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 Key To Economic Recovery

Kucinich Explains Monetary Reform


Posted by "CavalierZee"



The N.E.E.D. Act would put the Federal Reserve under the Treasury as part of a larger to plan to allow Congress to invest in our economy without creating debt or inflation. It does this in three simple steps outlined here.

A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?

On The History Of The US Economy In Decline

By Noam Chomsky
May 08, 2012
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

 The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world -- you could see it in the business press at the time -- because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On The Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today -- the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression -- and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy -- a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise -- producing things people need or could use -- to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian.  The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles -- what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries -- but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy -- it probably harms it and society -- but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact.  Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and The Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh -- and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less -- the .1% -- it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs -- the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” -- hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) -- was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat -- in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place.  In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. 

I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce -- which owned it anyway -- turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat.  It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted -- and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures.  It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT.

© 2012 Noam Chomsky

The Future Of The USA (4)

Five Strategic Proposals To Modernize The US Institutional System

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

LEAP/E2020 is a think-tank that certainly has a good knowledge of the United States, with contributors and subscribers there... and nearly two million American readers of its GEAB public announcements, but it is a European think-tank, not American. So we hesitated long and hard before responding positively to the request of many of our US subscribers that we should make some recommendations to help the country out of the impasse in which it finds itself. We are often highly critical of the absurd and unjustified advice that US leaders and experts offer to Europeans. It is therefore important for us not to do what we criticize in others. So we decided, first, to be brief, secondly, to limit ourselves to the institutional system and, finally, we bring to mind that each political entity has its own internal logic, its specific constraints, a base of values and ideals which belong to its citizens ... and it is often unrealistic for outsiders to pretend to understand them and integrate them into advice. These limits having been set, here are some ideas that may be useful in the debate that is beginning in the United States on the institutional future of the country. 

1st proposal: Make the debates and discussions on the Constitution universal 

It is neither a sacred, nor a perfect text. It embodies the political ideas of the United States founders and is necessarily marked with the seal of its time: the late eighteenth century. These same "founding fathers" would certainly be the first today to advise Americans of the twenty-first century to reconsider the whole of the institutional structure they have been devised. Two hundred years is very old for a constitution and the world of 2011 has almost no relation to that of 1787. Those who sanctify the political texts in the name of tradition or respect for the "founders" are usually the biggest current beneficiaries of the system and quite simply don’t want to lose the privileges it hands out to them. 

2nd proposal: Reconsider institutions’ geographic location 

The geographical location of places of power and the nature of this power are always linked intimately. Contradictory to the country’s federal concept, the United States actually has a hyper-centralized structure of political power: everything happens in Washington. Here we find a trait shared by two other old Western institutional systems: the British system where everything happens in London; and the French system where everything happens in Paris. This used to reflect the state of the transport infrastructure and communications of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (horses, stagecoach, steam train, mail) and is, therefore, very poorly adapted to twenty-first century societies characterized by the Internet, planes, high speed trains and satellites. 

On the other hand, hyper-centralization facilitates the capture of political power by the elite who self-renew, closed to the rest of the country, and developing incestuous relationships with the most powerful private interests because it encourages the emergence of an atmosphere of a “power bubble” cut off from the rest of the country. It is very surprising that a country as vast as the United States continues, in the twenty-first century, to see all its institutions concentrated in a city in the East of the country, thousands of kilometres from 75% of the population (West Coast , South Coast, the South of the East Coast...). The polycentrism of the federal state, that’s to say, the distribution of major government institutions in a number of the country’s major cities, would overcome this handicap and thus bring the country’s political and administrative elite closer to all of the population. Two arguments are generally used to oppose institutional polycentrism: "too high a cost" and a marked "inefficiency". They can be very easily scanned from the back of the hand: on the one hand, all large companies now operate in a network based on this polycentric model... and they are not known to look to increase operating costs; on the other hand, efficiency is a relative concept in political terms based on the relevance and success of decisions taken. Current hypercentralized systems, such as Washington, are characterized almost unanimously as now being truly incapable of taking informed decisions and successfully driving the chosen policies: there again, functioning in a network characteristic of polycentric systems, demonstrates its effectiveness in our societies on a daily basis as opposed to the pyramid functioning of centralized systems. 

3rd proposal: Reduce the situations for potential decisional deadlock 

It’s useful to eliminate from the system the maximum of procedures that enable small minorities to block general progress. In the case of the United States, this means reducing the discrepancy between demographic representation and States’ representation: it would be useful to increase the number of members in the House of Representatives to strengthen the people’s representation and, on the other hand, reduce the ability to lock down the Senate by States with a small population. This latter option can be done either by adding a demographic variable to the number of senators per State, or greatly reducing the qualifying majorities required for decisions, so as to limit the potential for blockage by a small minority. 

4th proposal: Sharply reduce the influence of money in Federal elections 

Payment of candidates’ campaign expenses by the Federal state and the introduction of selection via the requirement of a minimum number of citizens’ or elected officials’ signatures to become a candidate would prevent most of the current distortion practiced for the benefit of large corporations and the super-rich.

