Gretna.
Disaster strikes. You decide to evacuate. When you hit the border of the city, you are met by police. "If you attempt to cross, you will be shot."
At this point there are only two entities that can legitimately intervene. State government, and federal government. You take matters into your own hands, and most likely if you are black you are out of luck.
Sooner than you imagine, peak oil will evolve a test of mankind's humanity to our less fortunate fellows. Will some sort of oil depletion protocol come to pass allowing at least of modicum of oil to support every country's essential services? Or will peak oil be marked by survival of the richest?
This will soon be seen as the heart of the peak oil moral dilemma.
When the historians come to write the history of the 21st Century, they may well record that the African nation of Zimbabwe was the first to succumb to peak oil.
For students of African economies, the current Zimbabwean meltdown comes as no surprise. During the last decade, Zimbabwe 's dysfunctional government got itself involved in war that drained the treasury and then implemented a land redistribution program that drove out the white farmers. These actions devastated exports and led to runaway inflation. The Mugabe government finally got into so much trouble with the International Monetary Fund for failure to make meaningful reforms and repayments, that it is constantly on the verge of being thrown out of the IMF and in turn, can no longer avail itself of the Fund's services
When the price of oil started climbing into the $65+ range, official oil imports simply stopped. The country currently does not have the foreign exchange to purchase oil and it seems nobody is willing to extend credit on acceptable terms. Rigged elections and expropriated land have left the country at odds with the usual foreign aid donors so that only humanitarian food shipments are currently arriving in the country.
A few years ago, the government turned much of the oil import business over to the private sector while retaining price caps on retail gasoline. Obviously, when the cost of oil got higher than the permissible sales price, gas stations went dry. This has resulted in a black market where gasoline is selling for ten times the controlled price.
While Zimbabwe 's multiple economic problems make it an atypical case, it is the first country to run almost completely out of oil. This, in turn, gives us a look at what will happen as the consequences of expensive and scarce oil spreads around the globe.
By last week, nearly all buses and commuter taxis in the capitol, Harare , had stopped running, forcing tens of thousands to walk to work. While there are still a lot of private cars on the road, they are being fueled with $36 a gallon black market gasoline. Municipal services have stopped. There are no trash collections, no ambulances, or operating public works vehicles.
Only one fire truck has any fuel left. The police immediately commandeer any fuel they come across. Clean water and electricity are available sporadically. Hospitals are out of supplies and the staff is fleeing. What was once one of the cleanest, most modern cities in Africa is nearly finished.
The long-term effects on the Zimbabwean economy are equally dire. The only sugar refinery is shut due to a lack of coal caused by a lack of fuel for the coal-transporting railroad. Production of tobacco, a major export crop, is already down to 30 percent of pre-land reform levels. It now appears that only about five percent of the normal crop will be planted this year.
Large numbers of Zimbabweans are fleeing the county in the midst of what is clearly an economic death spiral. Famine, mass movements of peoples, and political turmoil cannot be far behind.
In the case of Zimbabwe, all this human misery is not completely attributable to peak oil and unaffordable gasoline; an abysmally incompetent government is playing a major part in the country's economic demise well in advance of better governed nations. It is, however, representative of what we will see again and again as oil depletion sets in. In the US, we are discussing whether tax cuts are the proper remedy for expensive gasoline. In Africa, people are starting to starve.
Somewhere in the future, peak oil will evolve a test of mankind's humanity to our less fortunate fellows. Will some sort of oil depletion protocol come to pass allowing at least of modicum of oil to support every country's essential services? Or will peak oil be marked by survival of the richest?
This will soon be seen as the heart of the peak oil moral dilemma.
I suspect there's going to be much retrospective weeping and gnashing of teeth when it finally dawns on Cobb that filial devotion to the rich is precisely analogous to the misplaced trust that piglets have for the seemingly kindly Farmer Brown.
While our beloved knowers/providers are instigating civil war and chaos in Iraq, using the calamity of Katrina to inflame white hysteria in the U.S. to heights unseen for decades - possibly in an effort to keep up with their UK confederates who're on quite the ripsnort.
It seems to me that inquiring minds would at least consider the terrible alternative possibility suggested by mounting current evidence - in the light of abundant historical precedent - that the hand that feeds you can and will turn around and harvest you - when it becomes expedient to do so.
I have an urge to say I told you so and link this to every related article posted over the past year here at Vision Circle. In the interest of brevity, I'll instead simply put it up with a set of keywords, social democracy, corporatism, dominionism, military energy complex, black gold, romanity...,
Something has happened in our country since the time of Franklin Roosevelt that we haven't directly reckoned with. The book I've just written has as its subtitle, "The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power." That polemical phrase "disastrous rise" comes from Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech where he explicitly warned against "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" in America – exactly the kind that has since come into being...…the power was empty. That's the irony, of course. We've created for ourselves the disaster an enemy might have liked to create for us. That was the essence of the Eisenhower warning. We've sacrificed democratic values. What accounts for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo? What accounts for the abandonment of basic American principles of how you treat accused people? We've abandoned this fundamental tenet of American democracy ourselves! We didn't need an invading force to take away this one chief pillar of the Constitution. We took it down ourselves.
Tom Englehardt reads America in the entrails of the U.S. Army over at LewRockwell.com. His analysis encompasses multiple simultaneous levels down to our foundational dependance on slavery.
The Destruction of the US Army in Iraq An Interview With James Carroll
We pull into the parking lot at the same moment in separate cars, both of us slightly vacation-disheveled. He wears a baseball-style cap and a half-length purple raincoat in anticipation of the downpour which begins soon after we huddle safely in a local coffee shop. As I fumble with my two tape recorders, he immediately demurs about the interview. He may have nothing new to say, he assures me, and then absolves me, now and forever, of the need to make any use whatsoever of anything we produce through our conversation.
The son of a lieutenant-general who was the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a former Catholic priest and antiwar activist in the Vietnam era (the subject of his book, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us), Carroll has long pursued his interest in the ways in which faith and force can coalesce into historically fatal brews. From this came, for instance, his bestselling book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.
