Looking back from the year 2050

[What follows is not a prediction, nor is it a program that I advocate.  It is a thought experiment. I attempt to answer the question: If the USA in the year 2050 is on a better path, what might have been the reason?]

Back in the early 2020s, things seemed hopeless to thoughtful Americans. Their government was controlled by oligarchs favorable to big business monopolies and by militarists committed to maintaining U.S. dominance by any means necessary.

Material living standards were falling.  Addiction and mental illness were increasing.  So-called “deaths of despair” – suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver disease – were increasing.

The manufacturing economy was being hollowed out. The political system was unresponsive to public needs or the public will.  Few expected the next generation to be better off than the present generation.

What Americans back then had no way of foreseeing was the religious movement we now call the Third Great Awakening.  It took a religious movement to transform lives and thereby transform the nation.

Historically, in the English-speaking world, this has always been the case.  Periods of moral and social decay evoke religious revivals in response.

So it was with the rise of Puritanism and Methodism in 17th and 19th century Britain and the first and second Great Awakenings in the early 18th and 19th century USA.

The core values of the Third Great Awakening were (1) putting the needs children, mothers and families first, (2) help in overcoming addiction of all kinds and rehabilitation generally and (3) sympathy for the poor and suspicion of holders of great wealth.

It was a combination of Pentecostal spirituality, Mormon emphasis on community, family and self-reliance, Twelve Step rehabilitation and Latin American-style liberation theology.  It was strict (though forgiving) in terms of personal conduct, but embraced a no-frills Christian theology that made it compatible with diverse denominations.

The core supporters of the Awakening movement were African-Americans, Hispanics and Bible Belt whites, but the movement appealed to people in every niche of American life.

The rise of the movement took place against the background of the Greater Great Depression of the late 2020s.  Governments and corporations went bankrupt and ceased to function.  This time the banks were “too big to bail.”

Confidence in major American institutions had been falling all through the early 21st century.  As they ceased to function, they lost all moral authority.

 Americans were forced to self-organize to cope with the emergency.  They joined together through their local religious congregations, and also through newly-formed labor and community organizations.

About this time the Jeffrey Epstein client files were published by Wikileaks.  They revealed how many high-level politicians, business executives and celebrities had sex with under-age, exploited young girls, and also how Epstein was part of a network of sex traffickers that had continued to function.

This resulted in a great backlash and a drive to track down and punish the guilty—many of whom were also guilty of financial fraud and war crimes.  Financial, political and sexual corruption became conflated in the public mind.  

Some people called what followed a witch hunt, but it weakened, discredited and, to an extent, emptied out the power structure.  New institutions and movements arose to fill the vacuum.

Watch out for the coming oil shock in the USA

This just in from Ian Welsh.

Recently read a smart lad who noted a few simple things:

1. Biden’s been releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

2. The SPR has basically two types of oil: sour and sweet.

3. Biden has been releasing almost all sour since that’s what most US refineries need.

4. At the current rate of release, the SPR runs out of sour crude to release around March.

[snip]

Of course, when Biden stops releasing oil, either because he’s out or because he chooses to stop after the election or the holidays are over, then prices are going to spike if sanctions are still in place against Russia and/or Russia is unwilling to sell to the West.  As a bonus, the government will need to buy oil itself to stock the reserve back up.

[snip]

What this means for Americans is that there’s a very good chance of a big inflation spike after the election.  It might hold off for as long as spring, it might start a few weeks after the election.  It won’t just hit gas prices, oil is important for much more than driving cars, so it’ll rip through the entire economy.  Stock up on what you need before the election if you can.

And let this be a lesson that GDP means very little when the chips are down.  Who cares if you have Hollywood and lots of fast food stores and Google and FaceBook?  What matters is what you grow, dig up, refine and make.

Javier Blas of Bloomberg News suggested President Biden could make up the different by getting Saudi Arabia to pump more oil, but Biden’s attempts to get Middle Eastern “allies” to help out by increasing oil production have ended in failure.

LINKS

When Is the Next Oil-Driven Inflation Spike in the US?  December to March by Ian Welsh.

“We’re going to have to talk about oil again” on Quiz Chad Had a Rack Twitter thread.

The US Is Depleting Its Strategic Petroleum Petroleum Reserve Faster Than It Looks by Javier Blas for Bloomberg News.

Europe faces self-imposed economic crash

Thousands in Prague protest energy crisis and NATO alliance

I’ve written about why I think Russia is likely to win its ground war in Ukraine and its sanctions war worldwide, and what I think the results of Russian victory might be.  This post is about one aspect of that war—how the sanctions war has brought about an economic crisis in Europe.

Six months ago, Europe’s leaders boasted they’d bring Russia to its knees through economic sanctions. Today their countries fact economic disaster because of blowback from those sanctions.

Many Germans are hunting through forests for firewood for the winter, because of the looming scarcity of oil and natural gas.  One report says there is a one-year waiting list for purchasers of wood stoves. Coal also is in great demand and short supply.

In Spain, the government is imposed rules forbidding air conditioning to be set below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Netherlands, a campaign called Flip the Switch asks Dutch people to limit showers to five minutes and do without air conditioning and clothes dryers.

One expert says six in 10 British factories are in danger of closing as a result of higher energy bills. The average British household is expected to see its annual average energy bill rise to $4,180, a rise of $1,765, according to CNN Business.

Forward contracts for electricity in France and Germany are 10 times what they were this time last year.

It’s hard to see how Europe can escape a energy crisis and an economic recession this winter.  The initial reaction of Europe’s leaders has been to double down.  Germany’s foreign minister said Germany will never desert Ukraine, no matter what.

The European Union is reportedly planning to seek sweeping powers over businesses in member states that would basically allow Brussels to tell these companies what to produce, how much of it, and whom to sell it to in times of a crisis.

A public opinion poll indicates a majority of Germans would like to negotiate a peace.  Unfortunately a compromise peace is no longer being offered.  The Russians now say their terms are unconditional surrender.

Tens of thousands joined to protest against the sanctions war in Prague.  I think it is the first of many such protests.  They may lead to sweeping changes across Europe; they may lead to existing governments and the. EU itself invoking emergency powers to stay in power.

I sympathize with the European peoples who’ve been caught up in the global struggle of the USA vs. the Russian-Chinese alliance.  Europeans have a lot to lose and little to gain by joining in.

Suppose Russia wins – what happens next?

Ukraine in 2021

We still cannot break the advantage of the Russian army in artillery and in manpower, and this is very felt in the battles, especially in the Donbass – Peski, Avdiivka, and other directions. It’s just hell. It can’t even be described in words.   ==Volodymyr Zelensky.

