Tag Archives: Consumerism

Make Sure You Download the Latest Ministry of Propaganda Updates

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It’s time once again to check for Ministry of Propaganda updates, which like Windows and iOS is constantly being updated to counter new threats and enhance the user experience (heh).

Much like the other operating systems that underpin our daily lives, the core functions of the MoP don’t change much. My chart from 2007 remains an instructive summary of MoP operations, with the only changes being Mr. Buffett is now buying oil companies and social media corporations are now major media players.

The core mission of the Ministry of Propaganda isn’t just to push a desirable narrative–it’s to mystify the underlying dynamics of a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many by promoting a self-serving worldview (weltanschauung) that explains how the world works in a way that protects the interests of those in power.

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick explains in the quote below, the MoP narrative isn’t just a cloak thrown over the underlying dynamics, it’s the creation of an entire universe / worldview, including contexts for understanding what’s going on, establishing what’s valuable and what isn’t, and what behaviors enhance status and which ones marginalize us.

The Ministry of Propaganda isn’t monolithic: various factions compete to push their self-serving narratives. As Dick noted, this includes governments, corporations, religious and political groups, each of which understands that once the populace accepts their worldview, their power is cemented in realms far above mere force.

A key mechanism in establishing a dominant worldview is the think-tank or equivalent self-serving body claiming authority over what’s true / false and important / unimportant. This can be authority over the “correct” interpretation of spiritual texts, economic policies, healthcare “standards of care,” geopolitical goals, etc.

Since humans are innately social, status-striving beings, hierarchies of authority and power are the air we breathe. Those who establish themselves as authorities don’t just gain power, they cement their power on the basis of their authority rather than on loyalty or competence.

The enormous powers of social media and traditional media to promote claims of authority have generated a deranging snarl of conflicting agendas and narratives. Various centers of power collaborate on pushing worldviews that benefit their interests, but this isn’t entirely coherent. The one thing all participants in the Ministry of Propaganda agree on is our power is deserved and must be defended against all threats, which includes hostile entities inside and outside the national borders.

This fragmented, constantly shifting cacophony of competing authorities is destabilizing. As the tectonic plates of worldviews collide, the edges crumble and people naturally seek the safety of some core set of beliefs, in effect “circling the wagons” in an attempt to restore some internal stability.

We see this in the intense political polarization of this era (see chart below). To make sense of the competing claims of authority, we reduce the perimeter of what’s defendable, putting more of the world into “outside enemies” (them) and reserving the “safe, trusted place” for fewer of “us.”

With so many competing factions in the Ministry of Propaganda, there’s a proliferation of propaganda such that there is literally nothing left but PR. In a universe constructed of nothing but agit-prop and PR, we all have our favorites examples. James Bond picks up his Nokia phone. Even though nobody’s seen a Nokia phone in ages, if you want to be cool like Bond, go buy a Nokia phone.

Marketing is the MoP’s entire universe. Everybody’s selling something to gain or maintain power, status, mindshare or the ultimate prize, the dominant worldview.

To ease the confusion, please download the latest updates from the Ministry. These updates replace all that misinformation, misdirection, and blatant marketing with the, ahem, facts, or the correct interpretation of the facts. (We had to destroy the village in order to save it. OK, got it.)

While it’s fun to sort all the propaganda into various boxes, we would do well to look for what all the marketers / MoP players seek to mystify. In my analysis, what must be mystified at all costs boils down to the unsustainability of 1) the current consumption of resources, 2) the current method of creating capital so the few can buy up the planet’s most valuable assets, 3) neocolonialism, the modern replacement for the old model of occupation and exploitation by force, and 4) neofeudalism, the economic / social /political arrangement in which the majority of the populace are modern-day serfs with extremely limited agency and power which they are told is limitless.

“You can be anything you choose to be!” Or at least your digital avatar can do so, and that’s practically as good as actually having agency and power in the real world. Or so we’re told, mindlessly, endlessly without pause or respite.

More on these topics in the coming weeks.

Calm Before the Tempest?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Let’s start by stipulating the obvious: no one knows the future, and most of the guesses–oops, I mean forecasts–will be wrong. Arguing about the forecasts now won’t make any difference as to which ones are correct and which ones are wrong. Time alone will tell.

That said, here’s a scenario that fits the dynamics I see as most consequential: Core-Periphery and the demise of the waste is growth / financialization / globalization model as the reigning model of how the global economy should work.

Core-periphery dynamics are pretty simple: unraveling starts on the periphery and seeps toward the core. The core actually strengthens in the process as capital and talent seek havens where they’re treated well, and the core became the core by treating capital and talent well.

The periphery responds to the unraveling of financialization / globalization by tightening its grip on whatever capital and talent is still available, incentivizing the flight of capital and talent to the core.

A great many people think there are many core economies. In my analysis, there is only one, due to the qualifying requirements: 1) issues a reserve currency, i.e. not pegged to another currency 2) liquid global markets for securities, debt, commodities, etc., i.e. anyone anywhere can trade in size in the core markets 3) transparent market and governance mechanisms, i.e. no overnight devaluations, expropriations, capital restrictions, etc. 4) diverse economy not dependent on exports or imports for its well-being and 5) ease of flow: capital, talent, enterprises and employees all have essentially unlimited freedom of movement within the core.

We can argue about which nations qualify as core but it won’t change the outcome. Capital and talent will make their own decisions about risk, safety, exposure to devaluation and expropriation and where the odds of being treated fairly are highest. It’s a good exercise to put yourself in the shoes of a manager of a $10 billion fund and go through the decision tree of where to put this $10 billion to preserve its purchasing power first and foremost, and secondarily generate a return.

Would you really gamble $10 billion on a 15% return on the bonds of Timbukthree, whose currency has fallen 20% against the U.S. dollar this year? Or Timbukfour, which is dependent on exports of commodities in a shrinking global economy? Or Timbukfive, which is dependent on imports of commodities and exports of consumer goods in a shrinking global economy?? If you answer “yes,” you’re not actually playing like you are responsible for $10 billion.

As the periphery unravels financially, it also unravels politically and socially. Bordering states are at risk of destabilizing, and any entity with large exposure to the unraveling debt or markets starts unraveling, too. The destabilization spreads to second-tier nations whose exposure to the dynamics of unraveling are structural.