Within days of the attacks of September 11, 2001, he became perhaps our most passionate – and prophetic – columnist in the mainstream media. His columns continue to appear, now every Monday, in the Boston Globe. The Bush administration, with its fundamentalist religious base, its Manichaean worldview, its urge toward a civilizational conflict against Islam, and its deeply held fascination with and belief in the all-encompassing powers of military force, was, in a sense, made for him. And he grasped the consequences of its actions with uncanny accuracy from the first moments after our President announced his "war on terror," just days after 9/11. A remarkable collection of his Globe columns that begins with the fall of the World Trade Center towers and the damaging of the Pentagon and ends on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, will certainly prove one of the best running records of that crucial period we have.
He speaks quietly and straightforwardly. You can almost see him thinking as he talks. As he reenters the world we've passed through these last years, his speech speeds up and gains a certain emphatic cadence. You can feel in his voice the same impressive combination of passion and intelligence, engagement and thoughtfulness that is a hallmark of his weekly column. I turn on the tape recorders and we begin to consider the world since September 11, 2001.
Tom Engelhardt: In September 2003, only five months after the invasion of Iraq, you wrote in a column, "The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?" Here we are two years later. What has it taken, what will it take, to face that truth?
James Carroll: It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers. I find it astounding that facing the truth in the month of August has been the business almost solely of these parents, pro and con. Cindy Sheehan on the one side, clearly saying that, whatever its imagined values, this war's not worth what it's costing us and it's got to end immediately; on the other side, parents, desperately trying to make some sense of the loss of their child, who want the war to continue so that he or she will not have died in vain. Both are facing a basic truth of parental grief and, I'd also say, responding to the same larger phenomenon: the war being lost. I'm not certain we'd hear from any parents if the war were being won. Given the great tragedy of losing your child to a war that's being lost, nobody gets to the question of whether it's just or not.
It's heartbreaking to me that, in American political discourse, what discussion there is of the larger human and political questions has fallen to these heartbroken parents. Where are the Democrats? Where, for that matter, are the Republicans? On the floor of Congress, has there been a discussion of this war? I mean in the Vietnam years you did have the astounding Fulbright hearings. [Democratic Senator William] Fulbright was in defiance of [Democratic President] Lyndon Johnson when those hearings were initiated, that's for sure. Where are the hearings today? We have a political system that is supposed to engage the great questions and they obviously aren't being engaged. How long will it take us to face the truth? It's just terrible that the truth has to be faced by these heartbroken parents, because even if they're opposed to the war – as I am – they're not the ones to whom we should look for political wisdom on how to resolve the terrible dilemma we're in.
TD: In March 2003, on the first anniversary of the invasion – and this was the piece with which you ended your book, Crusade – you wrote again, "Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war for the United States is clear, we have defeated ourselves."
Carroll: I was already instructed by the history of the twentieth century, summarized so well by Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World. He cites numerous instances in which broad-based, national resistance movements couldn't be defeated even by massively superior military power. It was his insight that the last century was rife with examples – the most obvious for Americans being Vietnam – where a huge superiority in firepower was irrelevant against even a minority resistance movement based in an indigenous population; and it's clear that this so-called insurgency in Iraq is a minority resistance movement, largely Sunni, and that it doesn't matter if it's a minority. There's an indigenous population within which it resides and which fuels it. And all of that was quickly evident. In fact, I think it was evident to George H.W. Bush in 1991. It wasn't Vietnam we needed to learn from first in this case; it really was the first Gulf War and Bush's realpolitik decision to stop it based on the sure knowledge that there was no way of defeating an indigenous popular religious movement prepared to fight to the death.
Presiding Over the Destruction of the U.S. Army
TD: So where are we now as you see it?
Carroll: It's already become clear to people that we can't win this. Who knows what being defeated means? I said we had lost because there's no imposing our will on the people of Iraq. That's what this constitutional imbroglio demonstrates. A month ago, Donald Rumsfeld was insisting that there had to be a three-party agreement. In August, it became clear that there would be none. So now there's a two-party agreement and the Sunnis are out of it. Basically, this political development has endorsed the Sunni resistance movement, because they've been cut out of the future of Iraq. They have no share of the oil. They have no access to real political power in Baghdad. They have nothing to lose and that's a formula for endless fighting.
TD: I was struck by recent statements by top American generals in Iraq about draw-downs and withdrawals, all of them clearly unauthorized by Washington. At the bottom, you have angry military families, lowering morale, and the difficulties of signing people on to the all-volunteer army; at the top, generals who didn't want to be in Iraq in the first place and don't want to be there now.
Carroll: Well, they've been forced to preside over the destruction of the United States Army, including the civilian system of support for the Army – the National Guard and the active Reserves. This is the most important outcome of the war and, as with Vietnam, we'll be paying the price for it for a generation.
TD: Knowing the Pentagon as you do, what kind of a price do you think that will be?
Carroll: I would say, alas, that one of the things we're going to resume is an overweening dependence on air power and strikes from afar. It's clear, for instance, that the United States under the present administration is not going to allow Iran to get anywhere near a nuclear weapon. The only way they could try to impede that is with air power. They have no army left to exert influence. If the destruction of the United States Army is frightening, so is the immunity from the present disaster of the Navy and the Air Force, which are both far-distance striking forces. That's what they exist for and they're intact. Their Tomahawk and Cruise missiles have basically been sidelined. We have this massive high-firepower force that's sitting offshore and we're surely going to resume our use of such power from afar.
One of the things the United States of America claims to have learned from the '90s is that we're not going to let genocidal movements like the one in Rwanda unfold. Well, we've basically destroyed the only military tool we have to respond to genocidal movements, which is a ground force. You can't use air power against a machete-wielding movement. And if you think that kind of conflict won't happen in places where poverty is overwhelming and ecological disaster is looming ever more terrifyingly, think again. What kind of response to such catastrophe will a United States without a functional army be capable of?
You know, in this way, we're now like the Soviet Union once it collapsed into Russia. When it could no longer pay the salaries of its soldiers, Russia fell back on its nuclear arsenal as its only source of power. In a way the Soviet Union never was, Russia is now a radically nuclear-dependent military power. The Red Army doesn't really count for much any more. And we've done that to ourselves in Iraq. This is what it means to have lost the war already. We didn't need an enemy to do it for us. We've done it to ourselves.
TD: "We" being the Bush administration?