If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact.  ==Donald Rumsfeld.

I think the Russians have a good chance of winning their war in Ukraine, for reasons I’ve stated in previous posts.  You may disagree.  But suppose, for the sake of argument, I’m right.  What would happen next?

The first thing to understand is that, at this point, Russians are not interested in negotiation, only in terms of surrender.  And the terms offered at the outset of the war may not be enough.

Historical map of Ukraine

Before invading, the Russian leaders demanded that Ukraine recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the independence of the secessionist Donbas republics, and renounce future membership in NATO.  But that is no longer enough to satisfy.

Russia is extending its operations to absorb the pink and blue areas on the map at the right, which are the areas with the heaviest concentrations of Russian speakers.  It is issuing passports to those who desire Russian citizenship.

This indicates a plan to carve out a “new Russia” from Ukrainian territory which would extend from Russia to Transnistria on the Moldovan border.

Russia’s demands go beyond Ukraine.  Russia’s goal is to push back all NATO bases and installations from which NATO forces could strike at Russia.  This includes missile sites in Poland and Rumania.  Presumably it would include Sweden, Finland or any other U.S. ally that becomes a site for NATO strike weapons.

The ultimate goal, which Russia shares with China, is to crack global U.S. military and financial domination and replace it with a balance of power that includes Russia, China, the USA and maybe other countries, such as India.

A vain hope

Compromise is no longer possible.  Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov say that US American leaders are “not agreement-capable.”  They say the USA and NATO allies have ignored their red lines for years, and the time for talk is past.  A recent speech by General of the Army Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, gives a good idea of the Russian point of view.

The main advantage Russia has in Ukraine is superior firepower.  The USA and its allies are drawing down their arsenals to supply Ukraine and will not be able to quickly replenish them.

Russia claims to be producing as much ammunition and armaments as it is expending.  If Russia wins, this claim will have been proved right.

Where does this leave Poland, Rumania and other NATO allies?  Their governments joined NATO because they believed the USA could protect them from Russia.  This belief will have been proved wrong.  The choices for Poland and Rumania will be to submit to Russia’s demands or to fight at a worse disadvantage than Ukraine had (except for being less corrupt than Ukraine).

The European nations would have to face the fact that they must either be willing to make peace with Russia or be prepared to depend on themselves for defense.  Ideally, they would do both, as Finland, Sweden and Switzerland did during the Cold War era.

At the same time, economic warfare against Russia is failing.  Economic sanctions have backfired.  The USA’s NATO allies are hurting much more than Russia is.

The Ukraine war and the cost of living

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Whatever else it is, the war in Ukraine is a war to control food and energy supplies.  The turning point was the 2014 coup, which took Ukraine out of the Russian economic orbit and into the U.S.-dominated  “rules-based economic order.”  

Umair Haque gives the big picture.

Food prices rising — commodities prices in general — were a directeffect of climate change.  So what about Putin’s war?  Well, just think about what it’s really about. Controlling resources.  Putin knows that if he controls the resources — oil, gas, metal, wheat, and so forth — he can control a dying planet.  He who controls the resources controls a dying planet, because we all need them that much more.  You can see this very, very clearly in the way that Putin’s skewered Europe right on the horns on an insoluble dilemma: allow war in Ukraine, or depend on Russian resources?

Putin’s war in Ukraine is driven by ideological reasons, true — the weird blend of religion and fanaticism I’ve called New Age Fascism.  But more than that, it’s the first of the great resource wars on a dying planet. Ukraine is a strategically vital nation, at least on a dying planet — it’s Europe’s breadbasket, provides the world all kinds of basic resources from wheat to metals.  Ukraine is one of the very first nations you’d want to conquer if you wanted to control what few resources were going to be left on a dying planet, and this is the deeper logic of Putin’s game.

Resource wars are not going to end. In fact, they are only now just getting started — just after commodities prices have been soaring for the last few years thanks to failed harvests.  See how predictable that is?  It’s not that the two are even consciously linked — some dictator sees commodities prices rising and thinks “it’s time for war!” — it’s just that this is what inevitably happens.  Putin’s wars are obviously not going to end.  China, soon enough, will have to secure its own empire of resources, as the planet goes on dying. The West appears to have no strategy for any of this, because it’s only answer is “globalization,” which has failed the way that my first marriage did — she threw plates at me, dear reader, because I was a bastard.

We are therefore now entering an age of (a) resource wars (b) shortages and (c) inflation.  Serious, sustained, vicious inflation.  These three things have already the defined the 2020s.  What did Covid do? Cause shortages around the globe — in a foreshadowing of the future on a dying planet.  Covid highlighted just how illusionary all this abundance of stuff really is — ships stop for a few days, borders shut down for a day or two, and bang — you can’t get stuff to eat or drink the way you’re used to.  But what happens on a planet of mega fires and mega floods and mega weather?  Mega risk does.  Shortages becomes endemic, a way of life.  As they slowly are now.

The flipside of shortages is, of course, inflation.  And inflation is the savage, gruesome reality of living on a dying planet.  There isn’t enough left to go around.  There never was.  20% of humanity — otherwise known as “The West” — consumes 90% of the planet’s resources.  That leaves just 10% of them for 80% of humanity.  The rest of the world has always lived without.  It’s just we in the West who are starting to discover what the real economics of existence are.

Global warming is here: We need to deal with it

Global warming is already here.  It is too late to avoid an era of continuing emergencies due to storms, floods, fires, droughts, heat waves and tidal waves.  The question is whether it will be possible to cope with these emergencies and to stop the acceleration of climate catastrophe.  

20 billion-dollar weather climate disasters in historical context by Adam B. Smith for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the Climate-Watching World, Everything New Is Old Again by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.

Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world by Jacob Blumenthal for Wiley Online Library.

Historical traumas in Russia, China & the USA

I have a friend who, like me, is tired of the propaganda that passes for news nowadays.  He wondered how things would seem to our counterparts in Russia and China—say, to a retired school teacher born in the 1940s.

I can only guess at the answer.  I have no first-hand knowledge of these huge, diverse nations.  But there is no harm in speculating.  

For one thing, such people would have had more radical upheavals in their lives than my friend and I did.

A Russian retiree would have experienced the period of stagnation under Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev, the euphoria and collapse of the economy under Boris Yeltstin and the slow rebuilding under Putin’s corrupt oligarchy.  

A Chinese retiree would have experienced the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, rebuilding under Deng Xiaopeng and now the tightening up under Xi Jinping.