As all these dominoes fall, eventually those closest to the core also crumble, and then core itself is finally destabilized.

Humans have an interesting talent for adjusting to new circumstances, i.e. habituating to new conditions. Those households consuming 14,000 gallons of fresh water a month may well scream that they can’t possibly get by on 12,000 gallons, but then if circumstances change and all the water we have is what we can carry in buckets a kilometer over rough terrain, we find that we can live on the few gallons we can carry a kilometer.

The amount of waste in developed economies is beyond easy measure. It’s estimated 40% of all food in the U.S. is wasted. Energy, food and fresh water have been treated as if low cost and abundance were birthrights rather than brief explosions of excess. While we’re screaming about energy costs, empty buildings are brightly lit, water taps are left running and one individual per idling vehicle in a traffic jam frets about rising costs.

When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake closed the Bay Bridge across San Francisco Bay, the main artery between San Francisco and the East Bay, economic doom was predictably predicted. Yet people quickly managed via extra BART (subway) trains that rain beneath the Bay and carpools with four people per vehicle rather than one occupant.

Is it possible that all the predictable predictions of economic doom are somewhat exaggerated by the thrill of sensationalism and projections of past trends, as if people can’t possibly make consequential adjustments to their behaviors and consumption?

Systems have constraints, and so there are limits on what adjustments can be made without altering the structure, but in many cases, we’re far from reaching limits on basic conservation work-arounds.

Is it possible that things will prove less dire than currently expected? It seems little credence is being given to the potential to adjust to new conditions.

Is it beyond conception that the core actually strengthens for a length of time before the unraveling reaches it? In my crystal ball, it seems not just possible but likely. This will be the calm before The Tempest, when the unraveling reaches the core and structural changes are finally required.

Wokeness is a Product of Neoliberalism

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Why don’t more people make this connection?

By Chad C. Mulligan

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab Substack

One thing I haven’t seen people point out anywhere else is how much the current atmosphere of “wokeness” is an outcome of neoliberalism.

Let me explain.

There was a lot of analysis written about neoliberalism back in the 1990s when it was still a relatively new phenomenon, having only been enshrined as the dominant economic paradigm in the 1980s. Now that neoliberalism has become simply the water in which we swim and the horizon upon which we gaze, we don’t even notice it anymore. The idea that there could be other ways to organize the economy and society has completely vanished from the discourse even on the nominal “Left”—so utterly complete has been its intellectual victory.

I can’t recall all the books and articles I read during that time, but a couple of standouts were One Market Under God by Thomas Frank and No Logo by Naomi Klein. Frank’s The Baffler magazine published a lot of good articles about neoliberalism back in those days, and Klein’s subsequent The Shock Doctrine is indispensable for understanding how neoliberalism took over the world.

One of the things that those analyses pointed out was the fact that neoliberalism derided governments as universally incompetent and inefficient and argued that only market competition could distribute goods and services effectively.

Furthermore, those markets had to be global in scope and free from “interference,” which was broadly defined as anything that hindered profit maximization including worker and environmental protections. This, in theory, would lead to ideal outcomes—or at least as close to ideal as they could be in a world of inherent scarcity.

As a corollary of this, neoliberals argued that democratic politics—the idea that citizens could express their wishes and desires via their elected representatives—was a hopelessly naive and outdated notion in the age of globalism. Rather, they argued that people’s preferences and desires would be more accurately reflected by how people spent their money in “free and open” markets. People’s spending patterns—aggregated and allocated by markets—would therefore be a better agent of social change than ineffective political action according to neoliberal theory1.

The One Big Market under neoliberalism, therefore, was seen not just a method for coordinating economic activities and allocating goods and services, but as the highest expression of people’s fundamental values. We were now expected to change the world thru shopping. As a result of this, you were expected to be an “ethical consumer.” You were exhorted to “spend your values.” Markets, neoliberals argued—and not popularly elected governments—were the true expression of the democratic will. As our choices at the voting booth began to narrow and seem more and more alike, we were told to vote with your dollar!

Here’s a concrete, real-world example. If you were concerned about dolphins being ensnared and killed in fishing nets used to dredge the ocean for tuna, the solution was not to ban the practice. No, the solution was to spend ethically on products labeled “dolphin safe.” Since consumers would express their preferences via buying dolphin safe tuna instead of the ones not so labeled, eventually the Invisible Hand of the Market would cause this practice to die out without a single government regulation. Similarly, if you wanted to support sustainable farming practices, you would spend preferentially on products labeled “organic” rather than the alternatives.

So in the neoliberal world view, the best way to bring about positive social change was by individuals spending their money in markets. That’s why in a modern shopping center you see all kinds of labels festooned on every conceivable product proclaiming how it is “responsibly sourced,” or how environmentally-friendly it is, or how the package is biodegradable, or how the farmers were fairly compensated, or whatever. You never saw that in the 1960s or 1970s—this change was ushered in by neoliberalism.

Now when you went to the grocery store it was no longer just to buy groceries—you had the obligation to save the world! (As if your life wasn’t stressful enough with the ever-longer working hours that were also the result of neoliberalism). A recurring theme of those analyses I read back in the day was the replacement of citizens with consumers.

(Of course, what’s to stop corporations from slapping any old claim onto their products? How can shoppers evaluate these claims? How can they possibly know what’s accurate and what’s not? Into this void stepped literally hundreds of different (private) certification agencies to try and make sure that these labels accurately reflected what they claimed. Thus, in the effort to avoid regulating markets, neoliberalism actually caused a proliferation of far more regulations and regulatory agencies than ever before. And often these privatized agencies have nonexistent oversight, poor standards and lax enforcement).

Another fundamental aspect of neoliberalism was the notion that competition would bring about ideal social outcomes. Therefore competition, neoliberals argued, had to be introduced into absolutely every aspect of human affairs. In this regard, neoliberalism a was really not just about economics, but was rather a radical totalitarian vision for remaking human society.

This extended even to social issues. For example, the philosophy behind “school choice” came from the notion that the problem with public schools was the lack of free market competition because schools were a state-owned monopoly. State-owned monopolies are the greatest possible evil under neoliberalism because they are not subject to market competition. By unleashing “choice,” schools would be forced to compete for students just like businesses compete for customers. This would make public education better, the thinking went, by eliminating bad schools and teachers and creating “lean and mean” educational institutions.

