My Core Beliefs for this Website

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Anti-capitalist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Militarist, Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Resources, Police State, Professor David Correia, Professor Julian Cribb, Resource Wars, Runaway Climate Change, Security and Surveillance State, Technophiliacs, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror

We’re approaching the one year anniversary of this website and I really have not explicitly stated my core beliefs and ideas. So let me begin by stating ten essential positions of this website:

1.) Anti-Capitalist. Capitalism has several fatal flaws which we’ve discussed here in numerous posts. It is at the root of our social and environmental ills. A system which atomizes society, turning each against the other as competitors and targeting all members of society with a nonstop stream of marketing and advertising propaganda, is the antithesis of a community-building ethos.

…cast your eyes on capitalism as a meme that effectively mutates the thinking of people, turning them into over consumers and profiteers. It is the relentless drive to grow profits that pushes us to do what we do. And that meme has metastasized globally. That is the real disease.

The original capitalism arose as a means to aggregate enough excess harvest so as to re-invest in capital equipment (before formal depreciation entered the scene) for the farm or village. It quickly led to investment in growing the capacity of a community to support more people and have more stuff and that led us, eventually, to what we have today — unbridled avarice and waste… ~ George Mobus

2.) Anti-Imperialist. Imperialism is the economic dominance and exploitation of a country, often underwritten by military force.

3.) Anti-Militarist (not the same as Pacifist). This stance goes along with 1 and 2. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has become a branch of government unto itself. ‘War for profit’ is big business with retiring generals becoming consultants to the weapons manufacturers. A large percentage of congressmen and senators are personally invested in the American war machine. With the War on Terror, the tail is wagging the dog.

4.) Man is part of nature, not separate from it. All life forms on Earth have intrinsic worth which cannot be accurately monetized or commodified. Economic activity by humans incurs environmental costs, but these costs are externalized. An economy which internalizes these costs is the only sustainable system able to support human societies long-term. What is the final cost of CO2 emissions, but likely the extinction of the human species along with everything else (6th Mass Extinction).

5.) Technology is not corrupt, the system is. I am not anti-technology. How a society applies a particular technology determines that technology’s social worth. Do we use it to keep vegitative patients alive at great cost? Do we use it to produce energy whose byproduct is toxic waste lingering for eons? Do we use it to annihilate each other under a mushroom cloud?
Many citizens of industrial capitalism have become technophiliacs, developing an unhealthy and unrealistic faith in the ability of technology to solve any and all problems. That’s a failure of a social system which deifies technology, promoting it as a cure-all while also using it to reproduce inequality and injustice.

Speaking on the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution, Professor David Correia says:

…In the end, the particular objects and artifacts of everyday “technology” are the tools of corporations and authoritarian governments. And by now it should be clear that democracy and capitalism do not cohere and the revolution cannot be carried out via “technology.” Rather the struggle must become a struggle over the social, political and economic conditions that have made the everyday objects of technology—our digital campfires—nothing more than the tools of authoritarian despotism and capital accumulation.

6.) We live under a form of growing tyranny called inverted totalitarianism. I first read about the term inverted totalitarianism from journalist Chris Hedges who quotes from political philosopher Sheldon Wolin. Hedges has done a great job of documenting and explaining the rise of the corporate state in this country and around the world. From the Fourth Estate to higher education to all other social institutions and venues, we have literally been ‘occupied’ by corporations.

Recent chilling interview(mentions climate change):

7.) Climate Change, or more aptly ‘climate disruption’, is human-caused.
Our use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution has disrupted the natural carbon cycle of the planet. I have numerous links on this site to scientific findings proving that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity. The evidence is overwhelming and supported by near unanimity amongst the scientific community. The fossil fuel lobby is extremely powerful and has financed a ‘public deception’ campaign to cast doubt on the root cause of climate change.

8.) Peak Oil is real and happening. It’s all about Energy Return on Investment (EROEI), and it’s a liquid fuel crisis. Despite the rampant self-deception of carbon man and the ‘public deception’ campaign by the fossil fuel industry, America is not and will not become energy self-sufficient in its current configuration of ‘urban sprawl to nowhere’ and its capitalist cornerstone of the automobile industry (individualized transportation).

Despite increased efforts to get more drivers to adopt fuel-efficient vehicles, U.S. households spent the highest percentage of their income on gasoline in 2012 than they did in any other year in nearly three decades except for 2008, according to new estimates.

The Energy Information Administration reported that the average household spent $2,912 on gasoline in 2012, or nearly four percent of their pre-tax income. – source

9.) Peak everything is happening. From industrial minerals which serve as the building blocks for modern civilization to the seafood that we eat, humans are eating the planet out of house and home. The energy bonanza of fossil fuels enabled the human population to spread far and wide, becoming a force of nature which now has the dubious distinction of having a geologic era named after it – The Anthropocene – and which has spurred one Professor to start a campaign in order to rename Homo sapiens to something other than ‘wise’. The Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization (Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water) are converging to bring Homo sapiens reign to an end.

