As I’ve explained in the past, my peculiar work routine really makes this site a sort of biweekly affair. So in keeping with that loose schedule, I’ll be taking the next several days off and will post again in earnest after Christmas. In the meantime, I’ll be partaking in the traditional family yuletide activities such as drinking funky-tasting eggnog and cruising through the neighborhood to take in all the lit up decorations like inflatable Walmart snowmen and Santas. Notwithstanding everything I’ve blogged about here, the world’s not coming to an end, right? Putin apparently had a 4 hour news conference which included this very subject:
So all these observable facts that we’ve been documenting here are just our own personal viewpoint of the world and certainly not the perspective held by the vast majority of the population, including world dictators leaders. We should just take a ‘glass is half full’ point of view, shouldn’t we?:
1.) Peak Oil? Not a problem… We’ve got more fossil fuels to exploit as revealed by the melting Arctic. And of course we can always fall back on our seemingly endless supply of coal:
2.) Overpopulation? Not a problem. Endocrine disrupting chemicals and other stressors of industrial civilization are decimating the sperm count of the global male population:
3.) Climate Change? The top minds of science are right on top of this one. Who said you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again:
4.) And the most dire threat of all… The Fiscal Cliff. Are you kidding? The bankers and corporate elite already have that one solved. Three for them and none for you:
…Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty – with cash incomes as low as $10,000 a year for a family of four. Is it any wonder that the US has the third highest poverty rate out of 30 leading industrial nations?
The problem is exacerbated by decades of economic and political policies that have resulted in a massive shift of national wealth from working people to the corporate boardrooms and the yacht owners. One result: real wage growth for workers has stagnated for 30 years; median household income has steadily fallen since the Wall Street produced economic crash of 2008. Much of the limited job growth since then has been in the lowest wage sectors, primarily food service and retail.
Sadly, the issue remained almost as invisible on the 2012 campaign trail as it was when Harrington shocked the nation in 1962. But it is not a surprise to nurses who, every day, see the faces of poverty and the suffering of families left behind – even as corporate profits once again soar and the parties and good times are back on Wall Street…
Well, we can always take up dumpster diving in the wealthy neighborhoods. I hear they “throw a lot of good shit away.”
Have a merry Christmas and don’t let the bastards wear you down!!!
…we encounter another fact about our planetary life: the fragility of the balances through which the natural world that we know survives. In the field of climate, the sun’s radiations, the earth’s emissions, the universal influence of the oceans, and the impact of the ice are unquestionably vast and beyond any direct influence on the part of man. But the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation, the interplay of forces which preserves the average global level of temperature appear to be so even, so precise, that only the slightest shift in the energy balance could disrupt the whole system. It takes only the smallest movement at its fulcrum to swing a seesaw out of the horizontal. It may require only a very small percentage of change in the planet’s balance of energy to modify average temperatures by 2C. Downward, this is another ice age; upward, a return to an ice-free age. In either case, the effects are global and catastrophic.
~ Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet)
In my two posts about climate tipping points, I spoke of the Amazon forest and boreal forests as specific tipping points, but we can lump the planet’s entire collection of wood, forest and jungle ecosystems into one global system that will be decimated in the current human-generated climate armageddon. Man will realize he is just a temporary visitor of planet Earth, soon to be evicted by the cruel and unforgiving laws of nature. The following factors, now well underway, will obliterate the Earth’s tree ecosystems in the coming decades: massive pest outbreaks like that of the bark beetle into new regions whose climate zones have been altered, hotter and more severe droughts, the spread of invasive weedy plants which act as fuel for bigger and more devastating wildfires, and the spread of tree-killing diseases.
There are four recent articles in the news which describe how we are fast converting the world’s woods, forests, and jungles from massive carbon sinks into massive carbon emitters, ultimately to treeless wastelands:
These studies sound a warning bell that we can expect to see forest diebacks become more widespread, more frequent and more severe — and that no forests are immune,” Engelbrecht continued. “The ramifications of this scenario are diverse and, in many respects, dire: forest mortality will be accompanied by changes in species composition, changes in ecosystem function and losses of services and biodiversity.
Professor Frank Fenner’s prediction will invariably come to pass. And the intuition of the unwashed masses is correct – we are living in End Times:
But no ‘believers’ will be saved from this eco-apocalypse and no God will appear. The only thing visited upon mankind will be his own self-annihilation brought on by ignorance, hubris, and greed.