Even environmentalism has been colonized by neoliberalism. Instead of limiting the emission of fossil fuels, for example, new and exotic markets would be established so that polluters could trade opaque “carbon credits” in order to theoretically allocate pollution the same way we allocate any other resource under neoliberalism. This also demonstrates how neoliberalism is not anti-regulation or “small government” as is often portrayed, since creating these kinds of artificial markets takes massive amounts of government regulation and bureaucracy.

As this all-encompassing philosophy gradually took over the world, social protections were dismantled, regulations were abolished, and untrammeled, cutthroat competition was unleashed in every arena of life.

But it was Karl Polanyi who pointed out that such a vision of turning over society to anarchic markets with no protections and no refuge from its capricious dictates would lead to the “demolition of society.” No one could long withstand the never-ending whipsaws and bullwhips of “pure”relentless market competition—not consumers, not workers, and not even the businesses themselves! That’s why its has never existed, he said, and cannot exist.

So what actually happened in the real world due to unleashing this radical philosophy was an unprecedented wave of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations in every sector of the economy, enabled by high finance (which was also “unleashed” thanks to neoliberalism).

You see, competition is expensive. It is also highly inefficient. It’s much more effective for parties to cooperate than to compete. That’s just game theory 101. It’s true of human affairs just as it is in nature. That’s why you see cooperation everywhere throughout the animal kingdom as Peter Kropotkin pointed out long ago. Any species where every single member was perennially locked in existential competition with every other member of the species would quickly die out, he said. Even where competition does exist in nature, it is in very limited in scope and in circumscribed contexts like mate choice.

Competition is also inherently unstable. You can’t just have an endless tournament going on forever and ever as free market theory depicts. Eventually there has to be a winner. Again, this is simply game theory 101. You can observe this everywhere you look.

So the current wave of consolidations and mergers in every sector of the economy can be seen as the logical outcome of neoliberal philosophy when applied to the real world as opposed to the world depicted in economic textbooks and think-tank policy papers. Want to know why the entire economy is dominated by a handful of mega-monopolies these days? That’s the reason why.

But getting back to our initial topic, here’s the point that’s absolutely critical: as a result of this neoliberal transformation, corporations had to portray themselves as agents of positive social change.

Read that again. And again and again and again until it sinks in.

This is what has lead to the rise of the modern “socially conscious” corporation and to so-called “woke capitalism.”

Think about it. Back in the pre-neoliberal 1960s, did any company bend over backwards to convey what it believed about absolutely anything? About any social issue whatsoever? No, because corporations weren’t expected to do that. Corporations were widely seen as anonymous entities devoid of values designed to make money by producing the goods and services consumers wanted. Back in the 1960’s—an era of rapid social change—no one cared about what IBM, Boeing, McDonalds, DuPont, General Electric, Coca Cola, General Motors, Prudential, Chevron, or any other big corporation thought about anything, much less the prevailing social issues of the day. That’s what politics was for! Businesses were expected to make money, full stop. Besides, how could a corporation really “think” anything? A corporation is a faceless bureaucratic enterprise composed of hundreds, or even thousands of individuals, each with their own personal set of values and beliefs. The very idea that a corporation could “believe” anything would have been seen as preposterous and absurd back then.

Spending money in “free” markets has subsequently become the only acceptable form of social protest or fomenting change under globalized neoliberalism—and not, for example, people banding together in popular movements to advocate for a better world. Government and politics have become passé and irrelevant—or so we’re told by those in charge. The sole option you have as a lone individual in the face of this relentless onslaught is to become an ethical consumer—in other words, to “spend your values.” Therefore, in order to meet this solemn obligation, you have to be sure that when you hand your money over to a corporation, that corporation reflects your values! That is a fundamental tenet of neoliberalism and its emphasis on markets—and not governments—as the highest arbiter of social values and preferences.

Yet very few commentators on the (fake) Left and the (pseudo) populist Right seem to grasp this. Instead they just shake their fists and rage.

So in order to get their hands on those precious “ethical” dollars, faceless bureaucratic corporations have to fashion themselves as “socially responsible.” As “ethical.” As being “positive change agents.” To that end they have launched wave after wave of PR campaigns designed to proclaim just how ethical and virtuous they are, from Amazon to Dove to Gillette, and every other big business has to follow suit.

Consider, for instance, those Dove advertisements that promised to let plus-size women believe they were beautiful—and publicly paraded them in their bras and panties in a commercial for cellulite-reducing cream. Or the Heineken “Worlds Apart” ad that showed people of disparate backgrounds and races coming together (eventually) over the beer. Or—to bring things back to the strategic positioning of carbonated sugar water as a proto-revolutionary product—the (thankfully short-lived) Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot that portrayed the soda as the means to bring Occupy-style protesters back into a grateful posture of consumer-abundance connoisseurship…

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

This also ties in with the “doing well by doing good” ethos of philanthropic capitalism as described by Anand Giridharadas in his book, Winners Take All. Once again, elected governments and politicians are portrayed as hopelessly inept and incompetent (sense a pattern?). In place of governments installed by the will of the people, therefore, “social entrepreneurs” will step into the void and solve the most pressing social problems of the day—and make a killing $$$ by doing so. This is portrayed as a “win-win” scenario in the media, which is owned and controlled by those same rich people (the fact that every single social problem seems to be getting exponentially worse has not deterred this policy approach in the slightest).

So if you wonder where all that cloying, patronizing Silicon Valley bullshit about “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” comes from—that’s where it comes from. It’s basically a form of neofeudalism in practice.

So the end result of all this is that under neoliberalism corporations are now obligated to portray themselves as ethical and moral in order to attract precious consumer dollars. Hence the rise of the modern “woke” corporation expressing it’s opinion on absolutely every hot-button issue of the day—from Black Lives Matter, to gay marriage, to the abortion debate, to transgender rights, to sexual harassment, to gun control, to multiculturalism, to whatever contentious wedge issue the political Right will dream up next.

And whether you like it or not, the people who tend to earn the most under globalized, technocratic monopoly capitalism really do strongly support cosmopolitan values like diversity, tolerance and inclusiveness. And since we are obligated to “spend our values” under neoliberalism, corporations have to cater to them—and to make sure that everyone knows about it. Thus they have to “officially” support things like Black Lives Matter. They have to speak out against discrimination against gay and transgender people. They have to be “antiracist.” They have to extol “empowering women and girls.” All because they need to attract the kinds of people who “spend their values,” and those values are more likely to be socially liberal for the kinds of people that corporations want to attract both as employees and consumers. That’s just the reality, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.