10.) With business-as-usual, humans will likely become extinct by the end of this century or shortly thereafter. Multiple tipping points have already been triggered which will have non-linear and self-reinforcing feedback effects. We have covered many of these feedback loops on this site. Suffice it to say, only the timing of the final consequences is debatable at this point. Massive and radical changes to our society could always be started to lessen the final impacts, but such a proposal is like telling a nicotine addict, who smokes through their tracheostomy, that “it’s never too late to quit.” Ugghh!

So I think we can all agree on most if not all of the above statements. If there are any questions on my core beliefs or if there are ideas which you think should have been included, then let me know. By the way, none of the above positions makes me a “Doomer”. I hate that title. I’m a realist.

Humans are the premier practitioners of hype.

At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African forest elephants from heavily armed poachers. And here we are in this safe auditorium talking about bringing back the Woolly Mammoth. Think about it… Hype can come back to bite you.

Nate Hagens: What if the Future is Real?

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 33 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Nate Hagens, Peak Oil, Peak Resources, Poverty, Wall Street Fraud

The video below is a talk given on Earth Day this year by Nate Hagens at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. It’s entitled “What if the Future is Real?”. This talk is not just about the issue of resource depletion and the multiple crises facing us, but about human behavior, how we perceive the natural world and our responsibilities to future descendants. Nate Hagens [Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont] is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light”. I found his talk useful. My notes/summary are below the video.

Nate’s website: http://www.themonkeytrap.us/

The Growth of Mega-Cities: Racing Towards Insanity

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 12 Comments

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Age of Madness, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Inverted Totalitarianism, Japan's Aokigahara Forest, Overpopulation, Psychotic Disorders of City Dwellers, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Theodore Roszak

Most have heard about various studies showing the benefits to human health, both for mind and body, that are gained by contact with the non-city environment. As humans destroy more and more of the natural world, physical and mental illness will inevitably increase. For this reason, industrial civilization could rightly be called a ‘death machine’. Converting what is healthy and life-giving into something that is inanimate and disposable is the height of insanity, but this is how the economy works. All of the planet’s life-support systems are viewed through the prism of profit and loss. Industrial civilization’s sociopathic hierarchy is the result of such a system, rewarding those who can grab as much $profit$ as possible, as fast as possible.

Ironically, many of those who make it to the top of the capitalist hierarchy end up buying large tracts of the natural world, even islands, to escape what is commonly called the rat race, the game of hustling for money or trying to accumulate enough paper tokens to exchange for the necessities of life, the very things which are rapidly being destroyed by industrial civilization – clean water, air, soil, and biodiverse-rich ecosystems. We also strive to acquire “creature comforts” which are defined as “not really needed by humans, but that improve comfort or a sense of being at ease.” Imagine the billions of people who have now bought into this hustler’s game of chasing after the “necessities of life” such as ‘piped-in’ water, central heating/cooling, monocultured food crops, and factory farmed meats, in addition to the “creature comforts” like flat screen TV’s and sundry digital devices, electric appliances, mass-produced furniture, and personal automobiles. More people joining the industrialized mode of living requires the conversion of a living planet into a dead and barren planet.

Viewed from the night sky, the circuit board layout of cities glows bright like molten fire. Industrial civilization’s infrastructure scars the horizon with geometric hard lines; gone is the unpredictable mosaic of trees, grass, streams, and rock which are dug up, covered over, and flattened. The meat grinder of industrial capitalism eats up nature and replaces it with a vast grid-like design of asphalt, concrete, and energy-consuming buildings. Nature gets steamrolled over to make way for strip malls, billboards, and the game of hustling for money – what humans call “progress” and “development”. To be blunt, ecologically sustainable cities do not exist:

…the story of unsustainable cities is characterized by a ‘tragedy of the commons’ phenomenon not only in the deployment of urban infrastructure but also in the overuse of the natural capital that sustain the city.
… looking at the story of unsustainable cities from the perspective of a simple general equilibrium urban model, open access to urban land leads to high concentrations of population, huge deployment of urban infrastructure and irreversible degradation of the natural capital creating a ‘tragedy of urban infrastructure’ that undermines the sustainability of cities creating preannounced urban ruins.

Psychotic disorders are the side effect of living in present day mega-cities:

…Previous research has shown that people living in cities have a 21% increased risk of anxiety disorders and a 39% increased risk of mood disorders. In addition, the incidence of schizophrenia is twice as high in those born and brought up in cities…By 2050, almost 70% of people are predicted to be living in urban areas…

The social media cocoons and virtual realities people surround themselves with in our digitized and commodified world must also contribute to this mental sickness. The innate unsustainability of modern cities underlies this unhealthy living arrangement. For instance, Japan adopted the fossil-fuel-powered, high-consumption, industrial way of life and has gone parabolic in its ecologic overshoot:

Japan’s per capita Ecological Footprint is 55 percent higher than the world average, 140 percent higher than BRIICS and 171 percent higher than ASEAN countries. However, Japan’s per capita Footprint is 27 percent less than the average G7 countries’, of which Japan is a member. This is mostly due to the United States’ high per capita Ecological Footprint and its relatively large population size, which drives up the G7 average…

