Post-Apocalyptic Musings

17 Saturday Aug 2013

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

≈ 36 Comments

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Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The End of More, Theocracy, unwashed public

Having conquered every last inch of Earth, humans now dream of spilling their burgeoning numbers out into distant planets, even whilst our own blue orb reels from climate chaos and our ever-growing consumption. Every iota of nature is now at the whim of the free market which sees no other path than to convert everything into a profit scheme. Thus a deadly game of musical chairs will be played out in the last days of capitalist industrial civilization as the foreign lands and water reservoirs of indigenous people are stolen to feed the mouths and gas tanks of cash-paying consumers in the First World. As the industrial world clamors for the last pockets of high-density energy sources to feed its energy-starved economic machine, desperate governments and businesses will continue to cut their country’s social safety net, throwing more and more people to the wolves. If you happen to live in a so-called developed country, you will have to run faster and faster on the cutthroat treadmill of the free market in order to stay afloat, lest you fall into the same boat as those of the malnourished and starving Third World. Wary of growing instability, governments will continue to strengthen their security and surveillance apparatus to control the growing unrest. For many, the confines of a prison cell may become the only place that a meal and secure place to sleep can be found. The last remaining chairs of this perverse game will be saved for the cosseted elite who sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme. This social system may seem savage and ‘uncivilized’, but little has changed since the brutal reign of medieval kings up to today’s rule of international bankers and corporate overlords…

…The laws of survival for them are the same now as they were in mediaeval times, when eating above subsistence level was a privilege of those with the means to pay for it… The market economics of the Middle Ages has been brought into the twenty-first century, its brutal indifference unchanged in 500 years…

~ End of More

Thus we are headed for a modern Dark Age: a tyrannical corporate state wielding overwhelming fire power and surveillance capabilities, a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable weather patterns and superstorms, and a blissfully ignorant population eager to find a scapegoat. The time to avert disaster was decades ago, yet the public believes technology is a source of energy as well as a solution to every conceivable problem, that economic growth is a prerequisite to living on Earth, and that anthropocentric climate change is still debatable, if not an outright lie. Our house is on fire and we’re still watching TV. The exit doors have all been super-glued shut with hopium and MSM propaganda. There is no place to run; the deathtrap is foolproof.

Reality filtered through the most effective propagandist tool in history, i.e. the television, has made even climate change a boring non-event for the masses awash in disaster flicks and Hollywood CGI effects.

Some have predicted that we will embrace theocracy as our world falls apart and the myths of modern life can no longer be maintained. The wrath of climate chaos could be interpreted and used as a sign of retribution from God; some already declare such disasters as divine vengeance:

In the absence of government, bishops ruled for decades and even centuries during the Middle Ages with religion as the law and morality system. It’s highly conceivable that the surviving populations will fall back on this authority when governments lose legitimacy, providing that the climate does not spiral too far out of control and allows some humans to reorganize into post-industrial communities. Of course there are other manmade booby traps lying in wait around the globe, as explained by a Guardian reader:

“A sudden cessation of industrial activity, besides financial collapse and the end of a regular and plentiful food supply, will affect every industry from nuclear and chemical to oil and electrical. Deep-sea oil wells, left to themselves when workers desert them to return home to their distressed families, will eventually escape into the oceans. With no-one willing or able to plug them, entire oil-fields will vent until depleted. Nuclear power stations, already the repository of all the nuclear waste of decades of power production will eventually meltdown and every molecule of radioactivity will ultimately escape into the biosphere, irradiating the entire planet to one degree or another while leaving much of it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Poisoned water sources, from chemical leaks and spills as well as polluted underground aquifers created from frenetic and frantic fracking will add to the mess. Returning to even a medieval style of living will be impossible.”

When entire civilizations crumble, megalomaniacs come out of the woodwork to institute their warped agendas and visions of how the world should be. The luxuries and wealth of today’s corporate elite will simply be transferred to this new circle of self-proclaimed holy leaders – televangelists of the post-apocalyptic world. With electricity in short supply, low-tech forms of punishment such as execution by the wheel, quartering, and of course hanging would come back into fashion. Human muscle would make a comeback in a post-fossil fuel world. Given enough time and with the absence of our fossil fuel servants, large-scale human slavery would likely become acceptable again. If you think about it, the wage slaves of today toiling away in mindless, soul-crushing corporate slots are not that far off from forced labor in a rock quarry.

