Dismantle Civilisation

By Paul Craig Roberts, at CounterPunch.

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.

Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail. When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources–food, medicine, water, energy–America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”

According to the Jerusalem Post ( December 26), “at 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. . . . Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets . . . More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded . . .”

As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.

Israel’s excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization, Hamas, fires off rockets into Israel to protest the ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans. The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties. However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.

In 2006 the US insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections. When free elections were held, Hamas won. This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis. In the West Bank, the Americans and Israelis imposed a puppet government, but Hamas held on in Gaza. After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.

Ehud Barak, who is overseeing the latest act of Israeli aggression, said in interviews addressed to the British and American publics that asking Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like asking the US to agree to a ceasefire with al Qaeda. The terrorism that Israel inflicts on Palestinians goes unremarked.

According to the London Times (December 28), “Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza. The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W. Bush’s sporadic Middle East peace efforts. The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas.” The British government also blamed Hamas.

For the US and UK governments, Israel can do no wrong. Israel doesn’t have to stop withholding food, medicine, water, and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets. In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to “settlers.” Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away. Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children.

The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn’t care less.

In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter held the United States and its British puppet state accountable for “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought.” Everyone knows that such crimes occurred in the Soviet Union and in its East European empire, but “US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all,” this despite the fact that “the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.”

Soviet crimes, like Nazi ones, are documented in gruesome detail, but America’s crimes “never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

America’s is “a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think.”

Pinter presents a long list of American crimes and comes to Iraq: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was . . . an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading–as a last resort–all other justifications having failed to justify themselves–as liberation.” Americans and their British puppets “have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”

“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?” Pinter’s question can also be asked of Israel. Israel has been in violation of international law since 1967, protected by the United States’ veto of UN Resolutions condemning Israel for its violent, inhumane, barbaric, and illegal acts.

American evangelical Christians, who are degenerating into Zionists, are Israel’s greatest allies. Jesus is forsaken as Christians swallow whole the Israeli lies. A couple of years ago the US Presbyterian Church was so distressed by Israel’s immorality toward Palestinians that the church attempted to disinvest its investment portfolio from assets tainted with Israel. But the Israel Lobby was stronger. The Presbyterian Church was unable to stand up for Christian principles and knuckled under to the Israel Lobby’s pressure.

This is hardly surprising considering that the US government doesn’t stand for Christian principles either.

America’s doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” means that, like Lenin’s dictatorship, America is not bound by law or morality, but by power alone.

Pinter sums it up in a speech he had dreams of writing for President George W. Bush:

“God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.”

If only our ears could hear, this is the speech we have been hearing from Israel for 60 years.

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by Stephen Lendman.

The world community is silent and lets Israel do as it pleases – despite repeated international law violations, willful acts of aggression, grievous harm to four million people under occupation, including 1.5 million under a medieval Gaza siege, now under attack.

Reports were that EU nations and Russia called for (but didn’t demand) an end to hostilities. According to Reuters, Washington urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties but stopped short of calling for an end to the attacks. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe blamed Palestinians in saying “Hamas’ continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop.” Unsaid was that they respond to IDF violence or that until December 27 no Israeli was killed or injured.

Blame the Victim, Not the Aggressor

On Saturday, Condoleeza Rice accused Hamas for the violence. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could only express “deep alarm,” and where was Barack Obama? An AP photo showed him on vacation “working out” at the Semper Fit Center at the Marine Corp Base Hawaii in Kailua, Hawaii on Saturday, and CBS News reported that he’s “closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” according to Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokesperson.

In a July 2008 interview, The New York Times asked Obama if Israel should negotiate with Hamas in Gaza. He replied that “I don’t think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens….I expect Israelis to do (all they can to stop them)….In terms of negotiating with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognize your right to exist, (and) has consistently used terror as a weapon. Hamas is a terrorist organization….it’s hard for Israel to negotiate with a country like that.”

Hamas was democratically elected. It’s the legitimate Palestinian government. It’s falsely called a terrorist organization, and it has every right to resist an illegal occupation under international law. It observed a unilateral ceasefire for months and extended peace overtures numerous times in the past. Israel spurned them by dividing Gaza and the West Bank, co-opting Mamoud Abbas, inciting Fatah against Hamas, isolating Gaza, and pursuing a policy of aggression, killings, targeted assassinations, mass incarcerations, and torture with full support from Washington, the West, and (from his comments above) the incoming Obama administration.

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We’d pretty much agree with Jim’s predictions:

Introduction
There are two realities “out there” now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let’s call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a “consumer” economy to resume in “growth” mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament — through “innovation,” through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via “drill, baby, drill” policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current “rough patch” into a vibrant re-energized era of “green” Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.
The minority reality (let’s call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the “consumer” era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we’ve come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can’t be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.
While the public supposedly voted for “change” this fall, I maintain that they underestimate the changes really at hand. I voted for “change” myself in pulling the lever for Barack Obama. I regard him as a figure of intelligence and sensibility, but I’m far from convinced that he really sees the kind of change we are in for, and I fret about the measures he’ll promote to rescue the Status Quo when he moves into the White House a few weeks from now.

Where We Are Now

Without reviewing all the vertiginous particulars of the year now ending, suffice it to say that the US economy fell on its ass and that the “global economy” did a face-plant as well. The American banking sector imploded spectacularly to the degree that investment banking actually went extinct — as if a meteor landed on the corner of Madison Avenue and 51st Street. The response by our government was to shovel “loans” onto the loading dock of every organization that pretended to be something like a bank, while “bailing out” an ever-longer line of corporate claimants with a pitiable song-and-dance. The oil markets went on a roller coaster ride. The housing bubble collapse grew to avalanche velocity (taking out whole colonies of realtors, mortgage brokers, and construction contractors in its path), the commercial real estate sector developed hemorrhagic fever, retail drove off a cliff on Christmas Eve, the stock market fell in the toilet, jobs and incomes went up in a vapor, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens addicted to revolving credit found themselves in a life-and-death struggle for the means of existence. None of this is over yet.

The Year Ahead

Much of what has been lost in 2008 will not be recovered: enterprises, personal fortunes, chattels, reputations.
I expect a period of euphoria to mark the early weeks, perhaps months, of the Obama team. It will be a relief to have a president who speaks English correctly and has experienced something like real life prior to politics. Restoring credibility and legitimacy in leadership will be a big deal. If nothing else, we may recover a collective sense of consequence from a president who tells the truth, even the harsh truth. The age when it was enough to claim that “mistakes were made” might be over. A sign of this sort of change may be the commencement of prosecutions for misdeeds in banking and securities that are now destroying the entire system of deployable capital. A good place to start will be an investigation of Henry Paulson for insider trading stemming from Goldman Sachs’s shorting of its own issued mortgage-backed securities when Mr. Paulson was the company’s CEO. Beyond his case, there should be enough work at Attorney General Eric Holder’s office to employ a line of law school graduates stretching from Brattle Street to the planet Mars. It will be salutary for the nation to see those who engineered the banking collapse come to greater grief than the mere surrender of their Gulfstream jets and Hamptons villas. By the way, being allergic to conspiracy theories, I don’t believe for a minute that there is some kind of shadow elite of “Bilderburgers” standing in the background to protect these grifters — and I also believe the reason these paranoid notions persist is because it is otherwise hard to account for the extravagant irresponsibility of the Bush circle and its servelings.

Apart from “cleaning up Dodge,” so to speak, and from issues of collective character-and conscience-in-office, I worry that the avalanche of troubles already ongoing will overwhelm Mr. Obama and his people. It’s also well worth worrying whether they will pursue policies similar in kind to the ones pursued by Bush, namely throwing money at everything and anything, and it sure looks like they are planning to do just that. I am especially concerned about an “infrastructure stimulus” project aimed at highway improvement at the expense of public transit. This would be the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We need to begin planning right away for a transition away from automobiles, not in order to be good socialists but because Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway. For one thing, it will cease to be democratic as the remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it. Contrary to what you might make of the the current situation in the oil markets, we are in for a heap of trouble with both the price and supply of petroleum (more on this below). And there is no chance in hell that any techno rescue remedy to keep all the cars running by other means will materialize.

