Tag: Dmitry Orlov

The inevitable wisdom of going solar

Guest Post from ClubOrlov

 

By Eerik Wissenz, GoSol.org for ClubOrlov

 

Technological progress, to qualify as such, has to increase the efficiency of exploiting natural resources. This is quite intuitive if we keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of consuming resources in a modern economy is to enable us to consume more resources, producing the sine qua non of modern politics and economics, economic growth. So, if we consume resources more efficiently, we make it possible to consume even more resources, even more efficiently. There is no paradox here. We have chosen to build an economy which not only places no limits to consuming whatever resources are available, but considers doing so a desirable and noble undertaking. Making an economy more efficient simply creates more of it, exactly as we might expect.

 

Could we have chosen differently? Is a different choice available to us now—one that doesn’t result in us shivering in the dark while slowly starving? Many of us would prefer to think that a different choice is possible, and wish that a sufficient number of us would choose to build a different economy. But what is needed is not strength in numbers but coherent action that addresses the factors that place limits on sustainable ways of living.

 

If some number of us do decide to make an effort to build a sustainable society, we would first need to build the tools for doing so: appropriate technology. Note that developing such technology is unlikely to automatically result in a widespread public embrace of it simply because it is a moral choice. On the other hand, if we don’t develop this technology ahead of time, then all of our talk about sustainability will be for nothing.

Lastly, if we develop technologies that will, in the foreseeable future, provide people with a superior alternative to what is available to them, and if we sow the seeds of this technology in enough places, then it is possible that its adoption will be a matter of following the path of least resistance, and make the adoption of the entire sustainable toolkit much easier, greatly accelerating positive change.

 

Sustainable toolkit

 

Solar concentrators are a technology that can make a sustainable local economy possible. Other important parts of this technology suite include:

Permaculture, forestry and forest gardening

Aquaculture and water management

Making shelter and clothes out of locally sourced materials.

These form the core of the sustainable toolset. Everything in the core toolset is, by definition, necessary. But there are important interdependencies between the elements. We need:

Water and heat to cook and preserve food

Food and energy to transport and build things

Thermal and mechanical energy to transform materials

a heat source to maintain comfortable temperatures.

In deploying this toolkit, at any given time and in any given place, we encounter limiting factors, both in the development of the techniques required and in the local understanding of them. The increasing pressures on land and water resources in many parts of the world are frequent topics of discussion, but there is one particular resource that will be particularly scarce: thermal energy. At present, in the economically developed nations of the world, we practically bathe in almost free energy generated by burning fossil fuels. The entire fossil fuel system hinges on the availability of transport fuels—jet fuel, gasoline and diesel—and these are all made from crude oil. Conventional crude oil production peaked in 2005; unconventional oil production (including oil from shale and tar sands) is expected to peak within this decade. Disruption of the global fossil fuel supply chains already caries non-negligible risk. We should also expect that most industrial alternative forms of energy, which rely on fossil fuels for their manufacture and maintenance, will be priced out of many markets.

 

In order to understand where we might be heading, let’s imagine, for a moment, that all fossil fuels are suddenly gone. What will we have left? Some photovoltaic panels will provide illumination and power communications systems. A few windmills will pump water and grind grain (the two niche applications in which wind-power is most successful). A few waterwheels will be used to saw lumber and to run spinning jennies and looms. Pack and draft animals will once again be used for transportation on land, and sailboats, rowboats and barges on water. But the most widely used form of energy—thermal energy—will come down to just one easily accessible source: firewood. Easily accessible—but not for long, because the use of firewood to make up for the shortfall in energy caused by the demise of fossil fuels will lead to very rapid deforestation. This, then, is the problem that is simply screaming for a technological solution.

 

What sustainable energy systems do we currently have? In theory, forests can be used to supply timber and firewood in a sustainable manner, but, again, a stressed, energy-deprived population is exceedingly unlikely to practice sustainable forestry. Beyond that, all of the energy installations we have are at an industrial scale and/or tied into existing industrial infrastructure, which runs on fossil fuels.

 

There is really just one sustainable energy system: you. Your body is capable of converting food (with help from a bit of sunlight) into thermal and mechanical energy. The precise technical term for it is endosomatic energy. Your body is largely self-maintaining and self-reproducing (if you are a woman and there is a man to help). Keeping you fed sustinably is also possible: sustainable food systems have been successfully developed to very mature states and have been shown to be deployable globally.

 

Endosomatic energy is all that most animals need to survive. But we humans, at some early point in our evolution as a species, have discovered fire, and have been using it to warm ourselves and to cook our food, making us crucially rely on exosomatic energy: energy that comes from outside of our bodies. And it is exosomatic energy that turns out to be the major limiting factor, because at the moment we consume far more energy in fuel than in food. Even if we learn to do our best to produce food using endosomatic energy, and to conserve our body heat with good shelter and clothes, we would still need a lot of exosomatic energy in order to prepare that food and to make that shelter and clothes. Most of the energy we will require to build local economies will be in the form of heat. It is this exosomatic energy that will be the limiting factor, because its default source—firewood—is, it bears repeating, insufficient.

 

Industrial effort

 

It is possible to imagine the development of sustainable energy technology as an extension of industrial activity—although complete reliance on industrial production is most likely going to be insufficient, if only because of high transportation costs from the factories to the poorer regions of the world, which are most at risk of deforestation. At present, all of the energy technology that is being touted as “sustainable” (wind farms, photovoltaic installations, large-scale solar power plants, biofuels from sugar cane and algae) crucially depend on the industrial manufacturing base for their production and on the global transport network for sourcing components and for final shipping to the installation site.

 

Furthermore, almost all of the focus has been on developing technologies that produce electricity to support the electric grid. All of them are required to be compatible with other capital-intensive industrial infrastructure projects, which feature high energy and materials inputs and low labor inputs and are expected to produce a value-added form of energy—electricity for those able to pay market rates for it—thus maximizing profit for the investor.

 

Thus, profit maximization does not necessarily point the way forward to solving global problems. Profitability of an energy source is maximized by it generating the greatest positive cash flow in the shortest period of time. Thus, if a greater profit can be had right now in developing a technology that is only relevant for 10% of people, and only for the next 2-3 years, that’s the direction in which the financial system will direct capital. The supposed sustainability of such a venture is seldom more than a public relations talking point. Even when sustainability is considered a value in itself, that value is swiftly reinterpreted as a market value, and intense pressure is brought to bear to classify stores of energy, ecosystems in particular, as “sustainable sources,” and to draw down these stocks in the shortest period of time, generating the most profit, politics being an inconvenient but generally surmountable obstacle to doing so. If such a scheme did manage to produce a sustainable source of energy, this would be a most surprising side-effect!

 

Of course, industrial renewable energy sources can still play a positive role. For instance, photovoltaic panels can make it possible to get local energy systems up and running. But complete reliance on industrial renewable energy, in the hope that it will displace some of the fossil fuels, runs straight into Jevons’ paradox. It is far more likely that it will make the use of fossil fuels more efficient, thus maximizing their use. Although it is preferable to doubling down on low-quality fossil fuel sources such as shale and tar sands, it will not solve the problem.

 

Good bye trees

 

If industrial renewable energy technologies are either unaffordable or unavailable in the quantities and on the time scale required, then the default alternative, throughout the world, is to resort to burning trees to meet our cooking, heating and materials processing needs. If we consider firewood as our source of fuel for a sustainable economy, this quickly becomes problematic, because we currently consume prodigious amounts of energy. Industrialized countries are extremely unlikely to be able to swiftly reduce energy consumption to a point compatible with local wood burning. Deforestation, both historic and ongoing, provides ample evidence that it isn’t feasible to implement sustainable forestry management on a global scale as a replacement for fossil energy; the vast reductions in energy use are simply not achievable.

 

To put this into perspective, a person can grow all the food they need on a small piece of land, but growing all the wood they’d need for cooking, food preservation, constructing shelter, etc., requires a far greater land area. To make matters worse, wood-burning is far more destructive of soil fertility than growing food. When we grow, eat and excrete plant matter, we can compost the result and return the nutrients back to the soil. If we are careful and clever, we can keep fed and build soil fertility. But when we harvest and burn plants most of those nutrients go up in smoke. What’s more, a tree can provide a significant amount of food, in the form of fruits, nuts and sap, with no harm done to the tree, which continues to provide many essential ecosystem services, both above and below ground. Cutting down and burning that tree destroys a productive resource. So burning wood wastes soil nutrients and destroys long term biological systems.

 

With extremely careful selective branch cutting (coppicing) it’s possible to burn trees sustainably, but very few societies have managed to do so over the long term. Felling a tree today provides an immediate economic benefit, and so there is always pressure to do so, especially in times of crisis. Afghanistan was once known for its splendid orchards; a few decades of war later—not any more!

 

In spite of much evidence from the developing world and from the past, the unsustainability of using firewood as a source of energy tends to be disregarded. Partly this is because wood-burning isn’t as significant today, because we currently burn fossil fuels. But the examples of what will happen are there for all to see: Haiti, with its dependence on wood burning, has been massively deforested, and now has just 2% forest cover. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, which shares with Haiti the island of Hispaniola, still has good forest cover, but this is only because the Dominicans can still afford to cook with propane. Once propane is no longer available and wood remains as the only alternative, there is no reason to assume that a massive deforestation process will be avoided, especially if we consider that fossil fuel delivery shortfalls and price spikes are unlikely to promote the stability that is required for meticulous forest management.

 

As fossil fuels rise in price, we should expect that firewood will begin to be substituted for them. This process has been well under way ever since crude oil left behind the good old days when it was just $20 a barrel. Growing trees for fuel is a major cause of deforestation already, yet it only represents a small part of our fuel consumption, because fossil fuels are still relatively easy to get, even after a swift 500% increase in the price of crude oil. Once the extraction rate rate of fossil fuels starts to decline, there will be a major risk of a massive, global deforestation event. Faced with hardship and with no other choice, people turn to burning trees.

 

People want energy

 

It is vitally important to understand that exosomatic energy is what enables the production of the four core tools of the sustainable toolkit: permaculture and forest gardening, aquaculture and water management, shelter and clothes. A significant investment of exosomatic energy is required to build and maintain a system encompassing these four elements—much greater than the amount of endosomatic food energy.

 

Look at the budget of anyone doing even a modest sustainability project: the part of it spent on food is a relatively small slice of the initial investment. Yes, there have been tribes that managed to survive even in the high Arctic with an igloo for shelter, fir parkas for clothing, and a tallow lamp for heat and illumination. But most people alive today exhibit a near-universal cultural preference for investing in significantly greater infrastructure, for style and comfort, and a shortage of fossil fuels is unlikely to stop them. Ecological infrastructure projects, of the sort people in industrialized, developed countries generally find acceptable, require a large investment in the transport of materials, materials processing, and even heavy machinery. Taking money as a proxy for energy, it becomes clear that it is exosomatic energy that is the limiting factor.

 

If we look non-industrial countries, where cultural preferences allow for much humbler adaptations, we still find that an initial energy investment the limiting factor. Although there the amount of exosomatic energy can be much smaller than for an ecological project in a rich country, it still tends to be more than what’s available. In countries both rich and poor, finance is a barrier. Working and saving to accumulate the capital to buy land and build a sustainable place is in practice often impossible: population pressures within the capitalist system continuously push wages down to subsistence level while the accumulation of wealth at the top bids up the price of land.

 

Trade goods

 

After the sustainable toolkit is put together and starts functioning, it continues to require external inputs, in the form of tools, supplies, and, of course, exosomatic energy, to meet its maintenance needs. Complete self-sufficiency is either impossible or intolerable for the vast majority of people. Even a small amount of trade is extremely valuable. Any sort of trade requires the local production of trade goods of some sort, and the production of trade goods requires exosomatic energy. An ecovillage can be as self-sufficient in food, shelter, clothing and entertainment as it wishes to be, but it must still produce trade goods, and remain competitive in trade or barter, in order to maintain its infrastructure over the long term.

 

If a sustainability project is designed to produce competitively priced trade goods, then this neatly removes the financial barrier to establishing it. The sustainability project becomes bankable: suddenly it has a viable business plan, can take out a construction loan and pay it back by selling trade goods. It is much easier to justify investing one’s own time and resources, and to find partners and investors, if the proposed project looks profitable. Food production, on a small scale, is very difficult to make profitable. However, even a small piece of land can be used to make a community largely self-sufficient in food, and to also produce trade goods. The production of trade goods can greatly accelerate the construction of sustainable systems, but the exosomatic energy for that production has to come from somewhere. Since the default mode of production of exosomatic energy in absence of fossil fuels—burning firewood—is both of limited scope and environmentally destructive, another solution is needed.

 

Although it can be argued that we may be able to sustain ourselves with very little wood burning, perhaps even do so sustainably, this becomes completely impossible as soon as we try to use firewood to fuel production of trade goods. As soon as people are able to turn a profit, they tend to want to turn more of it, and the pressure to cut and burn trees becomes relentless. Even if a conscious effort is made to avoid deforestation, the inevitable “norm creep” achieves the same result over time without anyone noticing. History is full of examples of entire provinces becoming deforested thanks to the production of plaster, or bronze, after which point production there collapsed due to lack of firewood. The availability of transport fuels makes the problem worse. In India, for instance, firewood is burnt to fire bricks, but the brick-makers don’t suddenly shut down their operations as soon as their immediate surroundings are stripped of trees; they simply pay to have their firewood delivered from elsewhere.

 

Localism vs. Urbanism

 

The above discussion assumes that a sustainable mode of living is achievable on a small piece of land, with relatively short resource cycles. For instance, the relatively closed cycle of

 

soil➝food➝storage➝mouth➝compost➝soil

 

can be constructed on less than a few hundred square meters. (In contrast, in industrialized countries the average piece of food travels over a thousand kilometres, and the nutrients it contains are eventually flushed into the ocean.) Similarly, most of the building materials needed to construct shelter can be grown on site, harvested sustainably, transported a few hundred meters to the building site and worked using hand tools. Once the shelter is demolished is replaced, the woody matter of which was made can dug into the soil to improve its water retention, where it will slowly decay, returning the nutrients to the soil.

 

Can such closed cycles be constructed in an urban setting? Urban population densities for the world’s large cities vary between 10k and 42k residents per square kilometre. This translates to 100 m2 per person at the bottom of the range, and only 23 m2 per person at the top. In neither case is this amount of land sufficient to both provide housing and workspace, and to also grow food, building materials, materials to make clothing, and materials to make trade goods. Large, dense cities are unsustainable.

