Forecast 2023 — Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine

“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier

“2023 could be a pivotal year for the USA if the pervasive lying can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun

“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy. Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” — Chris Martenson

“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger

“The incorrect narrative provided by mainstream media (MSM) is that climate change is our worst problem. To lessen this problem, citizens need to move quickly away from fossil fuels and transition to renewables. The real narrative is that we are running short of fossil fuels that can be profitably extracted, and renewables are not adequate substitutes. However, this narrative is too worrisome for most people to handle.” — Ugo Bardi

It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.

2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost it consensual mind.

Was the governing strategy simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at this point. And now onto the shape of things to come….

Economy

All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101 level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF, and its stooges — laid out explicitly in its house publications.

There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency.

This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the glaring point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations, hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity, we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early 1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark age in a resource-stripped world.

The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a money-loser, and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any real business.

This hard reality is especially true of shale oil, which had a good run production-wise 2009 to 2022, though the producers could barely make a dime at it. The shale oil “miracle” was largely a byproduct of near-zero interest rates. Investors flocked to it after 2009 because they couldn’t get any yield from bonds. Shale oil was played-up as a sure thing. It took investors a decade, and over a hundred oil company bankruptcies, to catch on — and now shale oil can’t attract enough new investment to keep up the giant operations at scale. The main shale oil regions, the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken fields of North Dakota, have entered permanent decline as they run out of “sweet spots” to drill and frack. Considering the new era of capital scarcity ahead, money for shale oil companies will be even harder to get and we’ll get less shale oil every year, while conventional oil continues its own remorseless decline. The catch here is that oil prices are just as likely to go down as up because the foundering economy creates substantial demand destruction — meaning that customers drop out of the market.

Natural gas involves similar dynamics. There seems to be a lot of it for now in the Marcellus formation spread over Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and into New York (where fracking has been prohibited for years). Natgas is very useful for electric generation, home heating, and some manufacturing, but not so much for transportation. Shale gas production is also based on “sweet spots” for drilling and there are fewer of them every year. The depletion curve for natgas is even more extreme than it is for oil: the flow stops all at once. The early shale gas plays in the southern US — Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett — have been in decline for years. As with shale oil, producing shale gas is expensive, with all the trucks ceaselessly delivering sand, water, and fracking chemicals to the drilling pads, and then transporting waste liquids off-site. Prediction: in 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about “nationalizing the oil industry,” which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether, given the all-around incompetence of government.

The strategy of changing out oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing US oil production. One, it’s premised on the fantasy that we can continue living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of so many millions of EVs in addition to everything else we ask it to do. Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their shrinking budgets anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The car industry itself may not survive the re-possession orgy coming in 2023 for defaulted auto loans. That shortfall will infect banking, too. The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly legs off.

Similarly, the new mandates against the use of nitrogenous fertilizers (made from natgas). European countries are already on-board with this WEF folly. The Netherlands, Europe’s leading food producer, is going so far as to forcibly shut down thousands of farms and limit fertilizer use on the remaining ones. Germany is likewise limiting fertilizers. Canada fell in line next. Prediction: in early 2023, “Joe Biden” will set in motion anti-fertilizer policies in the US. There will be plenty of squawking in the big farming states, rising to angry protests. The tractor convoys may invade Washington. The situation sets up a grim prospect for the US food supply: scarcity, high prices, and hunger ahead.

The Ukraine bread-basket is out of the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting season. Thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy, a more vulnerable Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer. By summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate to feed the existing populations. Routine grain exports to the poor nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve in those countries. By then, it will be too late to fix anything. The price of food will soar throughout Western Civ, aggravating other economic crises that will amount to metastasizing poverty. Populations will get very restless. Governments will fall (candidates: France, Germany, UK, Australia, the USA). In some places they will not recover in their prior form.

As a general proposition, Globalism is done. That got that underway in earnest with the Covid shut-downs. Now, geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced. Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine, including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity will just stop.

Europe has already blundered into buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville. Germany and the rest paid for that ticket by going along with feckless US policy to “weaken” Russia with sanctions (mission not accomplished). The coup de grace was the US wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines. So, Euroland has inadvertently decided to ditch its industrial base, which means they go medieval or worse. They have committed economic suicide. They’d better hope reincarnation is for-real. Anyway, they’re not coming back from this fiasco the way they went into it, that is, the way things were. When the shock of winter is over in early 2023, strife will be the new leitmotif in the Old World. People grow desperate in the six-weeks-wont of springtime. Nations crack up.

America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money. I’ve discussed this enough in books, prior blogs, and previous forecasts. Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value — for instance the tens of millions of suburban houses built with shitty, short-lived materials like strand-board and vinyl… all the cars….

Financialization led to the current inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer. People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hair-dressers. When the inflation is bad enough, say more than ten percent annually, it will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car payments, and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The bond-market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and they’re not being serviced or paid-off. The imploding bond market infects the stock markets and they crash, too.

Before long, nobody has money, except people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: the change-over from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum into the fall. The implosion leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, but this time without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a politician.

The Covid-19 Story Backfires Badly and Hell Breaks Loose

Against the backdrop of a developing economic depression, the public can no longer avoid seeing the calamity that the mRNA vaccines have instigated. Early death is in the news daily now and from exactly the adverse effects that have been derided as “conspiracy theory” by public health experts since 2021: myocarditis, blood clots, organ damage, neurological illness, unusually aggressive cancers, damaged immune systems. Meanwhile, America’s public health aristocracy — Dr. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many, many others will be compelled to testify under oath before newly re-constituted House committees and finally answer for all their dishonesty in the Covid-19 response saga. They lied about everything, especially the “vaccines?” It will go worse for them as public sentiment turns from submission to official bullshit to rage over a deadly fraud.

By then, the past efforts of this gang to mislead the public on Twitter and other social media will be well-documented. The exposed slime-trail of money and corruption between Pharma and federal bureaucrats will finally make an impression on the long-bamboozled nation. The mainstream media will be dragged into this morass and the public will begin to understand how the newspaper editors and TV news producers, too, were bought off by Pharma and controlled by the national security state to pimp for the Democratic Party and globalist interests outside the USA. This exposure could be the end of the great legacy news organs, The New York Times and the rest of the gang. Their executives will have to testify along with everyone else. They might not be prosecuted — in a gesture of respect for the First Amendment — but rather will suffer badly from their loss of credibility.

All of this will aggravate the animus against the government and the Democrat Party’s “Joe Biden” regime — which will be under assault from separate inquiries into the Hunter Biden laptop and its abundant evidence of bribery and treason, and hearings about the wide-open border, payments to Ukraine, and the gestapo-like behavior of the FBI.

Here’s a scenario for you: The Justice Department will be drowning in criminal referrals. The FBI will be in a state of paralysis, unable to carry out more insults against US citizens as its systematic crimes are revealed. When the DOJ dithers about bringing action, the public will be even more enraged. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gets dragged into Congress to answer for his misconduct and the resulting humiliation will run him out of office. “Joe Biden” may be forced to resign, drowned in a sea of troubles and scandals revealed. A deal will be made to let Veep Kamala Harris off the hook in exchange for her resignation.

That will leave the Republican Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with people who will follow the law. It will look like a promising return to decency and the rule of law. But the damage to America’s prestige will have been so gross by then that the federal government has lost legitimacy. The financial crisis, meanwhile, puts the government into something that smells like bankruptcy. The country is in a ferocious depression, the people have no money, but neither does the government. Real authority devolves to states and localities. The playing out of these dynamics also depends on what is happening outside the USA.

Europe in Macro

Don’t forget, Europe, the west end of the Eurasian landmass, used to be an important part of the world, with an aggregate GDP greater than even the USA’s or China’s. Europe is the birthplace of Western Civ, a division of the human project the past few thousand years that yielded tremendous advances in science, art, music, philosophy, and organized intelligence generally. Now it is on the rocks. Europe, in the aggregate, as represented, say, by the European Union, or NATO, made a grave error going along with the USA’s foolish Neocon project to make a heap trouble in Ukraine in order to “weaken” Russia.

Russia was no longer a threat to the USA after 1991. Once the USSR was done as a political entity, and after Russia recovered from the daze of collapse, it wanted to be treated by the West as a normal European nation. Russia became a market economy, like all the others in Europe. It held elections like the others, had a legislature, a new body of property law, a private news media, regular banks, and all the other trappings of modern political normality. Russia even requested early-on to become a member of NATO. The USA and Europe refused NATO membership, but also refused to admit Russia into European normality. Instead, led by the USA, the West conducted an asset stripping operation which hampered Russia’s redevelopment.

Otherwise, the West mostly ignored Russia, and in spite of all that Russia got back on its feet, got some industries going, especially oil-and-gas, and enjoyed two decades of relative stability. Russia eventually began reaching out in the world and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its Eurasian neighbors that functioned rather like the Eurozone.

As that was all happening — pay attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, on the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s uranium supply. Selling all that American uranium to Russia looked kind of bad, you’d think, and you’d be right. But then, suddenly, about $150-million dollars poured into the Clinton Foundation — much of it from Uranium One’s owner, one Frank Giustra — plus Bill Clinton happened to get a half-million dollar speaking gig in Russia, and… whaddaya know, CFIUS ended up approving the sale. The public hardly heard a peep about it. (Where was the US new media?)

During that same period, Hillary Clinton also helped facilitate the transfer of American bio-medical, nuclear, and Info technology to the high-tech consortium called Skolkovo, Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Much of the tech at issue was dual-use, good for civilian and military applications. Again, tens of millions of dollars gushed into the Clinton Foundation from the corporate participants in the Skolkovo deal. Crickets from the news media again.

In 2011, relations between the US and Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be friendly.

Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province, Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square. The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU — and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)

From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”

That declaration was accompanied by America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system. Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical for industry.

Russia did sacrifice more than $50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.

Europe was the big loser in all that. For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas, to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called “renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany, the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.

So now, Germany, and many other EU member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year. France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy shortages.

Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the 1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger role in that.

The USA poured over $100-billion into Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case, much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine. The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted, failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev and Lvov.

The open questions: how much punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.) What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt and mal-administered sovereign states.

Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out. Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.

Asia

The enormous region where most of the world’s people live is swirling with quickly changing dynamics. It’s hard to tell what kind of shape China is actually in at the close of 2022. The CCP capitulated on its extreme lockdown policy and now the country seems gripped by a new and severe outbreak of the Covid virus. It’s killing a lot of people, including quite a few higher-ups in the CCP. The world saw the beginning of a popular revolt in China through the fall of 2022 as demonstrations erupted. The political side remains opaque.

The economic side, less so. China’s wealth since year 2000 has derived from its immense factory capacity and cheap labor force. Globalism is wobbling, and with that the world’s supply line network. If trade relations with the USA continue to sour, both China and the USA will suffer. China will find itself at over-capacity, even for the giant Asian market. And they are competing with several other quickly-industrialized nations in the south, plus India, plus the old stalwarts South Korea and Japan.

The main problem for China, and indeed all the Pacific Rim nations on the Asian side: energy. China doesn’t have very much oil in the ground and is utterly dependent on imports. It has a lot of low-quality coal. It’s building coal and nuke plants like mad. Will that suffice? Electricity is great, but you need fossil fuels to run heavy industries. In the great shiftings of 2022, China made deals for getting more oil and gas from Russia. That might work for a while. But Russia’s energy resources are probably near peak production now. What happens on the way down from that peak? Maybe Russia will be less avid for sharing its fossil fuels with its neighbors. Maybe that will cause political friction. Maybe a desperate China will reach out and try to grab resources from Russia’s vast Siberian territories? Not next year, though….