A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year. Meanwhile, jobs will vanish by the millions and companies will go bankrupt by the thousands, especially in the so-called service sector, and in all the suppliers of such, along with the landlords in all the malls and strip malls. The desolation will mount quickly and will be obvious in the empty storefronts and trash-filled parking lagoons. In the event, two things will become increasingly clear to the nation: that the consumer economy is dead, and that there is no more available credit of the kind that Americans are in the habit of enjoying.
We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable. This is the area where the crash of giants will be heard. I’ve been saying since publication of The long Emergency that comprehensive downscaling in all our activities, from farming to business to schooling to governance, will be the categorical imperative of the years ahead. Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off. This argument implies that the federal government will tend to flounder just as General Motors, Citicorp, Target Stores and other gigantic enterprises will tend to flounder. It would be sad to see a President Obama so hamstrung and helpless, and it is largely why I see his role as largely symbolic — as a reassuring presence encouraging the distressed public to bravely bear their hardships, and to be kind and helpful among their neighbors.

Households, like businesses, will have to pay as they go from earned income. The house as ATM is over. Credit cards are maxed out and credit ceilings are lowering like the ceiling in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” preparing to slice-and-dice the old “normal” of family life in America. Bankruptcy will be the new Nascar. A lot of families will lose everything. They will sift and disperse into the housing owned by other family members — parents, siblings — and a strange new not-altogether comfortable kind of togetherness will become common. Over time, a lot of people will go looking for casual work “under-the-table”( and probably low-paying). To some degree, these workers will begin to look and act like a new servant class, and before too long they may be absorbed into the households of people who employ them. There will be plenty of room for them there.

Counties, municipalities, and states will join in the bankruptcy fiesta. It would be reasonable to expect collapsing services as a result. This would be a situation fraught with danger — of rising crime, of public health emergencies as water systems are not kept up and sewage treatment becomes unaffordable. I don’t imagine the federal government stepping into every Podunk or Metropolis from sea to shining sea and propping up these services. People will have to cope with danger and deprivation.
2009 may be the point where we begin to understand what kinds of places will be more hospitable to human society further ahead. I maintain that our giant urban metroplexes have way overshot their sustainable scale and will contract severely. With all the economic hardship, we ought to expect a lot of demographic churning, people leaving hopeless places and moving on to something more promising. I believe we will see them move to smaller towns and smaller cities. The reorganization of the rural landscape into smaller-scaled farms has not begun to occur — though 2009 might be very hard on agribusiness, given the shortage of capital and if oil begins to march up in price by late winter. Eventually, the rural landscape will require the labor of many more people than is currently the case. Whatever else happens, 2009 will surely see a massive return to home gardening as budgets become strained to the extreme. As the New Urbanist Andres Duany said recently, “Gardening is the new Golf!”

The Oil Scene

Many were stunned this year to witness the parabolic rise and fall of oil prices up to nearly $150 and then back around $36 by Christmas time. Quite a ride. I said in The Long Emergency that volatility would be the hallmark of post peak oil because it was obvious that advanced economies could not absorb super high prices and would crash in response; that at some point after crashing, these economies would respond to the new lower oil price, resume their cheap oil habits, and build to another price rise. . . and crash again. . . in a declension of ever-lower industrial activity.
What I probably didn’t realize at the time was how destructive this cycling between low-high-and-low oil prices would actually be in the first instance of it, and what a toll it would take right off the bat. We can see now that our first journey through the cycle took out the most fragile of the complex systems we depend on: capital finance. As a result, a huge amount of capital (say $14 trillion) has evaporated out of the system, never to be seen again (and never to be deployed for productive purposes). It will be harder for the USA to rebound from the grievous injury to this crucial part of the overall system, and Europe has foundered similarly — though the European nations are not burdened to the same degree by the awful liabilities of suburbia.

Even if these advanced economies — throw in Japan too — remain moribund, the price and supply prospects for oil look ominous. My own guess is that the price of oil has overshot on the low end just as it overshot on the high end, and that, when all is said and done, we’ll still see an upwardly trending price line over the long haul. The plunge, which began right after the $147 peak in July 2008, was as much the result of banks, hedge funds, and individuals dumping oil investments and positions to raise cash as it was a matter of the markets predicting a sharp fall-off in economic activity (and supposedly oil consumption). The truth is that demand destruction for oil in the USA has been surprising mild compared to the drop in price. Jim Hansen’s Master Resource Report says that gasoline consumption dropped from 9.29 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.99 million barrels a day for 2008. That’s not much of a fall-off, especially compared to the price drop.

As Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute put it recently: “There won’t be any energy bail-out.” And, as many other people have noted, the recent plunge in oil prices strongly implies future supply destruction, since so many planned oil projects have been suspended or cancelled because they are economic losers at $40-a-barrel (or even $70). Even projects well underway, such as Canadian tar sand production, have been scaled back or shut down because they don’t make sense at current prices. Some of these other newer projects will now never get underway — they have missed their window of opportunity with so much capital leaving the system — and so the hope of offsetting very-near-future depletions in old giant oil fields looks dimmer and dimmer.

Those depletions are very serious. For instance, Mexico’s super-giant Cantarell oil field, the second-largest ever discovered after Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, has shown a 30 percent depletion rate in the past year alone. (Pemex had forecast a 15 percent rate entering the year.) Cantarell provides over 60 percent of Mexico’s total production, and Mexico is America’s third largest source of imports — just after Saudi Arabia (#2) and Canada (#1). Obviously, Mexico soon will lose its ability to export oil, and as that occurs, America is going to feel more than pinch — more like a two-by-four upside the head. In short, remorseless depletion is underway and we are less likely now than even a year ago, to make up for it.

At some point, then, demand, even if slightly lower, will catch up with declining supply. My prediction for 2009 is that we will see two things occur, possibly at the same time: a resumption of rising prices, and spot shortages. I say this because the global economic fiasco is sure to produce geopolitical friction, and inasmuch as America has to import almost three-quarters of the oil we use, the prospect for trouble is great.

The tragic part of all this, of course, is that the temporary plunge in oil prices has prompted an incurious American public to assume, once again, that the global oil predicament is some kind of a fraud. Given the flood tide of fraud they have been subject to in banking and investment matters, I suppose you can’t blame them from thinking that everything is some kind of a scam. Given feeble car sales this season, there are reports that an increasing percentage of those sold now are are trucks and SUVs.

Though I give Boone Pickens high marks for stepping up to the leadership plate, I’m not altogether on board with his energy proposal for swapping natural gas for gasoline in motor fuels while we swap out wind power for natural gas in electric power generation. I don’t believe that the ballyhooed shale-gas-plays of the last few years will prove-out long-term, as some huckster’s claim. They are expensive to drill and run, and they all tend to deplete very quickly — around one year. I’m not convinced we have the capital or the resources even to come up with the steel necessary to drill for it. Anyway, the last thing we need is a way to prolong our car-dependency.

In the meantime, there are still those who hope (as described above) that various alt.energy systems will insure the continuation of Happy Motoring. This is an idle hope, and 2009 will be very sobering for those who imagine that hybrid cars, or electric cars, or “air” cars, or natural gas cars, or any other kind of car technology will save the day. Even if President Obama mounts an “infrastructure stimulus” program, it will not keep up with all the necessary routine road repair that our highway system requires. The extreme financial hardship faced by localities and states insures that they will have to postpone a lot of expensive highway maintenance — even if the federal government fixes a big bunch of bridges and tunnels — and so we face the interesting prospect that our roadway systems will enter their own deadly zone of systemic failure even before the whole car issue is settled.