Carroll: Yes, the Bush administration, but "we" also being John Kerry and the Democrats who refused to make the war an issue in the presidential election campaign last year. I fault them every bit as much as I fault the Republicans. At least Bush is being consistent and driven ideologically by his unbelievably callow worldview. The Democrats were radical cynics about it. They didn't buy the preventive war doctrine. They didn't buy the weapons of mass destruction justification for this war. They didn't buy any of it and yet they didn't oppose it! The cynicism of the Democrats is one of the most stunning outcomes of this war. And even now, as the political conversation for next year's congressional election begins, where's the discussion from the Democrats about this, the second self-inflicted military catastrophe since World War II. At least the first time, the Democrats were there. In the election of 1972, when they lost badly, George McGovern and company really did engage this question.
We're desperately in need of a Eugene McCarthy, someone who will speak the truth in a really clear and powerful way and in a political context so that we can respond to it as a people. Eugene McCarthy is putting it positively. I'd say negatively what we could use is a Newt Gingrich, someone who could marshal political resistance going into this next election period in a way that would make the war a lively issue in every senatorial and congressional election. We really need someone. In America, our system requires someone of the political culture to invoke this discussion.
A Civilizational War against Islam
TD: In the first column you wrote after September 11, 2001, you said, "How we respond to this catastrophe will define our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead." Four years later, how do you assess our response to each?
Carroll: Patriotism has become a hollow, partisan notion in our country. It's been in the name of patriotism that we've turned our young soldiers into scapegoats and fodder. The betrayal of the young in the name of patriotism is a staggering fact of our post-9/11 response. The old men have carried the young men up the mountain and put them on the altar. It's Abraham and Isaac all over again. It's the oldest story, a kind of human sacrifice, and that's what's made those cries of parents so poignant this August. But those cries also have to include an element of self-accusation, because parents have done it to their children. We've done it to our children. That's what it means to destroy the United States Army. Night after night, we see that the actual casualties of that destruction are young men, and occasionally women, between the ages of 18 and 30. And this in the name of patriotism.
On the second point, the shape of the world for the century to come, look what the United States of America has given us – civilizational war against Islam! Osama bin Laden hoped to ignite a war between radically fundamentalist Islam and the secular West. And he succeeded. We played right into his hands. Now, we see that war being played out not just in Iraq and the Arab world generally, but quite dramatically in Europe.
TD: You picked up on this in the first few days after 9/11 when you caught Bush in a little slip of the tongue. He spoke of us entering a "crusade"…
Carroll: …"This war on terrorism, this crusade."
TD: Yes, which, you said, "came to him as naturally as a baseball reference." Are we now, with the protesting military families, seeing a retreat from this kind of sacralizing of violence?
Carroll: No! I think the warnings signs are all around us for what has happened – the politicization of fundamentalist Christianity. I mean, we've had that since the early days of the Cold War when Billy Graham became a tribune of anticommunism. But what's new is the way in which this marginal fundamentalist Christianity has entered the political mainstream and taken hold on Capitol Hill. Dozens and dozens of congressmen and senators are now overt Christian fundamentalists who apply their theology – including religious categories like Armageddon and end-of-the-world justifications for violence – to their political decisions. The kind of apocalyptic political thinking that Robert Jay Lifton has written about has now become so mainstream that we even see it in the United States military. For the first time, at least in my lifetime, overt religiosity has emerged as a military virtue and I'm not just talking about General [William] Boykin, the wacko who deliberately and explicitly insulted the Islamic religion…
TD: …and who was promoted.
Carroll: And is still in power. Not just him but this most alarming and insufficiently noted phenomenon of the rise of fundamentalist Christianity at the Air Force Academy, conveniently located in the neighborhood of the two most politicized fundamentalist religious congregations in the country, Focus on the Family and the New Life Ministries. A significant proportion of the cadet population is reliably understood to be overt, born-again Christians and the commandant has been explicit in his support of religious conformity in the cadet corps. These are the people we are empowering with custodianship over our most powerful weapons in a war increasingly defined in religious terms by the President of the United States. All of this is our side of a religious war against an increasingly mobilized jihadist Islam.
Meanwhile in Europe, Great Britain had, until recently, been a far more tolerant culture than the United States (as indicated by the British welcome to large populations of Muslim immigrants over the last generation). All of that is now being firmly and explicitly repudiated by British lawmakers. You see it in the great cities of Europe everywhere. When people in the Netherlands and France vote against the European Constitution in some measure because it represents to them an opening to Turkey and the world of Islam, something quite large is happening.
Lighting the Dry Tinder of History
TD: Doesn't this take us back to a period you've studied deeply – the Middle Ages?
Carroll: It's true. We don't sufficiently appreciate how the paradigm of the crusades never ended for Europe. Europe came into being in response to the threat of Islam. The European structure of government, the royal families of Europe, they're all descended from Charlemagne, grandson of the man who defeated the Islamic armies at Tours. More than a thousand years ago, a system of identity first took hold in Europe that defined itself against Islam. This is the ultimate political Manichaeism in the European mind.
We're the children of this. Of course, Islam had been forgotten in our time. Never mind that there were more than a billion Muslims in the world. All through the Cold War, we thought that the other, the stranger, the enemy was the Communist. But the Muslim world never forgot about us. The crusades are yesterday to them. They've understood better than we have that the West has somehow defined itself against them.
It's in this context that we have to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A thousand years ago, as now, the political fate of Jerusalem was the military spark for the marshaling of a holy war. The crusaders, after all, were going to Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel, and the infidel was defined as a twin-set, Muslims and Jews. The attack on Muslims happened simultaneously with the first real attacks against Jews inside Europe. The ease with which, in the Middle East, the conflict in Israel has come to be subsumed as the defining conflict with the West is part of this phenomenon.
In Cologne [Germany] last week, I met with the head of the Jewish congregation and also the imam who heads the Muslim community, and they both reported the same experience. They both feel they're on the table – the table of sacrifice – in Europe. They're both feeling vulnerable to attack and they're right to feel that way. It's a very curious turn.
Anyway, the United States of America didn't understand the tinder it was playing with and George Bush, in his naïve reference to the crusades, demonstrated his profound ignorance of how deep in the history of our culture these conflicts go. Osama bin Laden understood this much better than Bush. It's no accident that the two epithets of choice the jihadists use for the American enemy are "crusaders" and "Jews," and they're mobilizing epithets for vast numbers of Muslim Arabs.