The Neocon-led US foreign policy establishment is insane for sure, but the CCP is only not-crazy during times of great stability. Throw in some popular dissent and some economic distress, and the CCP could go cuckoo. Uncle Xi shows very Mao-like tendencies for creative despotism. The party must have a long game for Taiwan, but a distressed and crazed CCP, and an agitated Uncle Xi, could turn that into a short game out of desperation — and then what? We’d have two really crazed governments, the USA and China, ginning up the Eastern theater of World War Three. The upshot of predicament depends to some extent on how delicately Mr. Putin can organize America’s exit from Ukraine.

Prediction: For 2023 internal friction will preoccupy China as it attempts to square its operations with those pressing trends of our time: downscaling and relocalization. All this could easily lead to regional strife in China. For decades, the CCP has been the glue between its disparate peoples. It may prove to not be superglue.

Japan remains as enigmatic as ever. It has drifted economically for nearly forty years. Now it looks like it’s drifting into a sovereign bankruptcy as it loses control of its deeply-gamed bond markets. I’ll stick to my old predication that Japan is en route to going medieval. Its pre-industrial culture was very charming and worked well for long periods of history. Industrial modernity demoralized them. Japan imports all its oil. Without it, you can’t even begin to run a modern war machine, so there won’t be a second reaching-out for resources as in the 20^thcentury. The Japanese will not be alone in the new medievalism when this era completes itself.

The Deep State, an Appreciation

America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism, with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein came among us all and got into our hearts.

Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the study of history, and by those terms we are have entered a deep secular winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth, dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare. Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.

More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence. Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….

Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Craig Collins

Source: CounterPunch

As modern civilization’s shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to the decline and fall of civilizations past. Their studies have generated rival explanations of why societies collapse and civilizations die. Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch. Of course, surviving the real thing will become a much different story.

The latent fear that civilization is living on borrowed time has also spawned a counter-market of “happily ever after” optimists who desperately cling to their belief in endless progress. Popular Pollyannas, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, provide this anxious crowd with soothing assurances that the titanic ship of progress is unsinkable. Pinker’s publications have made him the high priest of progress.[1] While civilization circles the drain, his ardent audiences find comfort in lectures and books brimming with cherry-picked evidence to prove that life is better than ever, and will surely keep improving. Yet, when questioned, Pinker himself admits, “It’s incorrect to extrapolate that the fact that we’ve made progress is a prediction that we’re guaranteed to make progress.”[2]

Pinker’s rosy statistics cleverly disguise the fatal flaw in his argument. The progress of the past was built by sacrificing the future—and the future is upon us. All the happy facts he cites about living standards, life expectancy, and economic growth are the product of an industrial civilization that has pillaged and polluted the planet to produce temporary progress for a growing middle class—and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.

Not everyone who understands that progress has been purchased at the expense of the future thinks that civilization’s collapse will be abrupt and bitter. Scholars of ancient societies, like Jared Diamond and John Michael Greer, accurately point out that abrupt collapse is a rare historical phenomenon. In The Long Descent, Greer assures his readers that, “The same pattern repeats over and over again in history. Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.” Greer estimates that it takes, on average, about 250 years for civilizations to decline and fall, and he finds no reason why modern civilization shouldn’t follow this “usual timeline.”[3]

But Greer’s assumption is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from all past civilizations in four crucial ways. And every one of them may accelerate and intensify the coming collapse while increasing the difficulty of recovery.

Difference #1: Unlike all previous civilizations, modern industrial civilization is powered by an exceptionally rich, NON-renewable, and irreplaceable energy source—fossil fuels. This unique energy base predisposes industrial civilization to a short, meteoric lifespan of unprecedented boom and drastic bust. Megacities, globalized production, industrial agriculture, and a human population approaching 8 billion are all historically exceptional—and unsustainable—without fossil fuels. Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coalmines of the past are mostly depleted. And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided.[4] Our complex, expansive, high-speed civilization owes its brief lifespan to this one-time, rapidly dwindling energy bonanza.

Difference #2: Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist. Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force. The unprecedented surplus energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the past two centuries. But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy, constant growth, and rising profits will vanish.

However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust. Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic. Catabolismrefers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself. As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created. By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society’s dramatic decline.

Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict. Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers. Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking. Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another.[5]

Difference #3: Unlike past societies, industrial civilization isn’t Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec, or Mayan. Modern civilization is HUMAN, PLANETARY, and ECOCIDAL. Pre-industrial civilizations depleted their topsoil, felled their forests, and polluted their rivers. But the harm was far more temporary and geographically limited. Once market incentives harnessed the colossal power of fossil fuels to exploit nature, the dire results were planetary. Two centuries of fossil fuel combustion have saturated the biosphere with climate-altering carbon that will continue wreaking havoc for generations to come. The damage to Earth’s living systems—the circulation and chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ocean; the stability of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles; and the biodiversity of the entire planet—is essentially permanent.

Humans have become the most invasive species ever known. Although we are a mere .01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our domesticated crops and livestock dominate life on Earth. In terms of total biomass, 96 percent of all the mammals on Earth are livestock; only 4 percent are wild mammals. Seventy percent of all birds are domesticated poultry, only 30 percent are wild. About half the Earth’s wild animals are thought to have been lost in just the last 50 years.^[6] Scientists estimate that half of all remaining species will be extinct by the end of the century.^[7] There are no more unspoiled ecosystems or new frontiers where people can escape the damage they’ve caused and recover from collapse.

Difference #4: Human civilization’s collective capacity to confront its mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet. Humanity faces a perfect storm of converging global calamities. Intersecting tribulations like climate chaos, rampant extinction, food and freshwater scarcity, poverty, extreme inequality, and the rise of global pandemics are rapidly eroding the foundations of modern life.

Yet, this fractious and fractured political system makes organizing and mounting a cooperative response nearly impossible. And, the more catabolic industrial capitalism becomes, the greater the danger that hostile rulers will fan the flames of nationalism and go to war over scarce resources. Of course, warfare is not new. But modern warfare is so devastating, destructive, and toxic that little would remain in its aftermath. This would be the final nail in civilization’s coffin.

Rising From the Ruins?

How people respond to the collapse of industrial civilization will determine how bad things get and what will replace it. The challenges are monumental. They will force us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history. Who are we? Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion? Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?

The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs. Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives? Can we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, re-learn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth? Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet? The stakes could not be higher.

Notes.

[1] His books include: The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

[2] King, Darryn. “Steven Pinker on the Past, Present, and Future of Optimism” (OneZero, Jan 10, 2019) https://onezero.medium.com/steven-pinker-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-optimism-f362398c604b

[3] Greer, John Michael. The Long Descent (New Society Publishers, 2008): 29.

[4] Heinberg, Richard. The End Of Growth. (New Society, 2011): 117.

[5] For more on catabolic capitalism see: Collins, Craig. “Catabolism: Capitalism’s Frightening Future,”CounterPunch (Nov. 1, 2018). https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/01/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/

[6] Carrington, Damian. “New Study: Humans Just 0.01% Of All Life But Have Destroyed 83% Of Wild Mammals,” The Guardian (May 21, 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study

[7] Ceballos, Ehrlich, Barnosky, Garcia, Pringle & Palmer. “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering The 6th Mass Extinction,” Science Advances. (June 19, 2015). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253

Three Paths

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Erik Lindberg

Source: Resilience

To have lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that, though disappointed, foreswears compromise. But, if congenial to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. –Thomas Hardy

We have the choice of three paths into the future. But choice is probably not the right word, for historical change is, at its most orderly, the result of action and reaction and reaction to that. The word paths may in the same way be too tidy, for we are more likely to go crashing into the thickets than to follow the marked and warn paths that inhabit our imagination.

But here, in this brief exercise, I’m thinking about moral and cognitive maps and the way we might direct our ideals. Perhaps, then, I may be forgiven these simplifications. I am not making predictions about how the future might actually unfold; rather, I’m imagining the directions towards which we might cast our highest aspirations.

1) The Arc of History Bends towards Progress

Path 1 might be called the Liberal[i] Choice. It follows the idea that a just and secure global order requires basic equality among all humans and all nations. But equality is only a half of it: as important as the ideal of equality to the Liberal vision is the way equality might be achieved—namely by way of economic growth and increased overall wealth, which (the Liberal half-assumes and half-hopes) will be spread more equitably in the coming decades, allowing the impoverished to increase their standard of living faster than the already-prosperous will. The Liberal vision imagines that Western and industrialized standards of living might be spread across the globe so that all people might enjoy electricity, paved roads, internet connection, urban anonymity, and (almost as human right) relief from the most difficult aspects of manual labor or subsistence farming, with the opportunity to become educated and free from the limiting prejudices of traditional societies. It sees mobility, individualism, and choice as the hallmarks of this just and equitable society[ii], and imagines humanity becoming more cosmopolitan, tolerant, and secular, while earning its daily bread through endeavors deemed creative according to middle class values.[iii]

Liberals sometimes appreciate the link between economic growth or growing overall prosperity, on the one hand, and a tolerant and cosmopolitan global order, on the other. This link is more implied than discussed (though it is also sometimes difficult to find policy makers discussing anything but economic growth). But Liberals are mistaken to assume, as they often do, that education, mobility, and secular tolerance (along with the embrace of “free markets” and the cultivation of an entrepreneurial spirit) have themselves created economic growth and growing prosperity, and are wrong to imagine (as they do in a vague and image-filled sort of way) that Africa, Asia, and South America might join the Euro-American prosperous middle class once they free themselves from the train of ancient and venerable prejudices[iv] that stunt their progress. Western prosperity, after all, is not a pretty thing if you look into it too much.

Liberals are likewise mistaken to believe that tolerance or peacefulness is a simple state of mind, or that they might be projected effectively with bumper-stickers, protest signs, and earth-tone sweaters, or that a Clinton regime would have somehow been less bloody than a Trump one, or, cum Sanders, that our unparalleled levels of consumption (i.e. prosperity) does not in fact require a menacing global military presence in addition to the manipulations of a multi-billion dollar marketing industry. Peace does not come from virtuous mental states; it is instead the product of a delicate sociological balance that is absent in many parts of the world and that is disappearing in traditionally Liberal nations—and often for reasons that Liberals are hard-pressed to explain except by declaring that we need more Liberalism and its states of mind, backed by vague and increasingly incoherent policy objectives. The tepid enthusiasm for the center left (in the U.S. last autumn or in France today[v]) may be a symptom of its incoherent and increasingly implausible vision.