I am waiting to see whether Mr. Obama will undertake a restoration of passenger railroad service. I’ve said enough about this in the past, but it’s worth reiterating that a failure to get comprehensive passenger rail service going will be a sign of how fundamentally unserious we are as a nation.

The Specter of Inflation

This is the “other shoe” that a lot of people are waiting to drop. Right now we are caught up in a compressive debt deflation as mortgages stop “performing” and loans of all kinds are welshed on. Since money is loaned into existence, and a great many loans are not being repaid, then a lot of money is going out of existence. That’s what I mean when I say that capital is leaving the system. At the same time, the Federal Reserve has made good on its promise to drop money from helicopters if necessary to prevent an implosion of the banking system (as all that older money goes out of existence), and so it’s now a question as to when the amount of new money will exceed the disappeared old money. (Of course when I say money, I mean “money,” because we are dealing here in a shadow realm of assumed value.) In any case, there is bound to be a lag period between the time that the Fed’s money is dropped from the choppers and the time it actually filters through the banks and other recipients to the so-called “real economy” of people who buy and sell real things. The credible estimates I hear run between six and 18 months.

I’ll only venture to guess that we could see the start of serious inflation sometime in 2009. To some extent, all currencies are now free-falling together, some at slightly faster rates than others, but the situation of the US dollar is so grotesquely dire, and our structural imbalances so monumental, that it is hard to imagine that our currency will not win the international race to the bottom. Gold resumed its movement upward against the dollar a week before Christmas, and that may be an early sign. The government — and anyone badly in debt — benefits much more from inflation than deflation, so every effort will be made to avert the latter. The trouble lies in the government’s dumb incapacity to control dangerous things that it sets in motion, so that an inflationary campaign to avoid compressive deflation can so easily lead to a fiasco of super or hyper inflation — the kind that kills governments and turns societies into murderous monsters. I’ll forecast the that the US dollar is worth 40 percent of its current value by next Christmas.

Geopolitics

Well, now, who the hell knows what’s in store. Aside from a few bombs here and there, and pirates skulking around the horn of Africa, the world scene was miraculously free of major incidents in 2008 — perhaps the worst being a toss up between the September Mumbai bombings and the fiasco in Georgia, where the US prompted Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili to send troops into the South Ossetia region and the move was answered by overwhelming force from neighboring Russia, leaving the US looking feckless and retarded for our troubles. But otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot of action out there.

Until the last few days of the year, that is. I’m sure the ever-growing cohort of American anti-semites who send me emails will be tickled when I assert that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israel of recent days guaranteed a sharp response from Israel — and now, of course, Hamas is playing the crybaby card: “… what’d we do to deserve this…?” Well, you fucking fired a bunch rockets into Israel. Did you ever hear of cause-and-effect? This matter requires no further elucidation, except that it seems to suggest a ramping back up of hostilities. I wonder if it is the beginning of a new coordinated offensive by Islamic extremism aimed at taking advantage of the West’s current economic plight (and the West’s probable aversion to anything that will complicate its desired recovery). We’ll know in a month or so, I think, since any coordinated campaign (if such a thing were possible) might well be aimed at confounding the new American president.

The other hot corner of the world right now is the India-Pakistan border where the 60-year-old rivalry, which has already produced three wars, looks to be gearing up for yet another round. I’m not the first one to say that Pakistan is an extremely dangerous regional player, being an economic basket case, possessing a score or so of nuclear bombs, harboring more Islamic fundamentalist maniacs than any other place in the world, and having a government held together with duct tape and twine. The caper in Mumbai last September could well have been construed as an act of war, but somehow India kept its head. Who knows where this is going. . . .

So far I have only described what is already obviously going on. Add to this the likelihood that Iran is closer to achieving membership in the atomic weapon club. They’ve been spinning their centrifuges all year and nobody has done anything about it. My guess is that neither the US nor Israel will attempt to take out their facilities in the year ahead. If Iran used a nuclear device against Israel, or anybody else, they would be asking to become, in turn, the world’s largest ashtray. End of story. A different story, though, is how Iran might behave if and when the US Military presence in Iraq is reduced. I can imagine Iran doing anything possible surreptitiously to gain control over Iraq’s southern oil regions around Basra, but even the Iraqi Shia don’t like the Iranian Shia that much. Anyway, iran’s economy has suffered hugely from the fall in oil prices. That nation may be in for more internal trouble than they have seen in thirty years since the Shah was tossed out by the minions of Ayatollah Khomeini.
There’s been a lot of sentiment the past year that as the US and the Europe fall into economic disarray, China would emerge as the great new hegemonic superpower. While it’s come a long way in a quarter-century, China’s internal problems are still enormous and worsening. They’re in trouble with water, food imports, mass unemployment, and energy. They have locked in some oil contracts around the world, but they are still susceptible to vagaries in the oil markets and Black Swan events. As the US consumer economy falls into a coma, and the shipping containers from China to WalMart get sparser, the Chinese government will face the wrath of millions of unemployed workers. I believe they will struggle through 2009, perhaps growing more surly as the US dollar inflates and their holdings of treasury bills begins to look more like a swindle.

Russia may be suffering economically for the moment due to the crash of oil prices, but they are energy resource-rich — at least for the next couple of decades — and if they don’t like the current price, they can keep more of their oil in the ground until the price looks more attractive. I think Mr. Putin has the confidence of the Russian people and will survive the current malaise.

Japan remains a riddle wrapped in toasted nori. They’re beggaring their own factory workers to stay solvent. Their banking sector has been zombified for a generation. They import 95 percent of the energy they use. Do they have a plan? One can imagine them sliding in resignation back to something like the sixteenth century, giving up the whole industrial circus as more trouble than it’s worth, just as they once gave up on firearms.

The over-arching geopolitical theme of 2009 will be the end of robust globalism as we’ve known it for some time. Reduced trade, competition for energy resources, sore feelings over debts and currencies will drive the nations inward or, at least, direct their energies toward their own regions. Note to Tom Friedman: the world turned out to be round after all.

Conclusion

The big theme for 2009 economically will be contraction. The end of the cheap energy era will announce itself as the end of conventional “growth” and the shrinking back of activity, wealth, and populations. Contraction will come as a great shock to a world of conventionally programmed economists. They will toil and sweat to account for it, and they will probably be wrong. Unfortunately, this contraction will do its work in unpleasant ways, driving down standards of living, shearing away hopes and expectations for a particular life of comfort, and introducing disorder to so many of the systems we have depended on for so long. People will starve, lose their homes, lose incomes and status, and lose the security of living in peaceful societies. It will become clear that the Long Emergency is underway.

My hope for the year, at least for my own society, is that we will transition away from being a nation of complacent, distracted, over-fed clowns, to become a purposeful and responsible people willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to get some things done. My motto for the new year: “no more crybabies!”

Thanks Jim. As said, we agree, contraction will be the word for 2009. Too many people still don’t get it, while the media is implying that this ‘recession’ won’t last long. Hopefully more people will soon start seeing what is really happening, and start to demand, and above all, DO the things that might help make this transition a little less painful, and that might allow some percentage of humans to carry on living on this amazing planet. Perhaps in 2009 the general public will start to see that civilisation is unsustainable, and wake up from their slumber…. we hope so.

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Article at ratical.org by Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

If we are to talk about sustainability, we must, first of all, really understand that unsustainability means CANNOT AND WILL NOT SURVIVE AS IS. In other words, we have no choice but to change the way we live as a human species. You will either be a contributing part of our change for the better, or, if you choose to ignore or deny the fact of our present unsustainability, you will, by default, contribute to the rapid decline of our civilization and all humanity. Naturally, I hope you will all choose the first course.

When you look at your society now, this may seem a difficult and hopeless time, with unemployment at a new high and unsustainability in the very air you breathe. But if you learn to look at the present from a broader evolutionary perspective, you will see the potential for a very different future. In fact, the present is really an unprecedented time of opportunity. Think of it as a stage between caterpillar and butterfly — a time of metamorphosis when an old unsustainable system fights to preserve itself as a new system struggles to be born.