….On average, the shipping distance of food imported into Japan is about 4500 miles, approximately the direct distance between Tokyo and Moscow…

…It takes 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that Japanese people use…

For those consumed by the system, the Aokigahara Forest in Japan is the world’s second most popular place to commit suicide; the first is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

…if you look beyond the modern, Western schools of psychiatry, you find that in traditional societies among primary people, the people we once used to call primitives, that it is understood that sanity and madness have to be defined always in relationship to the natural habitat; and that indeed to a very large extent, madness is understood to be an imbalance between the individual and the natural environment or between an entire tribe or a people and its natural environment…”

“…What Auschwitz was to its human inmates — an expertly rationalized, efficiently organzied killing ground — our urban/industrial system is fast becoming for the biosphere at large, and, for ourselves, as an inseparable part of the environment… ~ THEODORE ROSZAK

Living in an Age of Madness, the best one can do is to keep from succumbing to the insanity.

The Intractable State of Things: Life in the Corporate State

20 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ 8 Comments

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British Filmmaker Temujin Doran, Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dzhokhar 'Jahar' Tsarnaev, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Police State, Security and Surveillance State, The Brothers Tsarnaev, The Elite 1%, The Film "Obey", War for Profit, War on Terror

For the last week or so I’ve been feeling a sort of emptiness, an exasperation of the state of things, a growing acceptance of the intractable way of things. And no matter the reality that a small percentage of us can clearly see, the titanic wheels of the ‘system’ will spin onwards like a runaway train heading over a cliff, taking us all with it. People are not entitled to their own version of reality, but that is the society we live in today where facts are interchangeable with self-serving opinion and corporate spin.

This morning I came across an excellent movie entitled ‘Obey’ based on Chris Hedges’ brilliant book ‘Death of the Liberal Class’. For those who want to hear an insightful and perceptive analysis of the real world in which we exist, please watch:

…Passivity permits societies to transfer their emotional allegiance to the absurd and ignore real problems. It exacerbates despair. It keeps us in a state of mass self-delusion. Once we are drawn into this form of magical thinking, the structure and goals of the corporate state are not questioned. This magical thinking coupled with the bizarre ideology of limitless progress holds the promise of an impossible, unachievable happiness. It has turned whole nations into self-consuming machines of DEATH…

…The giddy, money-drenched choreographed carnival, the petty spectacle of politics will divert our attention from the collapsing world around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation will mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. We will convince ourselves that global warming never existed or we will concede that it exists, but insist that we can adapt. Both responses will satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our huge reckless pursuit for personal comfort. And all around us the natural world will change…

…The death of the planet is just another investment opportunity.

Many human monstrosities have burst forth from the bleak and soulless landscape of American suburbia, reaping their 15 minutes of infamy. The brothers Tsarnaev are simply the latest. American society, for the most part, does not exist; it’s been bought out, chopped up, and repackaged for the corporate state’s consumer culture. A society that has been broken up and atomized is ripe for control and plunder.

I was poking around the twitter account of Dzhokhar ‘Jahar’ Tsarnaev and found some ironic and disturbing reflections on life in America. With the morbid fascination our throwaway culture has with its own social atrocities, perhaps it’s not so odd that ‘Jahar’ now has nearly 85,000 followers.

Sifting through the evidence, people want to know why, but one thing that won’t be analyzed is the society from which such horrors spring.

American society always emerges squeaky-clean out of all the investigations, post-mortems, examinations, inquiries that follow. Its guiltlessness is asserted by implication that the motives for such slayings are incomprehensible, unfathomable…

…The script is now word-perfect. Whenever some violent event erupts in the US, the chronology is identical. The shock is followed by flowers at the site of the deed, which is transformed into a temporary shrine, the comforting of the bereaved and injured, the assertion of solidarity, the lessons to be learned. In the end, American society becomes the hero of the tragedy, with its perpetual penitence, its never-again reflex, its openness to the cleansing effects of trauma, its avowals of solidarity, its ritualistic counselling which is a form of cancelling, as people ‘come to terms with’ their grief.

What is never asked is, what kind of social pathology creates such disorders? ‘No Entry’ signs are posted on all avenues of exploration where some clue is most likely to be found… – source

(in chronological order)

A Matter of Survival: Breaking the Great Wall of Propaganda

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Joe Romm, Mass Die Off, Mass Media Propaganda, Neoliberal Capitalism, Security and Surveillance State, Social Scientist Chris Shaw, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud

Like a meth addict whose gums are dissolving, muscles deteriorating, skin abscessing, and behavior becoming psychotic, industrial civilization is deteriorating, the social fabric is getting threadbare, and leaders of rogue countries are spouting off nuclear threats. I believe we would all agree that a radical change to society is in the best interest of the long-term survival of Homo sapiens. So to break our current self-destructive path which is not unlike that of cancer cells killing off its host, what obstacles are in our way preventing us from achieving mass consensus. Some call it the ‘wall of propaganda’ which our current economic system has constructed to protect its interests, namely the almighty profit margin, at literally all costs. Media Lens has an excellent article out discussing this ‘wall of deceit’ which corporate capitalism surrounds itself with in order to maintain the unsustainable business-as-usual.