 

One often hears the claim that large-scale urbanism is now inevitable because the world is now over 50% urbanized. People assume that passing the 50% threshold marks some sort of point of no return: now the trend must run its course until the planet is 100% urbanized. This claim is so lacking in critical thinking that it’s not worthwhile to consider it further, beyond briefly noting that it happens to be false. A far more reasonable assumption is that peak urban density will have roughly coincided with peak fossil fuels production, and as the latter heads down, so will the former.

 

Sustainability requires localism, localism requires access to land, and access to land requires a rural environment; therefore, sustainability requires a rural environment. Alternatives along the lines of “urban sustainability” are essentially science-fiction-based fantasies that flout the laws of physics. The ecological vision of industrial urbanism is basically a version of contemporary fossil fuel-powered society envisioned by General Motors, but instead powered by magic high-tech green technology and managed by all-knowing computers gazing down from the cloud.

 

Decentralized energy production

 

Centralized, urban societies require centralized, highly concentrated energy sources: natural gas pipelines, the electric grid, paved roads and plentiful transportation fuels. It is significantly less efficient to power a centralized society using decentralized energy sources: its advantages of scale swiftly vanish. On the other hand, powering a decentralized society with decentralized energy sources is not a problem. In the case of energy systems and energy sources, opposites don’t attract. The local level of energy consumption must match the size of the local energy source, in each location.

 

The highly concentrated energy of fossil fuels allows for more efficient production in energy hubs: over half of the worlds GDP is produced in just three global industrial mega-centres. Fossil fuels also enable the distribution of products from these energy hubs. It is inefficient to decentralize fossil fuel-powered production by distributing it across the landscape; it is much more cost-effective to produce both fuels and goods in a few central locations and to transport the final product, as the weight of the final product is always less than its inputs—often orders of magnitude less. The energy expended in making a product adds nothing to its transport weight.

 

With a decentralized, diffuse, intermittent energy source the situation is reversed: gathering this energy in a few central locations is a costly, lossy process. It becomes more efficient to produce and consume products locally, and to transport finished products from the decentralized locations where they are made to relatively local destinations—from local villages to the nearby market town, and back out to the villages. With decentralized energy sources, economic advantage shifts to local production, because it minimizes transport and energy requirements.

 

Once the advantage shifts to local producers, only those products that cannot be produced on location, for technical reasons, would trade competitively when shipped from a central production facility, simply because there would be no local competition for them. But the range of such hyper-sophisticated products—ones that are truly necessary for survival—is rather small, and although centralized production facilities would have a monopol, their ability to impose monopoly pricing would be hampered by the lack of a dependence relationship. Consequently, the consolidation of such central producers would pose less of a problem than it does in a highly centralized society.

 

The shift from urbanized, centralized modes of production to local, decentralized ones need not be a matter of engineering or planning; the population will spontaneously maximize its advantages by following the shifts in the energy landscape. Centralized production would still be possible with decentralized energy sources; it would just be less competitive. As the flow of fossil fuels dwindles, artisans outside the cities will find that they can produce products at a lower cost and with greater benefit to themselves and the surrounding community than the workers toiling in large factories in the cities. In turn, these workers will realize that a better lifestyle can be had elsewhere, and gradually diffuse out of the cities. Thus, localized energy production can not only solve the problem of finance—by producing trade goods—but also the problem of recruitment—by drawing workers out of the cities and into the countryside.

 

The urban myth

 

One of the central myths of modern society is that the process of urbanization (and slumification—favelas are currently the fastest-growing form of human habitation) is due to city life being “more attractive” and farming becoming “more efficient.” Fewer people want to or need to inhabit the wider landscape, the story goes, and so they are moving to the cities. And this, some say, is simply a good thing. But the real cause of this rapid urbanization is that economic activity is moving to the city—because localized, artisanal production cannot compete with centralized manufacturing. This is a temporary dislocation made possible by burning fossil fuels.

 

At present, the larger landscape is regarded as little more than a source of raw materials for manufacturing, and food to feed the populations of the cities. Both mining and farming are being carried out using fossil fuel-powered machinery, with minimal labor inputs. But previously food production was just one activity out of many that kept people employed in the village or the small town. Artisans and tradespeople did many other things, and played important roles in the local economy. But even the peasants, many of whom didn’t own any land, did not farm as their primary activity, but had all sorts of other activities, from basket weaving to hunting and fishing to construction.

 

But as more and more factory-produced products and fossil fuel-driven machinery becomes available, less and less economic activity continues to make sense the countryside, and there are fewer and fewer reasons for a person to reside there. And so people move to the city, because they are unable to find local employment. If they do manage to hang on and get by through subsistence farming, their inability to produce trade goods, which are needed to maintain a reasonable quality of life, forces their children to move to the city instead.

 

What makes factory products cheaper than products of artisanal labor is not the inherently greater efficiency of factories. Rather, it is their ability to use energy/labor arbitrage: fossil fuel energy can, for now, be used to displace human labor and generate a profit as a result. But once the cost of fossil fuel energy increases beyond a certain point, distribution costs will limit the advantage of centrally produced goods, and it will suddenly become more “efficient” to build a dresser locally, out of locally sourced hardwood, instead of assembling a mass-produced one, made of plastic-veneered fibreboard and held together with plastic thumbscrews. But until that happens, centralized production and distribution remains far more lucrative and attracts more capital than local producers (who also miss out on the advantage of selling a global brand).

 

Of course, there is a bit more to the story than just the energy/labor arbitrage possibilities opened up by cheap fossil fuels. The history of modern society is full of clever ploys to make conditions favourable to centralized production (subsidies, tariffs, regulation schemes, infrastructure projects) and tactics that make people dependent on centrally produced goods (kicking people off their land, promoting debt, planned obsolescence, throwing up obstacles to growing your own food, or making it straight-up illegal). These ploys and tactics enable vast accumulations of capital in the hands of a few industrial magnates, they drive urbanization and produce large middle-class urban elites that help unify and centralize countries, and they make it possible to build up an industrial base that is necessary for a powerful military-industrial complex that can project force over wide geographic areas. However, these ploys and tactics can succeed only while there is enough to power the centralized system.

 

The fashionable idea that most people move from the country to the city because they are attracted to the bright lights rings hollow. If we look at the actual history of urbanization, it has always been resisted and deplored by the peasants and the local artisans, who were transformed from self-respecting, creative generalists into worn-out, stressed-out wage slaves. Whereas before they could take care of themselves and, though often poor in terms of money, enjoyed plentiful leisure time and unfettered access to the bounty, beauty and pleasantness of nature, they are now doomed to spending all of their waking time executing repetitive tasks in an oppressive, polluted environment.

 

A bad plan

 

From the previous discussion, it follows that:

“Sustainable,” green industrial centralization on the urban model is not feasible

Local, rural production of trade goods will be necessary without fossil fuels

Such local production is unlikely be sustainable if based on burning firewood

If these arguments are sound, then we must ask ourselves one central question:

 

What is the alternative to wood burning?

 

Answer: Both thermal and mechanical energy needed for local production can be supplied using solar concentrators.

 

These can, in theory, be manufactured centrally and distributed locally on a massive scale, but there are quite a few problems with this plan:

It depends on the global transportation system, which runs on oil

It would be capital-intensive and deployment would be impossible in areas that don’t have access to capital and are not subsidized by the rich countries

The unpredictable curve of oil depletion may disrupt the global economy at any moment, disrupting supply chains and making it impossible to continue the project

Once the supply chains are disrupted, the flow of centrally manufactured spare parts needed to maintain centrally manufactured installations will stop, putting all of the solar concentrators out of commission over time

This is not to say that such industrially manufactured solar concentrators are completely useless. But they are unlikely to succeed in the time frame we need, and will be susceptible to disruption for all the same reasons as the other industrial green technologies.

 

A good plan

 

A much better plan is to provide the plans and the know-how to build and maintain solar concentrators out of locally sourced materials, with the energy supplied by these same solar concentrators, training local people to build and maintain solar concentrators in the process. The question then becomes one of bootstrapping a solar concentrator self-replicating process, standing back and watching it run.

 

Before getting into the details of how this can be done, let us briefly look at the impacts and knock-on effects of this technology. Solar concentrators can be used to:

Recycle a majority of metals, aluminium in particular

Safely incinerate plastics

Fire pottery, bricks and tile (such as the reflective tiles used to build more solar concentrators)

Provide heat for food processing and preservation

Make glass

Make charcoal, for energy and for building soil

Provide hot water for baths and laundries

Heat buildings, greenhouses and fish ponds

Provide electricity for illumination, communications and power tools

Power bakeries, breweries, distilleries, machine shops, etc.

Recycled aluminium is a key material, since it can be used to make aluminium/glass mirrors with relatively little processing. Thus, given scrap aluminium and sand, solar concentrators can make more solar concentrators. This requires a relatively unsophisticated technological base—orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the present set of industrial green technologies, many of which require rare earth minerals, composite materials, clean-room techniques, computer control and so on.

 

Computer control is a bit of a green-tech fetish, but no electronics is needed to run a solar concentrator. Manual operation takes far less labor than tending a wood stove. Yes, pushing a button to turn on automatic sun tracking may be somewhat more convenient than paying a local boy to sit there and periodically turn a handle—but only until the electronic unit gets zapped by lightning and the nearest replacement turns out to be months away by sea.

 

Systemic effects

 

Here are some basic implications of this plan:

This system would be highly resilient. It can be constructed and maintained using locally sourced materials and scrap. If superior materials can be imported then that’s fine, but the point is that it doesn’t have to depend on global supply chains or global transport.

This system could arrive and reproduce itself in a region that is severed from the global economy. In turn, this means that such a system can be developed globally with few limiting factors. It can spread virally, without international government coordination and the inevitable bureaucratic foot-dragging and special interest boondoggling. A critical mass of awareness and know-how is all that is needed.

Let’s face it, firewood will still be used as a fuel source. But solar concentrators create a counterweight, a negative feed back loop, to deforestation. Without access to cheap transportation fuels, the costs of gathering firewood beyond a certain radius exceed the costs of switching to solar. That is, if both solar and firewood are available initially, there comes a time when it becomes less costly to just wait for the sun, and that time comes before each and every tree has been cut down and burned.

Solar concentrators can provide a highly resilient base, on top of which all sorts of globally interconnected, fragile and impermanent technologies can be built. Here’s a good example: a solar concentrator can power an Internet café with a satellite uplink. If the satellites fail and the Internet goes dark, the same solar concentrator can power shortwave radios and old 1200-baud modems to send text messages around the planet. But the point is that here fragile technologies are built on top of a resilient one. Normally it’s the other way around: if there is no fuel (fragile) for the pick-up truck then the firewood (resilient) can’t be delivered and you freeze. If the electric grid (fragile) fails, then you well-water (resilient) can’t be pumped. This is a crucial difference.

 

When one of our huge, complicated, sophisticated systems goes down today, (as it is prone to do) people can’t function. People can die as a result of even a short disruption in the energy supply. Prolonged disruptions, which are made increasingly likely by depleting fossil fuel reserves, would trigger problems with food, water and sanitation. Clearly, dependence on sophisticated, fragile systems is a huge systemic risk and in such times the few that have some other means to provide for themselves, whether by design or by chance, would be counted among the fortunate few.

 

Access to local solar thermal energy would considerably reduce systemic risk, both economic and ecological, by providing energy with very little ecological impact, and by fostering local energy independence. Such a technological system would also serve as a primary tool for preventing deforestation, as well as for dealing with the effects of climate change that may already be locked in. First, solar energy does not generate CO2 and, in absence of fossil fuels, becomes competitive with the only remaining energy source that does (firewood). Second, when environmental change makes a certain location uninhabitable, be it by parching it or by putting it underwater, solar concentrators can be set up in new locations that are decoupled from the global infrastructure of roads, pipelines and electric transmission lines.

 

This system of self-replicating solar concentrators does not yet exist in a mature form, but there is at present no impediment to its rapid development. Solar concentrators that provide high heat at low material cost already exist. The bulk of a solar concentrator, the structure itself, which comprises the majority of the total material, can be made of bamboo or wood if metal is scarce or expensive relative to labor, making it possible to literally “grow” it on site. The knowledge to locally source the materials to make more solar concentrators already exists.

 

The entire technological system need not exist in order for us to begin. As long as global supply chains exist, they can be used to source high quality manufactured components. What’s important is that if global supply chains collapse, erode, or simply become too expensive for some economies, the project can continue with only locally sourced materials. Dependence is not the same as use: we can make use of global supply chains, but we only come to depend on them if we leave ourselves without any options in case they fail.

 

The process has already started. At GoSol.org, a variety of demonstration projects and initiatives have already shown the effectiveness of this approach. The work is ongoing, and as our technology improves and our installed base expands, a time will come when every sustainable community will feature a solar concentrator as its centrepiece.

 

WOULD YOU PREFER TO BE FOOLISH OR DEAD?

If you thought my Welcome to Terminus article was depressing and apocalyptic, you ain’t seen nothing yet. While my article was more big picture, Dmitry Orlov fills in the details. His version of collapse is very likely, based upon our current path. It’s a must read on this dreary Tuesday morning. After I was done reading it I couldn’t help but think of Orwell’s quote from 1984.

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Business as usual

Thinking about collapse is very useful because it allows you to prepare for it. And preparing for collapse is very useful too—from the pragmatic perspective of risk management. Consider the possibilities.

If you prepare for collapse and it doesn’t happen, then you look a tiny bit foolish.

If you don’t prepare for collapse and collapse does happen, then you look a tiny bit dead.

Now, which would you prefer to be, foolish or dead?

This type of reasoning is very basic, and is used for such things as calculating the amount of insurance to buy or the amount of cash to keep in reserve in order to avoid being bankrupted should the worst-case scenario unfold. In order to do that, you have to have some idea of what the worst case scenario is. People seem comfortable with this kind of reasoning.

There is, however, a problem: most people don’t seem to be able to wrap their minds around the concept of collapse in the sort of unsentimental, dispassionate way that is required for engaging in practical risk management activities. They can think of a nuclear accident, or a tsunami, or a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a pandemic. They might be able to think of all five at the same time, but that’s a stretch for most. But the scenario that few people can react to adequately is the sort of gritty reality that is quite probable. Let’s try a couple of scenarios, and see how you react.

Scenario #1. You live in a major city. Banks are closed and ATM machines are defunct. There is no electricity. Shops are closed and looted. Gas stations are burned out. There is no pumped water and toilets don’t flush. There is no heat or air conditioning. Garbage isn’t being collected and there are piles of it everywhere. Roads are impassable and neighborhoods are barricaded from each other with concertina wire and piles of burning tires and patrolled by armed gangs. Home invasions occur with gruesome regularity, especially in the wealthier neighborhoods where there is more to take. Police are nowhere to be found, but there are army checkpoints on all the major roads leading out of the city where people are turned back.