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them.

If you look at unemployment figures with dismay, worrying about your future, you are not yet an imaginal cell. In my own life as a pioneering imaginal cell, I discovered early that the “business as usual” old system was not going to hire me or support my work. Why should it? My work is to replace it with a different way of doing things. All of my friends and colleagues now are imaginal cells. We have had to be very creative in making our living, generating our own resources and discovering new ones. I will not say it has been easy, but it has carried the enormous rewards of new adventure and pioneering a better future. I can say with assurance that it is easier now than it was half a century ago — much easier, because there are so many of us now.

If you use this butterfly metaphor in thinking of our transformation from unsustainability to sustainability, you will immediately see four sets of critical skills required to realize this great opportunity for co-creating a better world:

the skills of thinking and seeing systemically or holistically

the skills of creating a positive vision of the future

the skills of finding like-minded people for cooperative efforts

the skills of using available resources in new ways

You will have to be adventurous and creative to learn them, because you will not find them in the traditional university curriculum. I believe choices about institutionalized higher education should be made on the basis of specific needs for reaching specific goals. If you want to be an imaginal cell as a doctor or lawyer, for example, you will need to get those credentials. But this will not be an adequate education for sustainability, so know that your efforts to learn must go far beyond university education.

Let’s look at these skills one by one.

Definitely worth a read, whether you are wondering what may be useful in the post-petrol world, or are about to start a pointless course at college. Most of the careers of our society are or soon will be defunct. The age of waste and pollution, explotation and destruction have to end, and those of us who survive the transition have a responsibility to create a benign human society.

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By Jan Lundberg at Culture Change.

Will Obama be a Greater Gorbachev?
Culture Change Letter #221 – Housing starts in the U.S. are down 47% as of 13 months ago. Prices of commodities, not just oil, are falling because of job losses unseen since 1947. Oil is still very costly when subsidies are included. The prior recoveries from recessions were from bubbles: dot com and housing speculation — when oil extraction was still rising. Now peak money has come and gone. Climate disasters have barely begun. So to deny we’re slipping on a downward slope is getting harder, and more of us are wondering about the uncertain outcome.

Another bubble is highly unlikely, so we’re having to face the music. With nothing to reverse the trends, and with mounting effects of ecological degradation and overpopulation, we see things are headed in a terrible direction. Still, people don’t want to explore collapse, or they place a comforting limit on what it means and what might happen. “No one knows” passes for wisdom and even action.

Whether we have been hit mainly by crippling energy costs as part of peak oil and petrocollapse, or clobbered more by Wall Street greed, the state of the global corporate economy is sick and maybe terminal. It’s reasonable to expect — or get caught up in — food riots on a broader scale than ever. Same for the fall of governments. Fortunately, there’s something we can do to avoid the worst of the fallout if we act proactively.

Meanwhile, we are looking at the near certainty that the depression — “the Final Depression” or “Grand Collapse” or “Darkness before the Dawn” — will intensify. And, since we have to consider there’s no longer “unlimited” cheap energy to rebuild the infrastructure for rail, it is time to (1) anticipate what can happen to the nation in the throes of petrocollapse and the bursting of peak money, and (2) steer our megaship away from the iceberg in hopes of a glancing blow and launching all possible bioregional lifeboats.

The real danger is in clinging to the status quo. For example, we should not try to build ever-more cars to run on deteriorating roads built with and for oil. To do so is to throw good money after bad, to reward or bail out fat cats taking the whole ship down as we sit by. Given the late hour for cheap energy and rebuilding, we have to think bicycles more than trains to be produced from car-dinosaur factories.

Even the most visionary, radical thinkers seem to saying little more than, “Look, there’s a big problem out there!” Yes, we see it. Some of us see more than others. But we need to see what’s next, while visualizing the positive future we need.

The positive future that we’d like is basic security, more love, connection to community and healthy nature, and liberation from foolish work. What would you like? How can we get there? First we have to look at where our problems are pushing us. Then we can see how any handles we have on inescapable trends may be seized upon for improved results. Otherwise, it will be just maximum chaos and a doubtful rebuilding from utter collapse.

Risking chaos without any attempt to restructure for improvement is the prevailing tendency. Reforming a system of waste, while refusing to slash greenhouse gases and stop unproductive work, offers no hope except for green opportunism. As the recent International Arctic Change conference warned, “The roof of our house is on fire while the leaders of our family sit comfortably in the living room below preoccupied with “political realities” — the message from 1,000 scientists from around the world along with northern indigenous leaders.

Without abundant cheap fuel, a nation the size of the US will become virtually ungovernable, so again, we choose. Either make steps to downsize, or try to hold it all together but watch it all collapse. We suspect that in coming years all nation states will find it increasingly difficult to govern, particularly the large nations.
The key word for the future is LOCAL.

Jan’s website is packed full of useful information and articles, and he has been writing about the coming petrocollapse for some years, including:

Petrocollapse: Can you live without indoor running water?
Cultural Revolution, American Style: Unpetroleum?
Preparations and policies for petrocollapse and climate distortion

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Thanks to Tierra-y-Vida for this. Something to contemplate, as the new year approaches. Many of us are looking to accelerate the transition to a new cultural renaissance in 2009, while others are revolting around the world in anger that the promises made by capitalism and globalisation turned out to be lies, while the american dream is a nightmare. As the following passage says, we make the choice. There will be violence, there is already, but we can reduce that violence by correcting our relationship with nature and each other, embracing change rather than fighting and resisting it.

The entire Hopi Prophecy usually
takes many days to tell, and many
life times to fully understand. This is
a short summary of essential points.
_____________________________

The Balance of Life

As caretakers of life we affect the balance of nature to such a degree that our own actions determine whether the great cycles of nature bring prosperity or disaster. Our present world is the unfoldment of pattern we set in motion. Our divergence from the natural balance is traced to a point preceding the existence of our present physical form. Once we were able to appear and disappear at will, but through our own arrogance we took our procreative powers for granted and neglected the plan of the creator. As a consequence we became stuck in our physical form, dominated by a continual struggle between our left and right sides, the left being wise but clumsy, and the right being clever and powerful but unwise, forgetful of our original purpose.

The Cycle of Worlds

This suicidal split was to govern the entire course of our history through world after world. As life resources diminished in accord with the cycles of nature, we would try to better our situation through our own inventions, believing that any mistakes could be corrected through further inventions. In our cleverness, most of us would lose sight of our original purpose, become involved in a world of our own design, and ultimately oppose the order of the universe itself, becoming the mindless enemy of the few who would still hold the key to survival.

In several previous worlds the majority have advanced their technology in this way, even beyond what we know today. The consequent violations against nature and fellow humans caused severe imbalances which were resolved in the form of war, social disintegration and natural catastrophe. As each world reached the brink of annihilation, there remained a small minority who had managed to live in nearly complete accord with the infinite plan, as implied in the name, Hopi. Toward the final stages they would find themselves beset with signs of disintegration within, as well as enticing offers and severe threats from without, aimed toward forcing them to join the rest of the world.

Our Present World

Our common ancestors were among the small group who miraculously emerged from the last world as it reached its destruction, though they too were tainted with corruption. The seeds of the crisis we face today were brought with us when we first set foot in this world. Upon reaching our present world, our ancestors set out on a long migration to meet the Great Spirit in the form of Maasauu, the caretaker of this land and all that lives upon it. They followed a special pattern, however a very serious omen made a separate journey necessary, in order to balance the extreme disorder anticipated for the later days.

The True White Brother

A Hopi of light complexion, now known as the “true white brother,” left the group and travelled in the direction of rising sun, taking with him a stone tablet which matches a similar tablet held by one of those who went on to meet Maasauu at a place called Oraibi, where the present Hopi villages were established according to his instructions.