In this post I want to elaborate more on DK’s comment from my last entry:
…Pre-capitalist tribes had examples of both success and failure, perhaps equal measure of both. The key principle to these types of cultures succeeding is the principle of superabundance. There is strong correlation to the disappearance of superabundance and destructive tendencies…
In his essay ‘Are Wars Inevitable?‘, William T. Hathaway explains that modern research has shown that scarcity of resources acts as a trigger for social strife and that violence and war is NOT a genetic predisposition of humans:
…research, however, led to a key discovery: The chimps who invaded their neighbors were suffering from shrinking territory and food sources. They were struggling for survival. Groups with adequate resources didn’t raid other colonies. The aggression wasn’t a behavioral constant but was caused by the stress they were under. Their genes gave them the capacity for violence, but the stress factor had to be there to trigger it into combat. This new research showed that war is not inevitable but rather a function of the stress a society is under. Our biological nature doesn’t force us to war, it just gives us the potential for it. Without stress to provoke it, violence can remain one of the many unexpressed capacities our human evolution has given us. Studies by professors Douglas Fry, Frans de Waal, and Robert Sapolsky present the evidence for this.
Militarists point to history and say it’s just one war after another. But that’s the history only of our patriarchal civilization. The early matriarchal civilization of south-eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of peace. UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas describes the archeological research in The Civilization of the Goddess. No trace of warfare has been found in excavations of the Minoan, Harappa, and Caral cultures. Many of the Pacific islands were pacifistic. The ancient Vedic civilization of India had meditation techniques that preserved the peace, and those are being revived today to reduce stress in society...
Now DK goes on to say that in the absence of plentiful resources, the only logical and sane option is to give up our current exploitive and pathological economic model of capitalism and replace it with something that reflects today’s reality of rampant resource depletion and environmental collapse. Modern weapons of war are infinitely more destructive and, in and of themselves, pose a danger to all of mankind and global civilization; hence the need to get rid of capitalism is even more imperative:
…When superabundance is (inevitably) rendered invalid, it must be supplanted by a means to re-appropriate surplus in a fair and equitable manner- devoid of exploitation and informed by tangible limits, such as those posed by the environment and population limits. Such a system is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering- nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.
One could say that mankind’s ability or inability to successfully transition away from the self-destructive nature of capitalism will determine the fate of the whole human species. Tragedy of the commons, as I said previously, is on a global scale now. Hathaway goes on to elaborate a little on capitalism’s dog-eat-dog tendencies and the need to move away from this paradigm:
Our society, though, has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism’s need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We’ve been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it’s really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they’re so built into us…
…We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world’s resources more evenly… But that’s going to take basic changes…
These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemies. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable.
In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule over us, Blacks were inferior to Whites, women should obey men. We’ve outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.
Of course, as Gail of ‘Wit’s End’ pointed out, we will inevitably need to address the problem of overpopulation:
…although once upon a time some tribes (arguably) may have lived cooperatively and harmoniously (although the opposite is certainly more common) the only reason they could do so is because their numbers were so low and food was plentiful and relatively easy to obtain. Once human population outstrips resources, things get ugly no matter what social or cultural system is in place. And I don’t know of a place where human population didn’t eventually overrun the environment, with the possible exception of cultures that practiced infanticide, or had the ability to export people willing to emigrate.
It seems to me the problem is that we have filled every corner of the globe that is remotely habitable, and then some, and yet our population and levels of consumption continue to increase. There is no place left to emigrate to. It can’t last.
Resource constraints(i.e. peak oil, peak fertilizer, peak water) on our fossil fuel based agricultural system as well as environmental degradation(i.e. climate change and ocean acidification) are going to cause an epic population crash during this century before we have time, or for that matter the cooperation and agreement, to implement any sort of voluntary population reduction.
As far as implementing this egalitarian distribution model, I also agree that the odds of that happening are slim to none, as DK said:
…Such a system[egalitarian and respective of resource limits] is not compatible with profit seeking, as many in the environmental movement are now discovering – nor has it ever been put successfully into practice.
Nor is it likely to be.
Unfortunately, the world’s stockpile of thermonuclear weapons may not stay on the shelf forever, especially in a world where the Four Horsemen of Industrial Civilization are quickly converging: Climate Change, Peak Net Energy, Ocean Acidification, and Peak Water. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try everything we can to stop what seems to be our inevitable fate; I’m just saying that the prognosis is grim.