And even though conservatives may not like it, socially regressive people and reactionaries tend to be poorer and less educated overall—and hence are less desirable as workers and consumers. That’s also just how it is. Therefore, corporations are “woke” based on a cynical, self-interested calculation of what will net them the most consumer dollars under neoliberal capitalism, and no amount of conservative grousing is going to change that. As a result, reactionaries and authoritarians are increasingly turning to politics to force their values upon people which they can’t enforce via the kinds of free market choices that they believe should dictate every other aspect of life.

When it became clear that the NFL supporters—largely white, male, and older—were outnumbered by the corporation’s brand loyalists—more diverse and younger—Nike went ahead and now even claims that it inaugurated the campaign because it believes that Kaepernick “is one of the most inspirational athletes of his generation.”

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

Of course, if we had a healthy and functioning political system none of this would be necessary. And it follows that if neoliberalism had not become the dominant social and economic paradigm of the twenty-first century there would be no such thing as “woke” capitalism in the first place.

So it’s truly amusing to watch the political Right rage to the heavens at the result of their own economic philosophy being applied in practice.

It’s also funny that, to my knowledge, no one appears to have made this connection. After all, why did corporations only relatively recently (i.e. after the 1990s) begin virtue signalling at every opportunity? It’s not just because everyone suddenly became “based” at approximately the same time. It’s the economic system, stupid!

Of course, it’s a win-win situation for political conservatives since they now have something to permanently complain about to rally people to their side, even though they are still just as pro-wealth and anti-worker as ever, and even though they still fervently believe in the most toxic tenets of neoliberalism (such as its contempt for democratically elected governments and its antipathy toward regulations and constraining the rich in any way). That’s the natural result of gutting civil society in favor of apotheosizing an all-powerful Market.

Of course, the bad news is that the end result of neoliberalism will probably be the rise of a twenty-first century form of fascist authoritarianism based on what I’m seeing in the media and across the political spectrum these days.

In conclusion, I find all of these “culture war” topics utterly inane and ridiculous (despite all the money you can make by endlessly bellyaching about them on Sub$tack). In a country where many citizens can’t even access basic health care, homelessness is endemic and rising, higher education is unaffordable, crime and suicide are rampant, people are mired in debt, wages have stagnated and mass shootings occur on a weekly basis2, I find it hard to get worked up over “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” And, as many besides me have pointed out, the idea that this cynical virtue signalling by mega-corporations means that they are in any way “left-of-center” by any reasonable definition of that term is absurd. After all, we’re talking about some of the most vile, sociopathic billionaires since the Gilded Age and some of the most brutal working conditions since the era of George Pullman. And the saddest thing is, we’ll never be able to unite to stop them since—thanks to neoliberalism—we will be kept perennially at each other’s throats while they continue to Tweet from their luxury yachts, penthouses, villas, and private jets about diversity and inclusiveness for ever and ever.

1 A good book about this is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown. Here’s an interview with the author.

2 It’s worth noting that I wrote this post before the latest massacre in Texas.

Can a Nation Prosper as its Institutions Fail?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Economists focus on what can be easily measured: sales, profits, prices, tax revenues, etc. Since the decay and failure of institutions isn’t easily quantified, this decay doesn’t register in the realm of economics. Since it isn’t measured, it doesn’t exist.

But institutional decay and failure is all too real, and it begs the question: how can a society and economy thrive if its core institutions fail? The short answer is they cannot thrive, as institutions are the foundations of the social and economic orders.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, the conventional view has a naive faith that “great leaders” can reverse institutional rot. This faith overlooks the systemic sources of institutional decay and failure which are outlined in the graphic below, The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy, a.k.a. institutions.

Leaders are constrained by the nature of centralized organizations and the incentive structure that slowly shifts from rewarding efforts to further the institution’s core mission to self-service and protecting an ossified, failing institution from outside scrutiny and reform.

As Samo Burja explains in his insightful essay, Why Civilizations Collapse, those inside institutions are by design so compartmentalized that few (if any) even recognize the institution is failing. As long as everything is glued together in each little compartment, no one grasps the entire institution has lost its way. And since no one recognizes it, no one attempts to save it.

Institutions end up advancing caretaker managers who excel at the political game of rising to the top of a sprawling institution. When the decay (or budget cuts) finally trigger a crisis, the institution has been stripped of visionaries with a bold grasp of what’s needed to restore the focus on the core mission and institute new incentives. The bold leaders quit in disgust or were sent to bureaucratic Siberia as potential threats to the status quo.

The problem is institutions fail by the very nature of their centralized design. The organization is centralized so directives flow down the chain of command, and every branch is compartmentalized to limit the power of each department and employee to disrupt the orderly flow of top-down directives.

Within this compartmentalized, top-down structure, the incentives are to follow procedures rather than get results. The rewards go to those who dutifully follow procedures rather than to those who raise the alarm about the loss of transparency, effectiveness and focus on fulfilling the mission.

The path of least resistance is to protect the existing structure and add more compartments, i.e. “mission creep.” Rather than focus on the dissipation of resources and the decline of the core mission, leaders add “feel good” missions and PR promotions of phony reforms and initiatives that bleed more resources from the core mission.

Consider the institution of democracy, which has been corrupted into an invitation-only auction of state favors and rentier skims. Democracies have another fatal flaw: politicians win re-election by promising virtually everyone something for nothing: more benefits and entitlements and lower taxes. The gap between higher costs and declining revenues will be filled by government borrowing.

All this additional borrowing will supposedly be paid by the magic of “growth”, which will expand tax revenues at a rate that exceeds the cost of borrowing.

But demographics, resource depletion and the diminishing returns of a consumer economy fueled by rapidly expanding public and private debt have sapped “growth” in fundamental ways. Ironically, borrowing and spending more to spur “growth” only hastens the diminishing returns of increasing debt to fund consumption today.

Democracies are thus optimized for rapid “growth” and are ill-suited to transition to DeGrowth, i.e. less of everything for the vast majority of the citizenry as resources become scarce and debt eats the economy alive. (DeGrowth could work to everyone’s benefit, which is the point of Global Crisis, National Renewal.)