The Hopi anticipated the arrival of a race of lightskinned people from the east, predicting many of their inventions , which would serve as signs indicating certain stages in the unfoldment of the pattern the Hopi had studied from antiquity. It was clearly foreseen that the visitors, in their cleverness, might lose sight of their original purpose, in which case they would be very dangerous. Still the Hopi were to watch for one who has not left the spiritual path, and carries the actual stone tablet.

The Swastika and the Sun

Through countless centuries the Hopi have recalled in their ceremonies the previous worlds, our emergence to the present world, and our purpose in coming here. Periodically they have renewed their vow with Maasauu to live the simple, humble way of life he laid out for them, and to preserve the balance of nature for the sake of all living things. The knowledge of world events has been handed down in secret religious societies who keep watch as each stage unfolds.

The leaders watched especially for a series of three world-shaking events, accompanied by the appearance of certain symbols that describe the primordial forces that govern all life, from the sprouting of a seed to global movements such as weather, earthquakes, migrations and wars.

The gourd rattle is a key symbol. A gourd signifies seed force. The shaking of the gourd rattle in ceremonies means the stirring of life forces. On the rattle are drawn the ancient symbols of swastika, showing the spirals of force sprouting from a seed in four directions, surrounded by a ring of red fire, showing the encircling penetration of the sun’s warmth which causes the seed to sprout and grow.

The first two world-shaking events would involve the forces portrayed by the swastika and the sun. Out of the violence and destruction of the first, the strongest elements would emerge with still greater force to produce the second event. When the actual symbols appeared it would be clear that this stage of the prophecy was being fulfilled.

The Gourd Full of Ashes

Eventually a “gourd full of ashes” would be invented, which if dropped from the sky would boil the oceans and burn the land, causing nothing to grow there for many years. This would be the signal for a certain Hopi to bring out his teachings in order to warn the world that the third and final event would happen soon, and that it could bring an end to all life unless people correct themselves and their leaders in time.

Hopi leaders now believe the first two events were the first and second world wars, and the “gourd full of ashes” is the atomic bomb. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, teachings formerly kept secret were compared and released to the world. The details presented here are part of those teachings.

The Day of Purification

The final stage, called the ” great day of purification, ” has also been described as a “mystery egg,” in which the forces of the swastika and the sun, plus a third force symbolized by the color red, culminate either in total rebirth, or total annihilation – we don’t yet know which, but the choice is ours. War and natural catastrophe may be involved. The degree of violence will be determined by the degree of inequity caused among the peoples of the world and in the balance of nature. In this crisis, rich and poor will be forced to struggle as equals to survive.

That it will be very violent is now almost taken for granted among traditional Hopi, but man may still lessen the violence by correcting his treatment of nature and fellow man. Ancient spiritually-based communities, such as the Hopi, must especially be preserved and not forced to abandon their wise way of life and the natural resources they have vowed to protect.

The Fate of Mankind

The Hopi play a key role in the survival of the human race, through their vital communion with the unseen forces that hold nature in balance, as an example of a practical alternative to the suicidal man-made system, and as a fulcrum of world events. The pattern is simple. “The whole world will shake and turn red and turn against those who are hindering the Hopi.”

The man-made system now destroying Hopi is deeply involved in similar violations throughout the world. The devastating reversal predicted in the prophecies is part of the natural order. If those who thrive from that system, its money and its laws, can manage to stop it from destroying Hopi, then many may be able to survive the day of purification and enter a new age of peace. But if no one is left to continue the Hopi Way, then the hope for such an age is in vain.

The forces we must face are formidable, but the only alternative is annihilation. Still the man-made system cannot be corrected by any means that requires one’s will to be forced upon another, for that is the source of the problem. If people are to correct themselves and their leaders, the gulf between the two must disappear. To accomplish this one can only rely on the energy of truth itself.

The approach, which is the foundation of the Hopi way of life, is the greatest challenge a mortal can face. Few are likely to accept it. But once peace is established on this basis, and our original way of life is allowed to flourish, we will be able to use our inventive capacity wisely, to encourage rather than threaten life, and benefit everyone rather than giving advantage to a few at the expense of others. Concern for all living things will far surpass personal concerns, bringing greater happiness than could formerly be realized. Then all living things shall enjoy lasting harmony.
______________________________________________

Written by Thomas V. Tarbet, Jr., and reviewed by a traditional messenger. All rights concerning this publication are reserved by the author, with the exception that it may be copied or transmitted by any means, provided nothing is added or deleted, and provided it is not sold.
IF YOU VALUE THE DESTINY OF FUTURE GENERATIONS MORE THAN PERSONAL WELFARE, PLEASE MAKE SURVIVAL OF THE HOPI WAY YOUR PRIMARY CONCERN, AND LET THE SUCCESSFUL RESOLUTION OF THEIR PLIGHT AT THE HANDS OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD BE YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND GREATEST PLEASURE.
For Further Information
Hopi contacts: Techqua Ikachi Publications
Box 174, Hotevilla, AZ. 86030

Thomas Banyaca, Interpreter
Box 112, Oraibi, AZ. 86039

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Parts 1and 2 of capitalism at the expense of all life  are posted on dismantle civilization here.

by Juan Santos

This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” – has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth. The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class – understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

There are no words to convey the depth of criminal horror and illness of the rulers of a system that would create the conditions not only for genocide on an unimaginable, all but limitless scale, but that would commit the murder of all life – ecocide, biocide and geocide – in order to shield themselves from change and protect and maintain their ability to produce “profit.”

But the holocaust we are entering is not made of a single criminal act – it is not the pushing of a button by a lone madman in a fit of religious mania or suicidal despair, it is, rather, the accumulation of a billion little deaths, the reaching of a critical threshold of death, until death itself boils over, the way that water, when it reaches its threshold of heat, roils over the edges of a pot, waging war on the fire that feeds it. It is the final explosion, the river of blood from the slaughterhouse spilling over its banks, no longer to be contained. It is the millions of children beaten, molested, raped, enslaved and “schooled.” It is the billions who live on less than a dollar a day. It is the slow soul murder of television and of going to “work.” It is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is the homeless and the mad left hungry and frozen in the street. In the US, it is the millions of red, black and brown men locked behind prison bars, the mass terror of a racist system whose aim is to brutally reduce whole peoples to a state of utter subjugation, degradation isolation and immobility. Like the Nazi holocaust or the conquest of the Americas and Africa, it is not a single event, it is an historical process and an all – permeating “way of ‘life.’” It is the “supreme” way of life; the “non-negotiable” way, as GW Bush put it; the “American Way.” The capitalist way.

Marx and Engels had this much wrong. Civilization, slavery-based economies and more efficient forms of production like industrialist capitalism and socialism have not led to “progress,” unless “progress” can be counted as progress toward mass death and destruction, toward the enslavement and grave endangerment of human beings – all of us- and of every living plant, animal, fish and insect. Fundamentally, Marx and Engels believed in “profit” at the expense of the living Earth as much as any industrial capitalist – they just wanted to share the profit more broadly in a different money-system. The fundamental alienation of people from their connection with all life – and the most fundamental exploitation of life – would ultimately remain intact.

The Marxist project has failed, just as capitalism has failed. The state didn’t gradually “wither away” over a protracted period of change called “socialism.” Under the conditions prescribed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, the state can’t wither away. The state and the city are a single dialectical identity, a unity of opposites – they’re two faces of a single process, and the state can’t “wither away” unless the fundamental process of domination, control, exploitation, ecocide and genocide called the city – “civilization” – also withers away. The city necessitated the state and the state enabled the city. The city and the state arose together and they will die together. No one has remained free anywhere the city-state has arisen or in any area it’s conquered. No one has been free. Not the rulers. Not the ruled.

But that’s all over.

There’s a capitalist maxim: “Grow or die.” The maxim holds true within the limited sphere of the circulation of money and the accumulation of capital in a particular economic system; each individual capitalist project must compete – grow – or be swallowed by other capitalist ventures; in other words, it must “die.”