The article starts out:

The systematic propaganda of the corporate media – its deep-rooted antipathy towards upholding proper journalistic standards in the public interest – extends to its coverage of human-induced climate change. The Independent recently delivered a masterpiece of headline obfuscation with:

‘World cools on global warming as green fatigue sets in.’

The news report said:

‘Only 49 per cent of people now consider climate change a very serious issue – far fewer than at the beginning of the worldwide financial crisis in 2009.’

As usual, there was no mention of the role of the corporate media as a leading cause of why ‘green fatigue’ has supposedly set in. No mention of the media’s shameful failure to explore root causes of the climate crisis, not least the elite-serving corporate globalisation that has taken humanity to the brink of disaster. Chris Shaw, a social sciences researcher at the University of Sussex, noted on Twitter that nor was there ‘any mention of the work of the merchants of doubt, paid for and acting on the behalf of corporate interests’.

We’ve discussed this before and it continues to be the case – mass media in the hands of corporations is a pillar of inverted totalitarianism. In addition, the corporations also make use of the state’s security and surveillance apparatus in order to stifle any grassroots movements which threaten the status quo. Thusly, we are enthralled to the corporate state. The article then goes on to quote important rebuttal points made by Joe Romm to the corporate media’s claim of the public suffering from a ‘green fatigue’:

• ‘There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject [climate change], which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face.’
• ‘The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption…’
• ‘The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money.’

The popular mantra of keeping the global temperature below a 2ºC increase is another misleading idea put forth and circulated in the mass media:

…Guardian environment editor John Vidal, a safe pair of hands at the paper who has managed to skip over numerous troubling questions for over two decades, noted:

‘The chances of the world holding temperature rises to 2C – the level of global warming considered “safe” by scientists – appear to be fading fast.’

Here, Vidal uncritically relayed the dangerous and discredited notion of a 2ºC ‘safe limit’ for global temperature rise. Climate change has been hereby reduced to a phenomenon defined by a single global dangerous number. This is a simplistic and damaging view of climate which, in reality, varies widely in time and space with multiple, overlapping impacts and feedbacks including ice melt, sea level rise, increasing storms and devastating droughts. Social scientist Chris Shaw, whom we mentioned above, has studied how this skewed ‘safe limit’ framing of the climate change debate arose, and how it has become a stranglehold on climate policy and even on progressive voices who should know better. Shaw warns that ‘falsely ascribing a scientifically derived dangerous limit to climate change diverts attention away from questions about the political and social order that have given rise to the crisis.’ He notes:

‘The oft quoted quip attributed to Einstein, that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, even after it has failed, seems particularly apposite for the “dangerous limits” framing of climate policy.’

Rapid and dangerous climate change is already underway, with little chance now of keeping global temperature rise to under 2ºC …

…switch on the television or the radio, or open up a newspaper, and – bar a few items in passing – it’s as if none of this is happening. Instead, the public is being force-fed a diet of celebrity gossip, huge advertising campaigns to consume more and more, and tedious ‘news’ and ‘debates’ that elucidate almost nothing about the real world.

Journalists and editors at all levels of the major news organisations must be aware, to some extent, that the glorious vision of the media ‘holding power to account‘ is more myth than reality. But very few media professionals have the honesty, bravery and decency to speak out. We understand that it is not easy; one’s hopes of a stellar media career or even the prospect of continued employment might be on the line. In the early days of Media Lens, we used to entertain the very slim possibility that – if anyone – the environment editors of the major newspapers might do so. But signs of media sanity from even these quarters are scarce…

The Article then illustrates a few examples of media outlets like the BBC and The Guardian who are cobbled by the corporate need to downplay the catastrophic effects of human-induced climate change. The ever pervasive regime of business interests holds sway over public discourse:

Locked Inside A Box

…Take one report on the BBC News at Ten last month (February 19, 2013), for instance, by John Moylan, the BBC’s employment and industry correspondent. On the flagship television news programme, watched by millions around the country, Boylan spoke of the rising demand for energy and the cost of fuel. He stood in front of impressive high-tech graphics and he eloquently made his points. And he referred, briefly, to EU environmental targets on closing ‘dirty polluting power plants’.

But Moylan did not once mention climate change. In an era when leading scientists are warning of the catastrophic dangers of climate instability under global warming, how could the BBC correspondent possibly justify this omission from his report? We asked him, twice, but did not receive an answer…

…But what about the Guardian? It has long been considered by many greens as a sort of ‘flagship’ newspaper for the environment movement. This has never been an accurate picture. But even more so in recent years when, notes Haaretz columnist Zafrir Rinat, the paper has been avidly:

‘developing business ties with corporations leading to the creation of the websites such as Global Development Professionals, which received financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a host of corporations. The Guardian is also involved in several environmental ventures that are expected to yield profits.’

Rinat spoke with Joe Confino, an executive editor of the Guardian, and the chairman and editorial director of Guardian Sustainable Business. This is a Guardian-corporate partnership which promotes the notion of ‘corporate social responsibility’, a public relations oxymoron that should be exposed repeatedly.