2. Power Realism[vi]

As I write these words, geo-political analysts are envisioning Russia and the United States on the verge of a new cold war. Perhaps. Regardless of how heated it becomes, the nature of this new East-West opposition, especially when compared to the previous one, is well worth noting. Not only has the past ideological divide mainly disappeared, we might instead be struck by the way these global rivals are coming to resemble each other. Never mind the possible scandals and whatever is at their root, the arrival of Trump represents what might hyperbolically be called Russianization of the U.S. Like Putin, after all, Trump does not operate according to a myth of emancipation, but only according to the pursuit of national power. Trump may not share Putin’s understanding that the source of power lies in resources (but perhaps he does), but his actions and his economic assumptions seem to concur with this view, as does the operating outlook that statecraft should work to corner as many remaining resources as possible.[vii]

Meanwhile, the rise of Trump and Trumpism in the U.S., as well as similar movements and sentiments in Western Europe, should in fact be attributed to the failure of the Liberal path and the decline of global economic growth—the end of one version of the “delicate sociological balance,” and the only version most of us can imagine (that gap in imagination is why I write). Long term stagnation and the end of expansive bourgeois hope have worked to weaponize the “me first” attitude: under a neo-Liberal world order, self-interest was supposed to lead to a rising tide, but Power Realists have little need for any such benevolent apologia. Now harnessed by belligerent nationalists, this attitude of economic competition is more and more likely to accept wide-scale inequality and is instead concerned to be on the winning side of a winner-take-all competition over the world’s remaining resources and comparative advantages.[viii]

To put this last point in another way, relatively few people have, at least until very recently, been willing to openly and consciously embrace the me-first belief-system of Power Realism, absent any accompanying narrative of emancipation. But most of the West’s middle-class has long wanted, expected, and demanded in a way that effectively “chooses” a path of Power Realism and the international bullying it requires–far sooner, at least, than it would veer towards a lowering of any such demand and expectations.

Dead Ends

Liberals and Power Realists equally see the dead-end that the opposing path leads to. But both are equally blind to, or at least resignedly sanguine about, the dead-end that their own path leads to. Liberals correctly understand that the widespread global inequality that Power Realists appear ready to tolerate will lead to permanent war and conflict and perpetual assaults on national security by those left behind.

Meanwhile, Power Realists seem to understand[ix] or sense (though they don’t openly articulate it in public) that the Liberal vision of 3% economic growth into perpetuity is a farce and a fantasy, and that the whole world will never live like we in Europe or America do.[x] Our way of life may in fact depend, in the end, on the walls and borders that Liberals decry on “moral” grounds. Insularity and defensiveness may be the required dispensation, as we choose our way of life over global equality. Power Realists also intuit that most Liberals can be turned into Power Realists under increasingly common economic conditions. The mere loss of expansive prospects is enough to turn many an Obama supporter into a Trump supporter. Minor economic decline, even the absence of economic expansion, was all that it took. Except for those prepared to blaze a new trail into uninhabited ideological wilds, Path 1 usually leads to Path 2 with the onset of only moderate duress. Liberals mistakenly believe that hate is a prime driver[xi] of inequality or discrimination, and that it might be purged from the heart with an enlightened dose of Liberal hope. This may occasionally be true, but hate is more the symptom and might inflict itself on anyone who has suffered repeated humiliations or degradation—or even the mere loss of unquestioned privilege.

Our current political conflicts, both domestic and international, can therefore be largely attributed to our adherence to these two merging paths—especially if we take into account our destabilized climate and resulting droughts in places like Syria and Somalia, in addition to all the other ways nations and peoples jostle for power and advantage. Climate chaos and the resulting political chaos will be the most notable legacy of Liberal growth and the Power Realism that has begun to cruelly manage it.[xii]

Political conflicts are almost always presented as a battle of ideals (as with the American choice of freedom over tyranny during WWII[xiii]) with the implied presumption that we might choose peace and equality as discrete policies or national values, unconnected from our economic and consumptive being- in-the-world. According to this battle of ideals, then, one side sees the world divided between a coalition of enlightenment, empathy, tolerance, and inclusion, opposed to uninformed bigotry and short-sighted selfishness. As a bumper sticker I saw the other day smugly put it, “I think, therefore I’m Liberal.” The other side sees a line dividing steadfast, uncompromising faithfulness and resolve from naïve and undiscerning acceptance and compromise, a line between strength and weakness, between realism and soft-headed idealism.

But our current global change and conflicts are better understood with concepts drawn from sociology or anthropology than from self-reassuring talking-points. A stable social order requires what we might refer to as consent or “buy in,” perhaps a lessening of the inevitable tension between civilization and its discontents into a stable détente. During the short Pax Americana, this consent has been purchased with the promise of expanding prospects for all, fueled by an economy that devoured its own resource base in a way that renders its continuation impossible. The Liberal order replaced social bonds with growing possibility,[xiv] and required for its maintenance the fulfilled promise that every year would provide more and that every generation could expect distinct material improvements. [xv] This order had no plan for material contraction or the onset of limits, other than to declare in the face of reality that there are no limits to growth.

This lack of a plan for stasis, let alone degrowth, might explain the demise of what so many Liberals believed to be the arc of history. We maintain our acquisitive and competitive values and the primacy of individual liberty. But in the absence of the growth and opportunity that purchased consent, trust horizons shrink and we see a turn towards group identity (as an alternative to participation in some imaginary global civilization) and begin an openly hostile scramble for remaining pockets of wealth and privilege (in the absence of the promise that everyone might have more forever). Globalist buy-in has no dependable currency.

Picture global conflict not as the fight between liberals and conservatives, between the enlightened and the ignorant, between moderates and fundamentalists. Picture, instead, penniless children with their noses pressed against the candy store window, while entitled brats stuff their pockets full of unearned loot.[xvi] Forget ideals and instead imagine repeated humiliation, envy, and frustration, broken promises and abortive ideals. It is not some obscure “ideology of hate” or an unexplained failure of moderate pro-Western policies according to which the explosive vest is strapped on. Nor can we explain as simple sexism the way Donald Trump’s gropings (and so much else) were so widely forgiven. Far stronger than we tend to accept is the desire for purpose and belonging, and the desperate (and sometimes violent) search for renewed social bonds when the limitless world of boundless and bondless expansion flounders on the shoals of a finite planet. We once lived in a world when there was little disbelief in face of the comforting contradiction that we might all somehow “get ahead.” Now it is clear that only a few can actually do so. It is this realization that creates nationalism, Brexit, right wing populism, hatred of immigrants, or “America First.”

3. A Third Way

The Liberal Dream is dying because the planet was never infinite and our potential never limitless–not because some bad-guy ignoramuses somehow got the upper hand. A social order could never be maintained for long by the promise of more every year, while the tide can only rise so high before it washes all good fortune away. The most direct and facile, yet brutal and likely, antithesis of Liberal Growthism is personified by Trump, Putin, or Le Pen today, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in years past,[xvii] and can only lead to war and repression.[xviii] Such rulers are what arise at the onset of Liberalism’s decline. But they offer no real solution, only a quick reordering of hope and expectation into anger and hate—an ordering nonetheless. Intoxicated by the thrill of an arms race, Power Realists ignore the fact that the oppression and forceful repression of at least half the world’s population is unsustainable, and that the immiseration it spreads will eventually inflict us all. Liberals know this and are aghast at the rise of these values. But they, in turn, are all too ready to ignore the fact that Liberal hope requires unsustainable growth and insulate themselves from the realization that our global climate crisis was not caused by nationalism or the greed of someone else. It was caused by this same growth, which continues to demand levels of goods and services that are bringing our ecological systems to the point of collapse.

There is of course a third choice—one that is simple yet mainly unthinkable. It sees with heart stopping clarity the dead-end towards which the other two paths lead and has math, science, and even hard-headed economic analysis[xix] on its side, not to mention a pretty solid interpretation of most of the world’s major religions. But it is a choice that few appear prepared to adopt, even entertain. It accepts the view that a secure and stable global order must be a relatively egalitarian one—that, according to one idiom, all God’s children deserve a fair share of the Earth’s bounty. It understands that the 5% of the global population that the United States accounts for cannot continue to use a quarter or a fifth of the world’s energy and natural resources while emitting a similar proportion of carbon dioxide.

And here is where this path parts ways from any of the views normally deemed fit for polite company: for it does not believe that the rest of the world should be brought to our level; that would be ecological suicide. For if the whole world were to live like Americans we would need an additional four to six Earth’s to supply the required energy and natural resources, and to absorb our terrible waste. A transition to wind and solar power does not substantially change this equation, nor do all the most far-flung efficiencies that anyone might realistically imagine.

The path according upon which humanity has a chance to find a just and sustainable world requires what is unthinkable yet mathematically impeachable and morally imperative: that we in America and Europe live more like African villagers, Indian subsistence farmers, and South American peasants.[xx] They must become our models for the triumph of human dignity and justice, not to mention sustainability. We, who have the appearance, at least, of a choice, must choose this sort of radical simplicity, embrace the hard work and the community interdependence, and abandon dreams that we might live without limits and be or do anything we can imagine (that godlike conceit was forged under the illusion that we have an infinite universe at our disposal[xxi]).

This will never happen you say. It is unrealistic. People will never give up privilege unless they have to.[xxii] Congratulations: you have just chosen Path 2. But true enough, I can’t disagree, this skepticism is probably warranted, especially if the limits of human aspiration are to be pragmatic and strategic, if you can’t hope beyond the current political parties and already established life-paths for middle class people. For there is no clear path from where we are to a world of radically simple sustainability, except the one paved with cataclysmic violence and bloodshed, in which we will eventually be forcefully taken to our knees.[xxiii]

But we might still stand up and declare, “this is the right path, this is what I support, this is where I will throw my energy.” There is no reason why we must continue to choose Path 1 or Path 2, or accept it–no reason why we must continue to pretend that our way of life or our side of the ideological divide (give or take a few ideological tweaks) is just and sustainable. There is no reason why we should continue to give our consent to the maintenance of either growth or inequality. Let us openly and loudly declare our commitment to our own eventual material poverty, and in this declaration find moral and spiritual wealth. Let us begin to proclaim the unthinkable and think it every day.

[i] By Liberals I mean philosophical Liberals, which has generally included many who are considered political conservatives. Ronald Reagan was as much a Liberal as Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump, however, may not be a Liberal.

[ii] To borrow Chris Smaje’s term, Liberals are “solutionist” when it comes to freedom and choice, unable to see that there are in it advantages and disadvantages, payoffs and collateral damage.

[iii] Where apps are “creative” but managing erosion on a hardscrabble farm is not.

[iv] And accept that loan from the IMF along with the accompanying “restructuring” and “reforms.

[v] Does anyone really embrace the vision of a Clinton or a Macron? Or is it just a safe alternative to the alternative?

[vi] I am not suggesting that “Power Realists” are across the board more “realistic.”

[vii]http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-24/donald-trump-and-economic-growth-a-brief-interregnum-on-growthism/

[viii] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-24/donald-trump-and-economic-growth-a-brief-interregnum-on-growthism/

[ix] I’m completely not sure about this. Power Realists may be as Growthist as neo-liberals and certainly trumpet the ideals of economic growth. But their rise, I would assert without much qualification, has been made possible by the ending of growth and their policies are suited to the end of a Growthist order.

[x] It is with some weariness that I feel compelled to provide evidence for this conclusion. Either the idea that the Earth can provide enough resources for the rest of the world to live like us, or the idea that exponential growth remains a viable plan for the future, on their own, belie any mathematical conclusions. But the Liberal vision requires both. A true Liberal paradise would require that we maintain 3% or so economic growth in the industrialized world, while the “developing” world grows even faster to catch up. The main reason that this can’t work is, simply, that growth is tantamount to mass genocide followed by mass suicide. For despite ballyhooed efficiencies and alleged “decoupling” no one has figured out to create more stuff for more people without using more natural resources. There is no way to lift a 400 ton passenger airplane off the ground with a small ecological footprint or provide everyone with one-hundred horsepower personal transportation without making the planet unlivable. If everyone were to live like Americans, we would require about 6 times the current amount of things like rubber, oil, timber, concrete, and iron ore. Meanwhile 3% economic growth—the amount most Liberal economists believe is necessary to maintain our delicate sociological balance—means that the size of the economy (and the amount of natural resources it requires) will double every 23 years. That means in 56 years, the natural resource requirements would be quadruple the current level. This is not a viable path into the future. These resources simply don’t exist, and attempting to squeeze them out of our planet would make it unlivable. Past and current attempts may already have. No wonder so many pro-growth technophiles look to outer space as the solution to humanity’s alleged need for growth—which begs the very basic existential question of why so many humans see this as a better plan than the unthinkable one I suggest below. I review some of the fundamental problems of economic growth in http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-02-22/economic-growth-a-primer/

[xi] What Jacques Derrida would have referred to as a “transcendental signifier,” a thing-in-itself, something that just is, which, like “evil,” not only needs no further explanation, but in fact shuns it.