Central banking is another failing institution. When faced with fiscal crises, central states/banks inevitably succumb to the temptation to print/borrow currency in whatever sums are needed to fill the shortfall of the moment, i.e. political expediency. This profligate creation of currency seems to be magic at first; everyone accepts the “new money” at the current value. But eventually gravity takes hold and the currency’s purchasing power declines, as the real economy (the production of goods and services) grows at rates far below the expansion of credit and currency.

Even the greatest empires in human history have been unable to resist the “easy” solution of devaluing currency as the means of fulfilling all the promises that were made in more prosperous times.

The progression of centralized power slowly but surely replaces the self-organizing, resilient, decentralized structures of civil society with tightly bound hierarchical centralized structures that are increasingly ineffective, increasingly costly and increasingly fragile, i.e. increasingly prone to failure or collapse.

The irony of institutional decay and failure is everyone inside is so busy following procedures that nobody notices the decay until the whole worm-eaten structure collapses. Look no farther than financialized asset bubbles, healthcare and education for examples of institutions in run-to-failure decline.

We are in effect so busy arranging the beach umbrellas per our instructions that we don’t notice the approaching tsunami. Can a nation prosper as its institutions decay and collapse? Only in the fantasies and magical thinking of the delusional.

The Houses of Dead and Crooked Souls

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”      – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor.  An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this.  They offer a visible lesson in social class.

Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world’s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.

Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night:

The fog is where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself….Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Yet the rich don’t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses.  They know they are crooks and creators of illusions.  Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too.  So they rub it in their faces.  Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.

For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth.  It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt.  That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda – rebellion.  It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite’s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.

The recent news of Barack Obama’s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity “friends” at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha’s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point.  If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength – which obviously he does – then he is a deluded fool.  But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so.  It’s essential for the Show.  It must be conspicuous so the plebians learn their lesson.

Obama’s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.

Trump’s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood’s superstars send the same message.

Take Bill Gates’ sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.

Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer’s weeds.

Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and “dungeon” basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste.  “All these houses have endless things to do — it’s just mind-boggling,” he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a “glamorizer,” and his “exotica” paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities.  Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.

What would Vincent van Gogh say?  Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature “have always worked against the grain” and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed.  That might seem “mind-boggling” to Slonem.

Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so.  Even if they read Tolstoy’s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, it is doubtful that its truth would register.  Like Tolstoy’s protagonist Pahόm, they never have enough.  But like Pahόm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.

His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.

Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem’s, come from? Who wants to ask?

Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging.  Slonem’s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife.  Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants.  Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case “the dregs of Asia” and the Irish dogs.  Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle’s construction site as a young man.  No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.

Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find.  Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema.  But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.

It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way.  The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, “Life Without Principle.”

Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof.  The lockdowns – an appropriate prison term – have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world.  This is not an accident.  Despair and depression are widespread.

There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people’s money comes from.  Thoreau was so advised long ago:

Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick…

But the super-wealthy do not get sick.  They are sick.  For they revel in their depravity and push it in the faces of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves.  Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception.  In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent.  They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.

Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.

Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country’s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things – war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc.  But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.

But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money.  Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do.  If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others.  They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people.  And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.

Yes, houses speak.  But few ever speak of where their money comes from.  Those that are on the take – which has multiple meanings – always plead innocent.  Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions.  That is obvious.  So let’s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money.  Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.

Thoreau wrote: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.”

The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning.  And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls.  This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.

A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut.  It is advertised as “a house with a heart and a soul.”  It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain’s time. Similar or worse than Obama’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard today.  It has no soul or heart.  It was built with Twain’s wife’s family money.  Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York.  Twain reveled in opulent respectability.  He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise.  Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment.  This is false.  For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death.  He committed soul murder.  But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle.  His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.

Baudelaire once said that in palaces “there is no place for intimacy.”  This is no doubt why in people’s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large.  Bachelard says, “When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.”  For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible.  “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’  It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.”

He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one’s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen’s novel, is “the house of breath” where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.

There is such a hermit’s hut where the light shines.  It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread.  His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world’s woods to look to his fate and not turn away.  To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.

The house of propaganda is built on unanimity.  When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble.  The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.

Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more.  At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.

Sing Hallelujah!

The Accelerating Destruction Of Earth’s Biodiversity: When Will We Act?

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By Robert J. Burrowes

As those individuals aware of it will have observed, presumably with deep regret, the latest ‘International Day for Biological Diversity’passed on 22 May with the bulk of the human population continuing to act in ways that destroy Earth’s biosphere at an ever-accelerating rate.

Unaware that many authors continue to report the ongoing destructionof Earth’s biodiversity, which is under siege on a range of fronts by unchecked human destruction of Earth’s biosphere as well as particular assaults on Earth’s living creatures, responses to this ‘hidden’ path to human extinction continue to waver between non-existent and token.

Consequently, in such circumstances, the destruction of biodiversity might yet become the means by which Homo sapiens is consigned to the fossil record ‘beating’ nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and electromagnetic radiation as the fundamental driver of extinction.

Of course, these drivers are intimately related. Ongoing preparations for nuclear war (requiring the extraction of vast resources from the biosphere), the accelerating climate catastrophe and the ever-expanding electromagnetic contamination of the biosphere are all heavily implicated in driving the destruction of life on Earth and seriously addressing these issues is something only discussed in narrow, genuinely aware circles while official ‘concern’ and that of the human population generally continue to exhibit negligible engagement, perhaps ‘tut-tutting’ the latest news in the corporate media of the extinction of an iconic species. See ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Report on the State of Planet Earth at Year’s End 2020’.

But given that 150-200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles and microbes) become extinct daily, as noted in 2010 by Ahmed Djoghlaf, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity who stated that ‘We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate’, and with many biologists having noted that the species extinction rate is nearly 1,000 times the ‘natural’ or ‘background’ rate and ‘is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago’ – see ‘Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief’ – only a delusional individual would argue that this issue is drawing the attention and profound action that is needed to halt this existential crisis.

And given that, back in 2010, the UN was arguing that the ‘economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change’ – see ‘UN says case for saving species “more powerful than climate change”’ – there is obviously no doubt that, officially and otherwise, the destruction of biodiversity has been neglected compared to the (admittedly also inadequate) attention given to the climate catastrophe.