Scenario #2. You live out in the country. There is no electricity, no heating oil or propane deliveries. Gasoline is no longer available, and you can no longer drive 30 miles to the nearest supermarket or Walmart. In any case, these stores are no longer open for business because merchandise is no longer being delivered to them. You used to be on friendly terms with some of the neighbors, but now everybody is afraid of each other. In any case, it’s too far, and too dangerous, to walk anywhere. Your drinking water used to come from a deep drilled well via an electric pump, which no longer works. There also used to be a sump pump and a dehumidifier in your basement, which is now permanently flooded and filling with black mold. Armed gangs are filtering through the landscape, looking for caches of food and other supplies. They are increasingly expert at what they do, and most people either give up their stockpile voluntarily or die trying to defend it.

Presented with such scenarios, most people react in one of three ways: denial, paralysis or panic.

Denial is where you tell yourself that these scenarios are so incredibly unlikely where you live that thinking about them is a complete waste of time. You may be right about that, but who is to say? Subjective judgments of likelihood are not particularly useful in risk mitigation.

Paralysis is where your gut feeling tells you that this could, in fact, happen, but you can’t think of anything constructive that you could do about it—beyond trying to not think about it, to avoid distressing yourself to no purpose.

Panic is where you decide to act—by stockpiling food and weapons, or by developing plans to flee in some direction. Once you’ve done your shopping and planning, and the panic attack is over, you go back to paralysis (nothing more to be done) and then drift back toward denial (since it is mentally the most comfortable).

There is a fourth reaction worth considering, even though it amounts to an ad hominem attack on me as the messenger of doom. It goes like this: “Dmitry, your collapse scenarios are crap. They are depressing, distressing, and none of us can do anything about them except be depressed and distressed, or panic and go shopping for spam, shotgun shells and machetes. Would you please cut it out and stop bothering people with this collapse nonsense?” Sure, got me there, I’ll stop.

Let’s do something else instead: let’s consider that nothing will particularly change, and that things will stay on the same trajectory. Let’s define some scenarios that seem pretty likely to most of us, because it’s the sort of gradual change we’ve been seeing already: the economy will continue “recovering,” meaning that the rich will continue to get richer, the poor—poorer, unemployment will hold steady (as more and more people drop out of the labor force), debt levels will continue to explode, food and energy prices will continue to creep up and so on.

Security theater. We had the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, so now the TSA makes us take off our shoes and gropes our genitals (or irradiates us with the naked body scanner). We had the wannabe jihadis who got entrapped into trying to smuggle a two-part liquid explosive on board (which, according to chemistry Ph.D.’s, wouldn’t have worked anyway) so we can’t bring liquids through the checkpoint (except for mother’s milk, but even that has to be tested for explosive potential). Next step: somebody tries to smuggle a bomb in their rectum, and the TSA forces everyone to strip naked and subjects them to a body cavity search, prison style. Even if you can still afford to fly somewhere, would you want to?

Note that this security theater insanity only applies to flights originating from or terminating in the US, and that it has nothing to do with stopping terrorists. You stop terrorists by spotting them, and you do that by interviewing just the promising candidates. Testing for exploding breast milk is just plain idiotic.

Debt slavery. In the past year, student loan debt has grown from 1 trillion to 1.2 trillion. More and more students are realizing that they will never be able to pay back their student loans. Instead, the government, which guaranteed the loans, will garnish their wages, and eventually even their social security payments (should these still exist by the time they reach retirement age) for the rest of their lives.

Borders locked. More and more of these students will realize that their only real option is to leave the country forever. Facing a massive outflow of college graduates, the government introduces exit visas, which require a credit check, and refuses to grant them to entire families, so that a hostage is always left behind. The government also refuses to renew passports for expats who are in arrears on their government-guaranteed debt, creating a refugee crisis. Just as this happens, more and more countries, increasingly fed up with US State Dept. meddling in their internal affairs, decide that they’ve had enough Americans for now, and close their borders to US nationals.

Retirement cancelled. The already dire demographics, coupled with the flight of educated people mentioned above, mean that there will only be a couple of working-age unskilled workers supporting each retiree. Desperate measures, such as rolling IRAs and 401k’s into the Social Security Trust Fund, postpone the inevitable somewhat. Eventually the government finds that it has no choice but to raise the retirement age to 100. The vast majority of the baby boomer generation, which did not save for retirement in any case, will find itself destitute.

Medical confiscation. Thanks to ObamaCare, people between 55 and 65 are being forced into the Medicare system. At the same time, Medicare covers fewer and fewer services, with higher and higher deductibles. Since most people lack sufficient cash savings to cover them, they are covered by placing liens on property. Adult children living with their parents (an increasingly common situation) are then forced to sell the house as soon as they inherit it (or walk away from it). The other, increasingly popular option, of course, is to forgo medical care.

Demise of the dollar. So far, because of the US dollar’s reserve status, the US has been able to fleece other countries while taking on debt at an artificially low rate of interest. As more and more countries (China and Russia especially) are moving away from using the dollar for international settlements, especially in buying and selling energy, the status of the dollar continues to erode. As this process runs its course, the US government will be forced to resort to fleecing its own people. Raising taxes is politically difficult, and so instead lots of other measures will be put in place. There will be lots of so-called “bail-ins,” where depositor funds are used to bail out insolvent banks. Those who own precious metals will be forced to sell them for a fraction of their market price, as has happened before. There will be a low limit on daily cash withdrawals, as has recently been the case in Argentina, Cyprus and Ukraine.

Corporatization. The trend is to concentrate more and more wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporate entities. To this end, the government will clamp down on small businesses (which are already suffering because of, among other things, onerous health care insurance regulations). Eventually the government will outlaw self-employment, herding all owner-operators and freelancers into minimum-wage corporate farms. It will be made illegal to buy and sell products or services except through a major corporation (good bye Craigslist). All property transactions will automatically be taxed: sales tax plus capital gains tax. The limit on gift taxes will be dropped to zero: the giver will pay the gift tax on the value; the receiver will have to pay income tax on all gifts received, plus capital gains if they are ever sold. Together with the low limit on cash withdrawals, this will make it virtually impossible for people to directly give each other money without being taxed, or breaking the law.

As the cost of living continues to go up and salaries continue to stagnate, corporations will negotiate special corporate discounts with each other in order to make it possible for their employees to continue functioning. People without a corporate job will find their access to products and services severely restricted. But what really makes it possible for more and more corporate employees to survive is the increasing use of food stamps (EBT cards). Now at 50 million, participation in the food stamps program will grow until it becomes virtually universal, while at the same time the nutritional value of the food it makes available will continue trending down, nurturing the trifecta of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Criminalization. With small businesses and private enterprise made illegal, most people will be forced to resort to illegal activities, under the watchful eye of the NSA. But since putting even more people in jail will be prohibitively expensive, a new, streamlined process of dispensing justice will be put into place: the NSA and the Justice Department will link computer systems, and verdicts of fraud and suspended sentences will be issued by a computer program, in absentia. In keeping with current practice, both the charge and the evidence will be kept secret. The newly minted felons will be dropped from voter rolls, their passports cancelled, their bank accounts confiscated, and their employment (if any) terminated. They will receive form letters informing them of their sentence but most of them will be unable to read it because functional illiteracy rates will go from the current 40% to 80-90%.

Paragon of democracy. The effect of dropping much of the population from voter rolls will paradoxically result in much higher voter participation. After a while the only people allowed to vote will be the politicians themselves, their families, government workers and contractors, corporate functionaries and, of course, the ever-richer 1%. Since those barred from voting will not be counted as voters, it will look like voter turn-out is much higher than ever before. Everyone will celebrate the health of American democracy.

Demise of public education. Public schools will become dumping grounds for mental and physical defectives—junior prisons, if you will, where students are endlessly frisked and strip-searched by heavily armed security personnel and train for life under lockdown. The more promising students will be shunted to highly profitable charter schools, many of them virtual, where students get sit in front of computers all day, training to take standardized tests, and a single unaccredited teacher oversees more than a hundred of them. Beyond studying for tests, the students will become increasingly resistant to remembering anything at all—why know things when you can Google for them?

What should our risk management strategy be in light of such probable, predictable, and rather un-apocalyptically boring developments?

Do nothing? Well, you might not die, at least not right away, but then will your life be worth living? Even if you can’t think of anything good to do, you might still consider doing something—like drinking a lot.

Prevent them? You’d have to start with some sort of grass roots political campaign to change the entire system. Suppose you are amazingly successful at it, and manage to change the entire system. And it only takes you 30 years. Oops! Too late.

So, what do you do?

I have an idea, and it’s really, really simple. What’s more, it’s quite cheap, and it totally works… for the time being.

Here it is:

Get the hell out of this country!

In the US, democracy is now a sham

Guest Post from Club Orlov

[Guest post by Ray, just in time for April Fool’s Day.]

The founding principle for this new form of government which emerged in the 18th century, was that the Common Man was the ultimate source of power. Citizen legislators would enact the laws and shape the nation’s destiny. But instead, our republic is now strong-armed by professional politicians. The two dominant concerns of these careerists are to STAY in power and to do the bidding of those who ENABLE them to stay in power. Anyone who doubts this statement might try explaining why campaign finance reform and term limits are perennially “off the table.” Actually, that is an understatement – they aren’t even in the building.

It is bad enough that the President, Congress and the Courts serve the interests of a minority that is so tiny that it is almost microscopic. What is even worse, is WHO that elite constituency is. It is exclusively THE BIGS: Big banks, Big corporations, Big agriculture, Big energy, Big pharmaceuticals, Big health care, Big high tech and the BIGGEST of them all – the military-industrial complex.

The “Vox Populi” – voice of the people is now as quaint and outmoded as telephone booths on street-corners. Even when there is a massive outpouring of disapproval for a policy – such as the enormous public outcry against Iraq Invasion 2 – the will of the people is disregarded. Instead, the “leaders” kiss the sterns of their financial backers. Ten million irate citizens cannot offset a single Halliburton.

But not only has genuine democracy vaporized, its putrid carcass is used against the ordinary person for whom it was initially conceived. Our demagogues give stirring speeches applauding our inalienable rights and the freedoms that our constitution protects. But at the same time, they barely whimper when a whistle blower reveals that the surveillance grid that is monitoring our behavior is beyond the wildest imaginings of Orwell or Huxley. And when the head of the Department of Omnipresent Surveillance admits that he lied to Congress, he is not prosecuted for perjury. Amazingly, he doesn’t even lose his job.

When the President signs the NDAA act which allows for “indefinite detention” of citizens without formal charges or without the right to a lawyer, it should be utterly clear that the boot of Soft-Core Tyranny is now on our neck. And that unchecked and almost unnoticed power continues to grow at an obscene pace. Examples of this are the militarization of small town police departments, the unending malignant growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the cessation of Posse Comitatus which keeps the military from being used as a domestic police force.

But even though our career politicians only represent the rich and the powerful, and even though they abet the steady erosion of our constitutionally ordained rights, it is even worse! That’s because despite making a mockery of democracy at home, they trumpet its virtues abroad. This is shameful Hypocrisy with a capital H.

What they are really trying to spread is not Democracy but Predatory Capitalism. They want to expand the sphere of influence of their financial backers who want greater market share in more and more markets. They do this through subtle intrusion via the IMF and the World Bank. Concurrent with this, they embrace the most corrupt and brutal local politicians they can find. The saying “He may be a genocidal dictator, but he’s OUR genocidal dictator” is not a punch-line in a joke. It is standard operating procedure for U.S. foreign policy. If this kinder, gentler approach fails, then the next steps are assassination or invasion. So the spreading of democracy leaves death, mutilation and destruction in its wake.

So, in conclusion, it appears to me that America is no longer a world-wide exemplar of how to sculpt a civilized society. Instead, it is far down the road to becoming a full-blown Corporate Police State. It has fallen so tragically, that it is now just a self-deluded leper strutting about the global stage – unaware that the theater has already emptied.

COMMUNITIES THAT ABIDE

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Over the past few months I’ve been living in a place that agrees with me in a lot of ways. I like the fact that pets and children here roam free. The dogs roam about in playful packs, and temporarily attach themselves to humans they like. The cats stand their ground against dogs, and bring presents of dead animals to humans they like. There are even some wild horses that graze in the jungle during the day and go to the beach in the evenings, to be petted by tourists. The children quickly develop an ecosystem of their own, and look out for each other, with random adults providing whatever parenting might be required from time to time. Indoor cats, dogs on leashes and “helicopter” parenting are unheard of here. I also like how schedules here are for buses, while people do what they like when they like, depending on the general mood and the weather (which fluctuates between pretty nice and extremely nice). Having such great neighbors does a good deal to heal one’s soul.

One group of neighbors I have particularly come to enjoy is a large colony of Montezuma Oropendola, which is a sort of large, tropical, yellow-tailed blackbird. They are colony breeders, and there was a colony of well over 50 individuals nesting in a dead tree pretty much right in my backyard. I tend to spend a lot of time hammering on a laptop, and so having a view like that on which I could rest my eyes periodically was most welcome. The Oropendola are good-sized birds—the size of the average chicken—but much better flyers. They weave huge sock-like nests out of long strands of grass in which they sleep and rear their chicks. They are gregarious and talkative bordering on raucous, and some people don’t like their endless chatter punctuated by loud yodeling, but I got to like them.

After a while spent watching them, I realized that most of the yodels have to do with security and air traffic control. The Oropendola tend to claim an exclusive right over a given large tree, where they post a sentry. They are peaceful (I am yet to see a squabble) but they are so well organized that other birds, from eagles and vultures to the various tiny ones, tend to avoid them.) The sentry’s job is to check everyone in and out of that tree (although when the sentry is left alone guarding a tree, smaller bird species are welcome to visit). Most of the flights are straight line courses between trees, where they are bid adieu in one tree and greeted in another, using two distinctive series of squawks from the sentries.

These birds are late sleepers, hiding in their nests until broad daylight, whereas other birds wake up and sing at first light. Dusk is their favorite time of day; this is when they all congregate and socialize, and mate. They mate in mid-air, like eagles and vultures, but unlike these, they don’t just grab onto each other and plummet but do a maneuver reminiscent of pairs figure skating.
* * *

For about a year now, I’ve been working on an e-book on resilient communities: Communities that Abide. I certainly have collected enough material for one, but until now I have lacked the impetus to put it all together. When I write, I often look for a picture on which to anchor the words. (My wife thinks that this is childish, but it works for me.) And this Oropendola colony seemed like the perfect subject for cover art for a book about resilient communities. Here they were, thriving in a dead tree, just like we are attempting to thrive, while still tied to a civilization that is nearing collapse due to resource depletion, rapid climate change and the suicidal stupidity of those who are running the show.