They would remember the economic collapse in Russia in the 1990s and the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s.   I imagine their main desire would be to keep these traumatic events from happening again. 

We Americans may be heading into our own versions of a Yeltsin-style economic collapse and a Mao-style cultural revolution.  

Our economy primarily benefits a small number of super-rich individuals and monopolistic corporations.  The USA never really recovered from the Great Recession of 1980.  Governmental policy props up the banks and financial markets, but does little for average American wage-earners.   This is very like Russian economic policy under Boris Yeltsin.

What’s propping up the U.S. economic is the power of the almighty dollar.  The fact that the whole world needs dollars in order to do business enables the U.S. government to continually cut taxes for the super-rich and finance a huge global military establishment.  

The end of dollar supremacy will leave the U.S. in the same position as other nations with big trade and governmental deficits.  We as a nation would have to raise taxes, cut spending, raise prices, cut wages and sell national assets to foreigners, just like Greece.  But our banks and big corporations may well come out all right.

The other problem with news coverage is what is called  “woke-ness,”  a blanket term for evolving taboos about what you must and mustn’t say in public about race, gender and sexual orientation.  The mentality in many ways is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China in order to dismantle potential opponents and reassert control.  Big U.S. corporations, universities and government agencies allow woke-ness free rein because it diverts attention for their abuses.  In China, the movement got out of control.  The same could happen here.

What the Afghan failure reveals about the U.S.

Image from The Washington Post

In and of itself, the collapse in Afghanistan, in and of itself, is not a total disaster for the United States.  Our government, our economy, our military forces are still intact.

True, we Americans as a nation sacrificed the lives of thousands of patriotic young men, took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan people who did not threaten us and spent trillions of dollars (we’re not sure of how many trillions) only to suffer defeat by an enemy most of us think of as primitive.

But we are still rich and powerful enough to absorb the cost in blood and treasure, just as we did after the collapse in Vietnam.

The significance of the defeat is that shows us something about ourselves that is hard to face.  After all the lies, graft and incompetence, continuing over decades, how can we have any confidence in any of our institutions.

When I was growing up, the one thing the overwhelming majority of Americans believed in was America itself.  I don’t think the majority believe that anymore. 

We have a Constitution, which is supposed to be a check on unaccountable power.  We have a democratic form of government, which is supposed to reflect the will of the people. 

We have a free enterprise economy, which is supposed to make competition serve the common good.  We have military officers, civil servants, judges, intellectuals, physicians, lawyers and journalists, all with traditions and codes of conduct that are supposed to guarantee integrity.

All of these things really exist, at least in weak or latent form.

None of these things has been strong enough to save us from crime, failure and humiliation.  Unless things change, we’re on track for more crime, failure and humiliation.

The Afghanistan failure was a case study in failure to deal with reality.  Will we do better in dealing with the coming climate-related crises? pandemics? the breakdown of globalization? China?

As the saying goes, if something cannot go on forever, someday it will stop.  The USA cannot go on forever as it is, under the leadership it has.  So it won’t. 

I have long felt that something new is coming.  I don’t know what it will be.  It may be better; it likely would be worse.  I both hope and fear I will live long enough to see it.

LINKS

Assabiya Wins Every Time by Lee Smith for The Tablet. 

Assabiya is an Arab word, used by the historian Ibn Khaldun, which means bravery and patriotism.  He wrote that nations and peoples rise when they have it and decline when they lose it.  The Taliban have it; the U.S ruling elite lacks it.  Unless we Americans as a people have it, our future is dim.

Farewell to Bourgeois Kings by Malcom Kyeyune for Power & Politics. 

Kings claimed a divine right to rule, based on lineage and ideals of honor.  Our meritocratic elite claims a pragmatic right to rule, based on their mastery of reason, science and modern technique.  What happens to their legitimacy when their supposed mastery is shown to be fake?

Matt Taibbi warns of the next financial crash

In this interview, Matt Taibbi pointed out that all the signals that warned of the 2008 financial crash are flashing red today.

A financialized economy based on borrowing.  Check.  Financial manipulation out of control.  Check.  “Too big to fail” institutions.  Check.

The response of the federal government to the 2008 financial crash was to bail out the Wall Street companies whose recklessness and fraud created the problem in the first place.

The excuse was that these financial institutions were so vital to the U.S. economy that their failure would bring down the rest of the U.S. economy.  But the bailout gave the speculators assurance that they need not fear either bankruptcy or prison.

Any company that is too big to fail or too complicated to regulate is too big and complicated to be allowed to exist.  The big Wall Street companies should be broken up so that the failure of any one of them will not jeopardize the economy. 

Instead they have been allowed to grow even bigger by mergers. The huge profits they make draws capital away from manufacturing and the rest of the real economy.  Taibbi summed up the situation very well.

He pointed out that the Federal Reserve System is conducting a more-or-less continuing bailout, pumping money into the economy by buying up assets every time the financial markets falter.

This means that, when the day of reckoning comes, it will be so big that bailouts will be impossible.

The global rich and global climate change

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The great economic historian Adam Tooze wrote an eye-opening article about how the global rich (the richest 10%) are the chief drivers of climate change.  What he should have noted is that, at least in the immediate future, they will suffer the least from living on a hotter planet.

Tooze noted that their consumption causes nearly half of the world’s carbon emissions, and the global middle class (the next 40%) cause nearly all the rest.  The global poor (the bottom 50%) are responsible for hardly any, yet they will be the hardest hit.

He said we need to think less about which nations are the chief cause of the problem, and more about the different economic classes.  Global warming has been affected even more by the super-rich (the top 1%) in the OPEC nations and in China than the super-rich in North America.

China accounts for half the increase in global emissions from 1990 to 2015.  One-sixth of the total global increase comes from China’s rich and one third from China’s middle class. 

The betterment of material living standards in China during that period is one of the world’s great positive achievements.  But it also, according to Tooze, is a big contributor to what may be the world’s greatest problem.

It is not just that the richest 10 percent consume so much.  They are the ones who make the investment decisions.  This is true not only of private investment decisions, but of government investment, to the extent that it is financed by borrowing.

Add to that the fact that the richest 10 percent are the dominant political class in most countries.

Adam Tooze did not spell out the implications of this, but they are important.

The richest 10 percent, along with the global middle class, will try to meet the challenge of global warming by investing in alternative technologies that will maintain their material standard of living.