In the mean time, we’ll all be a captive audience to the onslaught of geoengineering schemes soon to commence once governments of the world figure out that food does not grow very well in a destabilized climate and that the 99% will not go quietly into the dark night of ecological overshoot. In a future of catastrophic sea level rise, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” will not apply.

Doomer

07 Sunday Jul 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

≈ 27 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mike Sosebee, Military Industrial Complex, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can’t drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don’t look behind the curtain. There’s a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our ~~corporatocracy~~ democracy, our ~~corporate scripted~~ independent news media, our ~~resource-plundering~~ ‘freedom fighting’ military, our ~~exploitive and destructive~~ wealth-building economy, our move towards a ~~“green-washed”~~ sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we’re on “a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a “feel good” fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…”

Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I’m sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV’s and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.

…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.

Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…

“Doomer”, as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word “collapse” in favor of “decline” seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that’s too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn’t hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.

We Are All Cogs in the Bone-Crushing Wheel of Capitalism

05 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 12 Comments

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Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Disaster Capitalism, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kyle Prindiville, Leon Kuhn, Richard Smith, Slavoj Žižek, The Delusion of Green Capitalism

Two important papers on capitalism by Richard Smith were published in the last few years explaining how capitalism, due to its structural mechanisms, cannot be reformed in any way to make it “sustainable”. In Smith’s papers, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, four primary dictates of capitalism illustrate that no matter how herculean the effort to “green the economy”, whether through energy or other areas, the end result of inexorable environmental destruction as well as incredible social inequality are inevitable.

1.) “Grow or die” is a law of survival in the marketplace:
In capitalism most producers… have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim “grow or die.” First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever-increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to better defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms. Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership, which separates ownership from operation, adds further irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owner-shareholders. And shareholders are not looking for “stasis”; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.
“…relentless and irresistible pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism. Further, I contend that, given capitalism, the first result of any serious reduction in economic output (GDP) to get production back down to some reasonably sustainable level, would be to provoke mass unemployment. So here again, there will never be mass public support for de-growth unless it’s coupled with explicit guarantees of employment for redundant workers, which are unacceptable to capital and would require a socialist economy…”

2.) Maximizing profit and saving the environment are inherently in conflict:
“…Corporations can embrace pro-environmental policies but only so long as these boost profits. Saving the world, however, would require that profit-making be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns…”
“Most of the economy is comprised of large corporations owned by investor-shareholders. And shareholders, even those who are environmentally-minded professors investing via their TIAA-CREF accounts, are constantly seeking to maximize returns on investment. So they sensibly look to invest where they can make the highest return. This means that corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose to produce as much or little as they like, to make the same profits this year as last year. Instead, they face relentless pressure to maximize profits, to make more profits this year than last year (or even last quarter), therefore to maximize sales, therefore to grow quantitatively…
In the real world, therefore, few corporations can resist the relentless pressure to “grow sales,” “grow the company,” “expand market share”– to grow quantitatively. The corporation that fails to outdo its past performance risks falling share value, stockholder flight, or worse… And if economic pressures weren’t sufficient to shape CEO behavior, CEOs are, moreover, legally obligated to maximize profits — and nothing else…”

3.) Consumerism and overconsumption are built into capitalism:
“…consumerism and overconsumption are not “dispensable” and cannot be exorcised because they’re not just “cultural” or “habitual.” They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.”

4.) The masses are dependent on the market:
“Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not possess their own means of subsistence. So in a capitalisteconomy, everyone is first and foremost, dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell, to re-enter production and carry on.”

To illustrate a case study in how impossible it is for even an “environmentally conscious” corporation to be sustainable, Smith discusses Ray Anderson and his company Interface, Inc.