[xii] As Michael Klare has recently noted more people are on the brink of starvation now than at any time since WWII. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-04-21/climate-change-genocide/

[xiii] This “choice” is far better described with that word, and with the notion of “ideals,” than anything we encounter today. However, the clean narrative of good vs evil has nevertheless been simplified, with the relation of national interests to resources and empire being erased from the picture, or perhaps overshadowed by the atrocities.

[xiv] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-17/the-growthist-self-growthism-part-3/

[xv] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-11/a-geo-physis-of-freedom/

[xvi] And then picture these same entitled brats with their noses pressed up against another window on some other day.

[xvii] As the US Joint Forces Command concluded in 2010, “A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. At best, it would lead to periods of harsh economic adjustment. To what extent conservation measures, investments in alternative energy production, and efforts to expand petroleum production from tar sands and shale would mitigate such a period of adjustment is difficult to predict. One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest.” https://fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf, p.22 (emphasis added).

[xviii] Someone like Reagan is of great historical interest, what with his attempt to create a synthesis of the two, reflected in his soaring rhetoric, but paid for with massive debt and the strategic use of populist hate.

[xix] I am not, of course, referring to most mainstream economic analysis. Economics as a discipline has been charged mainly with the task of figuring out how to grow the economy regardless of the consequences or the possibility. By “hard-headed” I am thinking of the few economists who have escaped this Growthist ideology and follow what Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard refer to as “biophysical economics.”

[xx] This point has been made most poignantly by Chris Smaje. If you haven’t been reading his work, start now. It’s among the most interesting in the “deep sustainability” world. I need to further note that this current essay was motivated by Chris’s “Article 51” where he writes: “I’ve been accused before of irresponsibly wishing to lower the standard of living in the wealthier countries to the level of common misery experienced by humankind in general in relation to my remarks on immigration. On reflection, I’m happy to embrace that accusation, if I’m allowed a few extra lines of defence. I embrace it because, well, what’s the alternative? Historically, capitalist ideology has justified itself with aqueous metaphors of downward trickling and upwardly rising tides that benefit all. It’s become clear that these are mirages. So the argument against a fair global spread of economic resources then boils down essentially to the devil take the hindmost. I can’t justify that to myself ethically, and in any case I think that road leads to a still deeper mire of global misery.” http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-03-28/article-51/

Smaje consistently condenses complicated issues into digestible form without sacrificing the complexity. I’m trying to recondense some of his thoughts—or my take on them—into my own idiom and may be justly accused of adding little to what he has already said.

[xxi] It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s everywhere. The prevailing “moral” of 90% of the movies currently made for 5 year olds is that they can be who or whatever they want, if they only follow their dreams and “be themselves.” I get where this is coming from, and can glimpse the cost of abandoning this fiction. But we need to start considering the fact that it just isn’t true, and certainly can’t be, at least as currently understood, for 6 or 7 or 8 billion people. It might be possible, for a while, for half a billion or so. And then they are likely to kick and scream and pout when the promise turns out to have been false.

[xxii] And the ecological limits of the world will never appear to us as a “have to,” even though they most certainly are.

[xxiii] There are of course brave pioneers who have beaten a track in this direction—ones like Jim Merkel. But the problem of a whole-society or whole-system transition has yet to be solved.

Made For Each Other

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic. The ship is the techno-industrial economy. It’s going down because it has taken on too much water (debt), and the bilge pump (the oil industry) is losing its mojo.

Neither faction understands what is happening, though they each have an elaborate delusional narrative to spin in the absence of any credible plan for adapting the life of our nation to the precipitating realities. The Blues and Reds are mirrors of each other’s illusions, and rage follows when illusions die, so watch out. Both factions are ready to blow up the country before they come to terms with what is coming down.

What’s coming down is the fruit of the gross mismanagement of our society since it became clear in the 1970s that we couldn’t keep living the way we do indefinitely — that is, in a 24/7 blue-light-special demolition derby. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with accounting fraud, but in the end it is an affront to reality, and reality has a way of dealing with punks like us. Reality has a magic trick of its own: it can make the mirage of false prosperity evaporate.

That’s exactly what’s going to happen and it will happen because finance is the least grounded, most abstract, of the many systems we depend on. It runs on the sheer faith that parties can trust each other to meet obligations. When that conceit crumbles, and banks can’t trust other banks, credit relations seize up, money vanishes, and stuff stops working. You can’t get any cash out of the ATM. The trucker with a load of avocados won’t make delivery to the supermarket because he knows he won’t be paid. The avocado grower will have to watch the rest of his crop rot. The supermarket shelves empty out. And you won’t have any guacamole.

There are too many fault lines in the mighty edifice of our accounting fraud for the global banking system to keep limping along, to keep pretending it can meet its obligations. These fault lines run through the bond markets, the stock markets, the banks themselves at all levels, the government offices that pretend to regulate spending, the offices that affect to report economic data, the offices that neglect to regulate criminal misconduct, the corporate boards and C-suites, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the guarantors of mortgages, car loans, and college loans, and the ratings agencies. The pervasive accounting fraud bleeds a criminal ethic into formerly legitimate enterprises like medicine and higher education, which become mere rackets, extracting maximum profits while skimping on delivery of the goods.

All this is going to overwhelm Trump soon, and he will flounder trying to deal with a gargantuan mess. It will surely derail his wish to make America great again — a la 1962, with factories humming, and highways yet to build, and adventures in outer space, and a comforting sense of superiority over all the sad old battered empires abroad. I maintain it could get so bad so fast that Trump will be removed by a cadre of generals and intelligence officers who can’t stand to watch someone acting like Captain Queeg in the pilot house.

That itself might be salutary, since only some kind of extreme shock is likely to roust the Blue and Red factions from their trenches of dumb narrative. If the Democratic Party had put one-fiftieth of the effort it squanders on transgender bathroom privileges into policy for mitigating our tragic misinvestments in suburban sprawl, we might have gotten a head-start toward a plausible future. Instead, the Democratic Party has turned into a brats-only nursery school, with the kiddies fighting over who gets to play with the Legos. The Republican Party is Norma Desmond’s house in Sunset Boulevard, starring Donald Trump as Max the Butler, working extra-hard to keep the illusions of yesteryear going.

All of this nonsense is a distraction from the task at hand: figuring out how to live in the post techno-industrial world. That world is not going to operate the ways we’re used to. It will crush our assumptions and expectations. Lying about everything won’t be an option. We won’t have the extra resources to cover up our dishonesty. Our money better be sound or it will be laughed at, and then you’ll starve or freeze to death. You’d better hope the rule of law endures and work on keeping it alive where you live. And nobody will get special brownie points for the glory of sexual confusion.

I look for the financial fireworks to start around March – April, as the irresolvable debt ceiling debate in congress grinds into a bitter stalemate, and it becomes obvious that there will be no voucher for the great infrastructure spending orgy that Trump’s MAGA is based on. Elections in France and the Netherlands have the potential to shake apart the European Union, and with that the footing of European banks. Pretty soon, everybody in all parties and factions will be asking: “Where did the glittering promises of Modernity go…?” As we slip-side into the first stages of a world made by hand.

For Purely Technical Reasons

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

It is tempting for us to think that our technological choices—whether we choose to live in a city, a suburb or out in the country; whether we want to drive a pick-up truck, a gasoline-electric hybrid or ride a bicycle; whether we take a train, drive long distances or fly—are determined by our tastes. We may flatter ourselves that we are in control, and that our choices are reflective of our enlightened, environmentally conscious values. This view rests on a foundation of circular reasoning: we behave in enlightened ways because we are enlightened, and we are enlightened because, to wit, we behave in enlightened ways. As to why what we consider enlightened is in fact enlightened rather than a question of possibly questionable personal taste—that is not to be discussed: de gustibus non est disputandum.

But there is an alternative viewpoint, which seems more realistic in many ways, because it rests on a foundation of physical, technical specifics rather than fickle and arbitrary consumer preference, whim or taste. From this viewpoint, our technology and associated lifestyle choices are dictated by the technical requirements of their underlying technologies, both physical (the operation of the energy industry, the transportation industry, etc.) and political (the operation of political machines that segregate society by net worth and income, relegating wage-earners to a global disenfranchised underclass).

A few years ago I found out that I needed to replace the diesel engine on my boat (the old one blew up definitively) and looked at a number of options, one of which was to replace it with an electric motor and a large bank of batteries. The electric option was touted as being quiet, non-polluting, and having just enough range to get in and out of the marina and to get back to dock if the wind died during a typical daysail. It turned out to be more than twice as expensive as a replacement diesel engine. As to what one might do to take such a boat any great distance (that involves many hours of motoring) the solution is to… add a diesel engine hooked up to a very large alternator, at triple the cost of just replacing the diesel. And so I just replaced the diesel.

Diesel engines have a lot of positive qualities: they can run continuously for tens of thousands of hours; they can be rebuilt many times just by replacing the bearings, the cylinder sleeves, the piston rings and the valves; they are exceptionally reliable; the fuel they use is energy-dense. For these reasons, they are found throughout freight and construction industries and are used for small-scale power generation. They can be very large: the larger ships have engines that are as big as houses, with ladders welded to their cylinder walls, so that servicemen can climb down into them to service them after the cylinder head and the piston assembly are pulled out using an overhead shop crane. Small diesel engines make a lot less sense, and the silliest of them are the ones found on small yachts. There are many aspects of their design that make them silly, but there is also an overriding reason: they use the wrong fuel.

You see, diesel is a precious commodity, used in the transportation industry (by trucks, locomotives and ships), and in construction equipment, with no alternative that is feasible. A cousin of diesel fuel is jet fuel—another petroleum distillate—that is used to power jet engines, again, with no alternative that is feasible. And then there is a fuel that is only really useful as a small engine fuel: gasoline, that is. Gasoline engines beyond a certain size become much more trouble than they are worth.

Each barrel of crude oil can be distilled and refined into a certain amount of diesel and jet fuel, a certain amount of gasoline, some tar and some far less useful substances such as naphtha. The diesel is spoken for, because it literally moves the world; but if enough small engines cannot be found to burn all the gasoline that is produced, it becomes a waste product and has to be flared off at the oil refinery, at a loss. Indeed, prior to Henry Ford coming up with the brilliant plan to build cars cheap enough for his workers to afford, gasoline was dumped into rivers just to get rid of it, because while everyone burned kerosene (a distillate, like jet fuel and diesel) in lamps, cars remained playthings of the rich, and there simply wasn’t a market for any great quantities of gasoline.