The problem is that making windmills, solar panels or electric vehicles is energy-intensive and uses up non-renewable resources.  Probably there is a net benefit at some point; I’m not qualified to say. The point is, you have to burn a lot of fossil fuels to create the alternatives to fossil fuels. 

What the global rich, and the global middle class, are not considering, is austerity for themselves.  Nobody that I know of advocates giving up air travel, for example. 

A new ‘war on terror’ is declared

I just got around to reading the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which was released a couple of weeks ago.  It is alarming.

There is no reason to think that the coming domestic war on terrorism will end any better than the George W. Bush administration’s global war on terrorism.

The threat, according to the document, is not primarily from terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan or al Qaeda, but from lone individuals, such as recent mass shooters, and ad hoc groups, such as the pro-Trump protesters on Jan. 6.

To protect society, it is not only necessary to suppress and disrupt inflammatory material on the Internet that might inspire violent action, but to conduct a society-wide educational campaign to counteract terrorist and pro-violence propaganda.

It is necessary to be aware of “inconography, symbology and phaseology” used by many domestic violent extremists, and to use “data-driven guidance” on how to identify them.

This could be used to develop watch lists of “known and suspected” terrorists to bar them from sensitive employment or put them on no-fly lists.

All this requires a coordinated effort involving federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments, but also bringing in civil society, the technology sector, academia and friendly foreign governments.

The document is full of boiler-plate language about the need to respect freedom of speech and other constitutional rights, but I do not take this seriously.  There are too many blurrings of distinctions between beliefs and deeds, between violence and nonviolent civil disobedience, and between actual and potential lawbreaking.

I recall the eclipse of civil liberties in the post 9/11 era, and I also am aware of how government and social media companies work together in the present era to suppress dissident opinion.

Interestingly, the document does not propose any legislation.  As I myself and others have pointed out, the legal and administrative machinery for dictatorship already exists.  All that is needed is to activate it. 

The limits to growth

Stein’s Law: If something cannot go on forever, someday it will stop.

I’ve completed a series of posts about China’s technological and economic progress, and how the United States may be falling behind.

The problem with framing things in this way is that, in the long run, there are limits to economic growth and someday the race will have to come to an end.

So maybe, instead of asking how we Americans can avoid being overtaken and left behind by the Chinese, I should have been asking how to disconnect from a economic system that requires ever-increasing consumption and create one based on sustainability and security.

Can we disconnect from an economic system that requires ever-increasing consumption and create one based on sustainability and security?

Even though I am not particularly extravagant by American standards, a sustainable world would require a greater degree of austerity than I have ever experienced.

I am one of the lucky ones.  Millions of Americans live in dire poverty even by world standards and millions more live in a precarious state where they could sink into dire poverty at any moment.  How could they be expected to embrace austerity.

Any political program based on shared sacrifice because “we’re all in this together” requires a certain basic economic justice in which there is no gross exploitation, and a certain economic security in which nobody has to fear being without food, shelter or medical care.

This would only be a starting point, and we Americans are a long way from this starting point.  And time is running out.

I think the pandemic, severe storms, wildfires and other emergencies of the past few years are just the beginning.

We as a nation are not coping well with these emergencies.  People on the left and right are losing confidence in our governing institutions with good reason.

I hope for reform that will create a better-functioning government and a greater degree of social justice, and then it will be possible to tackle the long-range issues. 

Of course none of this can be accomplished unless we bring a stop to the forever wars.

A long, complicated and difficult agenda!

But the alternative is a slow decline, followed by a sudden collapse, followed by something else.

The something else might resemble Bolshevism or fascism, evolving into something resembling ancient despotism or medieval feudalism. 

Ideally, the something else could be radically decentralized democracy, with communities providing for most of their own basic needs.

Or maybe something good will happen that I can’t even conceive of.  One can hope.

I admit I don’t have any personal plan for dealing with what I foresee except to continue to enjoy my pleasant life and hope that the crisis doesn’t happen during my lifetime.  (I’m 84.) 

I do not act on what I think I know.  Do not follow my example.

The sources and future of U.S. global power

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The goals of U.S. power.

With the fall of Communism in Russia in 1991, the USA found itself an unrivaled global power. Two factions in the U.S. governing establishment—the deep state, the establishment, the power elite, call them what you will—decided to keep it that way.

They set policy all through the Clinton, G.W. Bush, Trump and Obama administrations, and they continue to set policy today.

Neoconservatives sought full spectrum military dominance for the United States in every region of the world. Aside from the love of power for its own sake, they thought this would forever secure the United States from any military threat.

Neoliberals sought to give U.S. banks and global corporations access to every region of the world as a source of customers, raw materials and cheap labor. 

This meant suppression of socialist and nationalist regimes that opposed foreign domination of their economies, and, above all, any regime that refused to do business in U.S. dollars.

Other motives are loyalty to alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel and avoidance of the humiliation of obvious defeat.

No doubt there were and are individuals in the U.S. power structure who sincerely believe in using U.S. power to promote democracy, human rights, a “rules-based international order” and the like.  But they are not the decision-makers.  They are only allowed to speak when their ideals happen to coincide with U.S. policy goals.

The sources of U.S. power.

The main source of U.S. power is the dominance of the U.S. dollar in conducting world trade.

This gives the U.S. government the power to borrow money to finance the world’s most expensive military establishment, and not worry about paying it back.

The U.S. Navy dominates the world’s sea lanes, and the U.S. Air Force dominates the air over poor countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.  This allows bombing with impunity.

By using air power and flying killer drones, special operations forces and subsidized foreign fighters, the U.S. military can wage war without large-scale sacrifice of life.

The Central Intelligence Agency has a record of plotting the overthrow of left-wing governments and installing U.S.-friendly dictators.  Latin Americans have a joke: There will never be a military coup in the United States because there is no U.S. embassy in Washington, D.C.

Another source of U.S. power is the thousands of weapons in its nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world.  The only nation with a comparable arsenal is Russia.  This means that no other nation except Russia can rule out the possibility of a nuclear attack.

The power of the dollar also gives the U.S. government control of the financial bottlenecks of world commerce, and impose sanctions and embargoes on foreign countries without having to worry about retaliation.

Much of the world’s commerce flows through the New York money center banks.  This gives New York banks the authority to impound the funds of nations such as Iran and Venezuela.  It also gives federal judges in New York jurisdiction over such things as Argentina’s settlement with his creditors or Ecuador’s fine of Chevron for environmental violations.