The system’s true believers never thought they’d reach the limits of growth, but that is just what has happened. They’ve reached the limits of their “resource” base – the ecological and geological limits of what can be destroyed to produce more profit. The game is over. They broke the bank. They were warned. They didn’t listen. They’re still not listening. For them, and for most of us who’ve not shaken our entrainment in the ways of seeing the world they stewed us in as children, we have come to an unimaginable passage. Call it the end of the world as we know it. That’s the deal. The inescapable deal. It’s over. One way or another. Either this
“non-negotiable” way of “life” ends, or the capacity of Earth to sustain life ends. This is not to say that some solutions can’t be found. It is, rather, to say that any “solution” that doesn’t undo the fundamental theft and imbalance inherent in the system of profit is not really a solution at all. The problem is global – total. The magnitude of the solution must equate with the magnitude of the problem. The system of theft and imbalance called profit is simply not sustainable, not on the whole, not in part. Life that can’t be sustained dies. The capitalist equation is now turned right-side up: “Stop ‘growth’ or die.” And it’s not just the capitalist mode of exploitation that must end. We’ve got to eradicate the cancer at its root, and, of course, capitalism, and modern industrialism more broadly, are built on the foundations of earlier, less “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. That’s where the roots of modern industrial systems of death lie.

While the psychological and biological functions or dysfunctions – the emotional splits and repressions that lie at the very core of the origins of our cultural dysfunction – have yet to be fully articulated and formulated into a coherent picture that explains their intersections with cultural suppression, economic exploitation, and political oppression, this much is clear. The first and fundamental practical expression of these dynamics in terms of their impact on the life of the Earth lies in this: The acquisition of land title by force and the enshrinement of “property” as social law.

That’s how “civilization” started: a city cannot exist without seizing the land around it. A city is all-but by definition a concentration of people too large to be supported by the land within its own boundaries – it must seize control of nearby lands or its population will starve.

The seizure of land by force – both for agricultural and herding purposes and for mineral extraction – continues as a key link in the survival and expansion of a global human population whose numbers are rapidly outstripping the capacities of the territories it already dominates to sustain any further population increase. The result is the rapidly escalating destruction of the world’s forests (and the concomitant eradication of a huge and increasing number of plant and animal species), along with the bottom trawling of the oceans for fish to feed the spiraling human numbers, with the concomitant eradication of 90% of the world’s large fish populations. Other clear examples include the seizure of the territory of the nation of Iraq for its oil and the seizure of a significant portion of Navajo Nation land and the forced removal of its population for access to the 18 billion tons of coal that lie beneath its surface – basically the same thing that is happening to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region as their land is seized for farming, ranching and oil interests. “Growth” means an increase in exploitable “resources,” whether those resources are oil, coal, the fertility of the soil itself, or the “resources” for a “green” economy, like the ores to make the steel to build “environmentally friendly” hybrid cars (auto production creates, to cite just one example, 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually.) The end result of this orientation toward economic “growth” is death for the land base, for the indigenous cultures that care for it, and for the life the land and native peoples support. It is a cancerous growth. Same as it ever was.

A capitalist – or socialist – “green” economy is little more than another step in the evolution of a millennia long series of more “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. The fundamental premise behind the concept of a “green” economy and “green” growth is that the exploitation and destruction of life is somehow ultimately sustainable. “He is blind,” as one Hopi elder put it, “So he destroys himself when he tries to save himself.”

“Green” Growth is a mutually exclusive contradiction in terms.

No matter what we call the mode of production and destruction, and no matter how we distribute the “profit” – the “wealth” extorted from life and living systems – continued growth in production and destruction for the sake of human consumption can lead to only one end. Sooner or later – really sooner than later – we are going to crash full bore into the limits of growth – into the absolute limits of the “carrying capacity” of the Earth – the end of its ability to feed one more human, the end of the capacity of ecosystems to endure the disappearance of one more species without a complete and perhaps irreversible collapse.

There is, if we are honest with ourselves about it, only one possible result that offers hope. It’s not, I am sorry to say, social revolution. Nor is it the process of “bringing down civilization” advocated by some anarchist greens and anarcho-primitivists. The simple fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that revolutionary movements aimed at an overthrow of the state or at the literal, immediate, physical dismantling of the machinery of death can be developed on a sufficient scale with a sufficient understanding to undo what must be undone – nor could the seizure and wielding of state power do the trick. Not only is the state itself based on the seizure and maintenance of land title by force, but the existence of the state requires the existence of the city – it requires that the fundamental dynamics of empire, “resource” exploitation and “profit” remain intact.

Marx’s postulation notwithstanding, for the state to “wither away” the City must also “wither away”.

It is only the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other forms of life that makes the concentration of power in a state apparatus possible. Only an increasingly radical imbalance in the energy flows of the planet, an imbalance skewed toward humans at the expense of all life, makes for such an accumulation, and the imbalance must grow in concert with the human population’s growth until it reaches the very crossroads we have reached today. The seizing of state power in no way changes the fundamental equation. An ecologist might say that the equations of the solar budget are the only equations – the only bottom lines – that count.

The only way out – which is to say the natural way out – is a population crash. No human-invented scheme can overrule the way – the natural consequences or “laws” – of nature. And what happens to any and every population in overshoot in nature is a population crash. It’s nature’s way.

It can’t be improved upon. It can’t be subverted. It can’t be avoided, although, perhaps, the severity of the collapse can be softened. Blame is irrelevant, except to the extent that in identifying causes, we are able to learn and avoid their repetition. But, a human population crash will do nothing more than delay even worse results – like utter extinction – unless it is accompanied by a profound process of identifying and learning from what went awry in what has gone before.

Under the best of circumstances the global economy and the global system of dominance that rests on it will run into limits it cannot transform – so that it cannot continue until the point that the global ecosystem – life itself – collapses all around us and within us. In the best case scenario, peak oil will prove just such a limit, a limit that sinks the system of production and destruction to such a degree that it prevents it from resurrecting itself.

This formulation can, of course, be denounced as Malthusian. It can also be denounced by revolutionaries of all kinds. But here’s the simple fact. All we can do is hope, and to the best of our ability, align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of life. Yes, as Derrick Jensen suggests, hope is what you do when you have no agency, no power, no control. But then, it is precisely our drive to control and reorder nature that has brought us to this point, and it is that drive for control, and the pain that drives it, that must be healed, transformed and left behind. But, while we may not be able to control outcomes, make a revolution or “bring down” civilization, we can align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of Life.

By the same token and the same logic, the key tasks before us lie not in saving the global economy, not in creating a “green” economy, not in inventing new ways to exploit new energies in order to continue to mine the life of the Earth, nor in any other activity that would seek to preserve this system in any form whatsoever.

The key task before conscious people today is the forging of a profound understanding of what has gone wrong – a sweeping and utter re-evaluation of all values that will be tantamount to a new renaissance, a conscious re-creation and co-creation of culture. Much of that work began to be undertaken in the 1960s, and has borne important fruit, like William Kotke’s work, The Final Empire. It is ours to forge an authentically sustainable culture, even in the midst of this civilization’s fast approaching end – by relying on and integrating the deepest, clearest and most coherent teachings of traditional indigenous cultures, of students of the ecology, and of the multivalent healing practices of both indigenous cultures and of the new therapies that have arisen in the last 50 years. Such a movement – one that is intent on restoring the Earth and fostering social justice and renewing our cultures by incorporating the values and vision of indigenous peoples – is already underway on a global scale. Paul Hawkens, in his important book Blessed Unrest, calls it an “unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another.” His research shows that it is the largest movement in human history, involving some 2-3 million organizations worldwide and some 200 – 300 million people whose cultural, ethical, political and ecological creativity are already impacting billions. That the processes of renewal – of healing, rectifying and relearning – will best be fostered among those in living in direct contact with, and in a caretaking relationship with the Earth and other, non- human living beings should, I hope, be self evident.

Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at The Fourth World. He can be reached at: JuanSantos (at) Mexica.net.