Therefore, it became very important to find ways to sell gasoline, by finding enough uses for it, no matter how superfluous they happened to be. And although some people think that the private automobile is a symbol of luxury and freedom and feel the thrill of the open road, the reason they think that is because these ideas were implanted in their heads by the people who were tasked with finding a market for gasoline. Alongside cars, great effort was put into marketing all sorts of other small engines: for lawn mowers, jet skis, motorcycles, ATVs, boat outboard motors… The only semi-industrial use of gasoline is in chainsaws, small generators and air compressors, service and delivery vehicles, and outboard engines.

And so people were sold on the idea of driving their own car, whether they needed to or not, and spending lots of time stuck in traffic—all so that they would pay for gasoline. By causing all that excess traffic congestion, they also created the need to widen roads and highways, generating demand for another borderline useless petroleum product: road tar. And since there was a problem with cramming all these cars into cities (where cars are generally not needed if the cities are laid out using proper urban design, with sufficient numbers of tram, light rail and subway lines, etc.) the solution was to move everybody out to the suburbs. And so the reason half of the US population now lives in suburbia and drives has nothing to do with their needs, and everything to do with the need to sell them gasoline.

Some people may react negatively to the idea that their suburban castle and their magic chariot are all just part of a plan to make them spend much of their life paying for the right to dispose of toxic waste in unsafe ways. Rest assured, their preprogrammed negative reaction is part of the plan. Every effort has been made to program people to think that this waste disposal job—carried out at one’s own expense—is, in fact, something that should be considered a sign of success. The most efficient way to motivate a slave to perform is to convince him that he is free. To this end, driving is celebrated in music and film and portrayed as a way of life. Calling it what it is—being a slave to a machine—is bound to cause cognitive dissonance, all the more so because driving a lot destroys one’s mind: in the immortal words of a character from the movie Repo Man, ”The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.” In this respect, most of the people living in the US are far past the point of no return, and it is pointless to attempt to impart to them any ideas that are discordant with the dead-end lifestyle into which they have been unconsciously coerced.

Getting back to electric vehicles, such as what my boat would have ended up if I were gullible and made of money: they are obviously a defective idea. Their range is limited, they take longer to charge than it takes to fill a gas tank, and they use expensive and dangerous lithium-ion batteries that need periodic replacement. There is not enough lithium available to continue making batteries for laptops and smartphones (which periodically burst into flames), never mind providing for a giant expansion of battery-building to support lots of electric cars. Perhaps most importantly, they shrink the market for gasoline. So, what’s the reason behind the push?

It certainly isn’t part of any particular effort to electrify transportation in general, because no electric solution exists for ships or planes, and electrifying rail freight is an impossibly expensive proposition. It certainly isn’t part of an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, because most of the ways electricity is currently generated is by burning coal and natural gas—and will be, while supplies last, because electricity is hard to store, and no matter how many solar arrays and wind farms are installed something will be needed to power the electric grid on overcast, windless days.

No, the push for electric cars is motivated by a different sort of technology—political technology. You see, the oil age is drawing to a close. Last year the oil companies only discovered 1 barrel of oil for every 10 barrels they produced; at the turn of the century it was closer to 1 for every 4. At the same time, most of the easy-to-get-at oil has already been produced, and now it takes 1 barrel’s worth of energy to produce something like 10 barrels, whereas at the dawn of the age of oil it was closer to 1 for every 100 barrels. Such a low level of net energy production is turning out to be insufficient to maintain an industrial civilization, and as a result economic growth has largely stalled out. And although large investments in oil production have succeeded in keeping large volumes of oil flowing, for now, this is turning out to be an ineffective way to invest money, with many energy companies, once so profitable, now unable to pay the interest on their debt. And even though constant injections of free money are currently keeping developed economies from cratering into bankruptcy, it has been clear for some time that each additional dollar of debt produces significantly less than a dollar’s worth of economic growth. Growing debt within a growing economy can be very nice; but if the economy isn’t growing as fast, it’s fatal.

As the oil age winds down, personal transportation, in the form of the automobile, is bound to once again become a plaything of the very rich. But then, when it comes to electric cars, it already is! And I don’t mean Tesla: the most commonly used electric vehicle worldwide is the golf cart. And who uses golf carts? Members of golf clubs; guests at resorts; residents of posh gated communities; employees at corporate and academic campuses… And what do all these people have in common? They are all members of the salaried elite; they are definitely not members of the wage-earning class. To them, the electric car offers a way of preserving a semblance of the status quo for themselves while setting themselves apart (in their own minds) from all of the gasoline-burning riffraff. Let the great unwashed in the flyover states, with their pickup trucks complete with gun racks, burn what’s left of the gasoline while overdosing on synthetic opiates while the salaried elites and individuals of high net worth, ensconced in their campuses and gated communities, will create a different future for themselves, replete with wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars (until they all get shot by all those they have disenfranchised).

Positively Thriving Through the Collapse of Civilisation

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Open

Source: ZenGardner.com

Have you ever watched something happening in slow motion? You can quite clearly see the end result, but nevertheless, you can’t quite believe in your mind what your eyes are seeing. Like when the twin towers ‘collapsed’. The demolition was happening there right in front of you, but you had to pinch yourself to make sure you weren’t just dreaming. I feel exactly that way about modern society right now. The collapse is already happening, but in slow motion, so you can’t quite believe the entirety of it. What will it look like as the ‘buildings’ topple? More importantly, how can we not only survive the shift, but positively thrive in it?…

Slow motion free fall

Have you seen the film “Collapse” yet? It’s a grounded, real and at times very emotive interview with the late whistle-blower Michael C Rupert. I believe everybody on the planet should watch it (I’ve included it below). You hear the calling of a soul, put here for a purpose. Never so clearly have I witnessed a man express so eloquently, the destiny that drew him here.

He sums up so marvelously the reason why society is going to collapse. Let me correct myself: why it is already collapsing, just that it’s in slow motion, and not everyone has yet pinched themselves out of the dream that prevents them seeing the reality of it.

Society is built on the foundation of ‘infinite growth’, the need to continuously expand in order to service a surging ocean of debt. It depends on the ever burgeoning exploitation of natural resources. Which is why governments and corporations are more concerned with the last pockets of oil under the pole, rather than the ice on top of it. It’s why they’re stripping the tar from the sand, and fracking the earth into oblivion. Therein lies the problem. That’s why society is already in a state of slow motion free fall. Because we live on a planet of finite resources, and the two ends no longer meet. We’ve built foundations on sand and now the tide is fast flowing in.

Nevertheless, I am an optimist. Where others might slip into fear, I see the light shining through the shadows. There’s a way to survive what is to come. No, there’s a way to positively thrive in it!

Thriving the meltdown

You first have to accept what you see. That’s a challenge in itself. Watch the film, especially towards the end, because it’s fascinating. The interviewer suggests all manner of information can be presented to support the view you want to put across (like the ‘debate’ on global warming for example). And he’s right. But that’s not what Michael is about and neither am I. For me, and for others I work with, the debate is not necessary – such intellectual pontification is a pointless waste of time. We’ve already seen the towers collapsing. I can feel the energies of higher benevolence instigating the collapse mechanism. The earth needs to be saved from the wanton, consumeristic destruction. The debate – if ever there was one – is over. And until you can see through the veil, there’s nowhere to begin. So my first suggestion – assuming you feel any resonance with me – is to work to see past the veil into what is surely now taking place: collapse of the civilisation we currently depend upon.

When this lands for you, you’ll realise like the Hopi Elders, that the only way to prosper through this collapse, is by spiritual means. This will be a ‘war’ of the spiritual through the material. Not fighting. Rather breaking through the sense of physical disempowerment into the liberation of the spirit. The expression of the boundless, unlimited you, and watching this miraculous nature shine out into the world. Trusting that your every step will be supported. Not in the way your ego might want. It won’t deliver the physical outcome you desire. It’ll deliver much more than that: as the old skin peels off, a metamorphosis into an interconnected, interdimensional way of being – The rise of the Divine Human.

But yes, at this time we are physical beings too. And we’ll need a platform from which to unveil our divine being at the heart of every man, woman and child. Just as the dragonfly stands on the leaf, peels off the old skin and unfolds its wings in the sunlight before taking flight, so we’ll need a stable background to help people learn to fly.

What does that mean exactly?

It means we have to bring as swift an end to the system as possible. It’s gobbling up precious resources and energy, ridiculously wasting them on idle rubbish, mindless entertainment and hopeless addiction. We have to ween ourselves off this crutch through non-compliance with the corporations that would try to bolster it – those that would like to keep mankind dwelling in the murky depths of the pond, rather than flying liberated above it.

Discovering how less is more

We have to spend our time and money wisely now: to invest in ourselves and our future (especially since paper money will lose its value); to gather together the resources and communities that can help one another out as society steadily pulls itself apart. Even if you continue to work in the matrix, you can still prepare. And don’t worry, you have time, if you begin now. Society will not collapse in one fell swoop. It will be a steady degradation. It’s happening now. It’s just that most haven’t clicked yet as to what’s going on. So you’ve got time to gather together, share ideas, support and suggestions about what might work best. You can start growing your own food and collect a reserve of essentials to tide you through difficult times.

That’s the inspirational idea behind Transition Towns, which have been springing up and thriving all around the world for several years now. It’s about supporting local skills, already developing the web of a local support and resource mechanism. Even if it’s just a micro community of a few neighbours and friends, it will make all the difference as the globalised structure fractures.

In the film below, Michael shares a poignant and prophetic example of the fate of two countries – North Korea and Cuba – that both suffered through the collapse of the iron curtain: affected because they were both dependent on Soviet oil, just as the civilised world is right now.

The North Korean approach was to centralise resource, for government to control everything, like the collectivised food supply and nationalised energy. Communism? It sounds suspiciously like the leading western ‘democracies’ to me. And what was the result? Starvation on a massive scale. Cuba on the other hand encouraged people to come together in local communities, to grow their own food in their own back gardens, thus consuming a fraction of the energy. They no longer have the paraphernalia of modern society – a blessing – and the people positively thrived by needing less, discovering that less is more.

Some will say we can use unlimited supplies of ‘free energy’. Whilst we may benefit from new technologies that could come through, what we have to realise is how hopelessly dependent the current system is on oil. How will all those fossil fuel engines be replaced? Where will the resources come from to build the new machines, gadgets and widgets? Whatever technology we discover to tide us through, it is my strong assertion that we need to get used to consuming less, using wisely the resources we currently have…

Even if you new the world was to end tomorrow, would you plant that apple tree today? Would you live wisely, with compassion and a soft footprint on the earth? It is these souls that will ascend through the collapse of the old world. This is the new consciousness which will thrive as the old is peeled away.

Pinch yourself awake

The universe is a flowing ocean of energy. Humanity – spurred by an Interdimensional Intervention – has built a dam and tried to contain it in some eddy current. And we’ve turned a blind eye as the realigning energy of higher dimensional forces and devic consciousness now comes in to break apart the false reality fabric over time.

This shift and cleansing process that is beginning will be unlike any other to have taken place on earth. Why? Because Gaia has released her karma. She needed the control mechanism too, in order to experience being fully accepting and forgiving of those that would disrespect her. But she’s processed that constriction now and needs it no longer. Thus the ‘matrix’ no longer has a foundation. It will be peeled off over time. There will be no place for the old human consciousness, which will be shed with the skin too. Instead, will incarnate the new human consciousness – Divinicus Cometh – to thrive through this cleansing process which has now begun.