Confino said:

‘We are partners in ventures with businesses that we are convinced are going in the right direction on sustainability. The condition for all cooperation is preserving complete editorial independence.’

But high-ranking newspaper professionals always assert that there is a ‘firewall’ between advertising and editorial content, a claim that does not withstand scrutiny. Moreover, as Haaretz’s Rinat rightly points out:

‘Behind this [Guardian and corporate business] cooperation lies a pretentious worldview that it is possible to convince corporations to operate differently along the entire production chain, from the raw materials stage up through handling the refuse from the final products that are sold.’

Rinat added that ‘the media is still part of the problem because it continues to promote in its reports the culture of consumerism that depletes the planet’s resources.’ He noted that Confino ‘doesn’t deny’ this crucial point but, disappointingly, the Haaretz columnist did not press the Guardian executive about it.

Consider that a major imperative for corporate newspapers like the Guardian, struggling with dwindling advertising revenue, is to boost the numbers of people exposed to online ads by visiting their websites. Chris Elliott, the Guardian readers’ editor, was upfront about this in a recent column when he said that this was ‘essential’ to ‘secure the future’ of the paper.

But there are flickerings of internal dissent:

‘in the last six months three colleagues have written or spoken to me to express concern that the entirely reasonable desire to attract people to the site may be skewing news and features agendas.’

One ‘conflicted colleague’, as Elliott put it somewhat pejoratively, said:

‘There have been occasions recently where stories have been commissioned by editors who have talked about how they hope it will “play well” online – this appears to have been at the very forefront of their mind when commissioning. Certainly this is the prime driver of many online picture galleries. Obviously … we want to be well-read and popular, but it is a slippery slope, and it now appears that in a few cases we are creating stories purely to attract clicks.’

Given that Elliott’s piece was likely a sanitised, for-public-consumption version of the reality, one wonders what Guardian staff are really thinking, and how widespread is the concern, perhaps even direct opposition, inside their plush corporate offices…

Then we get to the crux of the whole matter, a life or death decision that modern society must work out before it is far too late:

…Covering dangerous climate change […] means not just reporting the science of climate change responsibly – a task too far for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. But it also means investigating the systemic reasons for global warming. That must include a critical appraisal of corporate-driven capitalism and unrestrained consumerism. And, finally, it must also mean full and open public debate about alternative ways of organising society to benefit human well-being and the climate stability of the planet.

There you have it in that last quoted paragraph. In order to move ahead and avert disaster, we must be given the unvarnished truth rather than be kept in the dark and fed shit. In order to do that, we have to get at the root of the problem – capitalism.

Mankind’s God Complex

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud, Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian

≈ 19 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, God Complex, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Oil, Privatization, Resource Wars, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

I almost never watch MSM news, but the other day a preview of a show with Dan Rather about the die-off of bees caught my attention. People were horrified that their business would be hurt, profits would be eviscerated, livelihoods would be irreparably damaged. It’s all about the humans and their economy, not the ecological balance of the planet or what humans have done to push all these non-human species into extinction, in turn threatening homo sapiens’ existence.

Everybody’s livelihood is at stake here over a little flying bee.

Mother Nature thinks the same thing of us: “The Earth is being forever defiled by these arrogant, self-centered bastards and all they can think about is their profit margin.”

Guess what. The Earth doesn’t care about human wants or needs. A misused and abused Earth does not consider the inconveniences to the human economy posed by climate chaos and environmental collapse. The other creatures inhabiting this planet are being silently driven off the face of the Earth to make way for humankind’s insatiable appetite for domination and control. A creature which sees itself as a force of nature to be reckoned with, separate and superior to the planet that spawned it, will soon be brought down by such conceit. I hope we can handle being the only thing left on the planet. We can pollinate our own crops like the Chinese, and bring back extinct species at will to be placed in zoos for our amusement. We can geoengineer the Earth ‘s atmosphere to fix what we’ve destroyed in a vain effort to maintain this colossal edifice of industrial civilization. We can genetically modify crops so as to try to adapt to the drastically altered environment we’re handing down to future generations, human and non-human. Better yet, we can genetically modify ourselves to survive within this toxic world we’ve created. There is no fucking end to our God Complex.

Connection with the outside world has been replaced by a virtual world of electronic devices – TV’s, computers, video games, iphones, blackberries, and other assorted digital devices – filling every public and private space with the latest infotainment news and gossip of a throwaway pop culture. The masses watch reality TV shows to escape from their own hollow reality of slave wages, deadend jobs, a collapsing environment, and the faux democracy of corporate rule.

Driven into the military as the only avenue out of poverty, many soldiers commit suicide to escape the clutches of an industrial war machine that chews up foreign countries and cultures in order to extract resources onto the chopping block of the global marketplace. Blood for oil; souls for dollars. The last remaining vestiges of a living planet get pulled into the marketplace to be commodified, priced, and privatized. Damaged soldiers come home to a jobless economy while their leaders who sold them these wars travel the country doing book signings and lauding their war crimes as accomplishments.