The following thoughts were emailed to me by Adam at speciesurvivalibrary and they appeared as a comment on the message board of Nature Bats Last dated November 28. The readers “found it quite moving”, as did I. Therefore, I compiled a video at the end to go along with Daniel’s articulate and resonating words. The scientific confirmations this year of the havoc industrial civilization has wrought to our one and only home have truly been life-altering for me, forcing me to question and re-evaluate everything. For those who have begun to internalize the cold reality of what lies in the not too distant future for mankind, the proverbial rug has been pulled out from under your world. We have unleashed Pandora’s box and the demons are methodically throwing off balance and unravelling the world we once knew, shattering the illusion of man’s dominion over nature.
The claims of near term extinction for mankind are getting stronger and stronger as new scientific evidence is released. Sometime before the end of this century, we’ll all be toast, so any measures we take now at “building resilience” will only be short-lived exercises in self-preservation. That’s how short-sighted we humans are: no consideration for the children and future generations. As long as we can stay comfortably cocooned within the wasteful amenities and faux culture distractions of industrial civilization, we’ll keep sucking on the great ‘carbon energy’ cigar to keep the illusion going, despite the fact that we’re committing species suicide. We are like the domesticated animal that can no longer survive in the natural world. Our addiction to fossil fuels has literally become an ingrained trait, selectively advantageous in the short-term but ultimately leading to our own evolutionary dead end.
If you missed it, the latest news is that, contrary to the propaganda put out by climate change deniers, the Antarctic is not gaining ice, but losing ice:
This is not good news. A new international study—done by 47 experts using data from multiple satellites and aircraft—shows that the Earth is losing ice at an ever-increasing rate from both poles. We’ve known for years that the Arctic has been suffering massive ice loss, with the record low broken more than once in recent years. What’s devastating about this new report is that it shows unequivocally and quantitatively that the Antarctic is also losing land ice, with the critical West Antarctica ice sheet losing on average 65 billion tons of ice every year.
Measuring ice is difficult to do and uncertainties are generally pretty big. By combining several different methods from several different sources, the scientists were able to get the best, most accurate measurements ever made. These new data show that the ice loss from both poles has increased by a factor of three since the 1990s. Just Greenland—the largest source of fresh water ice in the Northern Hemisphere—is losing ice at a rate five times what it did just in the 1990s: about 142 billion tons per year.
Together, since 1992, this ice melt has added over a centimeter (about a half inch) to sea level rise. That may not sound like much, but it doesn’t take much rise in sea levels to start causing catastrophic changes in erosion, storms, and flooding. Worse, this accounts for only about one-fifth of the total amount of sea level rise. Much of the rise is due to the water in the oceans expanding due to warming and other sources.
There’s a double whammy for you: Global warming is increasing the amount of water in the oceans from melting ice, and also increasing the sea level rise by heating up the water itself…
…This new study wipes out yet another false claim from climate change deniers, too. A common refrain from them is that Antarctic ice is increasing, not decreasing. However, this is not true for two reasons. The first is that they count sea ice in that measure. However, Antarctic sea ice tends to melt away completely every year in the spring and summer, and then it reforms in the winter. It therefore on average does not contribute to sea level rise or to the heat budget of the Earth. Second, this new study shows the claim is wrong anyway. We are losing ice from Antarctica every year, and it’s the critical land ice…
I’m sorry to say this, but all the ghastly visions of runaway climate change may very well come to fruition, wiping any trace of humans off the face of the Earth. In the end, man wasn’t really any different from lowly bacteria overwhelming the confines of a petri dish and extinguishing themselves. I’m sure we’ll have amassed an amazing trove of video, literature and other media documenting the horrors to come so that when some alien race visits the planet in the future, they will be able to watch bemused at how humans killed themselves off in the name of “progress” and a dollar.
Michael Sandmel:
“We make up half the world’s population, and frankly, we’re being screwed. We’re being denied a future by a lack of ambition, a lack of vision, and governments that are far too beholden to the interests of big fossil fuel companies, big coal companies, the banks that fund them.”
Zobama and Zomney had lunch Thursday afternoon to compare notes on how best to accelerate the growth of our death-dealing economy and bring on the Eco-Apocalypse of the planet. Their plans suffered a small setback in 2008 when the speculator vultures and moneychanger vampires over-engorged themselves on the working stiffs whose blood supply is still critically low.
The success thus far on the progress of zombification of the planet was discussed, with lavish praise going to the fossil fuel industry for their superb job in keeping the working stiffs hopelessly addicted to the ancient black elixir and hopelessly confused about the end results of such an addiction.