5th proposal: Integrate education into Federal jurisdiction 

As analysed in this issue, LEAP/E2020 considers that the collapse of US educational system is at the heart of the current crisis in the country. And we think that it’s impossible for the United States to exit this crisis other than with long term weakness if the education system is not put back on its feet. Under the pretext of avoiding a "Federal grip", the current institutional situation leaves, de facto, education as no-one’s political responsibility, or rather it is left in the hands of those who make financial gains from education. This is the worst of situations as it consists of leaving the country's future in anyone’s hands. The country must slice through this: either there is in fact a Federal jurisdiction and the president and Congress become directly responsible for the success or failure of the US educational system, or he entrusts it to the States and clears the Federal level of any responsibility making each state accountable for the quality of education to its own citizens. 

We hope that these ideas may be useful to some of our American subscribers.

The Future Of The USA (2)

The Unstoppable US Economic Spiral: Recession/Depression/Inflation

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

In fact, the United States ends 2011 in a state of weakness unmatched since the Civil War. They practice no significant leadership at international level. The confrontation between geopolitical blocs is sharpening and they find themselves confronted by almost all the world’s major players: China, Russia, Brazil (and in general almost all of South America) and now Euroland (1). Meanwhile, they cannot control unemployment where the true rate stagnates at around 20% against the backdrop of an unabated and unprecedented reduction in the labour force (which has now fallen to its 2001 level (2)). 

Real estate, the foundation of US household wealth along with the stock market, continues to see prices drop year after year despite desperate attempts by the Fed (3) to facilitate lending to the economy through its zero interest rate policy. The stock market has resumed its downward path artificially interrupted by two Quantitative Easings in 2009 and 2010. US banks, whose balance sheets are much more heavily loaded with financial derivative products than their European counterparts (4), are dangerously approaching a new series of bankruptcies of which MF Global is a but a precursor, indicating the absence of procedural controls or alarms three years after the collapse of Wall Street in 2008 (5). 

Poverty is gradually increasing in the country every day, where one in six Americans now depend on food stamps (6) and one in five children has experienced periods of living on the streets (7). Public services (education, social, police, highways...) have been significantly reduced across the country to avoid city, county, or state bankruptcies. The success with which the revolt of the middle class and the young (TP and OWS) has met is explained by these objective developments. And the coming years will see these trends get worse. 

The weakness of the 2011 US economy and society is, paradoxically, the result of the “rescue” attempts carried out in 2009/2010 (stimulus plans, QE ...) and the worsening of a pre-2008 “normal” situation. 2012 will mark the first year of deterioration from an already badly impaired situation (8). 

SMEs, households, local authorities (9), public services,... have no more “padding” to soften the blow of the recession into which the country has fallen again (10). We anticipated that 2012 would see a 30% drop in the Dollar against major world currencies. In this economy, which imports the bulk of its consumer goods, this will result in a corresponding decrease in US household purchasing power against a backdrop of double-digit inflation. 

The TP and OWS have, therefore, a bright future ahead of them since the wrath of 2011 will become the rage in 2012/2013. And according to LEAP/E2020, nothing is less certain than the ability of a general in uniform to master such a rage. For the great financial issue in 2012 (which is why the attacks on Euroland have multiplied and intensified since the end of summer 2011) is simply the financing of the huge “black hole” of US deficits. 

In the next GEAB issue, we will develop a clearer-cut analysis on why 2012 marks a catastrophic turning point for the US Treasury Bond market, but what we are talking about here was already officially recorded by the OECD: in 2012, there will no longer be enough money available to finance Western deficits (11). It's an anticipation that we made in 2009 by, for the first time quantifying what we called the disappearance of “ghost-assets” that this crisis is turning into smoke, shock after shock. The OECD confirms this prognosis and this explains the increasingly open warfare conducted by the UK and the US to try and appropriate the remaining financial resources, particularly at the expense of Euroland, capable of being a greater attraction on its own (12).

Source: OCDE, Société Générale, 11/2011

The unstoppable US spiral of recession/depression/inflation is, therefore, the harbinger of turbulences without modern equivalent for the United States, both in their scale and speed. Our team considers the players of the “Beltway” are unable to imagine this shock and its consequences. 

Thus, to take one telling example: when the Pentagon works with difficulty on a possible 5% reduction of its budget over the next five years, it’s totally mistaken in terms of the magnitude in budget cuts. Between the institutional deadlock and the 2012 economic and financial shocks especially, it should be working on cutting its budget by 50%. "Impossible!" say the officers and military experts. In fact they mean "Unthinkable!" This isn’t quite the same thing. They should ask the bosses of Lehman Brothers, AIG and the big Wall Street players if, in 2007, they thought a widespread collapse of their financial markets "possible" a year later? They should ask the Soviet generals of 1987 whether they thought it "possible" that the USSR would have disappeared four years later and that their budget would have fallen to almost zero? In an historic crisis, the "impossible" is in fact generally limited to the "unthinkable"... until the moment when suddenly reality imposes its choice which, in only a few cases, is what the players involved think. 

