(5) Another illustration of it is the rise in strength of creationism.

(6) The fall in scientific and technical education in favour of finance, law or management is thus going in the opposite direction to official speeches.

(7) We have seen in Iraq what a company (and its officers) without knowledge of a country’s culture or the complexity of a foreign society could do. The result is that the Americans leave Iraq being perceived primarily as occupiers and not liberators, thus forcing the complete departure of US troops. And the mismanagement of the Iraqi adventure leaves lasting negative marks throughout the Middle East, a region of strategic importance to Washington. Source:Washington Post, 12/12/2011

(8) As Andy Xie wrote in an excellent article in Caixin of 09/12/2011, for decades the US system has strengthened undue privilege at the expense of the general good.

(9) Source: New York Times, 28/11/2011

(10) Source: New York Times, 24/03/2011

(11) Education is also an infrastructure in fact.

(12) Source: Greenbiz, 19/05/2011

(13) Source: New York Times, 18/11/2011

(14) Source: MSNBC, 25/11/2011

(15) And it’s still possible that this figure will reach +50% because many sales were not taken into account pending validation of their status by the competent authority. Source: USAToday, 01/12/2011

(16) Firearms sales are on the increase since the beginning of the crisis.

(17) It also fuels, with the scarcity of jobs, a growing exodus of Americans overseas. Sources: CNBC, 06/12/2011; RT, 08/12./2011

(18) In 2016, the United States have been driven to review their unconditional alliance with Israel. First, because the TP and OWS agree on this point, wishing to drastically reduce the military budget and refusing overseas interventionism and, secondly, because the end of the Dollar monopoly over the price of raw materials, of which oil will make the cost of this unconditional alliance too high for Washington.

(19) Sources: William Pfaff, 22/11/2011; People's Daily, 01/12/2011

(20) The name of the future President of the United States is of little importance because he will be a lame President and, de facto, a simple transition against a backdrop of chaos. The competing personalities illustrate the situation: Obama in which everyone, including his supporters, has seen the lack of stature and political will, Mitt Romney of whom even the Republicans (especially the TP) don’t know quite know what think and Newt Gingrich is a complete demagogue without any conviction. The three are, in any case, the reflection of the powers in place in Wall Street and Washington, chosen because they are controllable... therefore irrelevant in a time of serious crisis. Sources: Reason, 12/09/2011

(21) We see how the UK is in the process of falling apart, in hitting the emerging continental sovereign which is Euroland with full force: a coalition on the verge of breaking-up and especially stepped up threats of separatism by the Scottish and Welsh leaders (sources Scottish TV, 12/12/2011, Wales Online, 07/12/2011). And, as regards France, our team fully shares the anticipations of Franck Biancheri in the French version of his book "The World Crisis: The Path to the World afterwards; (the relevant thirty or so pages do not appear in the versions published in other languages). He anticipates a major crisis in the French institutional system by 2020 at the latest if the state is not able to "break its Parisian centralism" and to be "polycentric" using the country’s regional cities. A growing majority of French people no longer recognize in the Parisian elite in increasingly weak actual power (due to European integration) the legitimacy to decide what France is and what the French want, all at an increasingly unbearable cost. Here also, the model inherited from the Revolution and Empire (late eighteenth century like the United States Constitution) is coming to an end under the attacks of a world that the crisis is changing at high speed.

(22) Our team, mainly European, has taken the liberty of suggesting the courses of constitutional development in the Recommendations section, particularly because, in recent months, a large number of American subscribers have asked us to do so.

Surviving America's Decline

'Ecotopia' Author Ernest Callenbach's Final Writings Were Found On His Computer After He Died. Here Is What He Left Us.

By Ernest Callenbach
May 7, 2012
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. 

[This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.]

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support -- a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together -- whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices -- of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend. 

Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things -- impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

___________________

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived.  Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved -- tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them -- the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

Ecotopia is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? As Ecotopia Emerging puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The "ecology in one country" argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether "socialism in one country" was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the "tongue" of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of "succession," as the biological concept has it, where "disturbances" kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state -- not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically -- since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopia among other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly.  He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer.

Copyright Ernest Callenbach 2012

The Corporate Right Hijacked America's Courts To Enrich The Top 1%

America's Political-Economy Is Caught In A Vicious Cycle, With Concentrated Wealth At The Top Leading To Outsized Political Power.

By Joshua Holland
May 10, 2012
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

For a generation, America's political-economy has been gripped in a vicious cycle. Those at the top of the economic pile have taken an ever-growing share of the nation's income, and then leveraged that haul into ever-greater political power, which they have in turn used to rewrite the rules of “the market” in their favor. Wash, rinse and repeat.