TD: Do you think that, in dancing with Osama bin Laden, Bush has somehow turned him into something like a superpower? You know, a word you used early on caught my eye. You said, "Mr. Bush's hubristic foreign policy has been officially exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination." However clever bin Laden has been, isn't there also something hallucinatory about all this?
Carroll: It's true that if you begin to treat an imagined enemy as transcendent, at a certain point he becomes transcendent.
The Mosquito and the Hammer
TD: You said we "forgot" Islam. A theme of your writings and maybe your life – if you'll excuse my saying so – is an American-style willed forgetfulness. Two key concerns of yours that seem "forgotten" in American life are the militarization of our society and nuclear weapons. Your father was a general. Your next book is about the Pentagon. What's the place of the Pentagon in our life that we don't see?
Carroll: When George W. Bush responded to the crisis of 9/11, two things came into play: his own temperament – his ideological impulses which were naïve, callow, dangerous, Manichaean, triumphalist – and the structure of the American government, which was sixty years in the making. What's not sufficiently appreciated is that Bush had few options in the way he might have responded to 9/11.
What was called for was vigorous diplomatic activity centered around cooperative international law enforcement, but our government had invested little of its resources in such diplomatic internationalism in the previous two generations. What we had invested in since World War II was massive military power, so it was natural for Bush to turn first to a massive military response. The meshing of Bush's temperament and a long-prepared American institutional response was unfortunate, but there it was. As somebody said, when he turned to his tool bag to respond to the mosquito of Osama bin Laden, the only tool he had in it was a hammer, so he brought it down on Afghanistan and destroyed it; then he brought it down on Iraq and destroyed it, missing the mosquito, of course.
Something has happened in our country since the time of Franklin Roosevelt that we haven't directly reckoned with. The book I've just written has as its subtitle, "The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power." That polemical phrase "disastrous rise" comes from Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech where he explicitly warned against "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" in America – exactly the kind that has since come into being.
TD: And yet one of the hallucinatory aspects of this, don't you think, is that when we responded after 9/11…
Carroll: …the power was empty. That's the irony, of course. We've created for ourselves the disaster an enemy might have liked to create for us. That was the essence of the Eisenhower warning. We've sacrificed democratic values. What accounts for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo? What accounts for the abandonment of basic American principles of how you treat accused people? We've abandoned this fundamental tenet of American democracy ourselves! We didn't need an invading force to take away this one chief pillar of the Constitution. We took it down ourselves.
And we've barely begun to reckon with the war machine that we created to fight the Soviet Union and that continued intact when the Soviet Union disappeared. Of course, that was the revelation at the end of the Cold War when the threat went away and our response didn't change. This isn't a partisan argument, because the person who presided over the so-called peace dividend which never came was Bill Clinton; the person who presided over the time when we could have dismantled our nuclear arsenal, or at least shrunk it to reasonable levels (as even conservative military theorists wish we had done) was Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was the person who first undercut the ideas of the International Criminal Court, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. When George Bush became president, he stepped into space created for him by Bill Clinton. This isn't to demonize Clinton. It's just to show that our political system had already been corrupted by something we weren't reckoning with – and the shorthand for that something was "the Pentagon."
TD: The bomb also arrived at that moment 60 years ago and you often write about it as the most forgotten of things.
Carroll: Marc Trachtenberg, the political scientist, has this phrase "atomic amnesia." Everything having to do with atomic weapons we seem to forget which is why the United States of America has had such trouble reckoning with the authentic facts of what happened in 1945, the negotiations around the Japanese surrender impulse, the invasion of Japan, and all of that. The first week of August every year we see this flurry of American insistence on the necessity of the bomb (almost all of which has been thoroughly debunked by professional historians across the ideological spectrum). At the other end of the spectrum, we have not begun to reckon at all with the nonsense of American policies toward nuclear weapons today – the fact that we're resuming their production even now, that we continue to threaten their use even now. How can these questions be so unreckoned with? Well, the answer is that they're part of this larger phenomenon, the elephant in the center of the American living room that we just walk around and nobody speaks about.
The Roman Empire – and Ours
TD: I was thinking of that relatively brief moment just after 9/11 and before Iraq when pundits were talking about us as the new Roman Empire; when there was this feeling, very much connected to the Pentagon, that we had the power to dominate the world, from land, from space, from wherever. Do you have anything to say about that now?
Carroll: We're not sufficiently attuned to the fact that we of the West are descended from the Roman Empire. It still exists in us. The good things of the Roman Empire are what we remember about it – the roads, the language, the laws, the buildings, the classics. We're children of the classical world. But we pay very little attention to what the Roman Empire was to the people at its bottom – the slaves who built those roads; the many, many slaves for each citizen; the oppressed and occupied peoples who were brought into the empire if they submitted, but radically and completely smashed if they resisted at all.
We Christians barely remember the Roman war against the Jewish people in which historians now suggest that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the Romans between 70 and 135 CE. Why were the Jews killed? Not because the Romans were anti-Semites. They were killed because they resisted what for them was the blasphemous occupation of the Holy Land of Israel by a godless army. It would remain one of the most brutal exercises of military power in history until the twentieth century. That's the Roman story.
We Americans are full of our sense of ourselves as having benign imperial impulses. That's why the idea of the American Empire was celebrated as a benign phenomenon. We were going to bring order to the world. Well, yes… as long as you didn't resist us. And that's where we really have something terrible in common with the Roman Empire. If you resist us, we will do our best to destroy you, and that's what's happening in Iraq right now, but not only in Iraq. That's the saddest thing, because the way we destroy people is not only by overt military power, but by writing you out of the world economic and political system that we control. And if you're one of those benighted people of Bangladesh, or Ghana, or Sudan, or possibly Detroit, then that's the way we respond to you. We'd do better in other words if we had a more complicated notion of what the Roman Empire was. We must reckon with imperial power as it is felt by people at the bottom. Rome's power. America's.
September 12, 2005
Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture.
Copyright © 2005 Tom Engelhardt
What if, just what if, what for all the world looks like a kakistocracy is in fact a kleptocracy with moves so smooth they border on the supernatural? I'm only just asking, since we're all assessing and connecting dots here - are there competing interpretations of these portents signifying the approach of something truly wicked?