Both agreed that soon the living arrangements on the planet will be perfect for zombies and the few remaining humans will quickly fall prey to a lifeless and uninhabitable environment suitable only for the ranks of the undead.
If you’re not really going to do anything about our omnicidal alteration of the planet, then it would make sense that you would host such a climate talk charade in the most profligate, fossil-fuel dealing, energy-gorging city on the planet – another irony for the ages as this blog below points out. Isn’t that like holding an alcoholics anonymous meeting inside a liquor store?
In Guy McPherson’s talk which was the subject of my last post, he said that those living in the inner part of the American Empire, the Great Plain States, would be in a whole lot of trouble in the coming decades. To elaborate on that statement, read the article below to see how things are literally fading away, soon to give new meaning to the term “dry county” (emphasis in red by the energy skeptic):
And history repeats itself, despite all our fancy techno-gadgetry and state-of-the-art instruments giving us unparalleled warning signs of our impending demise. The ApocoDocs recently quipped something to the effect of, “If we can foresee the collapse, then we can prevent it. Right? RIGHT!”
When you have at your disposal all the tools and knowledge to avert your own death, but collectively choose not to utilize them, that just makes it all the more tragic:
Now if that story doesn’t illustrate to you the ingrained, institutionalized insanity of the people running the show, I don’t know what will. I told you in a previous post they think the planet is one big ShamWow towelette for man’s endless flow of waste. A commenter on the above story gives a laundry list of examples illustrating how humans are complete failures at managing waste, concluding with the following statement:
…Unfortunately, industrial humans have always “managed” their wastes by throwing it away. This works well in a world with low population, or with a largely poor population that can’t object to living in someone else’s toilet. In the modern world, though, “away” is going away. (It’s worth noting that it does NOT have to be this way. Current conditions pertain because it is convenient/profitable, not because responsible waste management is impossible. But that’s another topic entirely.)
Hofmeister is proposing that we apply the same approach that we use for other industrial wastes – one which is failing, which preferentially exploits the poor, and is damaging our planetary life support system – to CO2. This is not a recipe for success or even survival – this is apologia for continuing business as usual.
Gail from Wit’s End referred me to Guy McPherson’s presentation above. I just finished watching it a few minutes ago. Here are my thoughts on the talk.
This is the big wild card which may well bring everything down since the IPCC assessments and climate models either don’t factor in these feedback effects or, if they do, don’t do it with much accuracy. For example, the Arctic is melting three times faster than predicted and that will have implications for the entire planet. The Arctic melt, as well as Greenland melt, makes all global climate change predictions unreliable. Another example just came across the news today:
Doha, Nov 27 (Prensa Latina) The rapid increase in temperature in the Arctic has caused a loss of ice in the subsoil of the region, a fact that should be considered in climate models, experts said today. If the “permafrost” melts, it will free all the carbon accumulated for centuries, said Kevin Schaefer, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the 18th Conference on Climate Change held in Doha, Qatar.
“Once it starts happening, the process is irreversible. There is no way to recapture the carbon released. And the process wil continue for centuries, due to the organic matter being very cold and descomposing slowly”, said the scientist.
This excess of carbon released into the atmosphere was never included in the projections of global warming, which is why the UNEP recommends that the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on the Evolution of the Climate specifically take into account the growing impact of permafrost thawing on global warming…
All of these uncertainties should give everyone pause because it means that the most dire predictions could very well be correct, as Guy points out in his talk.
Towards the end of the video, the camera spanned the auditorium and I could see all the empty seats. There were perhaps a few dozen people in attendance of Guy’s talk. That’s a sad commentary on society, but it also points to something else – catastrophe fatigue or the normalization of catastrophe. The slow and steady stream of doomsday news along with the popularizing of such themes in mainstream entertainment and pop culture has served to desensitize people to catastrophe and violence:
Guy doesn’t really talk explicitly about the link between capitalism and the environmental crisis. He should. Capitalism feeds off of crisis. As they say, capitalism is crisis. It is the primary root cause of the civilization-ending eco-collapse we are facing:
I thought I’d post a few pictures of what the world will look like before the end of this century. Artists have the intuitive imagination to conjure up such visions the general public can only imagine through Hollywood zombie flicks which seem to be all the rage these days. Why do I feel this vision is inevitable? Just look at the daily news to see what I mean:
It used to be that the mentally insane, flailing their arms and talking to invisible people in the streets, were the ones ranting and raving about the end of the world, but now it’s scientists who, in an attempt not to offend the beliefs of the scientific illiterati and free-market faithful, downplay their findings as much as possible. Optimism bias infects even the scientific community.