Saint Ray Anderson and the limits of the possible:

“…CEO Ray Anderson has probably pushed the limits of industrial environmentalism as far as it’s humanly possible to go in an actual factory operating within the framework of capitalism. Ray Anderson is everybody’s favorite eco-capitalist and he and his company Interface Inc. have been applauded by virtually every eco-futurist book written since the 1990s as the eco-capitalist example to emulate. But what Ray Anderson’s case really shows us is the limits of the possible, especially under capitalism. For after almost two decades of sustained effort, the goal of “zero pollutants” is still as unreachable as ever at Interface Inc. It is not in the least to diminish Ray Anderson’s sincerity, his passionate dedication, his efforts or his impressive achievements. But the fact is, according to The Interface Sustainability Report of 2009, Interface has “cut waste sent to landfills by more than half while continuing to increase production,” “reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30%,” “reduced energy intensity by 45%,” while “over 25% of raw materials used in interface carpet are recycled and biobased materials in 2007,” and non-sustainable materials consumed per unit of product have declined from 10.2 lbs/yd2 in 1996 to 8.6 lb/yd2 in 2008. Read that last sentence again. Make no mistake: These are impressive, even heroic industrial-environmental achievements. But if after more than fifteen years of sustained effort, the most environmentally dedicated large company in the United States, if not the entire world, can only manage to cut non-sustainable inputs from 10.2 to 8.6 pounds per square yard of finished product, to inject a mere 25% recycled and biobased feedstock into its production process, so still requiring 75% of new, mostly petroleum-based nonsustainable feedstock in every unit of production, then the inescapable conclusion must be that even the greenest businesses are also on course to “destroy the world.” So if the reality is that, when all is said and done, there is “only so much you can do” in most industries, then the only way to bend the economy in an ecological direction is to sharply limit production, especially of toxic products, which means completely redesigning production and consumption – all of which is certainly doable, but impossible under capitalism.”

Fascism 2.0 and Preparing for Energy/Climate Chaos

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Cyberwarfare, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 48 Comments

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America's Collapsing Middle Class, America's Crumbling Infrastructure, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Cyber-Industrial Complex, Cyberwarfare, Disaster Capitalism, Fascism 2.0, General Keith "The Emperor" Alexander, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, NSA, Peak Oil, Principle of Imminent Collapse, PRISM, Security and Surveillance State, State-Corporate Capitalism

With the infrastructure of America still scoring a “D+” by the American Society of Civil Engineers and needing $3.6 trillion in maintenance repairs by 2020, I find it ironic we are now going to spend $30 billion to militarize the U.S./Mexico border by adding tens of thousands of agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and of course more surveillance equipment. An additional irony is that illegal immigration from Mexico is the lowest it has been in decades. Both these contradictions make it clear this militarization of the border is just another extension of America’s surveillance and security complex.

What Are We Protecting?

America’s once prosperous middle class was put on the chopping block decades ago by the corporate elite who have looked overseas for profits from cheap labor and the expanding middle class of developing countries like China. As of today, the U.S. middle class now ranks 27th in the world and the wages of American workers just recorded their fastest drop in history. There is a long list of social and economic signs illustrating America’s decay, and none of them benefit from an out-of-control military industrial complex that uses up more than half of every tax dollar. It appears to me that America’s spying apparatus is more about economic hegemony and controlling a possible unruly and impoverished domestic population than detecting the actions of any phantom terrorist.

All About the Benjamin$

The primary driving force behind the expansion of the military and surveillance complex is the corporate cash cow of government contracts:

Speaking about possibly the world’s most powerful man, General Keith “The Emperor” Alexander, ZeroHedge quotes from an article describing the amount of money and resources pouring into the construction of America’s cyber-industrial complex at his behest:

Fascism 2.0

The degree of merging between U.S. state and corporate power have recently been revealed to be disturbingly far-reaching and abusive. As John Pilger points out, it is a modern day, high-tech version of classic fascism:

Preparing for Imminent Collapse

Now we get to where all this is leading. The military analysts are well aware of peak oil and climate change, both of which have been identified as national security threats. Both will bring down industrial civilization in the not too distant future, and the ruling elite are planing for the social and economic chaos that is to come. Not to worry… Disaster Capitalism will save us.

Mankind has constructed a global civilization dependent on such things as interconnected communication and computer networks, shipping and flight routes, international supply chains, just-in-time inventory systems, and an interwoven financial system. The fragility of the system to energy and climate shocks will increase as long as we are tied to a growth-oriented and fossil fuel-dependent economy. The collapse could literally come overnight the longer we resist change and push the biophysical limits of the planet.