It's the result of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance a reactionary legal regime in America's courts. In the process, the richest Americans now have their hands in both our legislative and judicial branches, while working America has become a voiceless stepping stone.

“The more pernicious effect of economic inequality comes indirectly through its impact on political inequality,” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, co-author ofWhy Nations Fail. In an interview with Think Progress, Acemoglu explained what he called, “a general pattern throughout history”:

When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor.

This dynamic is best understood in the realm of electoral politics. In a study of something that most people already consider to be obvious, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton, examined lawmakers' responsiveness to the interests of various constituents by income, and concluded:

In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes (PDF).

Or consider ALEC, an organization funded by major corporations that writes laws that, among other things, curtail workers' rights to organize and disenfranchises the poor, elderly and people of color. It then lobbies state lawmakers to pass its “model legislation,” and sweetens the deal with junkets – all-expenses-paid vacations at posh hotels for legislators and their families – where they can rub shoulders with the titans of industry.

Look at the fruit that union-busting bears for the wealthiest Americans:

Another way the wealthiest Americans have rigged the rules so more of the national income flows upward may be just as consequential, but less well understood. A 30-year campaign to push America's courts sharply to the right has borne abundant fruit for those in the top 1 percent.

We see it reflected in today's Supreme Court, which, having unleashed a flood of super-PAC cash into our political campaigns in a decision that was one of the most brazen examples of judicial activism in the court's history, now stands poised to overturn not only the Democrats' healthcare bill, but much of the jurisprudence that supported the welfare state developed since the New Deal.

A study by the Constitutional Accountability Center found that the Chamber of Commerce had won 65 percent of its cases heard by the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, compared to 56 percent under former Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986-2005) and just 43 percent of the cases that came during the Burger court (1969-1986).

But that's only the beginning. “The Roberts Court,” wrote Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, is “slowly but surely... giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct. In case after case, it seems big companies are being given the playbook on how to win even bigger the next time.”

Many of the court's rulings have overturned long-standing precedents. While conservatives constantly rail against judges "legislating from the bench," it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That's what several studies have concluded. Media Matters offereda run-down of a couple of prominent ones:

A 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled "conservative" were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism -- the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled "liberal" were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.

A 2007 study published by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein... used a different measurement of judicial activism: the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court's "conservative" justices were the most likely to engage in "judicial activism" while the "liberal" justices were most likely to exercise "judicial restraint."

In a recent opinion, two federal appeals court judges suggested that all efforts to protect workers, consumers or the environment were unconstitutional, including regulatory efforts by the states. It's a radical view, but one that has gotten increasing traction in conservative legal circles. It is also the culmination of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance what's come to be known as the “law and economics” movement, which analyzes legal rulings “costs” – essentially applying neoliberal economic logic to the field. Its advocates eschew the notion that human rights or economic fairness are inherently valuable factors for the law to consider.

The model has gained increasing influence in American courts, and that's no accident. In his book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, Johns Hopkins scholar Steven Teles writes that conservatives, reacting to what they viewed as liberal hegemony in the legal community of the 1960s, fought hard to shift the legal terrain rightward.

Spurred by their overlapping grievances, informed by an increasingly sophisticated of how to produce legal change, and coordinated by strategically shrewd group of patrons, conservatives began investing in a broad range activities designed to reverse their … organizational weaknesses. While similar kinds of organizational development were happening in other domains … in no other area was the process of strategic investment as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as in the law.

In 1998, the Washington Post reported that “Federal judges are attending expenses-paid, five-day seminars on property rights and the environment at resorts in Montana, sessions underwritten by conservative foundations that are also funding a wave of litigation on those issues in the federal courts.”

Funding for the seminars, run by a group called the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), also comes from foundations run by companies with a significant interest in property rights and environmental law issues.

One of the group's funders was the John M. Olin Foundation, which invested millions of dollars in the law and economic movement – endowing university chairs, funding think-tanks and providing early support for the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The foundation said in a 2003 report to its trustees, “All in all, the Federalist Society has been one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”

In 2005, the Olin Foundation actually declared “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times added that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.”

If the economics and law movement were to become the standard in our legal culture, it would represent a massive upward redistribution of wealth. Not only would “transfer payments” – unemployment benefits, assistance for needy families and the like – be deemed unconstitutional, but so would minimum wages, job training programs, subsidized student loans and most of our already threadbare social safety net. And that environment will have been purchased for a princely sum by those who have profited so handsomely from America's spiraling income inequality.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.