How can such a system survive when the only thing it knows how to do is treat everything as inanimate objects whose only real value is to serve the desires of a self-absorbed species? Humans are amusing themselves to death in their fabricated world of alsphalt, concrete, and steel while the real world burns under the slow-motion detonation of climate disruption and mass extinction. The scientists think they can save the world with new technology even while prior technology is ripping the world apart. Rather than add yet another layer of unsustainable complexity, perhaps it’s time to escape this technology trap and simplify our way of life before becoming victims of our own perceived success.

End-Stage Capitalism: Change or Die

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 9 Comments

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Exponential Growth, Fiat Money, Monetary Policy, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Debt, Private Debt, Public Debt, Steve Keens

The following is a comment left by Rhiter a couple of months ago (his last comment in fact) on a now defunct thread at the ‘prepping-for-profit’ site Peak Prosperity. It’s food for thought when we think about the non-viability of capitalism, an economic system dependent on growth and infinite resources.

For those not familiar with Steve Keen, the following interviews from last month are a good introduction for the layperson:

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-jNrQObT18%5D [youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5-a6ln-0I%5D

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4LPeQGnJo%5D 
I’ll leave the post there because my internet sucks right now. Thank you Hughesnet. I’ll be switching this Friday to another internet provider.

Protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline While Obama Golfs with Oil Executives

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Barack Obama, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Drill Baby Drill, EROEI, Geoscientist J. David Hughes, Inverted Totalitarianism, Keystone XL Pipeline, McDonaldization of Society, Peak Oil, Tar Sands

Are we going to wage an all-out war on reality while the natural world crumbles beneath our feet? By all available evidence – yes. The corrosive and corrupting effect of capital is working its Voodoo magic behind the scenes to ensure that industrial civilization will not go away quietly in the night, but will hang on to the bitter end. In response to anyone challenging the primacy of fossil fuels, Big Oil says “From my cold, dead hands!’.

According to a new report by geoscientist J. David Hughes, the cost of tar sands appears to outweigh any imagined benefits:

An EROEI of less than 3:1 for 80% of tar sands and the U.S. is counting on that for a large percentage of its oil ‘needs’, currently 24%? And the fossil fuel industry/government sock-puppet PR machine is touting this as a viable source of energy to prop up our vacuous, corporate manufactured, McDonaldized culture.

Legislating Reality Out of Sight & Out of Mind

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, AZ Bill SB1213, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate Personhood, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Georgia Representative Earnest Smith, Gun Control, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Delusion and Hysteria, McDonaldization of Society, NRA, Peak Oil, Republican Rep. Mike Leara, The Big Lebowski, The Booming Business of Psychic Reading, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud, War on Satire, Wayne LaPierre

With all the cataclysmic problems bearing down on mankind and his industrial civilization, one recurrent thought I have is, “Will humans ever get their act together?” I live in one of the more backward states of the union, so it comes as no surprise that we are at the forefront of the McDonaldization of society and the rejection of science. What a surprise for a state which ranks near the bottom of the nation’s education ranking. The latest evidence of this escapism from reality is AZ bill SB1213:

I’ve been told that during hard times like Depressions, or the current unravelling of industrial civilization, a lucrative job to have is fortune-telling, psychic reading, and similar hocus-pocus shenanigans which cater to peoples’ mental breakdown and flight into fantasy. So as the masses consult with palm readers in this time of slow-motion destruction, the sharks on Wall Street and our corporate overlords will continue to grab and pickpocket every last shred of wealth and revenue stream remaining on Main street. The Thieves in High Places will never go to jail because they’ve bought off all the branches of government and corporate personhood provides legal cover for their crimes.

While the thought police are outlawing the reality of human-induced climate change, the ‘right to bear weapons of war’ crowd are doing the same.

According the head of the NRA, limiting the number of bullets a citizen can spray into the air is a threat to the well-being of society:

…Semi-automatic technology has been around for a hundred years. If you limit the American public’s access to semi-automatic technology, you limit their ability to survive…”
~ Wayne LaPierre

You can expect more and more of the above craziness to manifest itself in the coming years as reality, in the form of resource constraints and the ravages of unfettered capitalism, kicks into high gear and imposes itself on industrial civilization. I don’t mean to pick solely on the U.S. because this craziness is happening on a global scale wherever fossil fuel dependency has taken root and the Western way-of-life has been adopted. Nevertheless, America is the leader of this mass delusion. We’re even losing our sense of humor as we begin the great unwinding. How are we supposed to lampoon our leaders if they outlaw photoshopping?:

A war on satire cannot be a good omen for an Empire in decline.
Don’t you feel reassured of man’s ability to deftly navigate peak everything and climate chaos? If the human species doesn’t like something, it just legislates it out of sight and out of mind.