The renewed human spirit is meant to ride this realigning wave, rather than try to manipulate it. Because anything that tries to control something else, ultimately ends up controlling only itself. So we need to learn to ride the wave of the soul once more. To listen to it and above all, feel it coursing through our veins, respond to its direction. We need to master the inner alchemy of change. There’s two streams of consciousness within you. Which do you identify with: the sense of separation, the fear and contraction? or do you penetrate that, soften through it and flow with your eternal spirit?Right now too many are still caught ‘rabbit like’ in the car headlamps as the slow motion tsunami approaches them. Hoping, pretending, that they’re just in a dream and when they wake up, all will be okay, the car won’t really be careering towards them. But by then, it’s too late.

I urge you then to watch the film, pinch yourself awake, but then let the soul inspire you to make new choices in this new multidimensional landscape. And if you can’t yet clearly hear the soul and follow its guidance through every choice, then I would suggest that’s the best place to begin. Here’s the documentary and afterwards, if you’d like help with the soul guidance part, feel free to get in touch.

from my heart to yours

Open
(on behalf of Openhand)

The Dying Americans

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Chad Hill

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

I’ve often used the term “the final solution for the working class,” in reference to the current American policy towards its vast intercoastal peasantry who, for reasons of circumstance or inclination, do not subject themselves to the decade or so of wildly expensive education that qualifies them for the remaining jobs on offer. It may be a reflection of my readership that I haven’t received any pushback. As someone who is in that same working class, I can clearly see what is happening around me, and I’m not alone. David J. Blacker, in his book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, also broached the subject of eliminationism, going so far as to study the German holocaust literature of the 1930’s which calmly and rationally discussed how to deal with the problem of getting rid of the millions of excess people whom the elites determined were “undesirable” in the brave new world they were creating.

After last week, it’s hard to argue that this is hyperbole. The news that America’s white working class between the ages of 45-65 has dramatically falling life expectancy, alone against nearly the entire world, received a surprising (to me) bit of coverage. When I first read it, I assumed it would be just another footnote story that I would write about here, but would be ignored everywhere else. But it received a surprising amount of coverage: even Paul Krugman wrote about it. I suspect a large part of that was due to the fact that it was research by the most recent economics “Nobel” laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, so it was harder to ignore than if it had been from some unknown researcher.

Often times you hear about a “dieoff” due to our situation. I think this study confirms beyond a doubt that the dieoff is already happening. Yet, consider that, before this study became popularized, you would have never heard about it in the mainstream press. Still doubt the collapse is real?

It’s not people dying in the streets, though, unlike some of the more feverish TEOTWAKI peak oil predictions. From the research, elevated levels of suicide and drug abuse are the prime culprits. It’s the million little deaths that go unnoticed in the obituary columns of decaying communities all across this formerly prosperous nation. Someone overdosed in a back alley. Or a meth lab exploded. Or maybe they were killed in a car accident, or decapitated while driving their motorcycle too fast. Or they were shot by police. Or they are dying of liver failure by age 40. Or, increasingly, they are ground down slowly by the many chronic diseases such as diabetes that are symptomatic of the chronic stress and horrid (yet highly profitable) junk food diet of most Americans. It’s a dieoff all right, but it’s never framed as such. You can see it all around you: the overcrowded jails filled with unemployed people, the overcrowded hospitals filled with sick, obese people, the folks standing on the medians and freeway offramps with cardboard signs and living their cars, all while the media just goes on reporting about spectator sports and celebrity gossip as though nothing bad is happening. Ignorance really is bliss.

The obvious analogy here is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, as many people writing about the study have pointed out: The Dying Russians (New York Review of Books). But there was no “collapse” of the United States. Or was there? Instead, we’re told by the media and politicians that everything in every way is getting better and better for everyone. Just look at the latest iPhone! Television screens are huge! Even the very poor have indoor plumbing! And you can Google anything you like, so what are you complaining about, loser?

Everything is famed as personal failure, thus the dieoff is just a million stories of individual failure with no overall pattern. Nothing to see here, more along. Study and “work hard” (whatever that means), and you’ll be okay. Certainly that fear is behind the epidemic of overwork, presenteeism and grinding hours of unpaid overtime Americans are putting in at work in the hope of not being next. It’s like being the model prisoner in a concentration camp, though. Ask the turkeys this month if being a good turkey had any effect on their ultimate fate. The Parable of the Happy Turkey (Global Guerrillas)

Up until now, Americans have been happy turkeys. Thus, they cannot comprehend what is happening to them. In America it is taken for granted that the ultimate locus of control is on the individual, and that there is no such thing as society. That belief has been heavily promoted over the past thirty years, along with the “create your own reality” and other assorted positive thinking nonsense (thanks Oprah!), and I think we can see why.

And since we see this always as personal failure and are not allowed to see it as systemic failure, the poor and formerly middle classes take it out on themselves instead of the system. After all, America is the land of opportunity; if you don’t “make it’ (whatever that means), you have no one to blame but yourself! Of course it is not true; the musical chairs job market and winner-take-all economy means that only a tiny number of people even have a shot at the middle class anymore, and a lot of that is due to geography, pre-existing social connections and luck.

They don’t have to kill you if they can get you to kill yourself.

And although framed as a tragedy, I wonder if to some extent this behavior on the part of working class males is a logical response to living in the kind of society that the United States has become. In a society that has no use for them anymore and where they have no sense of purpose and no hope for the future, it seems like suicide is a rational response. After a certain age, you realize that you have been sorted to the “losers” pile. If you live in the vast suburban flatland of Middle America, you likely live in a decrepit house somewhere in the anonymous miasma of strip-mall suburbia, buy disposable plastic crap made in China from baleful fluorescent-lit Dollar Stores, drive an older model pickup truck or SUV with a bad muffler and bad brakes over potholed streets and under rusty bridges, while all the jobs around you aside from the hospital and the university (which are mainly female-staffed) are minimum wage, dead-end jobs where you have to smile and wear a uniform. You realize you’re never going to meet the girl of your dreams since hypergamy is still baked into female mating choice, despite what some feminists claim. You realize you will never get that that great job that will allow you to be upwardly mobile and live in relative ease and comfort, and life is a bitter, hard struggle relieved only by the occasional joint and video games. Or you’re divorced and paying child support to your former wife who’s managed to keep herself presentable enough to hook up with one of the few remaining alpha-males, and half your income goes to support the kids you never see. Or your deadbeat loser children have been working multiple McJobs and living in the basement for years with no hope of even affording a one-bedroom apartment, and between them and the wife you never speak to anymore, you can’t even get into your own damn bathroom. You realize that, like most Americans, you will never afford to retire and will have to work your boring, dead-end job under your asshole supervisor until you literally drop dead. So why wait?

I mean, who wouldn’t kill themselves or anesthetize themselves with drugs and booze in an environment like this?

I once read an online commenter say that the rich are the beta testers for the lifestyles we will all be living in the future (and thus no restraints must be put on their wealth accumulation if we are to experience that future). But that commenter had it wrong. Rather, it is the poor–those living on less than a few dollars a day; those who live in ghettos marred by gangs and drug abuse; those with their heat, water, and streetlights turned off, who are the beta testers for the lifestyles that most of us will be “enjoying” in the near future. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.

Given the above, I can’t help but think of the “Rat Park” experiment. Rats in a cage, when given a choice between water and drugs, would overdose themselves to death on the drugs, neglecting even basic self-maintenance. But a cage is a boring, repetitive, stressful environment for a rat, so you might expect the animals to anesthetize themselves with whatever was on offer. But rats living in an environment specifically designed to be pleasant and give the rats what they needed to thrive did not overdose themselves to death; they preferred healthier behaviors instead. It’s worth noting that most of the drugs we use today have been known for hundreds or even thousands of years, but were not abused by the native peoples who discovered them. That is reserved for modern, “advanced” societies. The Rat Park experiment (io9)

I once wrote that if you wanted to intentionally design a social environment to drive a primate insane, you would develop something pretty much identical to modern-day America (advertising, chronic stress, inequality, separation from nature and each other, boring, repetitive work, constant surveillance, and on and on…). It’s pretty obvious how Rat Park parallels life in twenty-first century America with its ubiquitous television, concentration-camp schools complete with metal detectors, freeways and cul-de-sacs and landscapes of Applebees™ and Walmarts; along with a steady diet of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. It’s hardly an environment designed for human flourishing, is it? Rather, it is designed to maximize “economic growth” at all costs. The results of that experiment are as plain to see as they are predictable.

Most people who are still relatively comfortable are content to write off the people who are living in deprived circumstances among them right now, especially in the United States where so many of those poor are African-American. But more and more, whites are experiencing what they had previously dismissed as “black problems” due to their racist attitudes: the hopelessness and despair, the unemployment, the sociological pathologies; the drug abuse, divorces, domestic violence, youth gangs and so on. It’s not race, it’s environment, as Rat Park showed. Given a certain environment, an animal–any animal–will behave a certain way. Its totally predictable. We know this, but why do we pretend it is not true? Instead we reliably chalk it all up to “the Cult of Personal Failure.”

But this leads to an even larger question, one that gets to the heart of our modern predicament. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society are we creating where so many people see death as preferable to living in such a society? In what kind of a society do people see life as so miserable that they prefer to kill themsleves, either slowly or immediately? That is, why is this the end result of hundreds of years of supposed “progress?”

Fundamentally, how do you feel about this society? Do you feel good about this society? Do you feel good about the school-to-prison pipeline? Do you feel good that there are more prisoners than small yeoman farmers? Do you feel good that it is a felony to show us how our food is produced? Do you feel good about students mortgaging their future for jobs that won’t exist by the time the bill comes due? Do you feel good about hospitals treating chronic diseases taking the place of farming and making things as basis of the America’s rural economies? Do you feel good about police armed with body armor and and tear gas? Do you feel good about wall-to-wall advertising preying on our weakness and insecurities? Do you feel good about the atmosphere of incessant adversarial competition against everyone else for the shrinking pool of jobs on offer which pay enough to afford rent?

If so, why?

This puts a crimp on the Panglossian “everything in every way is getting better for everyone,” rhetoric that you hear so often in the media. What I find amusing is that this rhetoric used to come from the Left–that the welfare state would eliminate poverty, racism, that everything was under control and circles of cooperation would get larger and larger, and so on. But now, I mostly hear the Panglossian rhetoric coming primarily from the Right, whose preferred God is the unregulated “free” market. It’s in the Right-wing propaganda now that I constantly hear how wonderful everything is, and that those who are complaining are either delusional misfits or just jealous. Here is a prime example from the Right-wing National Review:

Good news abroad, and good news at home: In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City. That number has fallen by 85 percent. Murders are down, often dramatically, in cities across the country. The overall rate of violent crime has fallen by about half in recent decades. U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb. Despite the no-knowthings [sic] who go around complaining that “we don’t make things here anymore,” the United States continues to make the very best of almost everything and, thanks to our relatively free-trading ways, to consume the best of everything, too. General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen. Flexible and effective institutions helped ensure that we weathered one of the worst financial crises of modern times with surprisingly little disruption in the wider economy. Despite politicians who would usurp our rights, our courts keep reliably saying that the First Amendment and the Second Amendment pretty much mean what they say. I just filled up my car for $1.78 a gallon.

The world isn’t ending.