The SWIFT system—Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, based in Brussels—is a messaging system used by banks to transfer money and communicate information.  Being cut off from the SWIFT system means being cut off from the bulk of the world financial system, and SWIFT enforces U.S. sanctions.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are dominated by Americans.  They have a record of insisting that debtor countries impose “austerity”—higher taxes, fewer government services, higher prices and lower wages.  The debtor countries have to sell national assets and open up to U.S. and other foreign investors.

The 2014 coup in Ukraine came after the incumbent President decided to take a Russian loan instead of an IMF loan.  The new government took the unpopular IMF loan.

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The threat to U.S. power.

The greatest threat to U.S. power is neither Islamic terrorism, nor Russian subversion, nor China’s growing industrial power. 

It is the replacement of the U.S. dollar as the medium of exchange for doing world business.  Without dollar supremacy, all other sources of U.S. power would collapse.

The USA’s coming perfect storm of crises

New York’s Times Square during lockdown

It is said that the Chinese character for “crisis” is a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.”

I don’t know whether that is literally true or not.  I do believe that the USA faces a historical turning point—a perfect storm of crises out of which something better just possibly may come.

The crisis is economic, political and cultural.

The economic crisis is the high rates of unemployment, bankruptcies and evictions.

Revolutions are typically led by unemployed intellectuals.  Nationalist rebellions are typically led by unemployed war veterans.  The USA has plenty of both.

Many of us Americans hate each other based on our political affiiation.

Neither party is trying to win over members of the other side.  Partisan Democrats regard Republicans as bigots; partisan Republicans regard Democrats as immoral.  These are character judgements, not policy judgments.

Both sides have factions willing to resort to armed force.

In some of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, factions invaded municipal and federal government buildings and burned police stations.

In the recent pro-Trump election protests, an armed faction invaded the Capitol and tried to prevent the certification of the winner in the 2020 elections.

I don’t make light of any of this, but the actual number of deaths—an estimated 25 in protests during 2020 and five in the Capitol invasion—could have been a lot higher than they were.  There is potential for things to get a lot worse.

Ammunition and firearms sales are at record levels.  I don’t think these sales are limited to hunters, sportsmen and people who want guns for home protection, nor do I think they are limited to right-wing Republicans.

Only a small number of Americans are actually ready to engage in organized armed violence.  But there are millions who think that violence by one side is excusable and violence by the other side is inexcusable. 

It is interesting that all the armed factions, with few if any exceptions, consist of white men.  That includes those who embed themselves in the Black Lives Matter protests. There is a certain number of individual hoodlums and looters, including whites as well as blacks, but there is as yet no armed black organization equivalent to the Black Panthers of the late 1960s.

The stage is set for a continuing low-level war.  I don’t predict such a conflict will happen.  I do say there is nothing in place that guarantees it won’t happen.

President-elect Biden, who has taken credit for the USA Patriot Act, is talking about new laws against “domestic terrorism.”  Silicon Valley is moving to silence Trump supporters. 

The result of this will be to convince the hard-core MAGA Republicans that the political system is so stacked against them that they cannot work within it.  The populist radical left is also being squeezed out of the political system and may come to the same conclusion.

There’s long been a vast repressive apparatus in place to deal with any uprising. It is almost as if the powers that be have long expected an uprising and have made advance preparations to prevent it from succeeding.

We also have a crisis of governmental administration, revealed by the ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic and climate-related weather disasters.

All these crises are coming together and reinforcing each other.

Domestic fossil fuel industries in crisis

The domestic U.S. fossil fuel industry is in trouble.  Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake.  President Joe Biden will face a choice: try to save them or replace them with something better.  There is a good article in Dissent magazine about this.

In 2016,  [Donald] Trump charged Barack Obama with waging a “war against coal” and promised to bring the sector back to its former glory.

He manifestly failed to do so, but his rhetoric still proved an effective bludgeon against Hillary Clinton in Appalachia during the campaign.  In fact, more coal plants were retired under Trump than in either of Obama’s terms in office.

U.S. coal production had already been declining for years, as cheap natural gas edged it out of the energy mix used in power plants.  Coal jobs had been disappearing for years even before that, as the industry replaced workers with machines.

At its peak in the 1920s, the industry employed over 800,000 people in the United States.  Today, only about 42,000 coal mining jobs remain.

As coal companies have gone bankrupt, they have shed their pension obligations to former workers, leaving the federal government to pick up the bill.  Last December, Congress bailed out nearly 100,000 coal miners’ pensions.

In the long run, this was a good thing, not a bad thing.  Of all the important sources of energy production, coal is the dirtiest.  It generates the most air and water pollution and the greatest hazards to its workers’ health and the public health.  Still, that is no consolation if your livelihood depends on coal.

As energy researchers point out, coal is the canary for other fossil fuel industries. Oil isn’t on quite the same decline yet, but it’s headed in that direction.

The American fracking industry has expanded rapidly in the past decade with the use of cheap credit, and with encouragement from Obama, who boasted of making the United States the world’s leading oil producer.

But the shale oil that fracking produces is only profitable when oil prices are relatively high, and the overproduction of shale gas has glutted global markets.

The combination of a pandemic-spurred decline in demand and a price war between Saudi and Russian producers sent oil prices plummeting this year, resulting in a record number of bankruptcies among American oil producers.  An estimated 107,000 oil industry workers lost their jobs in the United States this year.

While some of those may come back as the economy recovers (whenever that is), many will not. Some energy analysts suggest that the world may have hit “peak oil demand,” as renewable energy begins to replace fossil fuels.  The Houston Chronicle reports that oil production employment in Texas “may never fully recover” as the overextended shale oil sector consolidates and learns to get by with fewer workers.

Source: Dissent Magazine

The fact that the fracking industry, or any other fossil fuel industry, is unprofitable doesn’t necessarily mean it will cease operations.  The economic incentive for an industry in the red is to do everything possible—in this case, extract every little globule of shale oil and gas—to minimize the loss.

Of course, moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing, not a bad thing—also overall.  Global warming is not imaginary.  Greenhouse gas emissions are real.  But what about all the people whose jobs depend on oil and gas?

We need something like a Green New Deal to create useful and sustainable jobs to replace jobs lost.  Without some such program, Americans will be forced to choose between short-run economic survivable and a livable planet in the long run.

The coming pandemic economic crisis

Joe Biden will be sworn in as President of a nation in which millions are unable to pay their bills and most of the programs to help them will have expired.

There will be much that he can do, with or without the cooperation of the Senate.  But what he will do is another question.