One moment humans are “on top of the world”, and the next moment…

Another Dire Report from a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

20 Thursday Jun 2013

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

≈ 10 Comments

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'Food for Fuel' Biofuels, 'Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes - Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Global Famine, Gross Inequality, Hurricane Sandy, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Poverty, Sea Level Rise, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The Global Land Grab, War on Terror, World Bank, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim

Building on a report which came out late last year, the World Bank released another report yesterday with the catchy title of ‘Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience‘. It was prepared for them by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and describes the effects of present day, 2°C, and 4°C (or 7.2° F) warming on agriculture, water resources, coastal ecosystems and cities across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia. Here are the key findings:

– By the 2030s, droughts and heat will leave 40% of the land in Sub-Saharan Africa, presently growing maize, unable to support that crop.

– Rising temperatures threaten major loss of savanna grasslands and the pastoral livelihoods of millions.

– By the 2050s, malnutrition is projected to increase by 25-90 percent compared to the present in various African subregions.

– In South Asia, the critical monsoon season may become erratic and unpredictable, precipitating a major crisis in the region.

– The devastating Pakistan floods of 2010 may become common place, threatening tens of millions.

– Extreme droughts across India may threaten their food system and lead to widespread shortages.

– As a temperature increase of 4°C approaches, rural populations across South East Asia are faced with sea level rise, more intense tropical cyclones, and loss of critical marine ecosystem services.

– Climate refugees fleeing into urban areas may lead to larger numbers of people living in ‘temporary’ camps which will increase their exposure to heat waves, flooding, and diseases.

– Sea level rise has been occurring faster than previously projected and a rise of as much as 50 cm by the 2050s may already be unavoidable as a result of past emissions.

– By the 2030s a sea level rise of 15 cm, coupled with more intense cyclones, threatens to inundate much of Manilla, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok.

Obviously this sort of climatic change is going to increase terrorism and war as well as tax the electric grid and infrastructure of industrial civilization. It may get so unbearable that many will pray for NTE.

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim had this to say:

This new report outlines an alarming scenario for the days and years ahead – what we could face in our lifetime. The scientists tell us that if the world warms by 2°C — warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years — that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heat-waves, and more intense cyclones. In the near-term, climate change, which is already unfolding, could batter the slums even more and greatly harm the lives and the hopes of individuals and families who have had little hand in raising the Earth’s temperature.

He goes on to add the following hopium:

I do not believe the poor are condemned to the future scientists envision in this report. In fact, I am convinced we can reduce poverty even in a world severely challenged by climate change. We can help cities grow clean and climate resilient, develop climate smart agriculture practices, and find innovative ways to improve both energy efficiency and the performance of renewable energies. We can work with countries to roll back harmful fossil fuel subsidies and help put the policies in place that will eventually lead to a stable price on carbon.

Spare me the false concern with the world’s poor and destitute. Has the World Bank lifted a finger to stop the global land grab?

…The World Bank has played a decisive role in turning agriculture into an industry, and promoting the ever-increasing incorporation of natural goods into the market. Everything seems to indicate that it remains faithful to this role today, and continues to facilitate land grabs that represent great business opportunities for capitalists but greater dispossession for rural communities. – source

Without a complete paradigm shift, there can be no other outcome except economic collapse, famine, pestilence, war, and a major population contraction. When the wolves are in sheep’s clothing, expect business-as-usual. Reports describing the dire nature of our predicament will continue to be published just as every prediction in said reports becomes reality. Population overshoot, resource depletion, and a destabilized climate cannot be mitigated by making cities “clean and climate resilient.” If you recall, the mega-cities of today are by their very nature unsustainable because they import vast amounts of resources to support their overstretched ecological footprint. The World Bank report even says that 50cm sea level rise is likely already baked into the cake from past emissions, all the while CO2 and methane levels continue to rise. How would you make all the coastal cities, whose residents comprise a major portion of the world’s population, “climate resilient”? Last time I checked, the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy was still visible and many people were rebuilding right where their house previously stood, with the hope that Sandy was a “once in a lifetime event”. “Develop climate smart agriculture practices” is code for GMOing our way out of this problem. A “stable price” for carbon? Is that going to stop China’s coal consumption?

…Despite its efforts to limit coal consumption and focus on alternative fuel sources, China’s thermal coal demand was expected to double by 2030, analyst Wood Mackenzie reported this week.

In a paper titled ‘China: The Illusion of Peak Coal’, Wood Mackenzie reported that the Asian major’s demand would grow to around seven-billion tons a year of thermal coal, which was contrary to speculation that China’s thermal coal demand may reach a peak in the next decade.