So Homo sapiens moves quickly and efficiently to its own extinction, an inevitable consequence of the destruction of the web of life.

An important aspect of the destruction of biodiversity is what precedes the extinction of a species.

In their report compiled in 2017, Professors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich & Rodolfo Dirzo recorded that Earth continues to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Our Vanishing World: Wildlife’.

But, tragically, many additional species are now trapped in a feedback loop which will inevitably precipitate their extinction as well because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated and as has already occurred in almost all ecosystem contexts. See the (so far) six-part series ‘Our Vanishing World’. Have you seen a flock of birds of any size recently? A butterfly?

Why is this Happening?


The accelerating destruction of Earth’s biosphere is driven by one fundamental cause. Over-consumption by humans in industrialized countries. With nearly a billion people living in poverty and about 500 million indigenous peoples living or attempting to live subsistence lifestyles around the world, it is those populations in industrialized countries who are determined to consume more than they actually need and generally live unaware of their ecological impact who are destroying Earth’s biosphere.

Because whether consuming water, energy for household use, fossil fuels for vehicle or airline travel, paper, plastic, metals or meat, only a rare human is keeping track of, and consciously minimizing use of, these ‘end product’ resources which are extracted directly from, or manufactured with resources extracted from, Earth’s biosphere, with a byproduct of this production being a massive amount of waste material, much of it not able to be disposed of in any way that is remotely ecologically benign.

And because the extraction of resources from the biosphere to satisfy consumer demand fundamentally depends on state or private corporations making a profit from the extraction, corporations will exploit anywhere with negligible concern for the local environments destroyed.

To highlight the cost of our endlessly-expanding consumption, one only has to consider a few of the near ‘endless’ list of biosphere assaults adversely impacting the Earth and the species dependent on impacted ecosystems.

Did you know about the planned oil drilling in the staggeringly beautiful and, until now, pristine Okavango Delta in south-west Africa, and what this might mean for the region’s 18,000 elephants and other wildlife (not to mention the human population)? See ‘A Big Oil project in Africa threatens fragile Okavango region’.

Did you know about the ‘massive volumes of fracking waste’ being illegally dumped at Vaca Muerta in northern Patagonia in Argentina?Good for the biosphere and local wildlife do you think? See ‘Argentina’s Illegal Oil and Gas Waste Dumps Show “Dark Side” of Vaca Muerta Drilling, Says Criminal Complaint’.

And while there is a huge number of mines around the world inflicting massive damage on their immediate location – see ‘Environmental Nightmares Created by Open Pit Mines’ – mining is just one way to destroy the biosphere.

Rainforest destruction is another key driver of biosphere degradationin all parts of the world where rainforests are located, notably including the Amazon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia and West Papua, and the range of assaults is breathtaking with logging, burning, land clearance to create cattle farms, palm oil and soybean plantations, dam building as well as mining and oil drilling just among the most damaging causes. See ‘Our Vanishing World: Rainforests’.

But, as hinted at above, the emission of ‘greenhouse gases’, notably carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide is destroying the delicate composition of Earth’s atmosphere, to the detriment of the biosphere generally and with catastrophic implications for life on Earth. Despite largely successful efforts by the elite-controlled IPCC to delude people into believing that the global mean temperature has increased by only 1°C, in fact, since the pre-industrial era (prior to 1750)greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have already caused the global temperature to rise by more than 2°C above this baseline (in February 2020). This occurred despite the Paris climate agreement in 2015 when politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial level and pledged to try to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above this level. See ‘2°C crossed’ and‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

And electromagnetic radiation is inflicting rapidly increasing damage to all forms of life with the deployment of 5G now in full swing. See ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

Of course, all forms of military violence – invariably done to gain control over biosphere resources – as well as the preparation for it, destroys vast areas of the natural environment (including the creatures that live in it) either deliberately or as ‘collateral damage’. See ‘Ten Reasons Why Militarism is Bad for the Environment’.

As can be readily observed, the destruction of biodiversity is a primary subset of the destruction of the biosphere. Every living organism needs habitat to survive. Every time we destroy part of the biosphere, we destroy the habitat of the organisms that live in it. But we also destroy life and biodiversity directly too. How much longer can the wolf, for example, hold on against the onslaught? See ‘Bill Allowing 90 Percent of Idaho’s Wolves to Be Killed Passes House and Senate’.

Humanity generally is so unconcerned about destruction of the biosphere and the biodiversity cost that goes with it, that we studiously ignore this cost, even when it impacts our closest relatives, human and otherwise. See ‘West Africa’s chimpanzees are on the brink of extinction!’ and ‘Western Chimpanzee’.

And even the most iconic of species, such as the elephant, are not safe from the human onslaught. From 26 million elephants in 1800, the elephant population of Africa is down to 415,000, thanks to poaching for ivory, ‘trophy hunting’, destruction of habitat and other human causes. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has now listed the African forest elephant as ‘critically endangered’ and the African savanna elephant as ‘endangered’. See ‘Disappearing Elephants’ and ‘Africa’s elephants now endangered by poaching, habitat loss’.

Of course, destruction of habitat takes an almost infinite variety of forms when it comes to Homo sapiens. The latest farming venture to threaten elephant habitat is just now being created. See ‘From poaching to avocados, Kenya’s elephants face new threat’.

Besides this, assaults on particular species are pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Wildlife trafficking, for example, is worth up to $20 billion each year. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West although China is heavily implicated too. And to mention elephants again in this context: every 15 minutes an elephant is killed for its tusks. See Stop Wildlife Trafficking.

But if we are not concerned about the iconic species, can you imagine the collective concern for those millions of creatures of which we have never even heard, let alone given a name? And yet, as the work of Professor Gerardo Ceballos and his colleagues cited above clearly suggests, there are many unknown or obscure species that are part of the ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ that are driving the ‘biological annihilation’ that they have documented.

So What Can We Do?


Well, in theory, we can participate in official responses to this crisis. See ‘Previewing the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’.

But, as history demonstrates, we would be unwise to rely on responses generated by the elite and promulgated through its agents. Such efforts are inevitably designed to subvert effective outcomes, which they do with unrelenting monotony to which the record of uninterrupted destruction readily testifies.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal that we can do, personally, that will make a difference.