Here’s the deal.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that—

1. Nearly 26 million American adults—12 percent of all adults—reported they sometimes or often had difficulty in putting enough food on the table during the first week in November.  That’s triple the pre-pandemic percentage.
2. An estimated 13.5 million adult renters—about one in five renters—were behind in their rent.
3. Nearly 81 million adults—one in three—reported it was somewhat or very difficult to pay their usual bills.
4. In September, some 31 million Americans met the official definition of “unemployed” or were part of a household of an unemployed person.

Bankruptcy filings are mounting, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Many owners of failed small businesses can’t even afford to file for bankruptcy.  State and local governments, meanwhile, are running out of money.

Most of the federal emergency programs to alleviate the crisis will expire at the end of the year.  The $600-a-week supplement to state unemployment insurance expired July 31.  The rest of the unemployment insurance supplement will expire at the end of the year.  An estimated 13.5 million Americans benefit from pandemic-related unemployment relief.

The Senate and House of Representatives are deadlocked  on how to extend emergency programs.

So will the moratorium on evictions decreed by the Centers for Disease Control.  That wasn’t sustainable as a permanent policy anyway.  Property owners who make a living from rental income need that income to maintain the properties and usually to pay for utilities.

And the moratorium on student debt payments decreed by President Trump also expires at the end of the year.  About 32 million Americans had loans eligible for suspended payments. 

Both the renters nor the student debtors still owe the full amount.  They got a temporary suspension of payments, not relief.

∞∞

Joe Biden is the first President to be take office in the middle of a national crisis in which one house of Congress is controlled by the opposition political party.  This limits his freedom of action, but progressives say existing law gives him a great deal of power.

The Higher Education Act gives the Secretary of Education authority to settle all publicly-held student debt and cancel all or part of it.  David Dayan of The American Prospect says that covers 95 percent of American student debt, which is up to $1.5 trillion.  This would help stimulate the economy by making it easier to get a home mortgage or an auto loan.

Biden also would have the authority to forgive up to $50,000 of student debt by executive order.

The Affordable Care Act authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to create a pilot program to cover medical expenses of anyone who suffers from an environmental health problem.   The coronavirus, Dayan said, is an environmental health problem.

Rod Dreher on the coming soft totalitarianism

Communism and Naziism were different from plain old run-of-the-mill tyrannies.  They were totalitarian, not merely authoritarian.

An authoritarian ruler is content with passive obedience.  Silence is enough to buy safety under authoritarian rule.

A totalitarian regime demands active and sincere support, without mental reservations.  Totalitarianism aspires to control not only your outward actions, but your inner thoughts.

The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s was new and frightening.  But after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War Two and the breakup of the Soviet Union following the Cold War, totalitarianism was seemingly defeated for good.

But the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, in his new book, LIVE NOT BY LIES: a Manual for Christian Dissidents, warns of the danger of a new form of totalitarianism.

The danger, in his view, consists of two converging forces: (1) the rise of what’s called “cancel culture” or “political correctness,” which seeks to punish people for unorthodox words and thoughts, and (2) the rise of surveillance technology, which gives the powers that be new tools for tracking down what you’ve said and thought.

You might say both fears are exaggerated.  Where is the equivalent of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps?

Dreher interviewed Christian dissidents who suffered under Communist rule, and they in fact see the seeds of a new totalitarianism in the USA and other Western countries.

It would be a “soft” totalitarianism, enforced by economic pressure and the pressure of public opinion.

People really do fear for their careers if they go on record as saying something unacceptable, even with the best of intentions.  It’s not just Christians or conservatives who suffer.  So do liberals or progressives who make a misstep.

It’s customary nowadays to search social media for things people may have said in the past that’s unacceptable now. 

Meanwhile high-tech companies such as Amazon offer services based on connecting everything in your life to the Internet.  This of course creates a record of everything you do. 

This information is sold to advertisers, marketers, bill collectors, insurance companies, credit rating agencies and anybody else with an interest in knowing about you, and also used to manipulate your mind.

It would be naive to think that your political and religious opinions are excluded from this, or that police and intelligence agencies don’t have access to this information.  We see a preview of what might happen in China’s social credit system.

I recommend Dreher’s book.  His fears are not exaggerated.  In fact, it is even broader than he makes out.  It is not just religious people and conservatives who are targeted.  Anybody of influence who is anti-war or anti-corporate is a target for cancellation.

And this is against a background in which the federal government asserts new powers to start wars, imprison whistleblowers, order assassinations and pressure social media companies to censor all those who depart from the official view.

I do not argue that you should be concerned about these issues rather than Dreher’s issues.  All these things are forces converging on the same outcome.

What a 21st century civil war would look like

Patriot Prayer rally. Source: US Defense Watch.

I think there is a real possibility of civil war in the United States—not all-out war as in 1861-1865, but an intermittent, continuing conflict like The Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968-1998.

Whatever the outcome of the Presidential election, the losing side will not accept it as legitimate.  Democrats will point to illegal purging of voting rolls and other tampering with the election process.  Republicans will point to slanting and censorship of the news by big media and high-tech companies to favor Biden.

Many Democrats think President Trump is a puppet installed by Vladimir Putin to undermine the U.S.  Many Republicans believe the Q-anon story of a secret struggle against a conspiracy of pedophiles.

I’m not going to argue the relative merits of these beliefs.  The point is that they are widely held.  Democratic leaders didn’t accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 victory.  They tried to block him from taking office by manipulating the Electoral College and then tried to impeach him on far-fetched grounds.

Along with this there are armed factions already in the streets—the revolutionary faction in the George Floyd protests and the armed right-wing militias.

Black Lives Matter originated as a non-violent protest movement.  But the conflict in Northern Ireland also originated with non-violent protests, conducted on behalf of the Catholic minority there.  The conflict didn’t stay non-violent because the Provisional IRA and the Protestant militias joined in.

One of the lessons of the Northern Ireland conflict is that when civil war breaks out, it is difficult or impossible for the government to put down both sides.  Inevitably, it lines up with one faction or another.

So could it be in the United States.  A Biden administration would tilt toward the Black Lives Matter faction.  A Trump administration would tip toward the right-wing militias.  Democratic and Republican mayors would have their own agendas, as would Homeland Security and state and local police. 

Things could get complicated, very quickly.   We see these kinds of alignments forming right now..

I of course hope that this doesn’t play out as I fear, or that, if it does, violent conflict soon dies down to the point where it can be controlled. 

But with a looming economic crisis, an ongoing pandemic and continuing climate-related crises, I fear the USA is headed for a tipping point, and I do not know what the results would be.

On Oct. 26, 1860, few Americans, North or South, expected or wanted a civil war.  A year later, they were fighting one.  I doubt that, in 1968, the people of North Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, wanted or expected decades of conflict.  But they were forced to choose sides, whether they wanted to or not.