“It is very unlikely that demand for thermal coal in China will peak before 2030,” said William Durbin, Wood Mackenzie’s Beijing-based president of global markets.

“Why? Because China’s aggressive investment programme for nuclear, natural gas and renewables capacity is centred in the coastal region while coal-fired capacity grows in the central and western provinces. Indeed, there are also a plethora of coal-intensive conversion projects being built or planned that are significantly adding to demand.”…

…“Government mandates to improve the environment by reducing coal use will require steep investments in alternatives, the use of emission control technology or reduced economic growth rate targets – options which are not currently happening,” Durbin said.

“But what is noteworthy, however, is that there is greater potential for further demand growth beyond our expectations. Failure to meet an aggressive noncoal-power capacity build, investment in more efficient technologies and the expansion of the UHV network will increase the dependence on and use of coal. In the end, China’s thermal coal demand will see persistent growth until 2030, rendering peak coal an illusion.

Humans can talk about becoming sustainable until they are blue in the face, but with a global population growing by more than 200k per day, the rest of the planet striving for a high consumption western lifestyle, and external environmental costs of business(doubling every 14 years) ignored by corporations, how can that ever be possible? It won’t… until it can’t.

Current Reality Vs. Utopian Visions of Technology and Wealth

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 25 Comments

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Brazilian Protests, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Libertarianism, Methane Time Bomb, Neoliberal Capitalism, Poverty, Privatization, Seasteading Institute, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technophiliacs, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

“No respect for nature, only a destructive, elitist,

machine-like attitude towards nature.” ~ Iamronen

More threatening than the recent milestone of reaching 400 parts per million CO2 (ppm) is that of a methane level reaching 1800 parts per billion (ppb) which occured on the morning of June 16, 2013. This is more than two and a half times the methane levels of pre-industrial times.

From a historic perspective, greenhouse gas levels have risen abruptly to unprecedented levels. While already at a historic peak, humans have caused emissions of additional greenhouse gases. There’s no doubt that such greenhouse gas levels will lead to huge rises in temperatures. The question is how long it will take for temperatures to catch up and rise. – source

Robert Scribbler also reports that a persistently stagnant(blocked) and bulging Jet Stream has delivered historic heat waves to that region of Alaska and the Arctic. Melt ponds can be seen from satellite images:

…Yesterday, temperatures in Prince William Sound hit upwards of 93 degrees. Communities there, including Valdez and Cordova, both set new record highs. Talkeetna hit 94 degrees, also an all-time record high for the date. Meanwhile, Seward hit a new record of 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures in the interior rose to between the mid 80s and lower 90s.

This pulse of heat was driven by a persistent bulge in the Jet Stream over the Pacific Ocean, the Western United States, and the Pacific Northwest that has been present since mid winter. The bulge has resulted in warmer than normal temperatures and drier conditions for much of the Western US while keeping temperatures warm for western Canada and Alaska. It is a blocking pattern implicated in the ongoing drought conditions in places from Colorado to Nevada and California. A pattern which sees 44% of the US still locked in drought.

Sunday and Monday, this blocking pattern enabled warm air to flood north into Alaska, setting off a record heatwave there. You may not think of 50 and 60 degree temperatures in Barrow, Alaska as a heatwave. But when average highs for June there are about 38 degrees, 50 and 60 degree weather is quite hot for this time of year…

Last month it was reported that America will ‘officially’ see its own first climate refugees within the next four years:

The 350 residents of Newtok, Alaska, will soon be the country’s first “climate refugees.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the village is likely to be underwater in just four years…

…”The snow comes in a different time now. The snow disappears way late,” says villager Nathan Tom. “That’s making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they’re starting to lay eggs when there’s still snow and ice. We can’t even travel and go pick them. It’s getting harder. It’s changing a lot.”…

…The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the cost of moving Newtok — with 63 homes — might reach $130 million. The people of Newtok do not have that kind of money, Goldenberg says.

“These people are living well below the average income of other Americans. They’re able to live that way because they hunt and fish for what they eat,” she says. “So they can’t all of a sudden go and build and pay for new houses on the other side.”