As is always the case with threats to biodiversity, the fundamental response to this crisis involves producing and consuming less. A lot less. ‘A difficult ask’ you might say. And more difficult than you probably realize, given the fundamentally dysfunctional emotional state that drives human over-consumption in materialist societies in the first place. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

But for those emotionally equipped for the challenge, you are welcome to join those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a ‘step by step’ strategy for achieving these ends. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Of course, you can also campaign to do other things as well. Halting war and all military activity of any kind would save the biosphere enormous resources so effort put into that is worthwhile. If you would like to campaign, strategically, to halt war there is a list of strategic goals for doing so in Campaign Strategic Aims.

In fact, if you wish to focus on strategically resisting any of the four primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, on that website too.

Equally fundamentally, if you would like to nurture children to become powerful individuals capable of acting strategically to prevent and respond to violence while able to critique society and elite propaganda, see ‘My Promise to Children’. A child who is emotionally whole does not need to use consumption as a substitute for giving up their unique identity as a survival strategy during childhood, as the ‘Love Denied’ article also explains.

As an aside, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

And if the options above seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge


Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food

6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices

7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws

10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons

11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere

12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)

13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant

14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion


Halting the human rush to extinction through the destruction of biodiversity will require monumental effort. Raising awareness of this rapidly unfolding but still largely-hidden tragedy is, therefore, a high priority. But that is only the start. Enormous effort is required as well.

Of course, for those too terrified to contemplate the reality of ongoing destruction of Earth’s biodiversity and its implications for our own behaviour, denial or delusion are easy ‘psychological retreats’, particularly when our childhood survival largely depended on such tactics.

So it is going to take those who are powerful enough to deal with reality to make a stand.

We are on the cliff-edge of extinction. What will you do?

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Where’s Dirk Gently When You Need Him?

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By Erik Assadourian

Source: Resilience

Did you hear? A supersized cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal on March 23rd? If you didn’t, you must do pretty well at avoiding the news, social media, and late night TV. But the short of it is: the Ever Given somehow lost control (sandstorm strength winds have been blamed, as have human errors) and crashed into the bank of the canal and lodged itself in.

So what? Is this really news? Or just a sensational story to distract us from the pandemic, which, one might argue, is itself a distraction from the rapid unraveling of Earth’s systems and thus human civilization? Perhaps. But then again perhaps not. Here’s why this incident is worth understanding.

First, a ship single-bowedly disrupted global trade for six days. It was finally freed on March 29th. However, there is now a backlog of over 300 ships while many ships rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. The Suez Canal is part of a trade route that carries more than 10 percent of global trade, including 7 percent of the world’s oil. Each day 30 percent of the world’s shipping container freight moves through the canal. Thus it created backlogs in shipping (including some 200,000 live animals who could have overheated or run out of food). It raised the price of oil briefly. It created shortages in factories—not just of parts but of shipping containers. And of course, it felt like a freak occurrence. Last year, of the 18,840 ships that moved through the canal, there were no incidents.

But the main reason is because this is an excellent metaphor on how fragile our entire globalized system has become.

It makes you wonder where Dirk Gently is to help straighten all this out. If you haven’t heard of Gently, he is a holistic detective, who uses “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to find missing persons (and cats) and solve mysteries. In fact, the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency includes him trying to figure out how a sofa got “irrevocably stuck” halfway up a staircase.

Similar story here: the Ever Given was jammed in tight—though fortunately with the help of the full moon and tides, unstuck without resorting to time travel (which was needed to free the errant sofa). And while the supernatural wasn’t at the root cause of this mishap as with the couch, instead of focusing just on the bad luck of a sandstorm (which are not uncommon in Egypt) combined with bad piloting, we should still investigate the root causes at play. So let’s peel back the layers one at a time.

Bigger is better!

At the surface, we might simply say the problem stems from the fact that we keep making bigger container ships. The Ever Given is a quarter mile long (one lap around a track or the height of the Empire State Building). And it weighs 220,000 tons and holds 20,000 containers (each 20-40 feet long). High oil prices (especially 2005-8), combined with cheap debt after the 2008 crash led shipping companies to invest in bigger and bigger ships. The Ever Given holds four times the cargo a ship carried in 2000. In fact, these containers were stacked so high that they acted like a giant sail and caught the intense winds that drove the Ever Given into the banks. So, yes, there’s more risk involved, but it’s cheaper to add more containers. To get as much on there as possible. Sometimes that means losing a load of containers to a storm or other incident (about 1600 containers are lost on average each year). Not to mention the fluke canal accident—not that this was a widely recognized risk. (However, this OECD report from 2015 did raise the challenges of burgeoning cargo ship sizes). But now this threat will need to be considered, including terrorists doing this intentionally to disrupt trade.

Now more concentrated!

But of course, looking holistically, let’s ask why do we even need these big ships? So, peeling another layer, we see that we have concentrated our manufacturing to a few major locations and promoted the consumer culture worldwide so we need to get goods of all types to rich Europeans, we need to get oil to run cars and planes in every country, we need to get livestock to the Middle East to feed this affluent desert population. Our globalized system depends on big old cargo ships. Even this incident is a reflection of our extreme globalization: the ship is owned by a Japanese company; run by a Taiwanese company (Evergreen); piloted by Indians; operating under a Panamanian flag; navigating through an Egyptian waterway, shipping brand name goods from all over the globe, and rescued by a Dutch salvage company. That’s kind of neat—a global Kumbaya moment—or a revelation of just how deeply aligned nations are in converting Earth’s forests, lands, water, and life into the latest in consumer products.

But wait, there’s more!

Peeling another layer, we find that the movement of all these consumer goods is driven by a culture fixated on growth, profit, and consumerism. We move factories to exploit cheaper labor, lax environmental rules; we spend $763 billion a year on advertising to convince people they need a new iPhone or a new car or a trip to wherever; we convert landscapes wholesale into resources; and we panic if our economies don’t grow. We’re trapped in a pursuit of material happiness, manipulated by the admen and politicians, driven now by our addictions to sweets, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, social media, and entertainment, to the point we’re “amusing ourselves to death.” But worse, we’re so amused we hardly even notice the death part any longer.

Free disconnect with every purchase!