Besides US banks will face a new massacre in 2012. As mentioned in the GEAB N°58, between 10% and 20% of them will go bankrupt (13) following the example of their European and Japanese counterparts. It’s the derivative products swilling around their balance sheets that will lead them there, the direct result of the European debt crisis and the direct hit of the shock that will affect the City first of all, the last bastion of Wall Street. 

Hyperinflation is a very real possibility for the United States (14) in 2013, against the backdrop of federal (and local) governments lacking the means of action and a banking system suffocated by the sudden rise of all the unpaid domestic (household debt, local authorities...) and external (sovereign debt) dues.

--------- 
Notes: 

(1) In his marvellous poem « If », Rudyard Kipling wrote “… If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken/ Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools/ Or, being lied about/ Don't deal in lies/ Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it”. And this advice applies to communities as well as individuals because the reading of the Anglo-Saxon press about the Euro and Euroland irresistibly makes our team think of this passage from the poem. However, with the marginalization of the United Kingdom within the EU and faster Euroland integration (as per our anticipations), we note the crossing of a psychological barrier in Euroland: it’s no longer the time to avoid offending the sensibilities of our Anglo-Saxon “allies”, but simply to protect ourselves from the attacks of our Anglo-Saxon opponents. Unlike the media and “mainstream” experts of Wall Street and the City, Euroland isn’t wasting time “to twist the words to make a trap for fools”, it satisfies itself in taking reality into account, to move forward “grinning and bearing it” and cut, one by one, the ties that bind it to the British and US financial centres (and the political ones later). Our team cannot resist the temptation to provide a further illustration of the daily “spinning” of information of which most of the British and US media have made a specialty. Thus, in the section of our heading “twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”, MarketWatch published an article on 14/12/2011 entitled “Fund managers fear a Eurozone break-up” Yet what did we discover in the article? That their main concern (75% of them) was a further US downgrade (48% think it will happen in 2012) and only 44% of them thought there was a risk that one day a country would leave the Eurozone, without mentioning a timeframe. An honest title should, therefore, have been “Fund managers fear a further US downgrade”. But as they say in French: “A la guerre comme la guerre (make do with what you’ve got)!”. 

(2) Whereas in the same time, the US population has increased by 30 million, a 10% rise. Source: Washington Post, 02/12/2011 

(3) Our team thinks 2013/2014 will provide, via the Congress and due to massive public support, an unprecedented opportunity to demand a dismantling of the Fed. The anti-federal beliefs of the Tea Parties and those anti-Wall Street of the OWS will find a compelling focal point here. 

(4) Source: New York Times, 24/11/2011 

(5) In this connection it is interesting to note that the rating agencies, led by Moody's, saw nothing coming once again since, until the end of summer 2011, MF Global had a positive rating from these agencies... even while the company was already tapping its clients’ accounts in an attempt to survive. May those who believe that their investments are better protected on Wall Street or in the City reflect on this “detail”. 

(6) Sources: MSNBC, 11/2011; RT, 08/12/2011 

(7) These are the numbers that henceforth rank the country fully in the “Third World” category in social matters. Source: Beforeitsnews, 29/11/2011 

(8) Gregor McDonald says the country can no longer generate growth. Source:SeekingAlpha, 05/12/2011 

(9) Source: Washington Post, 29/11/2011 

(10) In fact, it has never left it since 2008, except technically due to macro-economic measures. But no one eats macroeconomics... except economists. 

(11) Source: Financial Times, 11/12/2011 

(12) Here, if some believe that the Fed intervened with other major central banks a month ago to come to the “rescue” of Euroland, they know little about the motivations of US interventionism: the United States intervene outside their borders only if they feel their direct interests are at stake. Their late arrival in two world wars illustrates this very well. In this case, as we have analyzed and as the MF Global case shows, it’s quite simply to save their own banks and financial institutions that they intervened. They fluctuate on empty, with their balance sheets swollen with derivatives of which no one knows the exact content; and only the Fed in these last three years has prevented the widespread bankruptcy of Wall Street. As anticipated in several GEABs, the Fed is well aware that Euroland is the detonator “par excellence” that will trigger Wall Street and the City’s explosion, then it douses the wick as long as it can. 

(13) Without even mentioning the growing number of court cases in which the are enmeshed. Source: Le Monde, 04/12/2011 

(14) All the more since, according to LEAP/E2020, at the end of 2012 Euroland will put in place a proactive policy promoting the use of Euros inall exchanges, including in the field of energy. The decisions made by Euroland banks to stop lending money in USD (knowing the need for that fell from 1,300 billion USD to 800 billion, and probably down to less than 500 billion in 2012), as a result of the asphyxia attempt perpetrated against them by their Wall Street and City partners, will automatically result in two opposite phenomena at the end of 2012: a sharp fall in the global demand for USDs; and, on the opposite, a strengthened lending activity in Euros. Given that China, as well as its BRICS partners, continues to increase the amount of its exchanges in Yuan (or in other BRICS currencies), 2012 will therefore be characterized by the emergence of two big monetary zones next to the Dollar zone. This collapse in the global need for USDs in trade transactions will in turn generate a massive return of USDs to the United States, thus contributing to the episode of hyper-inflation that we anticpate in 2013. Source: New York Times, 01/12/2011