I took a number of pictures of this tree, during different times of day, until I got the one I wanted: the tree is deserted, with the entire colony out foraging for fruit and insects, except for the ever-present sentinel. And then, one rainy morning a few days after I took this picture there was the roar of a chainsaw, and then a loud crash. I came out to look, and the dead tree was missing. Instead, there was a large number of Oropendola up in the sky, circling around the spot where their tree had stood in uncharacteristic silence. The object lesson of the Oropendola just became a bit more poignant: this is what collapse looks like.

I soon found out that the tree’s roots were on an adjoining property, and that the owner of that property killed the tree by pouring a foundation slab over the roots and then, once it was dead and declared a hazard, hired some locals to cut it down. That person also owns a gift shop, and Oropendola nests sell for $75 apiece. The chainsaw gang charged her $300; there were about 50 nests. I saw them sitting in a wheelbarrow and stole one. The object lesson of the Oropendola became even more poignant: what destroyed their habitat was the profit motive.

The birds circled about for an hour, and then regrouped. They posted sentries on the neighboring tall trees, and spent a few hours drilling: flying back and forth between trees single-file and having the sentries check them out and in again, as before. A day later they started collecting grass for new nests. (They first assemble a giant stockpile of long strands of grass in the crook of a tree, and then start weaving.) Three days later, they didn’t seem any less happy than before the calamity, and a lot louder (apparently, there was a lot for them to discuss).

The object lesson of the Oropendola is now complete. We are nesting in a dead tree. The tree was killed by somebody else’s profit motive. Our communities will abide because 1. we are self-sufficient, 2. we have the ability to self-organize and recover in the face of calamity, and 3. we are not tied to any one place but are mobile.

I expect the book will take another month or more to put together. It will include chapters from several other authors: Albert Bates, Eerik Wissenz and Ray Jason have all agreed to contribute. If you would like to contribute a chapter as well, please let me know.

The Madness of President Putin

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Of all the various interpretations Western leaders and commentators have offered for why the president of the Russian Federation has responded the way he has to the events in Ukraine over the course of February and March of 2014—in refusing to acquiesce to the installation of a neo-fascist regime in Kiev, and in upholding the right of Crimea to self-determination—the most striking and illuminating interpretation is that he has gone mad. Striking and illuminating, that is, something in the West itself.

In times past, the international landscape reflected a multipolar order, a multiplicity of competing ideologies, alternative schemes of social and economic organization. Back then the actions of another country could be understood in terms of its alternative ideology. Even extreme figures—Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot—calling them crazy was an example of hyperbole, an intensified way of describing the brazenness with which they pursued their rationally set political goals. But when Chancellor Angela Merkel asks whether Putin is living “in another world,” echoing a theme in the narrative presented by Western media, the question seems to imply something quite literal.

We question someone’s sanity when we cannot explain their behavior or logic based on a common understanding of consensual reality. They become utterly unpredictable to us, capable of carrying on a normal conversation one moment and lunging at our throats the next. Their actions appear rash and disordered, as if they inhabit a world parallel to but completely different from the one we do. Putin is portrayed as a fiend, and the West acts baffled and scared. The feigned shock with which the West looks on at the developments in Crimea could be seen as a tactic designed to isolate and intimidate Vladimir Putin. The fact that this tactic is not only not working but actually backfiring changes feigned shock into real shock: Western meds aren’t working any more—on itself or anyone else.

The West—that is, the United States and the European Union—have played the role of chief psychiatrist in the world insane asylum ever since the USSR fell apart. Prior to 1990 the world was neatly carved up into two competing ideologies locked in a nuclear standoff. But then Mikhail Gorbachev capitulated. He was a champion of “common human values” and wanted to resolve the superpower conflict peacefully, by combining the best of both systems (all the humanistic victories of Soviet socialism plus all the seductive, consumerist prosperity of American capitalism).

But in effect Gorbachev capitulated; the USSR was dismembered and, over the course of the 1990s, Russia itself came close to being destroyed and dismembered. Although in the West, where he is still a popular figure, Gorbachev is credited with orchestrating a peaceful dissolution of the USSR, the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the USSR was an extremely traumatic event, with massive loss of life. When Putin calls the collapse of the USSR “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he echoes the feelings of many Russians—who, by the way, like to call Gorbachev “Mishka mécheny” (“Mickey the marked”—marked by the devil, that is.)

During the post-collapse period Russia could offer no competing ideology. In fact, it had no ideology at all, except for an implant of Western liberalism which, given a lack of a viable legal framework or traditions of private property and civil society, quickly turned into a particularly brutal brand of gangsterism. But then Putin came along and, using his experience in the KGB and connections with other post-Soviet “power ministeries,” he crafted a new order, which first decimated and either supplanted or absorbed the gangsters, and then imposed what Putin has termed “the dictatorship of the law.” This is the first important piece of the new Russian ideology: law matters and nobody can be above it—not even the United States.

Now, compare the concept of the “dictatorship of the law,” domestic as well as international, as it is promulgated by Putin, to the sort of law which now prevails in the United States. In the US, there are now two categories of persons. There are those who are above the law: the US government and its agencies, including NSA, FBI, DOD, etc.; Wall Street financiers and shadowy government contractors who are never prosecuted for their crimes; the über-rich who are politically connected and can prevail legally against anyone simply by throwing money at lawyers.

And then there are those who are below the law: everyone else. These are some of the most sheepish people in the world, living in constant fear of getting sued and stripped of their savings—or arrested, intimidated into accepting a plea bargain, and locked up. They can now be detained indefinitely without a charge. They can be kidnapped from anywhere in the world, transported to a “black site” and tortured. They can be put on trial without being informed of the charge and convicted based on evidence that is kept secret from them. Their communities can be placed under martial law without cause. Individually, they can be shot on sight with no provocation of suspicion of wrongdoing. Abroad, when wedding parties and funerals are taken out by misguided drone strikes, that’s a war crime—unless Washington is behind it, in which case it is just “collateral damage.”

Thanks to the relentless NSA surveillance, we now have no privacy and can keep no secrets. For example, German Chancellor Merkel is definitely “below the law.” When, thanks to Edward Snowden, she discovered that the NSA was listening in on her cell phone conversations, she was outraged and complained bitterly. The NSA stopped listening in on her phone and… started listening in on the phones of everyone she talks to! Now, isn’t that cute? Notice, however, how Frau Merkel has stopped complaining. Unlike Putin, she isn’t “mad”: she is a willing participant in a consensual reality in which what Washington says is the law, and what she says is just noise, for the benefit of maintaining the illusion of German sovereignty. For her benefit, let’s ask her in her native German: “Frau Merkel, glauben Sie wirklich dass die amerikanischen Politiker Übermenschen und die Deutschen und Russen und Ukrainer Untertanen sind?”

Putin’s second innovation is what he calls “sovereign democracy.” It is a system of representative democracy that is completely impervious to foreign political manipultion. Well, not completely impervious: just as it’s good to have a low-level inflammation somehwere once in a while to keep the immune system humming along, it’s considered healthy to have Moscow’s and St. Petersburg’s hipsters—many of whom, in their youthful folly, still worship the West—to go and get themselves roughed up by the riot police periodically. The worship appears mutual, and watching Wetern media worship a bunch of nobodys whose idea of public art is going into supermarkets and stuffing frozen chickens in their vaginas (“Pussy Riot,” that is) provides much-needed comic relief. But the firewall of Russian conservatism remains impervious to Western advances. (As Prof. Cohen recently pointed out, prior to Americans’ gay rights agitation, Russian gays used to be called “faggots”; now they are being called “American faggots,” and gay rights in Russia have taken a giant leap back.)

Again, let’s compare it to the state of affairs that now prevails in the US, where President Obama announced during this year’s state of the union address that, since Congress won’t cooperate with him, he plans to rule by decree (“executive order,” in American bureaucratese). In response, Congress is now drafting legislation that aims to compel the Obama administration to enforce acts of Congress. Apparently, they misplaced all their copies of the US constitution, which already describes this very process in considerable detail. Their studied appearance of endless legislative gridlock appears to be a veil designed to obscure the real work of distributing misappropriated funds among their campaign donors—funds that now run into trillions of dollars a year. Add to this the fact that half of US Congress has pledged allegiance to Israel. In Russian eyes, the US is neither sovereign nor a democracy; it is the festering corpse of a democracy being fed on by the world’s fattest vultures.

In contemporary Russian understanding, Ukraine is not sovereign either (it is open to blatant foreign manipulation) and therefore its government is illegitimate. The December 1991 referendum which gave Ukraine its independence was conducted in violation of the constutition that was in effect at that time, and Ukrainian independence is therefore illegitimate as well. Since the recent armed overthrow of Ukraine’s government was likewise contrary to the Ukrainian constitution, Ukraine no longer has a constitution at all. The Crimean referendum, on the other hand, is a legitimate expression of the will of the people in absence of any legitimate central authority, and therefore provides a solid legal basis for moving forward. The fact that the US government, and others following its lead, have declared the Crimean referendum illegal is neither here nor there: they do not have the power to invent laws on Russia’s behalf, and they are walled off from Russia’s internal politics.

* * *

One could mark the ascension of the US to the role world psychiatrist from around the end of the cold war. The Berlin Wall came down, and Western Capitalism, Democracy and Liberalism appeared to have won. The unified Western view of the way the world works, of what moves society forward, of what is the best and most productive form of economic, social, and political organization had prevailed over the entire planet. Francis Fukuyama published his inadvertently hilarious treatise on “The End of History.” In this context, in denying the Russian Federation the courtesy of allowing it to have a coherent alternative view, the US is attempting to claw back the illusion of its unquestioned supremacy, its absolute hegemony, its role as chief moralizer and arbiter of what counts as normal and abnormal in thought and behavior. Because either the world must have gone mad, or Putin must have. Prior diagnosis appears to have been faulty: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country,” said George W. Bush of President Putin at the Slovenia Summit in 2001. The patient expertly deceived the psychiatrist, making him believe that he is sane. And now the patient is running amok, and the West is desperately trying to drag him back into the asylum.

Some sympathy for the wardens of this insane asylum is also due. The developments in Ukraine and Crimea are especially troubling for the West because they violate the West’s linear conception of history. On this account, the advanced first world Western nations are ahead of the pack, and trying, simply out of their great compassion, to encourage stragglers like Ukraine along the path toward EU and NATO membership, monetary union and a slow-moving, controlled national bankruptcy in the hands of the IMF. The fall of the Soviet Union was a key psychological breakthrough in this story they tell themselves. They thrive on this story, for it defines them and gives them their sense of meaning and purpose. Anything that undermines its basic premises and foundations is deeply disturbing. However, many examples of unmitigated failure in the 21st century have been hard to ignore and have made this narrative sound increasingly shaky. With highlights like 9/11, the fiasco in Afghanistan, the ongoing Iraqi civil war, the global financial meltdown of 2008, intractable unemployment and economic stagnation plaguing the West in these first 15 years of the 21st century, and then the serial fiascos in Libya, Syria, Egypt and now Ukraine, and it becomes easy to see the special significance that this particular confrontation with Vladimir Putin has for the fragile Western psyche.

The West’s ascendant trip through linear history appears to be over. The paradox underneath this confrontation is that a situation with such low stakes—Crimea and the political leanings of a minor failed state—has taken on such vast proportions, and this suggests a deeper significance. The political turmoil that has taken root in the fertile soil dividing West and East, in Ukraine, which literally translates as the “borderland,” functions as a powerful symbol of the declining hegemony of the West. This confrontation continues to cast shadows of historical proportions because the authority of the world psychiatrist and world policeman is being openly challenged. The brief illusion of the triumph of the West is cracking. We have not entered into some post-historic phase, some fundamentally new future. The inmates are breaking free, and it looks as if the psychiatrist was the crazy one all along.

Consider the asymmetry. What is Ukraine to the West but an impoverished Eastern European political pawn on the geopolitical chessboard, one that has to be prevented from joining up with Russia in line with the overall trend? But to Russia Ukraine is a historic part of itself, the place of the earliest Russian capital of Kievan Rus (from whence it was moved, eventually, to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow again). It is a region with which Russia has eleven centuries of joint linguistic, cultural and political history. Half of Ukraine consists of Russian lands capriciously adjoined to it by Lenin and Khrushchev. I grew up thinking Kharkov was Russian (because it is) and was at one point amazed to discover that I would now need a visa to go there—because it got stuck on the wrong side of the border and renamed Kharkiv. (In case you are wondering, to convert to Ukrainian, you take Russian and replace ‘y’, ‘o’ and ‘e’ with ‘i’, ‘i’ with ‘y’, and ‘g’ with ‘h’. To convert back—you ask a Russian.) As of last December, the Russians in Kharkov and other Russian regions of Ukraine have been stuck on the wrong side of the border, as subjects of an unstable, dysfunctional and remarkably corrupt governent, for 22 years. It is little wonder that they are now waving Russian flags with wild abandon.

Even the muddle-headed John Kerry was recently heard to concede that Russia has “legitimate interests” in Ukraine. In challenging Russia over Ukraine the West isn’t just crossing some imaginary “red line” that Obama is so fond of proclaiming again and again. In installing a neo-fascist, rabidly anti-Russian regime in Kiev, it has crossed the double-yellow, guaranteeing a head-on collision. Question is, which side will survive that collision: the Russian tank column, or John Kerry’s limo? The West’s opening gambit is to deny visas and freeze accounts of certain Russian officials and businessmen, who either don’t have bank accounts in the West or have already pulled the money out last Friday (to the tune of a couple hundred billion dollars) and aren’t planning to travel to the US.

Russia promised to respond “symmetrically.” In its arsenal is: popping the huge financial bubble and causing a resumption of the financial collapse of 2008 by any number of means, from requiring gold instead of fiat currency as payment for oil and gas, to dumping US dollar reserves (in concert with China), to putting the EU on a fast track to economic collapse by giving the natural gas valve a slight clockwise twist, to leaving US and NATO troops in Afghanistan (who are about to start evacuating) stranded and without resupply by declaring force majeure on the cooperative arrangement currently in effect, where much of their resupply route is allowed to pass through Russian territory. That’s if Russia chose to act decisively. But Russia could also choose to do little or nothing, and then just the financial contagion from Ukraine’s forthcoming bond default and financial jitters over Ukrainian chaos disrupting natural gas deliveries to Europe could be enough to topple the West’s teetering financial house of cards.