Ray Nagin no friend of ours.., the folks who Ray Nagin is actually VERY friendly with and whose interests he has served with kakistocratic finesse - converting troublesome invisible refugees into expendable and even less visible detainees - and finally, the piece d'resistance in the whole seemingly chaotic jumble. Bearing in mind there are still quite a few folks convinced that the invasion of Iraq has something to do with preventing WMD's from falling into terra-ist hands...,
It is at times like this, when the focus is on disaster, that people show their true nature. At least that's what MLK said about the test of a man. Coming to grips with my partisan side, I recognize how best to antagonize the liberal nemesis: test his theories during times of duress.
I happened across a friend's blog and he mentioned, on his way to Burning Man, that doyenne of the diverse Hakim Bey. Bey's theory turns up at the oddest moments and from my perspective evoke little more than a romance for chaos. And so I quote from Bey wondering if Progressives here might be swayed by the highfalutin' theory as we observe what goes down in the town that drowned. To wit:
Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions--movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State--the turning of the wheel, the return of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever.
By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that "progress" which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle. Surgo--rise up, surge. Insurgo--rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan "Revolution!" has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every "heaven" ruled by yet one more evil angel.If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History. If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic--shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman's maneuver carried out at an "impossible angle" to the universe. History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." In this sense an uprising is like a "peak experience" as opposed to the standard of "ordinary" consciousness and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day--otherwise they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns--you can't stay up on the roof forever-- but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred--a difference is made.
Is there or is there not insurrection in New Orleans? Are people taking this opportunity to liberate themselves as the jackboot of the state is otherwise occupied? Will the prisoners released from jail to higher ground find an opportune moment to become what they have been denied from becoming? Is New Orleans a Temporary Autonomous Zone?
Or, are we just witnessing what happens to poor people who have but simple ambitions? Is everybody simply reduced to a lower form of survival and those not fit to achieve during normal days only depressed a bit further?
I think it is what it is. A city reduced to rubble and refugee status. There is no transcendence here, only human instinct and the spinning and framing of government assistance and media commentary. There is nothing special except that we Americans don't often look so closely at our neighbors. Everybody who wants to help, would help anyway. Everybody who wants to rob would be robbing sooner or later. Today, we're just getting a peak at ourselves naked. 24/7
It's not biblical. It's just a flood.
Jack Duggan brings it hard and correct at LewRockwell.com on the apartheid degeneracy perpetrated under cover of Katrina. Predictably, there hasn't been a peep raised about this in the MSM or by the traditional coonshowmen/wimmin.
Let's face it. If you're poor in America, you're a "suspect," maybe. If you're poor and black in America, you're a "criminal," definitely. Even if your life is in peril, no excuses. Your rights don't count as long as any badge or weekend warrior in BDU's says they don't.This is the real story of the Louisiana Superdome. Hurricane Katrina can certainly destroy the environs of the Louisiana and her neighboring states, but that can all be rebuilt. What will never be rebuilt is the dignity of the poorest citizens of that region, since the government acted with a greater destructive force than a hurricane. The lamp of freedom has been blown out by force-five bureaucrats, their sycophants and their head-embedded media enablers who will insure that it will never get re-ignited. For our own good, of course.
Heads should roll in Louisiana, for all those whose civil rights were violated on Sunday, August 28, 2005, outside the Louisiana Superdome of Shame.
Watching news coverage of the refugees trying to enter the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans for safety from the approaching force-five Hurricane Katrina, I was incredulous how the people attempting to enter the stadium were being treated by the National Guard troops and local police. The people were made to stand for hours outside in the awful Louisiana climate while they were admitted one or two adults at a time so they could be searched "for firearms and alcohol."
The frail elderly, many grasping walkers and others in wheelchairs seemed to be near collapse. They, along with hundreds of small children needing water and rest-room relief, were forced to wait as long as four hours to get to safety. It was often repeated during the video reports that the last time the Superdome was used as a hurricane shelter, a few of the temporary occupants removed some furniture. But this time, they had a large security force on hand, so that was NOT going to happen again, no-siree-bob.
During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.
There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice.
Can you imagine New Orleans' wealthy elite meekly submitting to such microscopic searches of their persons and property for drugs? Heads would roll. But poor people who had no money to escape the deadly storm's onslaught had no choice. They had nowhere else to go to save their children's and parents' lives. They were humiliated just for trying to survive. Their grandfathers and grandmothers suffered as slaves on Southern plantations decades ago, while today, they suffer as slaves to the state, the state that cancels their human rights and dignity in the name of "protecting" them.
Did you see that, America? Nothing has changed in the South. Poor people of are still being herded and treated as criminals because of the color of their skin. The Sheriff and Louisiana National Guard knows the profile of likely drug users: black people and anyone associating with them; they were searched just as if they were entering a state penitentiary visiting a death-row prisoner. Maybe the refugees would have fared better if they had had season tickets in their hands.
Think about it. They can allow in 30,000 screaming fans with fifty-dollar bills and costly NFL tickets in their hands in a few minutes, but poor black people fleeing for their lives, four hours. Four HOURS!
None of the news people I saw on the major cable and broadcast networks noticed this outrage. Apparently, they are still "embedded" with the government and couldn't possibly risk dislodging their heads long enough to report the truth right before their eyes.
We let morons take away our rights to person and property at the airports, all for the false "protection" they promised us and can't possibly deliver, so now we see them doing it to helpless citizens even when the citizens' lives are in danger. "First, we gotta check you for weapons and drugs...pull your dress up, lift up your arms...." – let those old people collapse and those kids soil themselves – "This is FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY."
God forbid that anyone have a hip flask to calm their nerves during a traumatic life-and-death experience. Someone else might actually toke up or take a non-prescription pill! And a few might take their right to keep and bear arms seriously, when everyone knows that only government employees deserve self-protection, not their citizen "bosses." The constitution doesn't apply when the government thinks it can make you safer by judging you, disarming you, and denuding you of your rights.
Who gave the order to make all these exhausted, miserable poor people wait for hours while they were searched so illicitly? Under what actual law did they search these refugees for anything whatsoever on their person? Do they search football game fans this thoroughly and for this long? Suuuuuure they do....
Could all this form a mass tort against the State of Louisiana? Maybe. Some of the Superdome refugees must be hopping mad.