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I’ve just been reading a very interesting article on the Oil Drum local, introducing ideas of how to store home grown foodstuffs without boiling or other heating methods.

I’d been meaning to write an article about the joys of the humble pumpkin, simply because they are so fantastic for keeping. Hard skin heirloom varieties keep in a cool room for several months, without any kind of processing.

This article by Jason Bradford summarises several methods of how to store foods without boiling. As well as growing pumpkins and other crops that keep, we also grow parnips and other root crops that will stay in the ground until we want to eat them, and perform most of the ideas that Jason documents.

Okay, back to the subject of preservation. My favorite is drying. Not everything does well with drying, but some of the most abundant fruits and vegetables, such as apples and tomatoes, perform well. This year my farm devoted a lot of effort towards drying and the associated equipment. In California I can take advantage of low summer humidity. Many foods can simply be placed on screened trays outside (see top image). Towards the end of the summer and early fall as the day length shortens and relative humidity increases, drying may require more concentrated heat. A couple friends of the farm build specialized food drying cabinets with a heat collection chamber, and these did a fantastic job.

This is what one of the driers looks like. The black box at the top holds the screened trays of produce. The slanted front piece is a heat collector. Here is a good web source for descriptions and plans of solar cookers, dryers, root cellars and stills.

This solar food dryer looks amazing, and we do plan to build something similar in 2009, to enable us to dry foods for preservation without any heat-source other than the sun.
In the affluent west we have been stupidly complacent regarding cheap abundant energy. This should never have happened, energy is valuable and should always have been treated as such. Solar cooking and drying is possible in most parts of the world, at least some of the time. In many places it is almost always feasible, particularly in hotter southern areas, that never had the luxury of energy wastage. I would like to see this kind of appropriate technology taken up all over – it just makes sense.

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By Jon Ronnquist, at Information ClearingHouse.

Here at last then is the defining moment of our time, our legacy to whatever lies beyond this cataclysmic failure of the human race. For the want of understanding, the kingdom was lost. And all this in what could have been the golden age of mankind.

Call it scare mongering, call it incitement of panic, hell call it terrorism for all that catchphrase means. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. The proverbial has hit the fan and the mess is going to be almighty.

By all valid accounts, which is to say all those you won’t hear about, the linchpin of the global economy, the all mighty US Dollar, is on a death march. We are not talking about deflation either, this is going to be a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. And with it will go everything and everyone whose plans, wealth and future was pinned on it, namely the western world as we know it.

How did this happen? Who is responsible? Why did we let it go so far? I suspect these questions will reach the lips of untold numbers before we see another winter. They are valid questions. Perhaps the only ones left that are worth asking. So let us not abandon them to posterity along with the ruins.

What looms on the horizon now is not a season for humility but the inevitable itself. This is the human race collapsing in on itself at the end of a long and slow process of rot which was eating away at the third world long before it reached the golden shores of the west. For a time we were all kings, walking tall beneath the banner of imagined destiny. In the east the grateful poor toiled at our behest and sang songs of praise to their generous masters beyond the sea. Or so we dreamt even as we watched them dead and dying at the hands of our henchmen. Now that our halls are crumbling beneath the weight of our own greed and false complacency, let us not dishonour the dead with our hollow pleas of innocence and ignorance. It is only we who do not yet know real suffering, to the world at large it has long since become a matter of course.

Were we manipulated into complacency? Of course we were. Does that absolve us of responsibility? Of course it doesn’t. Our very laws are founded on the principle that it can’t. It is all too easy to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of evil men. But you cannot stone the slave auctioneer when you are a profiteer of his trade. See reason and banish him by all means, but do not court hypocrisy by false disassociation.

I do not say that there is nothing left for which to fight. On the contrary this economic end of days may yet see us able to buy back our very souls. It is after all the first thing we lost and the most promising foundation for a newer and better world. But if that opportunity for amnesty does present itself, it must be extended to all or we will surely forfeit that most valuable of possession for good.

Stupidity, not economics, is the stepping stone to mass manipulation. Wise men do not buy fool’s gold. Complaisance, selfish interest and false neutrality are the aftermath, not the catalyst of the human tendency to look away. But stupidity is the key. And to support the status quo after all it has taught us would be the final act of human ignorance for sure. Not to mention a pointless one.

To see this collapse of global finance as a problem would be short-sighted indeed. Of course in the west that seems to be the crime of which we are universally guilty, one and all. We must stop seeing the world in the false terms in which we have been schooled to look at it. Only then can we begin to appreciate that what is dying before us is only doing so because we didn’t save it when it could still be saved. In it’s current form, the system is beyond redemption. Any effort to piece this global economy back together will amount to nothing more than the penultimate concentration of wealth in history. A concentration so great that talk of police states and new world orders would cease to be talk all together. If you believe that another loan will see you through this rough patch and into open seas on the other side, you have not understood what is happening.

I do not say these things lightly. I myself am scarred to death of the uncertainties which lie ahead. But when the hammer falls at least I will not become paralysed with dumb shock. And whatever I do make of my future, I know it will not look anything like my past and that is a blessing.

Wake up or sleep tight. The time for easy options is running out.

Over and out.

It is incredible how few people see the situation as it truly is. This is the end of the world as we know it, thank heaven! As Jon says, to understand is truly terrifying, but at the same time liberating and hope restoring!

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More great insights from Sharon Astyk. Ponzi schemes are illegal, but what is our economic system, or how we are treating the ecology, other than a giant Ponzi scheme, where today is being paid for by tomorrow. Crazy.

This point I’ve written about a number of times – but somehow I’d never quite fully grasped the corollary point, which I found myself articulating on the fly – that the Ponzi economy depends on an endless supply of laborers, laborers who wouldn’t quit because they can’t. And that means that the cost of living – of basic needs like housing, food and transportation have to be kept high – because otherwise people might notice that serving corporate masters isn’t the best or only way to live their lives. Those 850 square feet, and the costs associated with them, and the problems of housing the ordinary stuff we “require” for daily life in 250 square feet means that the cost of housing for ordinary people is dramatically high – so high that we must devote most our time to the corporate economy, so high we then have no time to do work in the informal economy, so high that we can never, ever think about whether there are any better choices out there.

We’re going to try and rescue the economy with another Ponzi scheme – with borrowing against our children’s future wealth to protect financial institutions and invest in some good things and some bad ones. This, of course, is the oldest ponzi scheme of all, and you can make the argument that some human societies have been playing this game for a very long time. We’ve been doing it with natural resources and are continuing to do so, and we’re also expanding the share of our children’s wealth we’re willing to borrow against. After all, what have future generations ever done for us? They might as well serve some purpose – to pay off our debt.

And of course we’ve got the best possible reason for this – we’re in a crisis. There’s always a good reason for taking just a little more of what belongs to the future – to bring people out of poverty, to resolve this or that crisis. Of course, the crisis was caused by borrowing against our children’s inheritence of natural resources, but more of the same is now necessary. A good Ponzi scheme always needs new investors – and if none are going to volunteer, well, let’s volunteer them. We’ll use the to prop up the stock market and today’s version of the Roman chariot business.

Our ecology and our economy all fundamentally are built on a Ponzi scheme in which we can never make enough to keep up – we are always losing ground, always having to steal from further down the line of our posterity. At the same time, we justify their forcible participation in this speculation by saying that we are protecting them – we have to protect them from a Depression, so it is worth risking their future. But, of course, if you actually care about your children and grandchildren, you don’t ask them to make sacrifices you aren’t prepared to make. Fundamentally, we’re covering our own asses, and asking our kids to do it for us.

And that’s, well, evil, to put it bluntly.

Sharon also, in a seperate post has gone over her predictions made in 2007 for 2008, and just how close to the mark she came. Her predictions for 2009 include ‘the collapse’ proper, and we are inclined to agree, that we ain’t seen nothing yet. In the UK we have seen Woolworths go into bankruptcy, and the pound lose over a third of its value compared to the euro in the past 12 months, but 2009 may very well make the problems of 2008 seem like a walk in the park! The time available to use the system to prepare for a different world, a less energy world, is coming to an end.