LINKS

A New Civil War: News & Opinion Aggregator.

Could America Split Up? by Damon Linker for The Week.

Is a New Civil War Possible? by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.

Over half of voters expect violence, disagree on election legitimacy by Ledyard King for USA Today.

The Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968-1998 by John Dorney for The Irish Story.

Even an FDR would have tough going today

In 2017, the incoming administration inherited a bad system that needed to be reformed, but, as we know. it wasn’t.  In 2021, the incoming administration will face overlapping emergencies probably even worse than Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933. 

The USA and much of the rest of the world faces not only an economic crisis, but an ongoing series of weather-related crises and probably a continuation of the pandemic plus ongoing international crises.

FDR was sworn in with the economy in ruins, including Wall Street and the banking system.  The country was pretty much ready to accept any bold action that FDR might propose. 

Yesterday’s leader

There were a number of political currents much more radical than Roosevelt––the CIO, the Progressive Party in WIsconsin, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, Huey Long’s “Every man a king” movement.  The Communists and socialists didn’t have a mass following, but they were more influential than they ever were before or since and gave a lot of energy to the labor movement.

In the political spectrum of his time, Roosevelt was what we’d now call center-left.  The Democratic Party was never a true party. like the British Labor party or the French Communist Party, but labor unions had a place at the table, along with the oil industry, teh real estate industry adn so on..

The opposition to the New Deal didn’t coalesce until 1938, when the Republican-Dixiecrat alliiance blocked FDR’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court and FDR failed to purge the Democratic Party of his strongest opponents in the Senate.

Then, too, there was no military-industrial complex in the USA in the 1930s.  The U.S. had a smaller standing army than Portugal.  The military-industrial cpmplex as we know it today was a creation of the Democratic administrations of the 1940s and its main opponents were Republican isolationists, many of them progressives who remembered World War One

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was in some respects like the New Deal—a short period of radical reform terminated by a war. Johnson’s legacy is as a great civil rights president – the greatest since Lincoln and Grant.

But except for Medicare, none of the Great Society programs provided universal benefits to a wide public, and none of them except Medicare were broadly popular.

Tomorrow’s leader?

The incoming president in 2021 will face a different balance of forces than FDR did.  Wall Street and the Fortune 500 corporations are not in disarray. 

Policies put in place during the Obama administration allow the Federal Reserve to prop up the banking and financial system without legislation.  The bailouts enacted by Congress earlier this year primarily benefit big business.

It is hard to see how any program of progressive reform can be enacted without a drastic reduction in military commitments and war spending.  But millions of Americans depend on the war machine for their livelihoods—not just plutocrats, but working people and the middle class.

We need to replace the military-industrial complex with a Green New Deal.  But I don’t see any mass movement in favor of it, and even if there were, it would be a big challenge to bring about.

The strongest mass movement we have in the United States today is the Black Lives Matter protest movement.  It is the biggest U.S. mass movement in my adult lifetime.

But the leaders of this movement, unlike the New Dealers, see the main division in the United States as racist white people vs. African-Americans and their allies. They don;t see it as the common people of all races vs. a rich and powerful elite.

Of course racial prejudice and racial discrimination, including police abuse of minorities, are a great evil and it is good that there is a strong movement for change.

But seeing everything through a racial lens is perfectly compatible with plutocracy and the forever wars.  That’s why BLM gets support from big corporations and foundations. 

The goals of Black Lives Matter need to be part of a larger, more inclusive movement, and I don’t see one on the horizon.  Of course this could change overnight.  Maybe it already has changed and I don’t see it yet.

A Constitutional crisis in the making

I think this prediction by economist Jack Rasmus is all too possible.

CNN poll shows 66% of Trump supporters will vote in person on Nov. 3 but only 22% of Biden supporters vote in person. (53% Biden supports to vote by mail). Trump will appear to win on Nov. 3 based on direct in person voting. He’ll declare victory and then move quickly to have Barr and the Justice Dept. stop the counting of mail in ballots in key swing states.

His lawyers are already fanning out and filing motions for injunctions against mail in voting. They will flood swing-blue states mail in ballot vote counting to delay the counting still further. States where Republican governors (and State secretaries of state who manage those states’ vote counting) will meanwhile throw out millions of mail in ballots based on technicalities like signatures failing to dot i’s or cross t’s to ensure Trump ‘red’ states turn in pro-Trump decisions.

Examples of US post office chaos & claims of lost vote ballots, etc. will be used by Trump lawyers to make legal argument that mail in ballots cannot be used to determine the final vote count. Injunctions will be filed to require states to disregard mail ballots. Further delays in mail in ballot counting will occur.

Disputes and legal action by Dems in response will be quickly sent up by Trump federal district judges (appointed by hundreds under McConnell since 2013) to the Supreme Court, now 6-3 in Trump’s pocket. Trump’s Supreme Court will repeat its Florida 2000 decision stopping the vote count––this time counting original votes not a recount. Only swing and blue states will be targeted, not red states already pro-Trump.

Street protests will erupt after Nov. 3 protesting the legal coup d’etat in progress. Trump has already called protestors “insurrectionists” and identified all protests as ‘antifa’ or ‘communist’. His attorney general, Barr, has also already pre-labeled protestors as “treasonous” and traitors who should be forcibly repressed and jailed

The US executive branch since 2002 now has its own executive police force called the Dept. Homeland Security (DHS), with de facto military swat teams who’ve been doing ‘dry runs’ in Seattle, Chicago, Portland and elsewhere. They will be used to suppress protests, aided by pro-Trump local police departments (e.g. New York City, etc.) and perhaps even welcoming right wing radical supporters as provocateurs to attack protestors and thus allow DHS-Police to declare protests riots and directly quash protests.

Source: Jack Rasmus

When Donald Trump was elected, I scoffed at those who called him a potential dictator.  I thought he was too erratic and ignorant to be a dictator.  I thought his significance was as a kind of proof-of-concept of how someone more intelligent and purposeful might become dictator.  Maybe I underestimated him.

This potential crisis is not Trump’s doing alone.  The Republicans–and it is mainly the Republicans–have been chipping away at the integrity of the voting system for 20 years.  In 2000, the election did not go to George W. Bush merely because the Florida recount was halted.  It was because thousands of black voters were disqualified based on false claims they had been  convicted of felonies in other states.

The virus and the world food supply chain

The fight against the coronavirus has resulted in collateral damage to world food supplies.  Or rather it has revealed underlying weaknesses in the world economic system.