The world is healthier, wealthier, and less hungry mainly because of the efforts of millions of unknown investors, entrepreneurs, farmers, workers, bankers, etc., all working without any central coordinating authority….There is much left to do: We have unsustainable fiscal situations in the Western welfare states, irreconcilable Islamist fanatics originating in points east but spread around the world, environmental challenges, and that tenth of the human race that still needs lifting out of hardcore poverty. But we have achieved a remarkable thing in that unless we mess things up really badly, in 50 years we’ll be having to explain to our grandchildren what a famine was, how it came to be that millions of people died every year for want of clean water — and they will look at us incredulously, wondering what it must have been like to live in the caveman times of the early 21st century.

Liberal Democracy and Free Markets, Take a Bow (National Review) Or better yet, strap on flight suit and hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Yes, for the folks on the Right, it truly is a Golden Age. There are a few flaws in the ointment like those pesky welfare states and all that but, hey, gas is cheap! Can’t you just feel the bright, shiny future ahead? Here’s a another sampling from The Wall Street Journal:

The trajectory of the world doesn’t justify this pessimism. People are living longer on every continent. They’re doing less arduous, backbreaking work. Natural disasters are killing fewer people. Fewer crops are failing. Some 100,000 people are being lifted out of poverty every day, according to World Bank data.

Life is also getting better in the U.S., on multiple measures, but the survey found that 55% of Americans think the “rich get richer” and the “poor get poorer” under capitalism. Sixty-five percent agree that most big businesses have “dodged taxes, damaged the environment or bought special favors from politicians,” and 58% want restrictions on the import of manufactured goods.

Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism? (WSJ) Silly people, how dare they “lose faith!” Once we stamp out every last vestige of “socialism” we can restore that faith.

So what’s going on here? Listening to the Right, one gets the appearance that things have never been better, and that people are just totally irrational and determined to complain no matter how good they have it, despite voluminous scientific literature portraying optimism bias as the default cognitive condition for most people.

I think it stems from two areas – the Neoliberal experiment has clearly been an unmitigated disaster, so the literature constantly has to portray a rosy picture for those still living in the elite ideological bubble by cherry-picking data: Cheer – Inequality is Falling Globally!! (and similar nonsense) (Pieria). It’s much like the “happy peasant” literature that prevailed on the eve of the French Revolution and during early Industrialism to convince upper-class readers that their efforts were actually for the good of all, not just themselves; it’s just that the feckless peasants were too short-sighted to realize it. The elites, for some reason, have a need to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the free-market fundamentalism they subscribe to is making everyone–not just them–better off. Perhaps it is a remedy for cognitive dissonance and a guilty conscience.

The second agenda might be to cover up the agenda of eliminationism referred to above.
Going back to the original topic, it’s fairly clear that getting rid of the lower classes is, as The Joker put it in The Dark Knight, “all part of the plan.”

Now that might seem a bit paranoid, but consider this – the governors of many states are withdrawing basic social protections for their poorest citizens, and actually paying for the priviliege! Here’ Kevin Drum:

…the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this.

The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again. So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor (Mother Jones)

Last week, McClatchy documented the unnecessary pain being inflicted on red state residents by their elected Republican representatives…Roughly 260 million Americans (roughly 85 percent) already have health insurance provided by their employers, the government or through individual policies they purchased. In places like Oregon, Colorado, New York, California and other, mostly Democratic states, governors and state legislators accepted the expansion of Medicaid to provide free health insurance for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty (FPL). For those earning between 138 and 400 percent of the FPL, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies will help them purchase insurance in the private market. But in the states where Republicans said “no” to the expansion of Medicaid, the picture is much different. As the AP explained the coverage gap:

Nearly 2 in 3 uninsured people who would qualify for health coverage under an expansion of Medicaid live in states which won’t broaden the program or have not yet decided on expansion.

The resulting Republican body count is staggering. Thanks to the GOP’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, 1.3 million people in Texas, 1 million in Florida, 534,000 in Georgia and 267,000 in Missouri will be ensnared in the coverage gap.

Health Insurance “Coverage Gap” Coming To A Red State Near You (Crooks and Liars)

That’s right, Republican governors are blowing a hole in their budget just to remove social protections for the poor. Often times, “unaffordability” is cited as a justification, but clearly this is not at work here. It’s pure ideology. But what is that ideology? Here’s more detail:

American conservatives for the past several decades have shown a remarkable hostility to poor people in our country. The recent effort to slash the SNAP food stamp program in the House; the astounding refusal of 26 Republican governors to expand Medicaid coverage in their states — depriving millions of poor people from access to Medicaid health coverage; and the general legislative indifference to a rising poverty rate in the United States — all this suggests something beyond ideology or neglect.

The indifference to low-income and uninsured people in their states of conservative governors and legislators in Texas, Florida, and other states is almost incomprehensible. Here is a piece in Bustle that reviews some of the facts about expanding Medicaid coverage:

In total, 26 states have rejected the expansion, including the state of Mississippi, which has the highest rate of uninsured poor people in the country. Sixty-eight percent of uninsured single mothers live in the states that rejected the expansion, as do 60 percent of the nation’s uninsured working poor.

These attitudes and legislative efforts didn’t begin yesterday. They extend back at least to the Reagan administration in the early 1980s…

Most shameful, many would feel, is the attempt to reduce food assistance in a time of rising poverty and deprivation. It’s hard to see how a government or party could justify taking food assistance away from hungry adults and children, especially in a time of rising poverty. And yet this is precisely the effort we have witnessed in the past several months in revisions to the farm bill in the House of Representatives. In a recent post Dave Johnson debunks the myths and falsehoods underlying conservative attacks on the food stamp program in the House revision of the farm bill.

This tenor of our politics indicates an overt hostility and animus towards poor people. How is it possible to explain this part of contemporary politics on the right? What can account for this persistent and unblinking hostility towards poor people?

Why a war on poor people? (Understanding Society)

Let’s restate this to be clear to make sure the point is not lost: these states are willing to lose money in order to make sure their poor die quicker. Clear enough? And we’re not even talking about things like the outright cold-blooded murder of the homeless by police, the breaking up of homeless encampments, the mass incarceration, and return of debtors’ prisons, and so on. It’s expensive to be poor in America. We do everything by the Matthew Effect from jobs to education, and wonder why class mobility is nonexistent. Yet we’re still told that everyone wants to be an American, that it’s the land of opportunity, and that things have literally never been better.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry (Guardian)

Much of the well-funded efforts of plutocrats and their allies has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which was designed by Right-wing think tanks), not to reform it or replace it with something more effective, but to return to the predatory status quo ante. Now, businessmen may be greedy, short-sighted and sociopathic, but they are not stupid. They surely know that the American System is wildly more expensive than any other place on earth, but they are willing to lose billions of dollars in profit just to make sure people don’t get health care! Think about that. A European friend said to me once that he didn’t understand why American businesses seemed to want sick, insecure employees who either don’t have access to health care, or are worried about going broke trying to pay for it. It seemed totally irrational to him. But it’s only irrational if you don’t understand the underlying ideology of eliminationism. Some societies actually want to kill off their own people, as Nazi Germany and other tragic examples have shown.

And it’s of a piece with the withdrawal of mass education that Blacker documents in his book. The elites are disinvesting from society in every way because they just don’t need us anymore. And their propaganda mills are dedicated to making sure the blame is squarely placed on individuals so that we will internalize learned helplessness which has prevented any effective resistance. Or their mills are insisting that it’s just not happening, and everybody is really better off, as we saw above, except for a few churlish losers who have no one to blame but themselves (and are probably looking for a handout).

Who turned my blue state red? (NYT). A great explanation of America’s crab mentality.

I’ve featured the analogy of horses that some economists use before. Human beings may have found other jobs (which is debatable), but the population of horses just went down in line with the work that was available for them to do. I think it’s obvious that this is a good analogy for what’s happening.

…Similarly, one could just as easily have said, a century ago, that: “Fundamental economic principles will continue to operate. Scarcities will still be with us…. Most horses will still have useful tasks to perform, even in an economy where the capacities of power sources and automation have increased considerably…”

Yet demand for the labor of horses today is vastly less than it was a century ago, even though horses are extremely strong, fast, capable and intelligent animals. “Peak horse” in the U.S. came in the 1910s, I believe. After that there was no economic incentive to keep the horse population of America from declining sharply, as at the margin the horse was not worth its feed and care. And in a marginal-cost pricing world, in which humans are no longer the only plausible source of Turing-level cybernetic control mechanisms, what will happen to those who do not own property should the same come to be true, at the margin, of the human? What would “peak human” look like? Or–a related but somewhat different possibility–even “peak male”?

Technological Progress Anxiety: Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human” (Brad DeLong)

Off to the glue factory with the middle class, then. As long as it’s kept diffuse enough, it will never be picked up on; “Work Makes You Free” hangs in the air over our heads instead of over the entry gates. Perhaps we should just inscribe it on the Gateway Arch.

So, all told, the self-destructive habits of the middle-aged white poor are hardly irrational. Rather, it seems to be to be the most rational response to the type of world we’ve created. The only question is, why do so many of us apparently want to stay on this path?

Oil and Money – Lessons Learned

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Reid Mukai

This is a concluding post for an excellent 7 part long-form series featured on the Hipcrime Vocab blog. While this serves as an adequate synopsis of what was covered, I highly recommend the series for it’s depth and scope starting with the introduction.

Source: Hipcrime Vocab

The first thing I learned is that I bit off more than I could chew, lol. I was intending a simple book review, and it turned into a lot more than I intended to write. I also learned how difficult and thankless a task blogging can be. I’m glad at least a few of you chimed in to let me know you enjoyed it.

One major thing I learned (which I already sort-of knew) is how much real resources have to do with the economy, and economic history, despite economists’ insistence that land, labor and capital are all that matter. In fact, real resources appear to be the MAJOR driver of our economic fortunes. Even Forbes magazine had to admit: The Recessions of 1973,1980,1991,2001,2008 Were Caused By High Oil Prices. Energy doesn’t matter, huh?

I was really taken aback at how recent this all is. I was somewhat aware the historic problem with oil was that there was too much of the stuff. Eric Roston, in The Carbon Age, writes, “Gasoline was a throwaway by product of kerosene refining until the early 1900s, used sometimes in solvents or as fuel for stoves. In 1892, two cents a gallon was a decent price. For another thirty years, apothecaries were the makeshift filling stations.”

But I had no idea just how much of a glut there was and how people thought it would last forever. That it was so cheap we needed the Texas Railroad Commission to hold back production so that the prices would be high enough. I mean, this substance contains the equivalent of ten to eleven years of human labor (1750 Kilowatt hours of human labor), for crying out loud! And it is a non-renewable resource! I was amazed at how far we went in coming up with new uses for the stuff, to the point destroying perfectly good and workable infrastructure just so we could use more of it. Can anything be more insane?

The long boom was driven by the exploitation of oil as a resource. This led to the dominance of the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). All of the knock-on effects of the ICE were behind the post-war boom. I mean, you could write a book about all the economic development caused by cars and trucks. In fact, truck driver/delivery is still the most common job in most states to this day! The ability to deliver goods cheaply anywhere had so many knock-on effects, from the creation of whole new cities to the rise of big-box retailers. Let’s not forget that everything in that big-box retailer is made from plastic which is made from petroleum feedstocks. Kunstler calls the suburbs the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It’s easy to see how that’s true.

I didn’t know that it was only as late as 1959 that petroleum overtook coal to be more than 50 percent of our energy use. I didn’t know that coal only became the world’s predominant energy source after 1900. Before that, we were still essentially in a wood/biofuel economy. As I wrote before, that’s pretty recent – less than three generations.