…we are the most tragic species. We not only destroy all of the world around us, we are aware of doing it but unable to stop ourselves. We have faith and hope that things will get better, that we can turn around at the last second what we’ve screwed up over years and decades. Which of course is nothing but an excuse to keep on screwing up. All courtesy of our optimism bias.
What better exemplifies the delusional optimism of man than the belief that he could hide out in a bunker to survive the ravages of a nuclear war? I’ll tell you what tops that fantasy – the belief that man can continue to do what he has done and expect the planet to unfailingly absorb all the environmental assaults we can throw at it via the endless growth of capitalist production and consumption. The planet is not some massive ShamWow towelette for man’s nonstop flow of excrement.
Of all the findings in the 2012 edition of the World Energy Outlook, the one that merits the greatest international attention is the one that received the least. Even if governments take vigorous steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report concluded, the continuing increase in fossil fuel consumption will result in “a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees C.”
This should stop everyone in their tracks. Most scientists believe that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius is about all the planet can accommodate without unimaginably catastrophic consequences: sea-level increases that will wipe out many coastal cities, persistent droughts that will destroy farmland on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their survival, the collapse of vital ecosystems, and far more. An increase of 3.6 degrees C essentially suggests the end of human civilization as we know it.
To put this in context, human activity has already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees C — enough to produce severe droughts around the world, trigger or intensify intense storms like Hurricane Sandy, and drastically reduce the Arctic ice cap. “Given those impacts,” writes noted environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.” Among those cited by McKibben is Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” Emanuel writes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, puts it this way: “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.”
At this point, it’s hard even to imagine what a planet that’s 3.6 degrees C hotter would be like, though some climate-change scholars and prophets — like former Vice President Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth — have tried. In all likelihood, the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets would melt entirely, raising sea levels by several dozen feet and completely inundating coastal cities like New York and Shanghai. Large parts of Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the American Southwest would be rendered uninhabitable thanks to lack of water and desertification, while wildfires of a sort that we can’t imagine today would consume the parched forests of the temperate latitudes.
In a report that leads with the “good news” of impending U.S. oil supremacy, to calmly suggest that the world is headed for that 3.6 degree C mark is like placing a thermonuclear bomb in a gaudily-wrapped Christmas present. In fact, the “good news” is really the bad news: the energy industry’s ability to boost production of oil, coal, and natural gas in North America is feeding a global surge in demand for these commodities, ensuring ever higher levels of carbon emissions. As long as these trends persist — and the IEA report provides no evidence that they will be reversed in the coming years — we are all in a race to see who gets to the Apocalypse first.
Enjoy industrial civilization’s fossil fuel blow-out sale while it lasts. This is a one-time-only, circus-like ‘liquidation event’. Everything must be commodified regardless of ecological loss or intrinsic value to the web of life. The Human species won’t want to miss these deals! There will be no returns or exchanges available as we are going out of business for good due to bankruptcy proceedings with Mother Earth. All life forms and resources on the planet must go!!!
In my previous post I quoted Professor Charles Hall’s assertion that the current economic paradigm is ill-equipped to account for and address externalities such as resource depletion and environmental degradation. Peak oil as well as climate change/global warming are just two in a long list of biophysical constraints which neoclassical Keynesian economics, i.e. mainstream economics, overlooks:
…the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth’s inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world’s Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague.
Left to its own devices, capitalism promises economic difficulties for decades to come, with increased assaults on the earnings and working conditions of those who are still lucky enough to be wage earners around the world, waves of bankruptcies and business consolidations for capitalist firms, and increasingly serious conflicts among economic entities and even nations over just who is going to pay for all this. Which automobile companies, in which countries, will survive, while others take over their assets and markets? Which financial institutions will be crushed by uncollectible debts, and which will survive to take over larger chunks of the world market for money? What struggles will develop for control of raw materials, such as oil or water for irrigation and drinking, or agricultural land?