And arriving at the inner layers of the onion, we find this: that our disconnection from the Earth is so deep, so profound, so complete, that we no longer even consider the planet in our decisions to manufacture items or ship them or buy them. We think instead about expanding our economies, upsizing our homes, upgrading our cars and phones, even stockpiling toilet paper (which again became a thing in the Suez Canal story as wood pulp supplies were potentially delayed). Even as scientists warn of ecological collapse, of cities lost to flooding seas, of regions abandoned due to perpetual drought, to the inevitable violence that all this will cause, to the countless species lost—many of whom we depend on directly for our survival—we focus on making memes, writing essays (guilty), and trying to live slightly-greener-around-the-edges-consumer-lifestyles.

Dealing with this metaphorical couch

Perhaps that’s why the struggling bulldozer became the source of so many memes. Except the most important one: The bulldozer as the environmental movement and the ship as Consumer Capitalism. Ultimately, trying to free the ship, or even convert it to run on green fuels or the latest in sail technology is treating the superficial layers. Instead, we need to dig deeper (yuk yuk). We need to re-regionalize production; reduce production; degrow our economies, find ways to disincentivize and discourage a consumer lifestyle; or better yet, make it clear that this whole culture of consumerism is suicidal and worse, anti-life, and must go in order to prevent future ship jams or far worse global disruptions. And even deeper, we need to reconnect people to the living Earth to make them understand that every sin against the planet, against other creatures, and against other humans who we exploit, we do to ourselves. That if we fail to change paths, we will run head first into the proverbial canal wall. And there will be no one to dig us out.

Desperate Americans Who Can’t Afford Housing Are Becoming “Modern-Day Nomads” …But Not By Choice

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By Robert Wheeler

Source: The Organic Prepper

A recent story floating around mainstream media regarding “modern-day nomads” reads like a contemporary article on Henry David Thoreau. It shares stories of people looking to downsize their life and live simply and stories of people who have fallen on hard times, unable to afford rent. 

However, what is lacking is the exposure of the dark underbelly of the “modern-day nomad” culture. In other words, they neglect to mention the fact that the enormous growth of the “modern-day nomad” is rooted in the fact that the world economy has all but collapsed, now mired in a global economic depression of unemployment, low wages, and personal financial catastrophes.

While it sounds romantic, it’s often rooted in desperation.

Nevertheless, some of the stories begin in the following way:

If you look closely on city streets, campgrounds, and stretches of desert run by the Bureau of Land Management, you’ll see more Americans living in vehicles than ever before. It was never their plan.

“I wasn’t prepared when I had to move into my SUV. The transmission was going. I had no money saved. I was really scared,” said April Craren, 52, bundled in blankets atop a cot inside her new minivan, a 2003 Toyota Sienna.

She flipped the camera on her phone to show me the camp stove she uses to make coffee and her view of the sun rising over the Colorado River. She has no toilet, shower, or refrigeration.

After separating from her husband, April found herself homeless in June 2020, exacerbating the depressive disorder for which she receives $1,100 a month in disability benefits.

“I could have gotten an apartment but in a crappy unsafe place with no money to do anything at all,” she explained.

Last year, where April lived in Nixa, Missouri, the average rent for an apartment was $762, slightly less than the national average. Like nearly half of American renters, she would have been crippled by the cost.

It’s not surprising, then, that job loss, divorce, or, say, the sudden onset of global health or financial crisis can push so many over the edge.

Many Americans have found themselves trapped in a spiral of poverty from which they simply can’t recover.

It doesn’t sound so bad to those of us with minimalist persuasions

At 52, April Craren didn’t choose this life. It was thrust upon her by unfortunate life circumstances. Craren couldn’t afford the exorbitant rent that is now average across the country on a fixed income. (Partly due to inflation but mostly due to the housing crash in 2008.)

The coordination of lockdowns and COVID restrictions have plunged the world into a deep depression of which we are only beginning to see. Even Wall Street couldn’t have caused this much damage. 

“If the Great Recession was a crack in the system, Covid and climate change will be the chasm,” says Bob Wells, the nomad who plays himself in the film Nomadland. Thankfully, Wells was able to help Craren adopt her lifestyle so she can now survive as a “nomad” through his Home On Wheels Alliance.

Wells’s lifestyle was a choice. But the newfound interest in the nomadic lifestyle is not a choice for many.

From Yahoo:

Realizing he had something valuable to share, he bought the domain name Cheap RV Living in 2005. He posted tips and tricks about better vehicle-dwelling, but what he was really offering was a road map to a better life.

Four years later, when close to 10 million Americans were displaced after the Great Recession, traffic to his site exploded. Finding himself at the center of a growing online community, he decided to create a meet-up in Quartzsite, Arizona. He dubbed it the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR), and in January 2011, 45 vehicles showed up. Eight years later, an estimated 10,000 vehicles convened for what was said to be the largest nomad gathering in the world.

The event’s explosive growth is undoubtedly a reflection of America’s increasing interest in van life as an answer to the affordable housing crisis, an idea made accessible by Bob on his YouTube channel, also named Cheap RV Living, created in 2015.

The “increasing interest in van life” that Yahoo News refers to is not some petit-bourgeois fantasy being realized by privileged middle-class white kids, able to go home at any time. It is the necessity of formerly middle class, working-class, and poor people all across America who are out of work or are working but cannot afford housing.

Minimalism is a legitimate lifestyle for some; others have no choice

For many, this culture of minimalism is genuinely how they wish to live. Nomads have a genuine desire to see empty overconsumption come to an end. However, we can not ignore that minimalism is being promoted to prepare the Western population who are used to high living standards to accept those that are much lower.

Why do you think we continually see articles promoting insects as a legitimate dining option? Why are The Great Reset promoters at the World Economic Forum telling the public that they will soon own nothing and learn to love it?

Being a nomad doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared.

For those who are already nomads, whether by choice or forced by economic circumstance, it might be helpful to know that there are many prepping options available to you. There is no need to be left to the mercy of wherever you are right now. 

I highly encourage you to access Daisy Luther’s article, “There’s Another Option Besides Hunkering Down and Bugging Out: Nomadic Living.” It will give you the perspective of someone who has voluntarily experienced and lived the nomadic lifestyle while also the mindset of remaining prepared for anything and everything. 

At the rate the Great Reset is taking shape, many of us may find ourselves embracing the nomadic lifestyle, willingly or not.

Have you considered nomadic living?