We think of the 19th century as the era of coal, but as the distinguished Canadian energy economist Vaclav Smil has pointed out, coal only reached 5% of world energy supply in 1840, and it didn’t get to 50% until about 1900.

The modern oil industry began in 1859, but it took more than a century for oil to eclipse coal as the world’s No. 1 source. “The most important historical lesson,” Dr. Smil says, is that “energy resources require extended periods of development.”

The Power Revolutions (WSJ)

Peak oil ideas made it sound like oil (specifically petroleum) was the only resource that matters to the economy, so that once oil production stops growing, the economy will collapse. That’s clearly not the case (oil is 36 percent of the world’s energy). There are lots of other fuels in the mix. However, things like fracking, tar sands, and offshore drilling clearly mean that cheap, easy-to-get oil is on the wane. Oil is cheap now because of fracking – not the tight oil itself, but rather because the fear of it is keeping prices low by the Saudis. That will change. I’m always amazed at the people who run out and buy SUVs the minute the oil price goes down. Do they expect it to be cheap forever or do they expect to drive their car for only a year? It’s also cheap because our economy is in the crapper.

Forget who the candidates are and all the campaigning and the billions of dollars spent– If oil prices are high, the economy is in recession, and the incumbent party will lose power. You can pretty much predict any presidential election by this fact alone. Two-thousand is the only one that sort-of breaks the mold, and that was such a bizarre election between the hanging chads, the voting fraud and the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s not just the economy driven by energy prices – it’s the political world too. Everything else is just meaningless fluff.

At the end of the day, whether a president presides over a good economy or a bad economy is almost entirely down to oil prices.

The other thing that strikes you is the “Groundhog Day” nature of the situation. Oil prices get high, we get worried about the environment, and there’s a great boom in alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental impacts, worries about the economy and supply chains, and so forth. Then oil prices go down and we forget all about alternative energy and all the inherent problems with relying on a finite resource. All the progress toward getting off of oil stagnates, and people assume oil will be cheap forever. Then they get high again, and suddenly it all becomes important again, and we have to go back to square one (compare the EV-1 to Tesla, for example. Heck, Edison built an electric car!). Charles Mann had a great line along the lines of “The human propensity to see flukes of good fortune as never coming to an end,” or something like that.

Given the manipulation of oil prices, it’s hard to see natural economic factors as ever being able to do the right thing when it comes to energy. When prices get high, new supply comes online and alternatives are pursued. But then oil prices crush the economy, demand falls more in line with supply, the price falls, and the initiatives are halted. It feels like the invisible hand is attached to an idiot. Maybe this time we’ll finally get serious.

Prices are temporary conditions. Peak oil is permanent.

The drug dealer analogy of us being addicted to oil is shopworn, but it is just so accurate. It was only once we were addicted to the product that they could jack up the price, and then we HAD to pay what they demanded. But like a drug that devastates the lives of its users, when you hit rock-bottom you try to get on the twelve-step program and get your life back. Then, the dealers will lower the price to keep you addicted, and the cycle begins again. Plus, every dealer wants to be your dealer, so they need to be just a little bit cheaper than the next guy. Barring that, they will bind together with the other dealers to keep the price high and protect their “turf.” The economics of drug dealing and oil are eerily similar. I wonder if anyone’s formally studied this.

In the past each new energy source was added on to the previous ones. Now we are talking about substitution – a totally different ballgame. That is, new energy sources will replace old. That’s substitution, not expansion.

Cheap oil combined with the opening up of China drove globalization. There is no way we could build the largest moving structures ever built to transport goods if we didn’t have a fuel source cheap enough to make it worthwhile. A single ship can move 19,000 containers, enough to move 300 million tablet computers.

That oil played a role in foreign policy shouldn’t be a surprise, but looking at exactly how it led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the civil war in Syria, the removal of Qaddafi, the propping up or removing of dictators, and the positioning of armies around the globe was still eye-opening. So much foreign policy is dictated by access to oil. So much…

I was actually unaware of the Eurodollar and how I caused the fall of Bretton Woods. As Smith illustrates, going back to the gold standard is practically impossible (sorry libertarians). I was unaware of the role that Petrodollar recycling played in the Latin American debt crisis. I was aware of how the Petrodollars funded terrorism. I’m sure readers of Dmitry Orlov were familiar with the role oil and grain prices played in the fall of the Soviet Union. Again, this made Reagan look like a genius.

What I really wanted to describe is how the oil price crisis came about and how it led directly to the rise of Neoliberalism. I also wanted to show how Jimmy Carter’s “failure” and Ronald Reagan’s “success” was based mostly on oil prices. Some people would take issue with that, but it’s hard to separate one from the other. Is it 100 percent? Maybe not, but what percentage was oil prices? Seventy? Fifty? Twenty-five? Surely it played a role.

The problem is that it made Neoliberalism look like a success. People came to believe that unions were evil, and tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and speculation were the magic keys to prosperity. But throughout the Neoliberal reign, oil prices were either stable or crashing. When that wasn’t the case, as in 2007-2008, the system came apart. The rise of China also made Neoliberalism appear to work. But it was smoke and mirrors – cheap uneducated labor, overinvestment, state-controlled enterprises, artificially cheap currencies, entire cities built with no people in them, etc. It was a Potemkin’s village on the scale of a nation. Globalization is a Ponzi scheme.

But now Neoliberalism is literally tearing the world apart. Some major reasons:

1.) Turning the speculators loose. The oil price rise and the food price rise seem to be mainly problems of market speculations (i.e. greed and fear, always the real movers of markets, not supply and demand). This has, in turn, led to political turmoil as we saw in the Arab Spring. If speculation continues to cause price rises for essentials like food, fuel and water to pad the fortunes of speculators, expect more chaos and collapse. Even in the U.S., the actions of Enron and “Kenny-boy” lay caused serious harm to economies, not expansion. And we spent enough on the bailouts to give every unemployed person a job and every homeless person a home, with billions left over. Is this how economies should be run?

2.) The suppression of worker wages has caused massive hardship around the world. The abandonment of full employment as a policy goal has led to a worldwide unemployment crisis that is destabilizing the world. Unemployed people have nothing to lose. People with nothing to lose tend to revolt (see above). The gutting of social services and welfare safety nets has also led to poverty and desperation all around the world. It calls into question the ability of capitalism to deliver broad increases in living standards everywhere. We are clearly not seeing that. We’ve been in reverse for some time. Shouldn’t an economic system make us ALL richer, rather than provide winners and losers? If it can’t, what kind of system is it?

3.) Globalism spreads not only the wealth around, but the poverty too. Some countries, notably Western Europe, have attempted to defend their citizens, while others like the United States, did nothing to insulate its workers from third-world wages and working conditions (and even encouraged them). Rising living standards in China and India are one thing, but falling living standards in formerly wealthy countries make the rich capitalists richer, but cause anger and consternation which is easily exploited by the unscrupulous and power-hungry. This is also destabilizing. Just look at all the anger in the U.S. today searching for a scapegoat.

4.) Austerity and the straitjacketing of governments has led to wealthy, industrialized countries “undeveloping.” The United States is a nation of private affluence and public squalor, with one-third of its children living in poverty, entire cities abandoned and crumbling, urban areas too expensive for median income workers, the infrastructure of a banana republic, poor access to education and healthcare, pockets of poverty, ghettoes, etc. Greece is being gutted as an example to the West. This is leading to rise of right-wing parties in Europe, again redolent of the run-up to the Second World War.

5.) The faith in Markets to solve all problems is especially disastrous with an ongoing environmental crisis. Instead of rationing or capping, instead we get easily gamed “cap and trade” markets to reduce emissions. Nature is just “natural capital,” and every drop of water, tree leaf, and grain of sand must be assigned an owner and a price. In other words, all of nature must be subsumed into the market, because markets are the only way we can solve our problems! This is a Neoliberal idea. Look at how the United States responded to the crisis in the seventies by contrast.

6.) Debt crises have caused massive hardship around the world. As I learned, Mexico’s reputation as a haven for poverty, prostitution, drug gangs, etc. was only after the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. That, in turn, led the massive influx of Latin American refugees into the United States turning America into a Latin country overnight. Prior to 1979, places like Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Libya were stable, secular, relatively prosperous places (See this. And this). Now look at them. Yes, they had dictators and human rights violations. But compare it to today. Latin America has fared somewhat better, largely by finding a way to reject or bypass Neoliberalism. Africa has not fared well, either. Note that you only heard about collapse and famine after the 1980’s (remember Ethiopia?). Yes, Africa was poor before then, but it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Not any more.

7.) People from these wrecked countries are heading to the Western industrialized countries in massive waves of migration–Latin America for the United States and Canada, and the Middle East and Africa for the European Union. This has driven down wages and caused the rise of nativist parties. Everyone is heading for the lifeboats as more and more countries become failed states. There is simply not enough room for all. But rebuilding these countries would mean abandoning the Neoliberal paradigm, forgoing debt and putting into place quasi-socialist policies. Then again, the rich can always retreat to floating offshore islands (and eventually space colonies).

It’s clear that much of the money that has not been collected by governments has gone not only into speculation as opposed to productive activity, but in purchasing political representation. This has led to democracies devolving into oligarchies and a mistrust of democracy in general. The buying of politicians and the media blocks any attempts to deal with collapsing systems. We’ve seen ever greater instability and ever greater bubbles under Neoliberalism now that government has been “contained” and workers have been “disciplined.”

The answer to our problems should be clear: abandon Neoliberalism and return to the mixed economy. Stop hamstringing governments. End speculation. Tax the rich. Close offshore tax shelters. Raise tariffs. Defend domestic industries. Write down the debts. Pursue full employment policies such as a job guarantee, reduced working hours and an basic income guarantee. Distribute essential social services through the government, and let the market handle non-necessities. Regulate to deal with externalities. Impose limits on natural resource extraction. Decarbonize energy.

All of this used to be common-sense. Now it beyond the pale.

The problem is, it’s a ratchet effect. We cannot go back, because TPTB will not allow it. And since the 1970s, they learned they had to not only control the government, but the information we imbibe day after day, otherwise we would instruct our government to do something the powerful may not want. Instead, we had to be convinced that Neoliberalism is the only valid economy – hence the think tanks, talk radio, publishing mills, Fox news, etc. Any sense of common purpose or solidarity is evil “socialism.” As we learned, even “liberal” news sources are fully dedicated to defending this paradigm at all costs, even at the cost of credibility. And the funding of the political classes by the wealthy will ensure that anything that threatens the fortunes of the oligarchs will be a non-starter, even if people do see past the media rhetoric.

The change in economics swallowed the hope of the sixties. How much does it have to do with Neoliberalism, and how much with oil prices? A lot of commenters say, “Hey, the oil is gone, we just need to learn to be peasants.” They point out that American wages stopped growing in 1973, around the time domestic oil production peaked in the U.S. But I think that’s simplistic. American wages stopped growing, not everyone else’s–not what we’d expect in an energy descent scenario. Rather, I think it was the wealth transfer of the seventies, and the politics it engendered, that was the primary culprit. The oil shock opened the door for globalized Neoliberalism, and that is the primary cause of our misfortune. By using oil as an excuse to be politically passive, we remove any chance at creating an economy that works better for all and play into the hands of the powerful.

I think old economy Steve puts it best. Or shall we say, “mixed economy” Steve:

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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