Ok, what about the coming year? While I think 2008 was when most people first realized something was wrong, I’m going to go out on a limb here (ok, not a huge limb, but a limb) and say that 2009 will be the year we say that things “collapsed.” I don’t think we’re going to make it through the year without radical structural changes in the nature of life in most of the world. I’m calling it, a la Yeats’s “Second Coming” the “The Year ‘Its Hour Come Round at Last’”

What do I mean by collapse? We throw that word around, but it is easy to misunderstand. I mean that the US is likely to undergo a financial collapse a la the Great Depression – widespread unemployment, lots of people facing hunger, cold and the inability to get health care, a disruption of what we tend to assume are birthright services, and a sense that the system doesn’t work anymore. I don’t claim that we are headed by Thursday to cannibalism, however – what I think will be true is that we will often do surprisingly well in the state of collapse, as hard as it is.

In previous years, I was fairly lighthearted about my predictions – this year, I don’t find it possible to be. I really hope I’m wrong about this. And I hope you will make decisions based on your own judgement, not mine. These are predictions, the results of my analysis and my intuitions, and sometimes I’m good at that. But I do not claim that every word that comes out of my mouth or off my keyboard is the truth, and you should not take it as such. You are getting this free on the internet – consider what you paid for it, and value it accordingly.

1. Some measure of normalcy will hold out until late spring or early summer, mostly based on hopes for the Obama Presidency. But by late summer 2009, the aggregate loss of jobs, credit and wealth will cause an economic crisis that makes our current situation look pretty mild. With predictions of up to a million jobs lost each month, there will simply come a point at which the economy as we understand it now cannot function – we will see the modern equivalents of breadlines and stockbrokers selling apples on the streets.

2. Many plans for infrastructure investments currently being proposed will never be completed, and many may never be started, because the US may be unable to borrow the money to fund them. The price of globalization will be high in terms of reduced availability of funds and resources – despite all the people who think that we’ll keep building things during a collapse, we won’t. We will have some variation on a Green New Deal in the US and some nations will continue to work on renewable infrastructure, but a lot of us are going to be getting along with the fraying infrastructure, designed for a people able to afford a lot of cheap energy, that we have now. The most successful projects will be small, localized programs that distribute resources as widely as possible.

I pray that we will have the brains to ignore most other things and set up some kind of health care system, one that softens the blows here. If not, we’re really fucked – the one thing most of us can’t afford is medical care as it works now in a non-functioning economy. Unfortunately, my bet is that we don’t do something about this, but I hope to God I’m wrong.

3. 2009 will be the year that most of the most passionate climate activists (and I don’t exclude myself) have to admit that there is simply not a snowball’s chance in hell (and hell is getting toastier quickly) that we are going to prevent a 2C+ warming of the planet. We are simply too little, too late. That does not mean we will give up on everything – the difference between unchecked emissions and checked ones is still the difference between life and death for millions – but hideously, regretfully and painfully, the combination of our growing understanding of where the climate is and the economic situation will force us to begin working from the reality that the world we leave our children is simply going to be more damaged, and our legacy smaller and less worthy of us than we’d ever hoped.

4. 2008 will probably be the world’s global oil peak, but we won’t know this for a while. When we do realize it, it will be anticlimactic, because we’ll be mired in the consequences of our economic, energy and climate crisis. Lack of investment in the coming years will mean that in the end, more oil stays in the ground, which is good for the climate, but tough for our ambitions for a renewable energy economy. Over the long term, however, peak oil is very much going to come back and bite us all in the collective ass.

5. Decreased access to goods, services and food will be a reality this year. Some of this will be due to stores going out of business – we may all have to travel further to meet needs. Some will be due to suppliers going under, following the wave of merchant bankruptcies. Some may be due to disruptions in shipping and transport of supplies. Some will be due to increased demand for some items that have, up until now, been niche items, produced in small numbers for the small number of sustainability freaks, but that now seem to have widespread application. And some may be due to deflation – farmers may not be able to harvest crops because they can’t get enough for them to pay for the harvest, and the connections between those who have goods and those who need goods may be thoroughly disrupted. Meanwhile, millions more Americans will be choosing between new shoes and seeing the doctor.

6. Most Americans will see radical cut backs in local services and safety nets. Funding will simply dry up for many state and local programs. Unemployment will be overwhelmed, and the federal government will have to withdraw some of its commitments simply to keep people from starving in the streets. Meanwhile, expect to see the plows stop plowing, the garbage cease to be collected, and classrooms to have 40+ kindergarteners to a class – and potentially a three or four day school week.

7. Nations will overwhelmingly fail to pony up promised commitments to the world’s poor, and worldwide, the people who did the least harm to the environment will die increasingly rapidly of starvation. This will not be inevitable, but people in the rich world will claim it is.

8. We will finally attempt to deal with foreclosures, but the falling value of housing will make it a losing proposition. Every time we bring the housing values down to meet the reality, the reality will shift under our feet. Many of those who are helped will end up foreclosed upon anyway (as is already the case) and others will simply see no point in paying their mortgage when, by defaulting, they could qualify for lowered payments (as is already the case). Ultimately, the issue will probably self resolve in either some kind of redistribution plan that puts people in foreclosed houses with minimal mortgaging, with foreclosures dragging down enough banks that people find it feasible to simply stop paying mortgages that are now unenforceable, or with civil unrest that leads people simply to take back housing for the populace. I don’t have a bet on which one, and I don’t think it will be resolved in 2009.

9. By the end of the year, whether or not we will collapse or have collapsed will continue to be hotly debated by everyone who can still afford their internet service. No one will agree on what the definition of collapse actually is, plenty of people will simply be living their old lives, only with a bit less, while others will be having truly apocalyptic and deeply tragic losses. Some will see the victims as lazy, stupid, alien and worthless, no matter how many there are. Others will look around them and ask “how did I not see that this was inevitable?” Many people will be forced to see that the poor are not a monolith of laziness and selfishness when they become poor. We will know that we are in our situation only in retrospect, only in hindsight – our children will have a better name for the experience than we will, caught up in our varied personal senses of what is happening Meanwhile, each time things get harder most of us will believe they are at the bottom, that things are now “normal” and adapt, until it becomes hard to remember what our old expectations were.

10. Despite how awful this is, the reality is that not everything will fall apart. In the US, we will find life hard and stressful, but we will also go forward. People will suck a lot up and retrench. It will turn out that ordinary people were always better than commentators at figuring out what to do – that’s why they stopped shopping even while people were begging them to keep buying. So they’ll move in with their siblings and grow gardens and walk away from their overpriced houses, or fight to keep them. Some of them will suffer badly for it, but a surprising number of people will simply be ok in situations that until now, they would have imagined were impossible to survive. We will endure, sometimes even find ways of loving our new lives. There will be acts of remarkable courage and heroism, and acts of the most profound evil and selfishness. There will be enormous losses – but we will also discover that most of us are more than we think we are – can tolerate more and have more courage and compassion than we believe of ourselves.

We are inclined to agree with Sharon’s predictions – and europe will be pretty similar to what she says about the US. The UK, since it has followed US suburbanisation and car culture closer, and has worse land distribution statistics, than any other european nation, is going to find things harder than its mainland counterparts. Much of southern europe still has a very active smallscale agricultural society, although these semi-subsistence farmers are aging, at the moment it does still exist and could be harnessed to feed or educate other parts of society. In the UK this does not exist, and farmers have not been valued, while many many skills have been regulated into scarcity.

2009 may well see famine in the west, as farmers and other parts of the food/shopping infrastructure struggle to get the credit that they rely on, and other parts of society collapse due to insufficient cheap energy or finance. Little is being done to alleviate these problems to our food system, so we can expect food shortages and food prices beyond the financial means of many people, probably before the summer 2009.

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