Gloomy though such considerations are, they leave out two paradoxically related factors that promise further dire effects for the future of capitalism: the coming decline of oil—the basis of the whole industrial system at present—as a source of energy, and the global warming caused by the consumption of fossil fuels. Even if continuing stagnation should slow greenhouse gas-caused climate change, the damage already done is extremely serious. Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist not given to exaggeration, called her soberly informative account Field Notes From a Catastrophe. The melting of glaciers threatens not only Swiss views but the drinking supplies of whole populations in such areas as Pakistan and the Andean watersheds; droughts have ravaged Australian and Chinese agriculture for years now, while floods periodically devastate the low-lying South Asian homes of tens of millions of people. The rolling parade of disasters is, unfortunately, only getting started. It will accompany a stagnant economy and only be exacerbated by the increased greenhouse-gas emissions that a return to true prosperity would bring… – essay adapted from Paul Mattick’s book ‘Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism‘
The mandatory growth requirement of mainstream economics also precludes the concept of sustainability. I have not yet read the above referenced book ‘Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism’, but a prominent socialist speaking of peak oil and global warming in the same paragraph is always intriguing. However, a brief critique of the book by a reader finds that Mattick does not go nearly far enough in incorporating these two realities into his analysis of our current crisis:
All mainstream institutions have subscribed to the near religious belief of the infallibility of the capitalist economy which itself is considered a self-regulating system governed by the “invisible hand” of the free market as explained by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Market ‘value’ is produced by the optimal use of capital, labor, and production. Mainstream economics operates under the assumption of a world with freely available and unlimited resources. It divides and reduces all resources into units of monetary value, not taking into consideration the value such resources hold in maintaining the ecological balance of the planet.
Isn’t it the height of hypocrisy that those wealthy nations trumpeting the superiority of the free market are also the same countries which dominate global resources and world markets by military superiority as well as the subversive and coercive tactics of their economic hitmen?
…war is integral to imperialism. Imperialism – and especially the imperialist powerhouse, the USA – needs the threat of war to sustain itself: ideologically, militarily, geo-politically and also financially. The arms and defence industry is a major part of the US economy. In 2011, the defence budget was a staggering $698 billion, or 4.8% of the US GDP (link). Add to that the cost of increased security concerns – for example, to combat the ‘terrorist threat’ within imperialist countries – and you have a major chunk of the economy being reliant on the continued existence of enemies within and without.
It’s a form of military Keynesianism to keep a faltering economy going. The further capitalism sinks into decline, the more irrational the drive to war becomes and the more ludicrous are the reasons presented by imperialism (weapons of mass destruction, nuclear capability, etc).
…a very naive view of how the world is run [is to hold the belief that] David Cameron, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu just ‘happen’ to be spending ‘too much’ on military, which on the surface seems deeply illogical at a time of official austerity. But, of course, the opposite is true: it is their way of staying in power.
Of course, we should fight against such ridiculous spending on increasingly refined machinery to exterminate humanity. But we should be clear why. – link
Moreover, America’s military has become a self-perpetuating industrial complex for profiting from war and instability.
Another problem with the world’s dominant economic system is that GDP is a misguided and inaccurate gauge for measuring the standard of living and well-being of the general populace:
…History shows that democratic forms are no proof against a slide into repressive forms. In Germany in the 1930’s, a declining standard of living contributed to the rise of the Nazi party; Hitler was democratically elected to the office of Chancellor (and then proceeded to establish himself as Fuehrer).
As America’s perpetual-growth economy faces the reality of ecological limits, as climate change imposes costs and decreased well-being on us, as food and energy and other resource prices increase because of the inexorable logic of a declining Energy Return on Energy Invested at the physical foundation of our economy, we face the prospect of a widespread decline in our standard of living. This dynamic lies at the root of this fact: Americans coming of age today are among the first generation who can’t be confident that they will be better off than their parents. By one widely used measure of well-being (the genuine progress indicator, which deducts loss of ecosystem services and other “disamenities” from the national accounts), the American standard of living has flatlined since the 1970s, despite continued strong growth in GDP.
Thus the cautionary lessons from Egypt and Tunisia. GDP is a measure of the commotion of money in an economy, not a measure of delivered well-being. If sustained or rising well-being is what is economically and politically desirable, we should measure it directly, instead of counting on GDP to do the job. And if we accept the idea of popular sovereignty—that governments rule with “the just consent of the governed,” as Jefferson put it in our Declaration of Independence—we must recognize that as the middle class goes, so goes the legitimacy of the regime in power. No system of government—despotic or democratic—fares well when the majority of its citizens experiences a declining standard of living… – link
For those who have not read Darbikrash’s last post, A Nation of Hustlers and Swindlers, it lays bare the big con game of capitalism. Similarly, the mechanic scenes in Oliver Stone’s U-Turn represent, for me, capitalism’s exploitive process of getting something for nothing:
So all these observable facts that we’ve been documenting here are just our own personal viewpoint of the world and certainly not the perspective held by the vast majority of the population, including world 