So what remains of Western global hegemony and of the West’s right to play the world’s psychiatrist? Make of it what you will, but some lessons seem quite clear. First, it now appears that, from Russia’s point of view, having good relations with Washington is quite optional, but that Ukraine is quite a bit more important. All Russia really needs from Washington is that Washington stop its meddling in world affairs. America is dispensable. Washington, on the other hand, needs Russian cooperation if it wants to pull its troops out of Afghanistan in one piece, or if it wants to keep visiting the International Space Station, and even if it just wants to save face after its endless blunders in places like Syria and Iran.

Second, the EU isn’t being asked to choose a new master, but slavish obedience to Washington’s dictates has led to mischief and may leave it shivering in the dark come next winter through no fault of Moscow’s, so the EU should start acting in accordance with its obvious self-interest rather than against it.

Is anyone really in control in Ukraine?

Do you think the captured MSM will be reporting that Obama and McCain are supporting nationalist thugs and rejecting a democratic vote in the Crimea? Just look at Egypt for your answer. We support a military dictator who overthrew a democratically elected leader and is now ruling the country with an iron fist. Free speech is outlawed and everyone must bow down to the dictator. Obama wishes he had the same power.

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

[While everyone is concentrating on the referendum in Crimea, let’s not lose sight of what’s happening in the rest of (formerly independent) Ukraine. As we already know, the government in Kiev is dead broke; the aid that is forthcoming from the US is barely enough to cover its debt to Russia’s Gazprom, for natural gas. Ukraine’s bond yield has spiked to 50% while $15 billion of these bonds mature and have to be rolled over this year.

A lot has been made of the Russian and Belarussian troops massing all around Ukraine and in Crimea, but so far little has been heard of the state of the military within Ukraine itself. But now it appears that Ukraine’s military (which has never been involved in any armed conflict anywhere and is poorly trained and poorly armed) is mostly on the Russian side already, and, in any case, not willing to follow orders from Kiev. It also appears that the National Guard goon squads being hastily organized by the government in Kiev may be effective at intimidating civilians, but that they won’t be much of a military force.


This information comes from a well-positioned source. There is a Spanish-speaking air traffic controller working at the Borispol International Airport in Kiev, who has been tweetting in Spanish and giving a blow-by-blow account of the goings on in the air and on the ground, along with some useful commentary. What follows is a summary of some of the recent tweets. Many thanks to Francisco for putting it together.

Here is what I see as the best case scenario for Ukraine: Russian and Ukrainian militaries fraternize and merge without a single shot fired, followed by a joint mop-up operation against the nationalist thugs. Once the nationalists’ ability to intimidate the populace is neutralized, the country can be reorganized, ideally as a federative structure that supports local languages, dialects and cultures.]

The Ukrainian military are by and large refusing to follow orders from he government. Many if not the majority of them are incredibly angry. Some generals have openly declared that they will not follow orders from some foreign-imposed government. The chief of the Air Force is a major problem for the government: so far he has flatly refused to fly any missions at all, and has grounded all the planes. He says that he will not follow orders except from a freely elected governent. Until such a time, he will follow only his own orders.

In this ATC’s opinion, this attitude within the military is a good thing, because there would already be lots of casualties had they had followed their orders. It looks like at least half, and probably more, of the military feels much more affinity toward their Russian colleages than towards the Ukrainian Nationalists who are nominally in power.The government is frantically trying to recruit and organize a National Guard, with whatever western help they can get. There is no equipment or money in the country.

The problem with this National Guard is that it’s being recruited based on an ideology of nationalistic bigotry and hatred rather than any useful aptitude. The people in Kiev are much more afraid of the nationalists and the National Guard being created than of the military. It appears that the sentiment towards the Russians is in general very friendly, that most Ukrainians consider Russians to be their brothers. The exception is the ultra-nationalistic faction, which superficially seems to be gaining a lot of power through intimidation.

The Crimean “Crisis” and Western Bias

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Everybody now admits that the Kiev massacre was a false flag operation, just like I said it was. The leading theory is that the snipers who fired indiscriminately on policemen, demonstrators and bystanders were hired by the Ukrainian opposition. (Interesting question: Were they paid with US State Dept. funds?) But in response the newly installed authorities in Kiev have gone full-retard and are blaming… why, Russia, of course! So obvious! Russia had just signed a historic deal with Yanukovych, accepting Ukraine into the Customs Union and giving it a huge discount on natural gas, plus the Winter Olympics in Sochi were underway. Of course Russia would want to throw all of that away, watch helplessly as Ukraine’s government gets overthrown and replaced by US-financed neo-Nazis, and now face sanctions for defending the rights of its citizens in Crimea. No, not really.

Meanwhile, Putin is having trouble explaining to Western leaders that Russia is not doing anything illegal: Russian troops are in Crimea legally, based on a long-term agreement with Ukraine and the self-defense forces in charge there are irregulars who do not report to the Russian military. Crimea is about to hold a referendum on independence from Ukraine (having ended up as part of Ukraine as an accident) but the West says the referendum is illegal. You see, unlike the Albanians in Kosovo or the South Sudanese or just about any other group, the Russians in Crimea do not have the right of self-determination. Why? Because they are Russian?

This week’s guest post is by Outlook Zen. It strikes me as exceptionally balanced; the one quibble I have is against mentioning Godwin’s Law while ignoring this. Goodwin rightly called out people who use the terms “fascism” and “Nazi” and gratuitously compare people to Hitler. But what about those who don jackboots and Swastika armbands and stomp around saluting each other with the Hitlergruß? Is the comparison still gratuitous? There seems to be a taboo in the US against mentioning that there were neo-Nazis behind the putsch in Kiev. The allegations that they hired snipers to shoot other protesters, to produce a rationale for overthrowing the government, are being hushed up too. Too embarrassing? Well, it should be! But there should still be a full investigation.]

Just two weeks ago, we had discussed the bias in international reporting, and the tendency of media outlets to report the most sensational facts without providing proper context and a full-view of the situation. How time appropriate, given the outbreak of the Russia-Crimea situation in the past few days. As we hear the reporting of the situation in US and western media, I’m reminded over and over again of my earlier complaints. So many of the articles seem so sensational and biased in their reporting. What stands out glaringly is the extent to which Russia has been condemned. Over the past days, I’ve seen Putin compared to Hitler, Russia compared to Nazi Germany, and the Crimean annexation compared to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The same media that has always jumped to condemn Bush-Hitler comparisons, is now the first to invoke Godwin’s Law when describing Russia and Putin.

 

Personally, as someone who has no ties to Russia, neither positive nor negative, none of their actions thus far strike me as being outrageous. Hence why the hyperbolic media reporting in the US strikes me as being a bit too biased & extreme.

 

A recap of the key events in recent days:

 

Ukraine’s democratically elected government was overthrown by mass-protests in the capital, Kiev.

 

These protests represent popular sentiment in Western Ukraine, but not in the East. Eastern Ukraine is strongly pro-Russian, and it was this faction that won the most recent elections and installed the President Viktor Yanukovych. The protests could thus be seen as a non-democratic overthrow of a democratically elected government, by the losing minority. It can also be credibly cast as the political censorship and subjugation of the pro-Russia Eastern-Ukraine, by the pro-EU Western-Ukraine.

 

Russia, in protest of the above, annexes/liberates Crimea, the already semi-autonomous and most heavily pro-Russian province in Ukraine. It was a bloodless takeover, with no casualties. There is no local protest or uprising against the Russian occupation. The Russian army is cheered on and; greeted warmly by the local population. Secession fever breaks out all over Eastern Ukraine, as people protest against the protester-installed government in Kiev. Pro-Russian protesters drape Russian flags over government buildings. Ukraine’s own Admiral Berezovsky, who was appointed by the interim government in Kiev, orders Ukrainian naval forces on the peninsula to disregard any orders from the “self-proclaimed” authorities in Kiev. Pro-Russian leaders in Crimea have scheduled a referendum to be held later this month, that will let the locals decide on secession and ties with Russia. Ironically, both Kiev and the West are opposed to this democratic vote that would allow the locals to chart their own future. Recapping these events, I’m having a hard time expressing outrage over anything Russia has done in the past weeks.

 

To be sure, this is a very complicated situation, and I certainly do not mean to oversimplify it. What exactly the locals in Crimea and Eastern-Ukraine want, and whether this is aligned with Russian intervention, is certainly a debatable topic. There are good arguments that can be made both for and against Russian intervention in Crimea. If the day ever comes when Russia ignores or suppresses the popular will of the Crimean people, I will be the first to condemn Putin.

 

However, what I do find most objectionable today is the hyperbole with which Russia is being regarded by Western media. The bias inherent in almost all reporting, and the arguments presented to justify only 1 of the 2 sides, is virtually bordering on propaganda. Even worse is the lack of context with which Russia’s actions are being presented. Consider the following list of US interventions in foreign countries over the past half century.

The US invasion of Panama, in order to protect their interests in the Panama Canal

The US sponsored invasion of Cuba to overthrow the popular revolutionary, Fidel Castro

US Intervention in Vietnam

US Invasion of Iraq, in violation of both UN law and Iraqi public sentiment, resulting in 500,000 Iraqi civilian deaths

US assassination attempts on foreign leaders, such as Fidel Castro, in the past decades

US spying on Allies, other countries’ Heads of States, and virtually everyone using the Internet

After looking at this list, it’s hard to make the case that Russian intervention in Crimea is outrageous compared to what we have been doing for decades. At no point during any of the above controversies did the media question whether our country is deserving of economic sanctions, whether we should have our G8 membership revoked, or whether we’re becoming a police-spy-war state like Nazi Germany. And yet, Russian intervention in Crimea has been deemed worthy of all the above.

 

[…P]atriotism is no excuse for biased reporting & hyperbole against Russia. It’s been 25 years since the Cold War ended. It’s time we evaluated Russia’s actions objectively, and not from the narrow prism of Western ethnocentrism.

SOME FACTS TO COUNTER U.S. MSM PROPAGANDA ABOUT THE UKRAINE

Guest Post from Club Orlov

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup

This is a guest post by Renée Parsons, who did a very good job of pulling together the facts. Facts are important, you know, especially in light of the rabidly anti-Russian press coverage in the US.

[Wednesday updates:
• According to a leaked EU’s Ashton phone tape, the Kiev snipers, who shot both protesters and police, were hired by Ukrainian opposition leaders, did not work for overthrown Yanukovych
• It turns out that Russia has a legal right to maintain a military force of up to 25 thousand troops in Crimea in accordance with an agreement signed by Russia and Ukraine in 1997, which will remain in effect until 2043. Current Russian troop strength in Crimea is well under the legal limit. The troops are there to safeguard Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
• John Kerry has pledged $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. Ukraine’s natural gas bill to Russia is going to be $2 billion.]


Listening to the US media, even the most diligent news junkie would find it difficult to know that the U.S. State Department played not only a vital role in the violence and chaos underway in Ukraine but was also complicit in creating the coup that ousted democratically elected President Viktor Yanuyovch. Given the Russian Parliament’s approval of Putin’s request for military troops to be moved into Crimea, Americans uninformed about the history of that region might also be persuaded that Russia is the aggressor and the sole perpetrator of the violence.

Let’s be clear about what is at stake here: NATO missiles on the adjacent Ukraine border aimed directly at Russia would make that country extremely vulnerable to Western goals and destabilization efforts while threatening Russia’s only water access to its naval fleet in Crimean peninsula, the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East – and not the least of which would allow world economic dominance by the US, the European Union, the IMF, World Bank and international financiers all of whom had already brought staggering suffering to millions around the globe.

The fact is that democracy was not a demand on the streets of Kiev. The current record of events indicates that protests of civil dissatisfaction were organized by reactionary neo-Nazi forces intent on fomenting a major domestic crisis ousting Ukraine’s legitimate government. As events continue to spiral out of control, here is the chronology of how the coup was engineered to install a government more favorable to EU and US goals.

April 11, 2011: A Kiev Post article entitled “Ukraine Hopes to Get $1.5 Billion from IMF in June” states that the loan is dependent on pension cuts while “maintaining cooperation with the IMF, since it influences the country’s interaction with other international financial institutions and private investors” and further that the “attraction of $850 million from the World Bank in 2011, depended on cooperation with the IMF.” Well, that about says it all: if Ukraine played ball, then the loan money would pour in.

November 21, 2013: fast forward to the EU summit in Lithuania when President Yanuyovch embarrassed the European Union by rejecting its Agreement in favor of joining Russia’s Common Union with other Commonwealth Independent States.

November 27, 2013: it was not until February 23, 2014 when Anonymous Ukraine hackers released a series of emails from a Lithuanian government advisor to opposition leader and former boxer Vitaly Klitschko regarding plans to destabilize Ukraine; for example:

“Our American friends promise to pay a visit in the coming days, we may even see Nuland or someone from the Congress.” 12/7/2013

“Your colleague has arrived … his services may be required even after the country is destabilized.” 12/14/2013

“I think we’ve paved the way for more radical escalation of the situation. Isn’t it time to proceed with more decisive action?” 1/9/2014

November 29, 2013: well-orchestrated protestors were already in the streets of Kiev as European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso announced that the EU would “not accept Russia’s veto” of the Agreement.

December 13, 2013: As if intent on providing incontrovertible evidence of US involvement in Ukraine, Assistant US Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nuland proudly told a meeting of the International Business Conference sponsored by the US-Ukrainian Foundation that the US had ‘invested’ more than $5 billion and ‘five years worth of work and preparation” in achieving what she called Ukraine’s ‘European aspirations.” Having just returned from her third trip to Ukraine in five weeks, Nuland boasted of her ‘coordinated high level diplomacy’ and a more than two hour ‘tough conversation’ with Yanukovych. Already familiar with Nuland as former Secretary Clinton’s spokesperson at State, one can imagine her discourteous tone and manner when she says she made it “absolutely clear” to Yanukovych that the US required “immediate steps” … to “get back into conversation with Europe and the IMF.” While Western media have portrayed Yanukovych as a ‘weak’ leader, Nuland’s description of a ‘tough’ meeting can only mean that he resisted her threats and intimidations. In what must have been a touching moment, Nuland spoke about a show of force by government police on demonstrators who “sang hymns and prayed for peace.”

What Nuland did not reveal on December 13 was that her meetings with ‘key Ukrainian stakeholders’ included neo-Nazi Svoboda party leader Oleh Tyahnybok and prime minister wannabe Arsenly Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party. At about the same time Nuland was wooing fascist extremists, Sen. John McCain (R-Az) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D- Conn) shared the stage in Kiev with Tyahnybok offering their support and opposition to the sitting government. The Svoboda party which has roots with extreme vigilante and antisemitic groups has since received at least three high level cabinet posts in the interim government including deputy prime minister. There is no doubt that the progenies of west Ukraine’s historic neo-fascist thugs that fought alongside Hitler are now aligned with the US as represented by Victoria Nuland.