Let's face it. If you're poor in America, you're a "suspect," maybe. If you're poor and black in America, you're a "criminal," definitely. Even if your life is in peril, no excuses. Your rights don't count as long as any badge or weekend warrior in BDU's says they don't.
This is the real story of the Louisiana Superdome. Hurricane Katrina can certainly destroy the environs of the Louisiana and her neighboring states, but that can all be rebuilt. What will never be rebuilt is the dignity of the poorest citizens of that region, since the government acted with a greater destructive force than a hurricane. The lamp of freedom has been blown out by force-five bureaucrats, their sycophants and their head-embedded media enablers who will insure that it will never get re-ignited. For our own good, of course.
Heads should roll in Louisiana, for all those whose civil rights were violated on Sunday, August 28, 2005, outside the Louisiana Superdome of Shame.
August 30, 2005
Jack Duggan [send him mail] lives in Fort Apache (Hamilton, New Jersey, site of the anthrax mailings) with his family.
Neocon wagerers please step to the betting window.
Katrina is a category 5 storm. It's gonna shutdown 1 Million barrels of daily oil production and 10 million cubic feet of natural gas production {which as we all know by now, peaked a long time ago in these here united states...,} and which will have an even greater impact than the approximately 2.5% disruption of our daily oil jones.
If G-Dub opens the strategic petroleum reserve today {800 Million barrels of black gold} it'll put the speculative wolves into check at market opening tomorrow morning, and, indicate that the administration is focused on the well-being of the American people. If, on the other hand, he salutes us with his middle finger, as I fully expect him to do, I will interpret this as a clear and present signal that we are strategically committed to putting in work in and around the Tehran metropolitan area within the next x months weather and other logistical factors permitting.
So neocons, is your boy about the well-being of the American people, the well-being of energy speculators, or, is he fittin to put in work in Iran which necessitates he hold that oil dear for the use of Rumsfeld and company?
Waiting until world conventional oil production peaks before implementing crash program mitigation leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for two decades or longer," according to a report prepared for the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) by Science Applications International Coporation (SAIC).
Here is a link to the full 91 page report and the executive summary from the report. Inquiring minds want to know, where is MSM on this subject? Who's looking out for me?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.
In 2003, the world consumed just under 80 million barrels per day (MM bpd) of oil. U.S. consumption was almost 20 MM bpd, two-thirds of which was in the transportation sector. The U.S. has a fleet of about 210 million automobiles and light trucks (vans, pick-ups, and SUVs). The average age of U.S. automobiles is nine years. Under normal conditions, replacement of only half the automobile fleet will require 10-15 years. The average age of light trucks is seven years. Under normal conditions, replacement of one-half of the stock of light trucks will require 9-14 years. While significant improvements in fuel efficiency are possible in automobiles and light trucks, any affordable approach to upgrading will be inherently time-consuming, requiring more than a decade to achieve significant overall fuel efficiency improvement.
Besides further oil exploration, there are commercial options for increasing world oil supply and for the production of substitute liquid fuels: 1) Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) can marginally increase production from existing reservoirs; one of the largest of the IOR opportunities is Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which can help moderate oil production declines from reservoirs that are past their peak production: 2) Heavy oil / oil sands represents a large resource of lower grade oils, now primarily produced in Canada and Venezuela; those resources are capable of significant production increases;. 3) Coal liquefaction is a well-established technique for producing clean substitute fuels from the world’s abundant coal reserves; and finally, 4) Clean substitute fuels can be produced from remotely located natural gas, but exploitation must compete with the world’s growing demand for liquefied natural gas. However, world-scale contributions from these options will require 10-20 years of accelerated effort.
Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. To explore these complexities, three alternative mitigation scenarios were analyzed:
• Scenario I assumed that action is not initiated until peaking occurs.
• Scenario II assumed that action is initiated 10 years before peaking.
• Scenario III assumed action is initiated 20 years before peaking.
For this analysis estimates of the possible contributions of each mitigation option were developed, based on an assumed crash program rate of implementation. Our approach was simplified in order to provide transparency and promote understanding. Our estimates are approximate, but the mitigation envelope that results is believed to be directionally indicative of the realities of such an enormous undertaking. The inescapable conclusion is that more than a decade will be required for the collective contributions to produce results that significantly impact world supply and demand for liquid fuels.
Important observations and conclusions from this study are as follows:
1. When world oil peaking will occur is not known with certainty. A fundamental problem in predicting oil peaking is the poor quality of and possible political biases in world oil reserves data. Some experts believe peaking may occur soon. This study indicates that “soon” is within 20 years.
2. The problems associated with world oil production peaking will not be temporary, and past “energy crisis” experience will provide relatively little guidance. The challenge of oil peaking deserves immediate, serious attention, if risks are to be fully understood and mitigation begun on a timely basis.
3. Oil peaking will create a severe liquid fuels problem for the transportation sector, not an “energy crisis” in the usual sense that term has been used.
4. Peaking will result in dramatically higher oil prices, which will cause protracted economic hardship in the United States and the world. However, the problems are not insoluble. Timely, aggressive mitigation initiatives addressing both the supply and the demand sides of the issue will be required.
5. In the developed nations, the problems will be especially serious. In the developing nations peaking problems have the potential to be much worse.
6. Mitigation will require a minimum of a decade of intense, expensive effort, because the scale of liquid fuels mitigation is inherently extremely large.
7. While greater end-use efficiency is essential, increased efficiency alone will be neither sufficient nor timely enough to solve the problem. Production of large amounts of substitute liquid fuels will be required. A number of commercial or near-commercial substitute fuel production technologies are currently available for deployment, so the production of vast amounts of substitute liquid fuels is feasible with existing technology.
8. Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s offer important guides as to government actions that are desirable and those that are undesirable, but the process will not be easy.
Mitigating the peaking of world conventional oil production presents a classic risk management problem:
• Mitigation initiated earlier than required may turn out to be premature, if peaking is long delayed.
• If peaking is imminent, failure to initiate timely mitigation could be extremely damaging.
Prudent risk management requires the planning and implementation of mitigation well before peaking. Early mitigation will almost certainly be less expensive than delayed mitigation. A unique aspect of the world oil peaking problem is that its timing is uncertain, because of inadequate and potentially biased reserves data from elsewhere around the world. In addition, the onset of peaking may be obscured by the volatile nature of oil prices. Since the potential economic impact of peaking is immense and the uncertainties relating to all facets of the problem are large, detailed quantitative studies to address the uncertainties and to explore mitigation strategies are a critical need.