The world produces enough food that no-one need go hungry.  An expert quoted by National Public Radio said average world food prices are lower than they were a century ago, despite the huge increase in world population.

The question is how to get the food to those who need it and who pays for it.  There is nothing in the nature of things that makes this impossible, but only the structure of the world economy.

LINKS

‘Instead of Coronoavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us’; A Global Food Crisis Looms by Abdi Latif Dahir for the New York Times.

COVID-19 pandemic leads to huge spike in world hunger by Kevin Martinez for thr World Socialist Web Site.

COVID-19 risks to global food security by David Laborde, Will Martin, Johan Swinnen and Rob Vos for Science magazine.

Obstacles to a new New Deal

The USA is heading into an economic crisis with evictions, foreclosures, small-business failures and unemployment rates like those of the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, made worse by the pandemic and catastrophic climate change.

But Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist whose specialty is money and politics, said that a second Great Depression will not necessarily result in a second New Deal.

The Great Depression was touched off with a crash in the financial markets.  Banks closed.  Business profits fell.  This weakened both the credibility and political power of big business.

No such situation exists today, Ferguson noted.  The Federal Reserve is propping up the banks and the financial markets.  The super-rich are actually richer and more powerful than ever.

President Roosevelt’s first response to the crisis was the National Recovery Act, a kind of democratic corporate state.  It was only when big business turned against him that the New Deal as we remember it emerged. with Social Security, the Wagner Act and so on.

The impetus for the true New Deal came from the new labor movement organized by John L. Lewis and the CIO.

Conditions today are different. Ferguson said.  Big business is entrenched in both parties and is able to block popular and necessary reforms such as Medicare for all.

There are wildcat strikes and a few militant unions, but nothing as yet like the labor movement of the 1930s.

Ferguson saw some long-range hope in the insurgent movement in the Democratic Party as represented by the Justice Democrats and other factions.  But in the long run, as someone said, we are all dead.  The crisis is not going to put itself on hold until 2022 or 2024.

LINKS

Biden Blurring Almost Everything, an interview of Thomas Ferguson for theAnalysis.com.

Joe Biden’s Platform for 2020: Anti-Populism by Bill Scher for POLITICO.

The Non-Voter by Chris Arnade for American Compass.

The test of reality

For decades, the USA and other rich nations have had the luxury of dealing with self-created problems.’

Some were self-created (deregulation of finance, foreign intervention), some symbolic (the border wall, Confederate statues) and some imaginary (the Russiagate plot).

Now, however, we’re up against real things.  Pandemics don’t care about public opinion polls.  Climate change doesn’t care about the limits of the politically possible.

Some nations are demonstrating the resiliency needed to rise to these challenges.  Some aren’t.  In a few years, we’ll have the results of real-life experiments as to what works and what doesn’t.

My hope is that we Americans will learn from experience.  My fear is that we will be unable to endure the pain of facing reality and the consequences of what we have allowed our rulers to do.

∞

COVID-19 is the quiz, climate change is the final exam by Jeff Masters for Yale Climate Connections.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s bet on the world of 2020

The Luddites in action

Back in 1995, Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, made a bet with Kirkpatrick Sale, the critic of technology.  The bet was that, by the year 2020, technology would have produced a much better world.

Kevin Kelly believed then and still believes that technological progress will automatically produce a better world.  Kirkpatrick Sale believed the opposite.  He thought then and still believes that the world has been on the wrong course since Columbus’s voyages in 1492.

My old friend in Texas called my attention to a 2019 article, in which Sale described the bet and told how he foresaw the world going wrong:

First, an economic collapse. I posited that it might take the form of a worldwide currency devaluation, in which the dollar loses its standing as the world’s reserve currency and becomes effectively worthless even in this country, and a global stock-market crash and depression.

Second, a political collapse, with upheavals both within nation-states and between. I saw the collapsed economy leading to maybe the bottom fifth of society in the developed world, no longer bought off with alcohol and drugs and celebrity and consumerism, rising up in rebellion and creating havoc and disarray throughout; at the same time a similar rebellion of the poor nations, no longer content to take the crumbs from the table of the rich, and simultaneously fighting violent guerrilla wars and flooding into the developed nations to escape their misery.

And finally, perhaps over-arching, an environmental collapse, in which global warming and ozone depletion, for example, made some areas like Australia and Africa unlivable and caused ice packs to melt, and old diseases, released from melting ice and deforested swamplands, mixed with new and spread deadly infections to all continents.

Source: CounterPunch.org

Kirkpatrick Sale’s predictions haven’t come true, at least not completely, but they seem much more probable than Kevin Kelly’s faith in inevitable technological progress.

I have to say, though, that, in 1995, I would have bet on Kelly’s side.

Is green technology a mirage?

If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact.  [Attributed to Donald Rumsfeld]

It is possible to ignore reality, but it is not possible to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.  [Attributed to Ayn Rand]

A new Michael Moore movie, “Planet of the Humans,” is an attack on the renewable energy movement.  Environmentalists by and large are outraged, and some demanded the movie be suppressed.

It actually was taken down from YouTube for 11 days, but it’s back up now.  If it is taken down again, you can view it on the Planet of the Humans Home page.

It runs for 100 minutes, which is a long time to watch something on a computer screen.  But it held my interest, and maybe it would hold yours, too.

In the first part of the movie, director Jeff Gibbs shows that solar panels and windmills are built through energy-intensive industrial processes and that they are made of materials such as high-grade quartz and rare earths that are scarce and non-renewable.

Solar panels and windmills wear out and have to be replaced.  In one scene, he visits Daggett, California, which pioneered in the development of solar and wind energy.  He sees a wasteland of dilapidated panels and windmills, because the pioneers couldn’t afford to keep them up.

And they don’t even fully replace fossil fuels.  Because of variability of sun and wind, backup electrical generators have to keep spinning, and the ones that aren’t hydroelectric use coal, gas and nuclear fuel.

In the second part, he looks at the environmental destruction caused by biomass energy.  There is no gain from freeing yourself from dependence on coal companies and embracing logging companies.

He makes a big point of pointing out the corporate ties of environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and of environmentalists such as Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Richard Branson and even Bill McKibben.

He questions the whole premise, promoted by advocates such as Al Gore, that it is possible for middle-class Americans to enjoy our current material standard of living simply by adopting a new technology.

Fossil fuels made possible a world with an exponentially increasing population with the average individual using an ever-increasing amount of fuel and raw materials, Gibbs said.  Such a world isn’t sustainable, he said.