January 24, 2014: President Yanukoyvch identified foreign elements participating in Kiev protests warning that armed radicals were a danger to peaceful citizens. Independent news agencies also reported that “not all of Kiev’s population backs opposition rule, which depends mainly on a group from the former Polish town of Lvov, which holds sway over Kiev downtown – but not the rest of the city.”

January 30, 2014: The State Department’s website Media Note announced Nuland’s upcoming travel plans that ”In Kyiv, Assistant Secretary Nuland will meet with government officials, opposition leaders, civil society and business leaders to encourage agreement on a new government and plan of action.” In other words, almost a month before President Yanukovych was ousted, the US was planning to rid the world of another independently elected President.

February 4, 2014: More evidence of Ms. Nuland’s meddling with extremist factions and the high level stakes of war and peace occurred in her taped conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing their calculations of who’s in and who’s out to replace Yanukovych. Note mention of Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok. Here are some selected excerpts:

Nuland: “What do you think?”

Pyatt: “I think we’re in play… the [Vitali] Klitsch piece is obviously the complicated electron here especially the announcement of him as deputy prime minister. Your argument to him which you’ll need to make, I think the next phone call we want to set up is exactly the one you made to Yats [Yatsenyuk]. And I’m glad you sort of put him on the spot on where he fits in this scenario and I’m very glad he said what he said in response.”

Nuland: “I don’t think Klitsch should go into government. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Pyatt: “yeah…I mean I guess. You think…what…in terms of him not going into the government, just let him sort of stay out and do his political homework and stuff. I’m just thinking in terms of the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys. I’m sure that’s what Yanukoyvch is calculating on all this.”

Nuland: “I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. What he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside and he needs to be talking to them four times a week you know…I think with Klitsch going in at that level working for Yats, it’s not going to work.”

Nuland: “My understanding is that the big three [Yatsenyuk, Klitsch and Tyahnybok] were going in to their own meeting and that Yats was going to offer in that context a three plus one conversation with you.”

Pyatt: “That’s what he proposed but knowing the dynamic that’s been with them where Klitsch has been top dog; he’s going to take a while to show up at a meeting, he’s probably talking to his guys at this point so I think you reaching out to him will help with the personality management among the three and gives us a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn’t like it.”

Nuland: “…when I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy…Robert Serry—he’s now gotten both Serry and Ban ki Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday…so that would be great I think to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and you know fuck the EU.”

Pyatt: “Exactly. I think we’ve got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure the Russians will be working behind the scenes … Let me work on Klitchko and I think we want to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help midwife this thing.”

Nuland: “…Sullivan’s come back to me saying you need Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an” ‘atta’ boy’ and get the deeds to stick so Biden’s willing.”

February 20, 2014: Foreign ministers from Poland, Germany and France visiting Kiev secured President Yanukovych’s agreement that would commit the government to an interim administration, constitutional reform and new parliamentary and presidential elections. With “no clear sign that EU or US pressure has achieved” the desired effect, opposition leaders rejected Yanukovych’s compromise which would have ended the three month stand-off. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called on the German, French and Polish foreign ministers to step in and take responsibility for upholding the deal they helped forge and not let “armed extremists” directly threaten Ukrainian sovereignty.

February 21, 2014: At a special summit in Brussels, European foreign ministers agreed to adopt sanctions on Ukraine including visa bans and asset freezes. The EU decision followed “immense pressure from the US for the European powers to take punitive action against the Ukrainian regime.” Washington had already imposed travel bans on 20 leading Ukrainians.

February 22, 2014: An hour after refusing to resign, the Ukrainian Parliament voted, according to Russian president Vladimir Putin, in an unconstitutional action to oust President Yanukovych and that pro-EU forces staged a ‘coup’. Yanukovych departed Kiev in fear for his life.

March 1, 2014: During a conversation initiated by the vice president, Biden delivered his ‘atta boy’ with a phone call to newly installed prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk reaffirming US support for Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity.”

All of the above machinations expose an incoherent and corrupt American foreign policy with a litany of US hypocrisy that might be hilarious if not for its potentially grave global implications. The comment “you just don’t behave by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext” might just win Secretary of State John Kerry the Hypocrisy of the Year Award. Kerry, of course, famously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq seeking nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

But then again, the President’s own comments that “…countries have deep concerns and suspicions about this kind of meddling…” and that “…as long as none of us are inside Ukraine trying to meddle and intervene…with decisions that properly belong to Ukrainian people…” while announcing $1 billion aid package to Ukraine (but not Detroit) would be a close runner-up for the Award.

SOLID GOLD TOILET

Good analysis by a Russian who understands Ukrainian/Russian history. Will this be a trigger for the next phase of the Fourth Turning?

Guest post by Dmitry Orlov

Shock over Ukraine

[Update: I am pushing this live a few days early, because the Ukrainian situation is evolving so rapidly. One political corpse (Yanukovych) is out; apparently he has fled to Russia. Another political corpse (Tymoshenko) has been hastily rehabilitated and is ready to be put on the ballot for elections in May. Question is, Will there still be a country for her to (pretend to) run? Financial reserves are down to a few days, federal structures are being dismantled throughout the country, regional governors are fleeing, and a default on some €60 billion of Ukrainian bonds, many held by Russian banks, seems likely. Could this be just the kind of financial contagion needed to finally pop the ridiculous US equities bubble? At least two Ukrainian provinces are openly talking secession; one (Crimea) wants to immediately join Russian Federation. A question for US State Dept. flunkies and EU functionaries: What does that do to your geopolitical calculus? At risk are five nuclear power plants and a lot of Russian gas that transits Ukraine on its way west. Ukraine is shaping up to be a lot like Yugoslavia, except with more than twice as many people, lots of crazed street fighters who think they now own the place, and a role critical to European energy security. If you aren’t in shock about this, then you haven’t been paying attention.]

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails asking me what I thought was happening in Ukraine. It took me a while to formulate an opinion, but what I now think is happening is this: a complete and utter failure of politics on every level.

Everyone has failed: the EU representatives, the US State Department with its Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, the Yanukovych government, its political opponents, and the Kremin. And now they are all in shock and nobody knows what to do. Except for the protesters, who do know what to do: continue to protest. Most of them don’t even know what it is they are protesting, but, in essence, they are protesting the very existence of their country, which is made up of two parts: Eastern Poland, which is Ukrainian-speaking and predominantly Catholic, and Western Russia, which is Russian-speaking and predominantly Orthodox. The “Russians” outnumber the “Ukrainians” two to one. The ultimate resolution to the crisis lies in partitioning the country. Nobody has the stomach to even talk about it—yet. But until that happens we will continue being subjected to this strange spectacle, where every single actor in Ukraine does everything possible to undermine the country’s political system. Deep down, the Ukrainians don’t want there to be a different government in Kiev—they don’t want there to be a government in Kiev at all.

I now turn it over to Andrey Tymofeiuk, a Kiev resident who posted the following on his Facebook page, in obscenity-riddled Russian. (The Russian language is remarkably rich in obscenities, which pack tremendous expressive power but don’t translate into English with its paltry collection of four-letter words.) I think he provided a good, information-rich summary of the situation from all the angles, his graduate-level potty-mouth notwithstanding, so please give him props. Translation and clean-up are mine.

I think that the current situation is such that everyone is in terrible shock over what’s happening.

The EU representatives are shocked most of all. They were playing at being skillful diplomats, who stooped to work with the barbarous dictator of a third-world country. He was supposed to quiver with anticipation over his handout, in the form of an EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, which would have allowed him to don the mantle of the great Euro-integrator and win the 2015 elections.

Gazing down from their lofty diplomatic perch, these experts were blindsided when the barbarous dictator suddenly decided to do a bit of arithmetic, spotted a flaw in the deal (Ukrainian national bankruptcy) and swiftly decided to take his 46 million slaves away from the EU and give them to Moscow instead. And then, due to their ridiculous bureaucracy and complete lack of understanding of Ukrainian reality, they allowed an initially peaceful protest to develop into something like civil war.

The EU representatives really don’t need a bloody quagmire with a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands of refugees, terrorist attacks, tanks on the streets and other such joys, and they will try to do all they can to prevent it, even if this means that the thick-headed barbarous dictator has to stay in power. But the problem is that the barbarous dictator seems to have lost his mind.

Now the EU representatives will have to answer some very difficult questions from television viewers back home. Such as: “Why are the people waving EU flags wearing Nazi emblems? Are we supporting Nazis?” or “If they are peaceful, then why are they throwing Molotov cocktails at policemen and taking them hostage?” That’s just for starters. Here is a more serious question: “Do we really want 46 million of these violent barbarians to join the EU?” And how about this one: “What makes you think that the five Ukrainian nuclear power plants will remain safe if the country falls into chaos?” Just one more, but it’s a doosie: “If Ukraine becomes ungovernable, how are we going to get our fix of Russian natural gas next winter? Are we going to freeze to death?” But the EU representatives may not have to field such questions much longer because their diplomatic careers may be at an end. After all, they haven’t been too effective, have they? To transform a perfectly peaceful protest into a bloody mess is not exactly the pinnacle of European diplomacy. A few mid-level al Qaeda operatives could have managed the job just as well.

Ukrainian opposition leaders are in shock as well. They were all ready to use the energy of the demonstrators to advance their own political ambitions—but now these ambitions seem rather beside the point. They are politicians, not field commanders, and now they don’t know what to do. Their task is an immensely intricate one: on the one hand, they must act like ardent revolutionaries, or the crowd will turn against them, haul them off the podium and string them up; on the other hand, they have to placate the Europeans and somehow make them believe that they still have influence, that this is still a peaceful protest, and that they are not leading illegal combatants to overthrow lawful authority, but legitimate, peaceful protesters. They still hope that the Europeans will give them jobs in the new puppet government once this is all over. So far, this is not working, and they themselves no longer believe that they are in control of anything. They sign agreements to end hostilities, and hostilities continue.

The barbarous dictator, Yanukovych, is in shock too. His luck has been quite good until now, but has suddenly run out. He rose from low ranks, became one of the kingpins of the Donbass region, survived the collapse of 2004 and then got rich and built himself a palatial estate complete with a Solid Gold Toilet. Up until now he had several different ways of winning the elections in 2015. After that, he could have borrowed a page from Lukashenko’s playbook and fashioned himself into Ukraine’s president-for-life. But now that dream is gone.

He had a couple of chances to resolve the situation, but he made missteps, constantly listening to the hard-liners in his administration, and now the situation is serious and his options quite limited. After the events of February 18 there is no way for him to even claim to be a caretaker president, in power until the 2015 elections. His special forces can’t disperse the protesters. He was counting on Putin’s help, but Putin is less than pleased with his avarice and stupidity, and is noncommittal even about granting him asylum should he need to escape from Kiev. Plus, he’d be leaving behind the Solid Gold Toilet. But if he sticks around the people might hang him. He has gone from trying to survive the next election to trying to survive until the next election.

The administration’s hard-liners are in shock too. They sincerely believed that all they have to do is wave some night-sticks and the crowds will disperse. They trucked in special forces, traffic cops, criminals under their control, assorted zombie idiots, and ordered them all to attack the protesters. They tried it once—nothing; tried it again—still nothing. Protesters aren’t dispersing. Just the opposite: the more they beat on the protesters, the more their numbers grow and the more violent their tactics become. Once they saw an armored personnel carrier —a symbol of their invincibility—engulfed in flames, their hands started to shake. They don’t think that Yanukovych will abandon them, but what can he do? Order in the army? But the army people haven’t been placated with special privileges like the special forces and the police, don’t have much to lose, and could easily cross over to the other side.

The special forces are in even greater shock. A lot of them also worked as policemen, happily beating up football hooligans and collecting bribes from businessmen. And now they are confronted with a most unwelcome situation: the hooligans and the businessmen are united against them. In the beginning it was fun for them—beat on defenseless people in the center of Kiev, receive medals and money, and go home. But things have dragged on and on. The the stupider ones (the majority) are now furious, can’t understand why they haven’t been ordered to just shoot everyone, and think that Yanukovych is a sissy. The smarter ones (the minority) understand full well how dangerous that would be. First of all, success is not guaranteed and losses are likely to be high on both sides—but they have no desire to lay down their lives in defence of the Solid Gold Toilet. Second, even if they manage to suppress and disperse the protesters, the day after that they would start getting killed off one by one, because there exists a database with their names and addresses. Unlike the higher-ups in the administration, they won’t have the chance to flee abroad, and will stay to experience popular anger firsthand. They really want Yanukovych to magically return the situation to the way it was before, but the probability of this happening is dropping every day.

The Kremlin is in a bit of shock as well. They were carefully masterminding the situation, supporting the Donbass thugs, gradually ramping up their influence in Ukraine and buying up key stocks. They were methodically planning to annex half of Ukraine as a “voluntary incorporation.” But then this idiot Yanukovych started giving them a hard time trying to extort money in return for joining the Customs Union, and then he made a series of mistakes leading to the current disaster—in the middle of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, no less! The right thing to do would be to send tank columns into Donbass and Crimea, but that would put a damper on the Olympics. Plus, nothing is ready—Ukraine is not tiny Georgia, and a beautiful textbook military operation would not be possible without preparation. And a less-than-stylish military operation could lead to visa problems and international banking difficulties for the Russian leadership at a minimum, and World War III at a maximum.

The Kremlin’s propaganda people are observing the formation of the contemporary Ukrainian nation right on the streets of Kiev, and they are crying bloody tears. How are they going to be able to explain to these people that their country is not Ukraine but “Little Russia,” that their national language is made up, and that they should come home to Mother Russia and start sending their taxes to Moscow? More importantly, what about the average Russian, who is used to thinking that “nothing can be done” but is now seeing right on his television screen how for three months now special forces, armed to the teeth, haven’t been able to do much of anything to put down a ragtag mob of provincials? Thoughts are starting to course through his brain—dangerous thoughts. And the average Belarussian is even further ahead in his thinking. He has stopped looking at the television screen, has walked over to the window, and is looking at the door of the nearest government office, where local officials recently beat a bribe out of him.

The Americans and the Brits are also in shock. They couldn’t possibly care any less about the sufferings of the Ukrainian aborigines. All they care about is that Russia doesn’t grow stronger. Until recently Yanukovych seemed like a pleasant sort of dictator—not too accommodating toward the Russians, and willing to talk business with the West, about shale gas and other natural resources in particular. But now there’s a bloody mess, with Molotov cocktails, troop carriers on fire, catapults, snipers… They could dismiss Yanukovych, but then who would honor all the agreements and contracts he has signed? And who will they talk business with? The guerilla warrior nationalists from The Right Sector? The club-wielding Cossacks? And what if the Russians achieve some kind of breakthrough, absorb Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, and grow even stronger?