Down by Law

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State

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America's Collapsing Middle Class, “Inland Empire”, Blackstone Group, Capitalism, Class Consciousness, Corporate State, Financial Elite, Governor Jerry Brown, Gross Inequality, Jim Jarmusch’s 'Down By Law', Oaktree Capital Management, Political Economy, Real Estate Bubble, Regulatory Capture, Rentier Class, Ronald Reagan, San Bernardino County, Southern California, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud

Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 masterpiece “Down by Law” with its rolling panorama of bleak pre-Katrina Louisiana, and distant, blank character stares suggesting inchoate malaise, effectively captured the unarticulated angst of the ascendant Reagan generation.

Like canaries in a coal mine, Jarmusch and other artists of the era anticipated the contemporary assault on class consciousness with pinpoint precision-decades in advance of the more cognitive punditry in evidence today.

This brings us to an interesting development in today’s post crash histrionics, which provides a conveniently compact diorama on display for all to view and interpret. We begin with what is intuitively obvious to any who care to observe, and that is the dynamic change in the character of the residential real estate market in most parts of the country, but especially evident in those areas hardest hit by the bursting bubble of speculative real estate.

This can be nicely cataloged by examining the infill areas of Southern California know as the “Inland Empire”.

Pre-2008 crash, these areas offered semi-affordable buying opportunities for homeowners priced out of the highly desirable coastal California markets, as well as respite for inner city residents looking to escape gang violence. Properties could be had for 1/3-1/2 of the price of a comparable dwelling in the more desirable areas near the coast and employment centers, but in return a 30-50 mile one way commute was extracted as compensation. In the era of $2/gal gas, this was deemed acceptable, especially as around the water cooler scuttlebutt yielded the notion that such a property could be bought and sold at a 50% profit 3 years later, with the proceeds used to buy a house closer to the employment centers thereby rendering the commute temporary.
This became a de rigueur business plan of many lower middle class workers, who one must acknowledge otherwise had a 1 in 10,000 chance in aggregating enough savings to achieve even a modicum of survivability in retirement.

I would make the case that the motivations were at the very least in line with the conventional bourgeoisie wisdom of bootstrapping one self’s upward in the social mobility chain by taking on some risk and making investments to better one’s life standing.

This explanation of course runs afoul of the current bourgeoisie narrative, which seeks to demonize those that participated in such shenanigans as irresponsible slobs and layabouts, lying on loan applications in a blatant attempt to defraud the salt of the earth folks in the financial industry of their hard earned capital. Because to concede that these people were simply following the time tried examples set forth by their more well endowed peers would be to point out structural cracks in a system that is perennially corrupt and unworkable.

So it goes something like this, if I do it and succeed, I shall be valorized, if you do the same thing and fail, it’s because you’re a dishonest layabout gaming the system.

OK, so now here is where it gets interesting.

The combination of rising gasoline prices, massive job losses and a real estate market in free fall meant that the “Inland Empire” was to become a major epicenter in residential foreclosures. To add insult to injury, the daily commutes to employment centers had become traffic nightmares, with a typical 40 mile commute taking 2 hours each way, so naturally private companies put in toll roads and toll lanes on state owned freeways and charged substantial toll fees to avoid this congestion.

As is well documented today, when 15 homes in a tract of 40 homes goes into foreclosure, no one else can sell their home either.
So guess what happens? Groups of institutionalized investors swoop in to buy these properties for pennies on the dollar, paying for them in cash as no realistic mechanism for property appraisal exists when such a large percentage of homes are in foreclosure.

All this anguish comes in pursuit of a modest home in the exurb of San Bernardino County, the epicenter of the Southern California housing crash. Plummeting values here sparked a vicious wave of foreclosures.

But it’s precisely because prices fell so far here that Sepe can’t buy a house now. In a sharp irony, many would-be homeowners in hard-hit markets can’t compete with a flood of all-cash offers from investors, some backed by Wall Street war chests.
So they’re missing out on the only upside of the real estate crash: historically low prices and interest rates.

The repeated rejections come despite Sepe’s solid qualifications: a stable job as a cell tower technician and a pre-approved home loan. He watches as houses hit the market, then get scooped up within an hour. He offered a battle metaphor to describe his plight.

“I am this little country,” he said. “And it’s like this huge country is coming and attacking my country, and I can’t win.”

No one thinks to consider this effect in terms of class consciousness, as the investors are of course valorized and the free market is commended for saving the real estate world in general, and those hapless former homeowners in particular. It is important to realize what is happening here, before our very eyes, and that is a.) the erasing and transference of an entire generation of home owners into permanent renters, and b.) the beginning of capital consolidation into the rentier class, effective displacing mom and pop rental property owners by big investment conglomerates like Blackstone Group and Oaktree Capital Management.

San Bernardino County, as well as two of its largest cities, Ontario and Fontana, stirred a national controversy when it recently considered — then shelved — a plan to use eminent domain to seize and restructure underwater mortgages. In a testament to the lasting effects of the crash, about 40% of borrowers in the region still owe more on their properties than they’re worth, according to mortgage tracking firm CoreLogic.

But a turnaround is well underway, thanks in part to deep-pocketed investors snapping up bargains with cash. The housing supply is now so tight that it’s common for home shoppers to put in 20 or 30 offers before securing a house, real estate agents say.