The money has not been forthcoming from the government either, Goldenberg says. Neither the state nor federal government recognizes climate change as a disaster for the appropriation of relief funds…

Contrast this stark reality with the wildly unrealistic views of man’s technological infallibility. A concept which appeared back in 2008 is the utopia of floating cities, called “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees”, which would hold 50,000 climate refugees as the coasts become inundated with rising sea water. I wonder how well these things, if they even were feasible and the money, materials, and energy were available, would hold up to the kinds of hurricanes that climate chaos would throw at it. No doubt it would fold up and sink to the bottom of the ocean like a tin pan:

Actually, there is another idea similar to the one above which was/is being planned by a billionaire libertarian. I can’t think of a more elitist view towards the Earth and fellow humans than this libertarian wet dream:

Picture from the Seasteading Institute…

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late…

As I said in my previous post, the über wealthy will try to insulate themselves from climate chaos, leaving the masses in their countries as climate refugees and victims of industrial civilization’s climate disaster. And the shit rolls downhill; third world countries and the poor will bear the brunt of it all. As you can see from the first part of this post, Native Americans in Alaska, some of America’s most disenfranchised and poverty-stricken citizens, will be the first to be flushed down the toilet of neoliberal capitalism. Perhaps we should take note of current events in Brazil.

Staring Into the Abyss

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Canfield Ocean, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dystopic Future, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Technophiliacs, The Anthropocene Age, The Great Cleansing

I’ll admit, I don’t really read far into any of the scientific analyses. They all point the same direction: massive discontinuity and unpredictability, what some describe as nonlinear. Armed as I am with only a modest science education, the most basic fact still able to be grokked by the masses is that we live on a water world, where oceans are both the base of the food chain and the creator/regulator of the air we land-based creature breathe. The oceans need not die in their totality before withdrawal of their support functions kills us, yet we behave as if it’s all expendable. We can’t even admit such basic biological mechanisms, so the oceans are simultaneously overharvested and used as dump sites for everything. Real smart, like the rest of collective mistakes.”

~ Brutus

Hello fellow collapsitarians, train wreck rubberneckers, concerned citizens, and everyone in between. My time for respite from the horrors of capitalist industrial civilization has arrived wherein I let this site sit fallow for a couple of weeks. When I rail against capitalism, this doesn’t by default make me a proponent of communism or any other ‘ism’. Globalized capitalism is what has conquered the world and it happens to be the current ‘ism’ destroying the biosphere with the industrial efficiency and speed of a Nazi gas chamber. The time to have created another ‘ism’ which may have saved humans from omnicide has long since passed. We are hurdling towards the end of the Anthropocene and into a period I call ‘The Great Cleansing’, whereby Mother Nature scrubs the Earth of all the hubristic artifacts and baggage of modern man. Of course there will quite a bit of noxious material that she’ll have to deal with and absorb such as radioactive waste, plastics, and CO2, but what is a few million years of remediation when compared to the Earth’s age of nearly 5 billion years with perhaps another 7.5 billion to go until consumed by the Sun. Despite all the insults and neglect that she has suffered at our hands, she will probably allow a small tribe of humans to survive the bottleneck. It would be a shame for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to have no beneficiaries, would it not?

What was our major downfall? I think we put too much faith in technology. Indeed we have used our big brains to solve many seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but we’ve put our technological cleverness on a pedestal at the expense of everything else. Technology has become the God of the 21st Century, the saviour for all of industrial civilization’s increasingly complex and insoluble problems. Granted, it has allowed man to search the stars and decode the DNA of life, but in the process it has clouded our memory of where we’ve come from, the womb from whence we were born. We’re just temporary visitors here with no preeminent right to rule the world above all other living things, and it looks increasingly like we have overstayed our welcome. While Homo sapiens are busy arguing about who or what is responsible for their current predicament, Mother Nature is slowly ramping up her fury. Geophysical forces on a planetary scale have been unleashed; they can no longer be contained by the scientific computations and laboratory tinkerings of mankind. The die has been cast and our fate sealed. No geo-engineering scheme or whiz-bang techno fix can contain her. As the Arctic melts away, followed by the Greenland ice sheet, and then the West Antarctic, our coastal cities will succumb to the sea. Jet streams and hydrologic cycles will transfigure themselves. Our once hospitable and stable seasons for agriculture will become erratic, the water sparse, and the land barren. The great oceanic currents will stall and break down, creating the anoxic and purple-hued waters of a ‘Canfield Ocean‘. As Paul said, the human race is “living in some kind of fantasy land, a land in which truth is avoided”, but a handful of us have peered into the abyss of the unfolding eco-apocalypse, and the stark reality of mankind’s own extinction has been seared into our brains.