Even China has something to think about. China has its own interests in Crimea, and is not so much shocked as perplexed: why can’t the local barbarian put down his opponents? There was a similar problem in China in 1989 on Tiananmen square, but there they mowed down hundreds of unarmed students without any undue excess of emotion and it was all over quickly. The West grumbled for a bit, but then resumed economic cooperation as if nothing happened. The Chinese can’t grasp why this dictator can’t do the totally obvious thing, but in general they don’t care. Ukraine is far away, and they have no desire to play a part in Eastern European conflicts. They have more important things to think about, like winning every single medal at the Olympic games in 2016 and putting a red flag on Mars.

The active population of Kiev has been in shock for a few months now, continuously, more and more every day. But at some point shock was replaced with active enthusiasm: it is better to go carry medicine to the wounded and to hurl shingles at police on Independence Square than to watch horrors unfold on television.

The passive population of Kiev is still quietly drinking beer and poking around with social networking apps. They don’t understand what’s happening yet. But if the unofficial state of emergency (including limitations on access to the city) last a few more days—and food and drink running out—then they will end up in a state of shock more serious than anything they have ever experienced.

So, who isn’t in shock? I saw him today on Independence Square: a Cossack dressed in national garb, who, with a smile on his face, was marching off to skirmish with the special forces. In one hand he held a shield with “Glory to Ukraine” written on it, and in the other a frighteningly big club. He was singing a patriotic song. It occurred to me that this man isn’t bothered by questions such as “How will I get home tonight?” or “What if something happens to me?” or “What is going to happen to us all?”

He isn’t in shock. He no longer gives a damn, bless him.

 

SECRET DEFIANCE

The Peace-Violence Axis

By Dmitry Orlov

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-peace-violence-axis.html#more

Albert’s plot of thinkers has elicited some strong reactions. The vertical “Ecotopia”/“Collapse” axis seems somewhat less controversial: it seems that some people are more optimistic, some less optimistic, but that this is a personal preference that others can easily accept. But the horizontal axis, especially in his initial version, where it went from “peaceful transformation” on the left to “violent revolution” on the right, didn’t sit well with many people. The new version, which goes from “transformation” to “resistance” may be more politically correct, but I feel that something is lost in eschewing the concept of violence, which I feel is omnipresent and inescapable.

Perhaps the new axis should start out with “appeasement” rather than “transformation”? Doesn’t it stand to reason that to remain scrupulously peaceful and cooperative in a situation where acts of unspeakable violence are being carried out in your name is to tacitly condone that violence? When US citizens pay their taxes, or cast their vote for President, they, wittingly or unwittingly, give their approval to a system of mass imprisonment that has surpassed both Hitler’s and Stalin’s, become complicit in the mass murder of foreign civilians, a.k.a. “collateral damage,” that number in the hundreds of thousands, and underwrite a system of global surveillance that has put East Germany’s Stasi and USSR’s KGB to shame. By this standard, a law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying American is automatically one of the worst criminals mankind has ever known. How is that nonviolent?

Turning our attention to the right end of the axis, where the label has been changed from “Violent revolution” to “resistance,” things are not any less muddled. A good example of “resistance” is the recent Greenpeace action to stop Russian oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The activists got arrested, charged with “hooliganism,” imprisoned, and then amnestied and released. The Russians were able to neutralize their effort and to deter any repeat of the action. As far as their drilling program, no damage has been done. Another good example is the “resistance” against XL pipeline, where various celebrities burned lots of jet fuel and gasoline to travel to Washington and get themselves arrested. Unlike most Russians, most Americans can’t seem to see the irony in burning fossil fuels to protest the burning of fossil fuels. It is rather late in the day for the environmental movement, and it seems to have devolved to the status of fossil fuel industry’s “useful idiots.” Is resistance just another form of appeasement?

If so, then the horizontal axis goes from “passive appeasement” on the left to “active appeasement” on the right, and both of them, and all points in between, are soaked through with violence—against people and against nature. The difference between them seems to be a matter of posturing: some people prefer to act in ways that get them invited to international conferences which fail to achieve anything; other people prefer to hire college students to stand around on the sidewalk and get money from passing pedestrians, so that they can then grandstand on the high seas and get caught, charged with “hooliganism” and released. It’s a question of style: some people prefer business-casual, while others like to dress sporty.

If resistance=appeasement, then what is left? What is the actual behavioral difference that actually does make a difference? It is not resistance, it is defiance. Now, there are two types of defiance: open defiance and secret, clandestine, plausibly deniable defiance. Open defiance is the domain of fools and madmen: refuse to pay your taxes, and you get fined and jailed. Secret defiance is the key to success: don’t owe any taxes, and you find yourself living better than most. It is also the key to making tangible improvements to your tiny patch of the world. Now, it would make no sense to ask people to place themselves on the “obedience”/“defiance” axis, since doing so would constitute open defiance, which is foolish. Moreover, secret defiance starts with defying classification.

Classification, you see, is a form of violence—a subtype of “objective violence.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek defined the terms “subjective violence” and “objective violence” roughly as follows: subjective violence happens when you are walking down the road and somebody throws a brickbat at your head and robs you; objective violence happens when you then get taken to a hospital emergency room, stitched up, and later receive a hospital bill for tens of thousands of dollars, including $300 for a $3 bandage, plus a separate exorbitant bill from a doctor who didn’t even see you. Now, you could say that the robber “classified” you as an easy mark—somebody who could be robbed—but that’s stretching it, because the robber’s victims do not constitute a recognizable class. On the other hand, when you are received in the emergency room, you are immediately classified as a patient, triaged, treated, and, upon release, pursued in the public realm of collections agencies and bankruptcy courts. Epistemologically speaking, your victimhood in a robbery is a matter of perspectival identification—“that guy over there,” while your victimhood in this commonplace episode of medical extortion is public identification—based on your full name, social security number, date of birth and, if you decide to flee, your fingerprints and biometric data that are on file.

Classifying people is almost always an act of objective violence. Let’s try an exercise. You probably fancy yourself as a member of the middle class. Most people prefer to consider themselves middle-class, because upper-class aspirations seem arrogant and overweening while lower-class aspirations don’t exist. On the other hand, it is often said that the middle class is rapidly disappearing. The parents might still fancy themselves middle-class, but their underemployed basement-dwelling adult children have scant hope of keeping up the appearances. Now, let’s follow this trend to its obvious conclusion. The middle class is gone; what are you now? Let’s introduce some categories: we have nobs (filthy rich bastards), proles (who have a job serving the nobs) and bums (who don’t have such a job). Which one are you? Do you feel slightly offended at being classified in such a manner? Well, you should be. Classifying people is an offensive thing to do.

But this sort of thing goes on all the time, and English-speakers seem particularly susceptible to it. English, with its definite and indefinite articles, which, unlike other languages, convey semantic rather than grammatical distinctions, makes it a grammatical requirement to classify things. In Chinese or Russian, you can only say the equivalent of “president of bank”; in German you can say ”Bank-Präsident”; while in English you might say “a president of the bank” or “the president of a bank”, in each case picking out one or more members out of one or more classes. It is commonly believed that different languages do not set limits on what thoughts their speakers can entertain, but they certainly do set limits on what thoughts their speakers can refuse to entertain, and English-speakers cannot refuse to entertain thoughts about the class membership of the objects they wish to discuss. I believe that this may help explain the appalling level of objective violence and the horrific level of social stratification and inequality that can be observed in most English-speaking societies.

And so I am quite happy that Albert’s plot produced such great discomfort; maybe there is some hope for us English-victims after all… I certainly have resented the classification “Orlov is a collapsitarian” (whatever that means) with which some fool writing for Mother Jones once tried to pin me down. I defy efforts to classify me. I suppose this puts me somewhere on the defiance spectrum, but I can’t tell you how high or I’d be openly defiant, i.e., I’d be a fool. Maybe you can do even better. This is one parameter in which some one-upmanship might be called for. How defiant are you?

TRYING TO STAY SANE IN AN INSANE WORLD – AT WORLD’S END

In the first three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of this disheartening look back at a century of central banking, income taxing, military warring, energy depleting and political corrupting, I made a case for why we are in the midst of a financial, commercial, political, social and cultural collapse. In this final installment I’ll give my best estimate as to what happens next and it has a 100% probability of being wrong. There are so many variables involved that it is impossible to predict the exact path to our world’s end. Many people don’t want to hear about the intractable issues or the true reasons for our predicament. They want easy button solutions. They want someone or something to fix their problems. They pray for a technological miracle to save them from decades of irrational myopic decisions. As the domino-like collapse worsens, the feeble minded populace becomes more susceptible to the false promises of tyrants and psychopaths. There are a myriad of thugs, criminals, and autocrats in positions of power who are willing to exploit any means necessary to retain their wealth, power and control. The revelations of governmental malfeasance, un-Constitutional mass espionage of all citizens, and expansion of the Orwellian welfare/warfare surveillance state, from patriots like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden has proven beyond a doubt the corrupt establishment are zealously anxious to discard and stomp on the U.S. Constitution in their desire for authoritarian control over our society.

Anyone who denies we are in the midst of an ongoing Crisis that will lead to a collapse of the system as we know it is either a card carrying member of the corrupt establishment, dependent upon the oligarchs for their living, or just one of the willfully ignorant ostriches who choose to put their heads in the sand and hum the Star Spangled Banner as they choose obliviousness to awareness. Thinking is hard. Feeling and believing a storyline is easy.

 

A moral society must be inhabited by an informed, educated, aware populace and   governed by honorable leaders who oversee based upon the nation’s founding principles of liberty, freedom and limited government of, by and for the people. A moral society requires trust, honor, property rights, simple just laws, and the freedom to succeed or fail on your own merits. There is one major problem in creating a true moral society where liberty, freedom, trust, honor and free markets are cherished – human beings. We are a deeply flawed species who are prone to falling prey to the depravities of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Men have always been captivated by the false idols of dominion, power and wealth. The foibles of human nature haven’t changed over the course of history. This is why we have 80 to 100 year cycles driven by the same human strengths and shortcomings revealed throughout recorded history.

Empires rise and fall due to the humanness of their leaders and citizens. The great American Empire is no different. It was created a mere 224 years ago by courageous patriots who risked their wealth and their lives to create a Republic founded upon the principles of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; took a dreadful wrong turn in 1913 with the creation of a privately held central bank to control its currency and introduction of an income tax; devolved into an empire after World War II, setting it on a course towards bankruptcy; sealed its fate in 1971 by unleashing power hungry psychopathic elitists to manipulate the monetary and fiscal policies of the nation to enrich themselves; and has now entered the final frenzied phase of pillaging, currency debasement, war mongering, and ransacking of civil liberties. Despite the frantic efforts of the financial elite, their politician puppets, and their media propaganda outlets, collapse of this aristocracy of the moneyed is a mathematical certainty. Faith in the system is rapidly diminishing, as the issuance of debt to create the appearance of growth has reached the point of diminishing returns.

 

Increase in Real GDP per Dollar of Incremental Debt

“At the root of America’s economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America’s political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world.” – Jeffrey Sachs

Five Stages of Collapse

The day of reckoning for a century of putting our faith in the wrong people with wrong ideas and evil intentions is upon us. Dmitry Orlov provides a blueprint for the collapse in his book – The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivors’ Toolkit:

Stage 1: Financial Collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings wiped out and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial Collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political Collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social Collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural Collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

The collapse is occurring in fits and starts. The stages of collapse do not necessarily have to occur in order.  You can recognize various elements of the first three stages in the United States today. Stage 1 commenced in September 2008 when this Crisis period was catalyzed by the disintegration of the worldwide financial system caused by Wall Street intentionally creating the largest control fraud in world history, with easy money provided by Greenspan/Bernanke, fraudulent mortgage products, fake appraisals, bribing rating agencies to provide AAA ratings to derivatives filled with feces, and having their puppets in the media and political arena provide the propaganda to herd the sheep into the slaughterhouse.

The American people neglected their civic duty to elect leaders who would tell them the truth and represent current and future generations equally. They have neglected the increasing lawlessness of Wall Street, K Street and the corporate suite. The American people have lived in denial about their responsibility for their own financial well-being, willingly delegating it to a government of math challenged politicians who promised trillions more than they could ever deliver. The American people have delayed tackling the dire issues confronting our nation, including: $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, the military industrial complex creating wars across the globe, militarization of our local police forces, domestic spying on every citizen, allowing mega-corporations and the financial elite to turn our nation from savings based production to debt based consumption, and allowing corporations, the military industrial complex, Wall Street, and shadowy billionaires to pick and control our elected officials. The civic fabric of the country is being torn at the points of extreme vulnerability.

“At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where, during the Unraveling, America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action. Anger at “mistakes we made” will translate into calls for action, regardless of the heightened public risk. It is unlikely that the catalyst will worsen into a full-fledged catastrophe, since the nation will probably find a way to avert the initial danger and stabilize the situation for a while. Yet even if dire consequences are temporarily averted, America will have entered the Fourth Turning.”  – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

Our Brave New World controllers (bankers, politicians, corporate titans, media moguls, shadowy billionaires) were able to avert a full-fledged catastrophe in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009 which would have put an end to their reign of destruction. To accept the rightful consequences of their foul actions was intolerable to these obscenely wealthy, despicable men. Their loathsome and vile solutions to a crisis they created have done nothing to relieve the pain and suffering of the average person, while further enriching them, as they continue to gorge on the dying carcass of a once thriving nation. Despite overwhelming public outrage, Congress did as they were instructed by their Wall Street masters and handed over $700 billion of taxpayer funds into Wall Street vaults, under the false threat of systematic collapse. The $800 billion of pork stimulus was injected directly into the veins of corporate campaign contributors. The $3 billion Cash for Clunkers scheme resulted in pumping taxpayer dollars into the government owned union car companies, while driving up the prices of used cars and hurting lower income folks.

Ben Bernanke has peddled the false paradigm of quantitative easing (code for printing money and airlifting it to Wall Street) as benefitting Main Street. Nothing could be further from the truth. He bought $1.3 trillion of toxic mortgage backed securities from his Wall Street owners. He has pumped a total of $2.8 trillion into the hands of Wall Street since September 2008, and is singlehandedly generating $5 billion of risk free profits for these deadbeats by paying them .25% on their reserves. Drug dealer Ben continues to pump $2.8 billion per day into the veins of Wall Street addicts and any hint of tapering the heroin causes the addicts to flail about. Ben should be so proud. He should hang a Mission Accomplished banner whenever he gives a speech. Bank profits reached an all-time record in the 2nd quarter, at $42.2 billion, with 80% of those profits going to the 2% Too Big To Trust Wall Street Mega-Goliath Banks. It’s enough to make a soon to retire, and take a Wall Street job, central banker smile.