The purpose of this analysis was to identify the critical issues surrounding the occurrence and mitigation of world oil production peaking. We simplified many of the complexities in an effort to provide a transparent analysis. Nevertheless, our study is neither simple nor brief. We recognize that when oil prices escalate dramatically, there will be demand and economic impacts that will alter our simplified assumptions. Consideration of those feedbacks will be a daunting task but one that should be undertaken.
Our study required that we make a number of assumptions and estimates. We well recognize that in-depth analyses may yield different numbers. Nevertheless, this analysis clearly demonstrates that the key to mitigation of world oil production peaking will be the construction a large number of substitute fuel production facilities, coupled to significant increases in transportation fuel efficiency. The time required to mitigate world oil production peaking is measured on a decade time-scale. Related production facility size is large and capital intensive. How and when governments decide to address these challenges is yet to be determined.
Our focus on existing commercial and near-commercial mitigation technologies illustrates that a number of technologies are currently ready for immediate and extensive implementation. Our analysis was not meant to be limiting. We believe that future research will provide additional mitigation options, some possibly superior to those we considered. Indeed, it would be appropriate to greatly accelerate public and private oil peaking mitigation research. However, the reader must recognize that doing the research required to bring new technologies to commercial readiness takes time under the best of circumstances. Thereafter, more than a decade of intense implementation will be required for world scale impact, because of the inherently large scale of world oil consumption.
In summary, the problem of the peaking of world conventional oil production is unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society. The challenges and uncertainties need to be much better understood. Technologies exist to mitigate the problem. Timely, aggressive risk management will be essential.
Anonymous dropped it like it was hot over at P6. A deadly serious fellow traveller, undistracted by the theatre of the absurd, called it like it T.I.is..., I pray that folks will take note of this. With all the other distracting hijinks now in play, this is a crystal clear synopsis of the terror of the situation looming just past the signpost up ahead.
Ponder - or better yet construct - your own local version of this. Special consideration should be given to your direct control of and access to material necessities. Additional consideration should be given to the strength of the community on which you depend. How DO you measure your riches? Does blackness factor into your concept map of adapting to resource constraints?
Last night, I had one eye on the 2005 NBA draft and another on a frosted mug of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (!!!!) Between sips and dips, I heard the announcers refer to "upside" and potential as desirable traits in players at this stage of their careers. This approach has presented some questions which I would like to share with the group...
At this stage, should productivity trump potential?? Or is the shadow cast by the likes of Garnett, Bryant and McGrady too long for GMs to change partners mid-dance?
Have GMs already changed partners since many college players were selected ahead of high schoolers and the core body of international players?
What areas of work/play serve as sufficient proxies for prior performance? In other words, is playing in the ACC a sufficient litmus test for judging serviceable to great players - or not given the careers of Chris Washburn, Chris Corchiani, Rodney Monroe (Fire and Ice, if ya remember) (NC STATE), Len Bias, Adrian Branch, Herman Veal (Maryland) and the slew of busters from DUKE? Or is proximity to UNC sufficient to warrant a look?
Are there still players who don't have the long, lean super athletic body-type that get their game off in the league? Can a round fella still rock the rafters by playing the game below the rim ala Moses Malone??
Do elite players who dominate above-the-rim perform better than those who dominate below-the-rim? Which players are able to do both? Is this distinction worth making? For example, Magic and Bird were below the rim dominators. Shaq is arguably a below-the-rim dominant player because of his use of lower-body strength to impose his will and establish position...contrast with the likes of Jordan, Wilkins, Ben Wallace, etc. If there is no difference, where are the below-the-rim guys on draft boards and in the stat columns?
How will any of this be impacted by the 19 year-old age limit?
According to the NSA intercepts, Petro SE was devised by the Saudis because of their overriding fear that if an internal revolt or external attack threatened the survival of the House of Saud, the U.S. and other Western powers might abandon them as the Shah of Iran was abandoned in 1979. Only by having in place a system that threatened to create crippling oil price increases, political instability and economic recessions did the royal family believe it could coerce Western military powers to keep them in power.
This is a free book in the form of a Power-Point presentation that is comprehensive, well done, and quite accessible. Illustrations and easy dialogue coupled with statistical data make for an effective presentation suitable for those unfamiliar with the issue(s).
Beyond Vietnam A Time To Break Silence This Memorial Day weekend I have been awestruck by the prophetic brilliance of this speech. It leaves no doubt whatsoever that America is now spiritually dead...,
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The leading energy analysts who foretold Enron's demise have an alarming new claim: The world's major oil companies are almost tapped out.
Today, the analysts at Herold -- a research-only firm that issues valuations on several hundred publicly traded energy companies -- are making predictions even bolder than their call on Enron. They have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.
Many analysts have estimated when the earth will reach its peak oil production. Others have done estimates on when individual countries will hit their peaks. Herold is the first Wall Street firm to predict when specific energy companies will hit their peaks.
The USA is "No. 1" in nothing but weaponry, consumer spending, debt, and delusion.
No concept lies more firmly embedded in our national character than the notion that the USA is "No. 1," "the greatest." Our broadcast media are, in essence, continuous advertisements for the brand name "America Is No. 1." Any office seeker saying otherwise would be committing political suicide. In fact, anyone saying otherwise will be labeled "un-American." We're an "empire," ain't we? Sure we are. An empire without a manufacturing base. An empire that must borrow $2 billion a day from its competitors in order to function. Yet the delusion is ineradicable. We're No. 1.
Well...this is the country you really live in:
The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
"The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).
Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!
"The European Union leads the U.S. in...the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).
"Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70).
Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).
Foreign applications to U.S. grad schools declined 28 percent last year. Foreign student enrollment on all levels fell for the first time in three decades, but increased greatly in Europe and China. Last year Chinese grad-school graduates in the U.S. dropped 56 percent, Indians 51 percent, South Koreans 28 percent (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004). We're not the place to be anymore.
The World Health Organization "ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. [was]...37th." In the fairness of health care, we're 54th. "The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world" (The European Dream, pp.79-80). Pay more, get lots, lots less.
"The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens" (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a "developed" country? Anyway, that's the company we're keeping.
Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That's six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)
"U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower" (The European Dream, p.81). Been to Mexico lately? Does it look "developed" to you? Yet it's the only "developed" country to score lower in childhood poverty.
Twelve million American families--more than 10 percent of all U.S. households--"continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves." Families that "had members who actually went hungry at some point last year" numbered 3.9 million (NYT, Nov. 22, 2004).
The United States is 41st in the world in infant mortality. Cuba scores higher (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).
Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).
The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004).
"Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the 1980s.... In the 1990s, the U.S. average compensation growth rate grew only slightly, at an annual rate of about 0.1 percent" (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.
"Sixty-one of the 140 biggest companies on the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, while only 50 are U.S. companies" (The European Dream, p.66). "In a recent survey of the world's 50 best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European" (The European Dream, p.69).
"Fourteen of the 20 largest commercial banks in the world today are European.... In the chemical industry, the European company BASF is the world's leader, and three of the top six players are European. In engineering and construction, three of the top five companies are European.... The two others are Japanese. Not a single American engineering and construction company is included among the world's top nine competitors. In food and consumer products, Nestlé and Unilever, two European giants, rank first and second, respectively, in the world. In the food and drugstore retail trade, two European companies...are first and second, and European companies make up five of the top ten. Only four U.S. companies are on the list" (The European Dream, p.68).
The United States has lost 1.3 million jobs to China in the last decade (CNN, Jan. 12, 2005).
U.S. employers eliminated 1 million jobs in 2004 (The Week, Jan. 14, 2005).
Three million six hundred thousand Americans ran out of unemployment insurance last year; 1.8 million--one in five--unemployed workers are jobless for more than six months (NYT, Jan. 9, 2005).
Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea hold 40 percent of our government debt. (That's why we talk nice to them.) "By helping keep mortgage rates from rising, China has come to play an enormous and little-noticed role in sustaining the American housing boom" (NYT, Dec. 4, 2004). Read that twice. We owe our housing boom to China, because they want us to keep buying all that stuff they manufacture.
Sometime in the next 10 years Brazil will probably pass the U.S. as the world's largest agricultural producer. Brazil is now the world's largest exporter of chickens, orange juice, sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Last year, Brazil passed the U.S. as the world's largest beef producer. (Hear that, you poor deluded cowboys?) As a result, while we bear record trade deficits, Brazil boasts a $30 billion trade surplus (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
As of last June, the U.S. imported more food than it exported (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
Bush: 62,027,582 votes. Kerry: 59,026,003 votes. Number of eligible voters who didn't show up: 79,279,000 (NYT, Dec. 26, 2004). That's more than a third. Way more. If more than a third of Iraqis don't show for their election, no country in the world will think that election legitimate.
One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).
"Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined" (The European Dream, p.28).
"Nearly one out of four Americans [believe] that using violence to get what they want is acceptable" (The European Dream, p.32).
Forty-three percent of Americans think torture is sometimes justified, according to a PEW Poll (Associated Press, Aug. 19, 2004).
"Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available" (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004).
"The International Association of Chiefs of Police said that cuts by the [Bush] administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever" (USA Today, Nov. 17, 2004).
No. 1? In most important categories we're not even in the Top 10 anymore. Not even close.
Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is a scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil.
Conservative Congressman Roscoe Bartlett serves as Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. One of three scientists in the Congress, Dr. Bartlett is also a senior member of the Science Committee. Due to his ten years of experience as a small business owner, he also serves on the Small Business Committee and is its Vice Chairman. Published on 15 Mar 2005 by US Congressional Record. Archived on 16 Mar 2005.
Dilbertization of overly eager shareholders and boosters of the neocon corpostate aborning is going to become my new hobby. Naomi Klein does a really nice job of summarizing exactly what's going on in the well-spun world of neocon brand management.
"There is a reason Bono is so admired in the Administration that the White House might just choose an Irishman. As frontman of one of the world's most enduring rock brands, Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values."
The Bush Administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to "change the story."
Hopefully, at some point in the spirit of Sarbanes Oxley which seeks to hold management accountable for truth in performance reporting, we'll shrug off all the rhetorical corpospeak distracting us from a cold, clinical, and ruthless audit of what the corpobeast is really up to, before we find ourselves holding the bag like bunch of Enron patsies and stooges...,
Given the jarring blackout of progress reportage on Fallujah, this supersize me screed at Cobb begged some questions. Didn't take much backchannel searching to come up with fair and balanced coverage in the south asian press
Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of War, Fallujah has still not let itself be "taken" to date. The mightiest military machine in history has met its match. A turning point in military affairs? The end of warfare, as practiced by the Americans - the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory?
No wonder it's gotten so quiet on the Fallujah front.....,
I remember when the University of Michigan added digital photographs to their ids. Made it so that your picture would be stored in the system, and you had to ask to have it removed. I pitched a fit, thinking about all the nefarious purposes that stored picture could be used for. By that time they had already begun to track our purchases, and our travel (to get into the dorms after hours instead of using a key, you had to use your id).
Of course I got used to it. We all did. And now that I'm on the other end, I have access to pictures of students and all types of sensitive data.
How long do we have before this becomes commonplace among professionals? How long before Falwell, Cokely, and the others tell folks to get their guns and watch out for the black copters?
A Reuters post today, China Jails 180 Falun Gong Members for SARS Rumors, touches on the fascinating and frustrating intersection of the SARS epidemic and apocalyptic religion:
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has detained 180 members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group for spreading rumors and recruiting new followers amid the SARS epidemic, state radio said on Thursday. The practitioners were all arrested in the northern province of Hebei, it reported. Police officials were not immediately available for comment. "They spread doomsday theories in a bid to cause panic in society and claimed that the SARS outbreak in China was a warning to those who persecute and hate the Falun Dafa," it said, using another name for the group. "They also spread falsehoods that people who practice Falun Gong will not contract SARS in order to try to spread the cult and recruit more followers," it said.Chinese authorities are unlikely to be monitoring and reporting on the particulars of the "rumors" spread by Falun Gong members, since they consider Falun Gong superstitious as well as dangerous, but the form taken by the members' "doomsday theories" would be of intense interest to scholars of apocalyptic movements such as the members of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University -- of which I am one -- both for their own intrinsic interest, but also because such things are leading indicators for the ways in which apocalyptic belief can configure political dissent and on occasion trigger violence.