How do we go on from here? …one day at a time. What once was important has become trivial. This would include all of the trappings and illusions of mainstream culture. Functioning in this “fantasy world” and going through the motions seems otherworldly and fake. We feel like blurting our what we know to those around us, but we can’t. There’s a straitjacket awaiting us at the nearest insane asylum. No one believes what the cold hard facts and trends have told us after we discarded the rose-tinted glasses society demands everyone wear. And why should they? It’s a traumatic experience to the psyche. Everything about the world you have been taught, all the myths of eternal progress and man’s place in the universe, comes crashing down in a thousand pieces.

So the question remains of how to live in a world of illusions and fakery. Gravitate towards that which is real. Shut off your TV and walk outside to breath in the summer air and run your fingers along the bark of an ancient tree, hike into the wilderness and watch the stars at night, spend one-on-one time with those close to you. They don’t need to know what you know; most will refuse to believe the facts even when meticulously laid out before their eyes. Leave them in their comfort zone, at least for a little while longer or until they become curious. A citizen of modern industrial civilization who confronts the horrific future awaiting their unsustainable way-of-living is like a drug abuser trying to deal with his self-destructive addiction. Both are under the spell of a very powerful force that does not let go until death. They are prisoners, mentally and physically. To talk about this dark subject, the collapse of industrial civilization and mankind’s impending extinction, join a group of like-minded people. Such clubs seem to be growing these days.

It’s a bit odd talking into the ether of the internet to people I will never meet or hear the voices of, but such a venue is really the only place a dissident voice can be heard in today’s atomized and one-dimensional society. For the reasons discussed above, I cannot speak of these disturbing topics to anyone else. This is my only outlet.

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

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

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.

A Note on the Recent Terrorist Bombings

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Boston Marathon Bombings, Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Iraq, Military Industrial Complex, Religious Extremism, Resource Wars, Saudi Arabia, Security and Surveillance State, War for Profit, War on Terror

The horrific bombings which took place recently at the Boston Marathon are the most significant terrorist attack to have occurred on U.S. soil since 9-11. My condolences go out to the innocent victims. Ideologies of any sort can be twisted to justify abhorrent acts. This terrorist act opens up old wounds for an Empire which in the last decade has gone on the offensive, spending vast resources on foreign wars and a security and surveillance state. Even with such Herculean expenditures, the asymmetric nature of terrorism demonstrates there is no foolproof solution for preventing such acts. The perpetrators spent perhaps a few hundred bucks on their homemade bombs, and we spend incalculable multiples of treasure and blood in return. This was really the goal of Osama bin Laden – to draw the Empire into costly wars and expenditures of life and limb. As has been stated by others, the best that can be hoped for from a military standpoint is to keep terrorist groups in a constant degraded and disorganized state. As much as left-leaning individuals as myself like to point out the foreign policy “transgressions”(to put it mildly) of the American Empire, decades of capitalist imperialism will never be put back into the bottle. Such bombings are pretty much daily occurrences in war-ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other areas of the Middle East. Our incursions into those countries only seem to have fueled the fire.

A law enforcement official had some interesting info on the bombings:

…A preliminary analysis of the bombs, which went off near the race’s finish line on Boylston Street, suggests they are similar to the improvised explosive devices found in war-torn regions like Iraq and Afghanistan, the law enforcement official said.

“The shrapnel, the simplicity of it — it’s something right out of the Iraq War. A basic roadside bomb,” the official said.

That “basic bomb” can be seen in the design of the Boston bombs, the law enforcement official said: pressure cookers stuffed with nails, ball bearings and other projectiles, and hidden in black duffel bags left near the 26.2 mile mark in the race.

What appear to be fragments from a pressure cooker were recovered at the scene, along with BBs, nails and black-nylon fragments possibly from a bag used to house the device, the FBI said.

Black explosive powder and a circuit board believed to have been used to detonate the bombs were also found, the federal official said.

Similar explosives have been used in third-world hot spots from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, and one of the devices used in the botched bombing of Times Square in May 2010 employed a pressure cooker.

The Pakistani Taliban, which claimed blame for the 2010 Times Square attempt, said it had no role in the Boston attack, according to The Associated Press.