“The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger. The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business  than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.” – Henry Hazlitt – 1946

Any serious minded person knew Wall Street had too much power, too much control, and too much influence in 2008 when they crashed our economic system. When something is too big to fail because it will create systematic collapse, you make it smaller. Instead we have allowed our sociopathic rulers to allow these parasitic institutions to get even larger. Just 12 mega-banks control 70% of all the banking assets in the country, with 90% controlled by the top 86 banks. There are approximately 8,000 financial institutions in this country. Wall Street will be congratulating themselves with record compensation of $127 billion and record bonuses of $23 billion for a job well done. It is dangerous work making journal entries relieving loan loss reserves, committing foreclosure fraud, marking your assets to unicorn, making deposits at the Fed, and counting on the Bernanke Put to keep stocks rising. During a supposed recovery from 2009 to 2011, average real income per household grew pitifully by 1.7%, but all the gains accrued to Bernanke’s minions. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Therefore, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery. This warped trend has only accelerated since 2011.

The median household income has fallen by $2,400 to $52,100 since the government proclaimed the end of the recession in 2009. Real wages for real people continue to fall. A record 23.1 million households (20% of all households) are receiving food stamps. After four years of “recovery” propaganda, we are left with 2.2 million less people employed (5 million less full time jobs) and 22 million more people on SNAP and SSDI. A record 90.5 million working age Americans are not working, with labor participation at a 35 year low. Ben’s money has not trickled down, but his inflation has fallen like a load of bricks on the heads of the middle class. Bernanke’s QE to infinity constitutes a transfer of purchasing power away from the middle class to the bankers, mega-corporations and .1%. This Cantillon effect means that newly created money is neither distributed evenly nor simultaneously among the population. Some users of money profit from rising prices, and others suffer from them. This results in a transfer of wealth (a hidden tax) from later receivers to earlier receivers of new money. This is why the largest banks and largest corporations are generating the highest profits in history, while the average person sinks further into debt as their real income declines and real living expenses (energy, food, clothing, healthcare, tuition) rise.

Screen Shot 2013-03-04 at 12.35.48 PM.png

Ben works for your owners. Real GDP (using the fake government inflation adjustment) since July 2009 is up by a wretched 5.6%. Revenue growth of the biggest corporations in the world is up by a pathetic 12%. One might wonder how corporate profits could be at record levels with such doleful economic performance. One needs to look no further than Ben’s balance sheet, which has increased by 174%. There appears to be a slight correlation between Ben’s money printing and the 162% increase in the S&P 500 index. With the top 1% owning 42.1% of all financial assets (top .1% own most of this) and the bottom 80% owning only 4.7% of all financial assets, one can clearly see who benefits from QE to infinity.

The key take away from what the ruling class has done since 2008 is they have only temporarily delayed the endgame. Their self-serving exploits have guaranteed that round two of the financial collapse will be epic in proportion and intensity. This Fourth Turning Crisis is ongoing. The linear thinkers who control the levers of power keep promising a return to normalcy and resumption of growth. This is an impossibility – mathematically & socially. Fourth Turnings do not end without the existing social order being swept away in a tsunami of turmoil, violence, suffering and war. Orlov’s stages of collapse will likely occur during the remaining fifteen years of this Crisis. We are deep into Stage 1 as our national Detroitification progresses towards bankruptcy, with an added impetus from our trillion dollar wars of choice in the Middle East. Commercial collapse has begun, as faith in the fantasy of free market capitalism is waning. The race to the bottom with currency debasement around the globe is reaching a tipping point, and the true eternal currencies of gold and silver are being hoarded and shipped from the West to the Far East.

Monetary Base (billions of USD)

When the financial collapse reaches its crescendo, the just in time supply chain, that keeps cheese doodles and cheese whiz on your grocery store shelves, Chinese produced iGadgets in your local Wal-Mart Supercenter, and gasoline flowing out of gas station hoses into your leased Cadillac Escalade, will break down rapidly. The strain of $110 oil is already evident. The fireworks will really get going when ATM machines run dry and the EBT cards stop functioning. Within a week riots and panic will engulf the country.

“At some point we are bound to hear, from across two oceans, the shocking words “Your money is no good here.” Fast forward to a week later: banks are closed, ATMs are out of cash, supermarket shelves are bare and gas stations are starting to run out of fuel. And then something happens: the government announces they have formed a crisis task force, and will nationalize, recapitalize and reopen banks, restoring confidence. The banks reopen, under heavy guard, and thousands of people get arrested for attempting to withdraw their savings. Banks close, riots begin. Next, the government decides that, to jump-start commerce, it will honor deposit guarantees and simply hand out cash. They print and arrange for the cash to be handed out. Now everyone has plenty of cash, but there is still no food in the supermarkets or gasoline at the gas stations because by now the international supply chains have broken down and the delivery pipelines are empty.”  – Dmitry Orlov – The Five Stages of Collapse

We are witnessing the beginning stages of political collapse. The government and its leaders are being discredited on a daily basis. The mismanagement of fiscal policy, foreign policy and domestic policy, along with the revelations of the NSA conducting mass surveillance against all Americans has led critical thinking Americans to question the legitimacy of the politicians running the show on behalf of the bankers, corporations and arms dealers. The Gestapo like tactics used by the government in Boston was an early warning sign of what is to come. Government entitlement promises will vaporize, as they did in Detroit, with pension promises worth only ten cents on the dollar. Total social and cultural collapse could resemble the chaotic civil war scenarios playing out in Libya and Syria. The best case scenario would be for a collapse similar to the Soviet Union’s relatively peaceful disintegration into impotent republics. I don’t believe we’ll be this fortunate. The most powerful military empire in world history will not fade away. It will go out in a blaze of glory with a currency collapse, hyper-inflation, and war on a grand scale.

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

In Whom Do You Trust?

“Use of money concentrates trust in a single central authority – the central bank – and, over extended periods of time, central banks always tend to misbehave. Eventually the “print” button on the central banker’s emergency console becomes stuck in the depressed position, flooding the world with worthless notes. People trust that money will remain a store of value, and once the trust is violated a gigantic black hole appears at the very center of society, sucking in peoples’ savings and aspirations along with their sense of self-worth. When those who have become psychologically dependent on money as a yardstick, to be applied to everything and everyone, suddenly find themselves in a world where money means nothing, it is as if they have gone blind; they see shapes but can no longer resolve them into objects. The result is anomie – a sense of unreality – accompanied by deep depression. Money is an addiction – substance-less and unreal, and sets itself up for a severe and lengthy withdrawal.” – Dmitry Orlov – The Five Stages of Collapse

Our modern world revolves around wealth, the appearance of wealth, the false creation of wealth through the issuance of debt, and trust in the bankers and politicians pulling the levers behind the curtain. The entire world economic system is dependent on trusting central bankers whose only response to any crisis is to create more debt. The death knell is ringing loud and clear, but people around the globe are desperately clinging to their normalcy biases and praying to the gods of cognitive dissonance. It seems the only things that matter to our controllers are stock market levels, the continued flow of debt to the plebs, continued doling out of hush money to those on the dole, and of course an endless supply of brown skinned enemies to attack. With every country in the world attempting to the same solution of debasing their currencies, we are rapidly approaching the tipping point. India is the canary in the coal mine.

Government, Household, Financial & Non-Financial Debt (% of GDP)

An exponential growth model built upon cheap plentiful energy and debt creation has its limits, and we’ve reached them. With the depletion of inexpensive, easily accessible energy resources, higher prices will continue to slow world economies. Demographics in the developed world are slowing the global economy as millions approach their old age with little savings due to over consuming during their peak earnings years. Bernanke has already quadrupled his balance sheet with no meaningful benefit to the economy or the financial well-being of the average middle class American. Financial manipulation that creates nothing has masked the rot consuming our economic system. The game has been rigged in favor of the owners, but even a rigged game eventually comes to an end. Americans and Europeans can no longer maintain a façade of wealth by buying knickknacks from China with money they don’t have. The US and Europe are finding that their credit is no longer good in the exporting Far East countries. This is a perilous development, as the West has depended upon foreigners to accommodate its never ending expansion of credit. Without that continual expansion of debt, the Ponzi scheme comes crashing down. As China, Japan and the rest of Asia have balked at buying U.S. Treasuries with negative real yields, the only recourse for Ben has been to monetize the debt through QE and inflation. The doubling of ten year Treasury rates in a matter of three months due to just talk of possibly slowing QE should send shivers down your spine.

We are supposedly five years past the great crisis. Magazine covers proclaimed Bernanke a hero. If we are well past the crisis, why are the extreme emergency measures still in effect? If the economy is growing and jobs are being created, why do we need $85 billion of government debt to be monetized each and every month? Why are the EU, Japan, and China printing even faster than the Fed? The answer is simple. If the debt was not being monetized, it would have to be purchased out in the free market. Purchasers would require an interest rate far above the 2.9% being paid today. The debt levels in the U.S., Europe and Japan are so large that a rise in interest rates of just a few points would explode budget deficits and lead to a worldwide financial collapse. This is why Bernanke and the rest of his central banker brethren are trapped by their own ideology of bubble production. Just the slowing of debt creation will lead to collapse. Bernanke needs a Syrian crisis to postpone the taper talk. Those in control need an endless number of real or false flag crises to provide cover for their printing presses to keep rolling.

There are a couple analogies that apply to our impending doom. The country is like a 224 year old oak tree that has been slowly rotting on the inside due to the insidious diseases of hubris, apathy, selfishness, dependence, delusion, and debasement. The old oak gives an outward appearance of health and stability. Winter has arrived and gale force winds are in the forecast. One gust of wind and the mighty aged oak will topple and come crashing to earth. I think an even more fitting analogy is the sandpile with grains of sand being added day after day. Seven out of ten Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. Goliath corporations and the uber-wealthy use the tax code and legislation to syphon hundreds of billions from the national treasury every year. We spend $1 trillion per year on past, current and future wars of choice. Annual interest on the debt we’ve racked up in the last few decades already approaches $400 billion per year. The entire Federal budget totaled $400 billion in 1977. The sandpile grows ever higher, while its instability expands exponentially. One seemingly innocuous grain of sand will ultimately cause the pile to collapse catastrophically. Will it be an unintended consequence of a missile launch into Syria? Will it be a spike in oil prices? Will it be the collapse of one of the EU PIIGS? Will it be an assassination of a political figure or banker? No one knows. But that innocuous grain of sand will trigger the collapse of the entire pile.

Worried people are looking for solutions. They often get angry at me because they don’t think I provide answers to the issues I raise about our corrupt failing system. They want easy answers to intractable problems. Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that our system and majority of citizens are too corrupted to change our course through the ballot box or instituting policies along the lines of those proposed by Ron Paul and many other thoughtful liberty minded people. We are experiencing the downside of a representative democracy.  Once a person is democratically elected a gulf is created between the electors and the person they elected, as the representative becomes corrupted and bought by moneyed interests. Elected officials become a class unto themselves. The political class grows to be puppets that resemble human beings but are nothing but cogs in a vast corporate run machine, pawns in an enormous game of chess played by powerful vindictive immoral men.

There are no cures for our disease. It’s terminal. Anyone telling you they have the answers is either lying or trying to sell you something. More people and organizations are on the take than are playing by the rules. The producers are being overrun by the parasites. The barbarians are at the gate. An implosion of societal trust is underway. The next stage of this crisis, which I believe will materialize within the next twelve months will try the souls of the weary.

“As the Crisis catalyzes, these fears will rush to the surface, jagged and exposed. Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things. This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust. This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets. This devaluation could be a short but horrific panic, a free-falling price in a market with no buyers. Or it could be a series of downward ratchets linked to political events that sequentially knock the supports out from under the residual popular trust in the system. As assets devalue, trust will further disintegrate, which will cause assets to devalue further, and so on.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

As a nation we have squandered our inheritance, born of the blood of patriots. A freedom loving, liberty minded, self-responsible, courageous people have allowed ourselves to fall prey to selfishness, apathy, complacency and dependency. Once we allowed our human appetites of greed, power seeking, and control to override the moral responsibility for our own lives and the lives of future unborn generations, collapse was inevitable. The danger now is what happens after the unavoidable collapse. Will the millions of dependency zombies beg for a strong dictator to protect them, provide for them and lead them into further bondage? Or will the spark of liberty and freedom reignite, allowing citizens to throw off the shackles of banker and corporate control? I believe most of the people in this country are good hearted. We are merely pawns in this game of Risk being played by those seeking power, wealth and world domination. We are all trapped in our own forms of normalcy bias. Have I cashed out my retirement funds, sold my suburban house and built a doomstead in the mountains? No I haven’t. Do I second guess myself sometimes? Yes I do. But even the aware have families to support, jobs to go to, bills to pay, laundry to do, lawns to mow, and lives to live. I can’t live in constant fear of what might happen. We only get 80 or so years on this earth, if we’re lucky. The best we can do is leave a positive legacy for our children and their children. A drastic change to our way of life is coming, but most of us are trapped in a cage of our own making.

Each living generation will need to do their part during this Crisis if we are to survive the coming storm. Since no one knows the nature of how the next fifteen years will unfold, it would be wise to at least make basic preparations for food, water, heat and protection. This is easier for some than others, but you don’t have to star on Doomsday Preppers in order to stock up on items that can be purchased at Wal-Mart today, but won’t be available when the global supply chain breaks down. Make sure you have neighbors and family you can rely upon. A small community of like-minded people with varied skills is more likely to succeed in our brave old world than rugged individualists. With no financial means to maintain our globalized world, living locally will take on a new meaning. After much turmoil, chaos, violence, and likely mass casualties the best outcome would be for the Great American Empire to break into regional republics, incapable of waging global war, led by law abiding moral liberty minded individuals, and willing to trade freely and honestly with their fellow republics. Daily life would revert back to a simpler Amish like time. Would that be so bad?

This Fourth Turning could end with a whimper or a bang. There are enough nuclear arms to obliterate the world ten times over. There are enough hubristic egomaniacal psychopathic men in power, that the use of those weapons has a high likelihood of happening. It will be up to the people to not allow this horrific result. I love my country and despise my government. The Declaration of Independence clearly states that when a long train of abuses and usurpations lead toward despotism, it is our right and duty to throw off that government and provide new guards of liberty. My family comes first with my country a close second. I will fight with whatever means necessary to protect my family and do what I can to influence the future course of our country. Time is running out. Will we have the courage, fortitude and wisdom to make the right decisions over the next fifteen years? Will we choose glory or destruction? The fate of our nation hangs in the balance. Are you prepared? Are you ready to fight for your family and your rights?

The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale. – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

  

 IT’S OUR CHOICE.