Aware of the destructive dynamic and further slide down the slope of income inequality, the county (with support from the State under Jerry Brown) put forth a proposal to seize the blighted properties under eminent domain laws, and then once owned by the county, to issue a county bond to provide funds at below market rates to loan back to the foreclosed homeowners allowing them to keep their homes.

Note the issue here is not so much below market loan rates, but availability of a lender (the county) to fill in for private mortgages, who will not loan under any circumstances into these blighted neighborhoods.

But of course this well meaning effort was drowned in the bathtub by the small gubymint crowd, you can well imagine the hew and cry of the conservative bourgeoisie when faced with such an obvious interference in the “free market”. Imagine the perceived travesty of a government entity intervening to prohibit free market evangelists from extracting their pound of flesh and smashing down an entire generation of the middle class back to the stone age and, I hope it goes without saying, perpetually converting these hapless suckers into a permanent revenue stream while they pay rent.

Private equity groups, including Oaktree Capital Management and Blackstone Group, have formed or partnered with companies dedicated to buying single-family homes. Unlike the flippers made famous by the housing boom, these institutional investors are in it for the long haul. They’re buying homes in bulk, then renting and holding them to reap long-term price appreciation.

Some of these private equity giants and Wall Street firms have employed former homebuilding pros and partnered with big apartment managers. Their plan is to transform the single-family home rental business, once a largely mom-and-pop affair, into a full-scale industry.

The Santa Monica real estate investment firm Colony Capital, founded by Tom Barrack, last year won an auction by the federal government to purchase 970 foreclosed homes in California, Arizona and Nevada from mortgage titan Fannie Mae for $176 million. Most of the California properties were in the Inland Empire.

Carrington Mortgage Holdings, based in Aliso Viejo, has partnered with Oaktree to buy and rent out single-family homes. Carrington spokesman Rick Sharga acknowledged that cash buyers have an advantage. But he said competition has helped revive a depressed market.

As promised, this neatly packaged diorama shows the full circle of exploitation and alienation of a full blown class war, in one easy to grasp trajectory:

– Financial capital consolidates and exploits the residential home mortgage market, securitizing these lousy loans for huge profits.

– When the boom goes bust, the same actors campaign aggressively to prohibit any mortgage relief, forcing widespread bankruptcies and foreclosures.

– The marketing arm of the financial capitalist spends tens of millions of dollars socializing the idea that these homeowners were and are morally deficient, and deserve no recourse. They are to be punished for their transgressions.

– These same financial capitalists with prey now firmly trapped then look for ways to further exploit their captives, and find examples in privatizing freeway systems to extract more revenue from commuters trapped in gridlock.

– The conservative and tea party fanatics interrupt their sheet-less Klan party long enough to advance the popular notion that further deregulation is needed, and demonize any government participation that might circumvent capital’s relentless desire to crush all but the few. In their capable hands, it becomes fashionable to decry government of any kind with a full throated call of Statism, and a groundswell is created to “restore liberty” and allow unfettered capitalism to thrive.

– Having discouraged any state intervention by conflating ideological association to diminished freedom, the mark is ready for the takedown. Large groups of investors swoop in with pennies-on-the-dollar all cash purchases of distressed properties en masse, displacing large segments of the population, and sometimes even renting the properties back to the original homeowner.

The upshot of this large scale displacement by capital effectively unwinds 70 years of New Deal and post WWII governance. State encouragement of home ownership was thought to be a useful means to ensure “skin in the game” for the working class, as in encouraging home ownership, labor strikes were thought to be less likely to occur with heady financial commitments hanging overhead, as well as community ties, might discourage labor activism.

They were right.

So this leaves a vulnerability and an internal contradiction, as large groups of former homeowners become permanent renters, they are disinclined to invest in the community, local economic spending goes way down (what renter will invest in the property?) impacting local business, and property crimes go way up as alienation and other side effects of visible and blatant exploitation percolate to the surface for the working class. Ironically, the size and magnitude of police state intervention will rise significantly as compared to the aborted eminent domain intervention, as now the upper middle class and general bourgeoisie will demand increased police (State) action to knock down property crimes and lawless behavior. Think police checkpoints and constant aerial drone surveillance of these communities.

The other effect as mentioned is the consolidation of the rentier class, wherein these large investment groups begin to “brand” the single family residence as part of a larger portfolio of related revenue streams, e.g. grouping big box stores nearby corporate owned rental developments in backdoor revenue sharing arrangements, eventually degrading to a truck system to more efficiently extract any remaining surplus from the working class. This large scale consolidation will bring the capitalist death spiral to small scale rentiers who own only a few rental properties, they will face exclusionary tactics wherein associated mercantilist outlets will give discounts to large company renters, but not to renters of the small independently owned properties. Further, the coercive laws of competition will be brought to bear on the independents, wherein access to community pools and other trinkets will be offered free or nearly free by the large corporate rent factories, and marketed as “lifestyle” destinations with corporate parties for renters only extending into the domain of social reproduction.

The demise of the independent rentier, or more aptly, the petite bourgeoisie, will follow almost as quickly as the former homeowner himself.