A 2010 bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned pressure-cooker bombs are as easy to transport as they are to conceal.

“Terrorists can exploit the innocuous appearance of easily transportable items such as pressure cookers to conceal IED components,” the alert said. “Placed carefully, such devices provide little or no indication of an impending attack.”

That some victims lost limbs in the blast puts the device “into a powerful class,” said John Goodpaster, head of the forensic science program at Indiana University–Purdue University, and former chemist with the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Goodpaster said the blasts appeared to be from a “high explosive of some kind, military explosive, commercial explosive or improvised explosive.”
…

The sooner the world can get off MENA oil, thereby pulling the plug on the financial network of terrorist groups, the better off we’ll all be, not to mention our indispensable biosphere.

According to Wikipedia resources:

…Saudi Arabia is said to be the world’s largest source of funds for Salafi jihadist terrorist militant groups, such as al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia, and donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide, according to Hillary Clinton.^[1] According to a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.”^[2]

The violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan is partly bankrolled by wealthy, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them.^[1] Three other Arab countries which are listed as sources of militant money are Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, all neighbors of Saudi Arabia…

In an encouraging sign, The small country of Portugal is now running its economy on 70% renewables, serving as a role model for the rest of the world.

…Actually 70 percent isn’t unheard of for Portugal. For a few hours in 2011, Portugal was entirely run on renewable power. Yet this was the first time so much was sustained for a quarter.

Portugal’s investment in modernizing its electricity grid in 2000 has come in handy. Like in many countries, power companies owned their own transmission lines. What the government did in 2000 was to buy all the lines, creating a publicly owned and traded company to operate them. This was used to create a smart grid that renewable energy producers could connect to (encouraged by government-organized auctions to build new wind and hydro plants)…

Of course planet Earth has an avalanche of environmental problems coming to a head in the near future (all caused by humans, mind you), but it’s good to see some accomplishments in at least one area of human impact – reduction of fossil fuels – even if it may be too little, too late.

Ruled By Hi-Tech Savages

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Andrew Feinstein - Author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, Arms Dealers, Capitalism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Danny Schechter, Democracy Now, Empire, Faux Democracy, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, War for Profit

The blood-drenched money interests of U.S. weapons manufacturers and the military industrial complex win again:

While President Obama has forcefully called out Congress for not passing gun control, the United States has been one of the leading countries blocking a global treaty to regulate the $70 billion international arms trade, torpedoing it last summer and dragging its feet on it this week at the United Nations. While Iran, Syria and North Korea are generating headlines for officially blocking the treaty, less attention has been paid to the role of the U.S. — acceding to pressure from outside groups including the National Rifle Association — in stalling its progress.

In an earlier post ‘The Sandy Hook Massacre and the Merchant$ of Death‘, we talked about the control that the U.S. weapons industry and the military industrial complex(MIC) have over ‘our’ government. The MIC dictates American foreign policy in the interests of not only Big Oil and corporate capitalism, but also the U.S. arms industry which sees big profits in war and strife. Some call this corrupt arrangement the military-industrial-congressional complex or military-industrial-banking complex. Perpetual war has become an integral part of our economy and a majority of our wealthy Congress ‘leaders’ are heavily invested in this war-for-profit machine. Chances are that your 401K, if you still have one, is invested in the MIC one way or another. Here is the latest infographic illustrating our war-based economy:

And the costs keep getting bigger and bigger as the Empire bleeds its citizens dry at home, spreads ill will and animosity abroad, and continues to funnel wealth upward to the oligarch class:

This is why I have said that America is ‘The World’s Most Destabilizing Force‘. Do you really think a “pussy-ass” topic of saving the biosphere will ever be taken seriously? Environmental issues will always be relegated to the back pages when you have savages running the show.

If the supposed “most enlightened” and “advanced” nation on Earth profits from death and destruction and uses Orwellian titles, for example Operation [Iraqi] Freedom, to label their military invasions, then how can we judge the behavior and actions of foreign nations when they are often the blowback from America’s own depravity. A nation using high-tech weapons of war to plunder and murder while hiding behind the façade of democratic institutions and kangaroo courts is still a country of savages and barbarians, no different than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun.

…Emmy-award winning TV journalist, author and media critic, Danny Schechter turns the cameras on the role of the media. His new film, WMD, is an outspoken assessment of how Pentagon propaganda and media complicity misled the American people…