Tag Archives: Regulatory Capture

The Quiet Collapse: Institutional Decay, Elite Consolidation, and the Erosion of American Democracy

22 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Introduction

The United States today stands at an unprecedented and perilous historical juncture, witnessing a profound and rapid transformation under President Donald Trump’s reign—one that carries the unmistakable hallmarks of a creeping authoritarian state coupled with rampant lawlessness. What might once have been dismissed by some as mere political dysfunction or policy miscalculation is now undeniably a systematic and strategic dismantling of the very pillars upon which American democracy and constitutional governance have long stood.

Trump’s second term is revealing a chilling blueprint of authoritarian consolidation: an executive branch aggressively dismantling democratic institutions, subverting the rule of law, weaponizing government apparatuses, and destabilizing economic foundations, all with ruthless precision. This is not random chaos born of incompetence but a coordinated project to concentrate power narrowly and unaccountably, placing the presidency and its oligarchic beneficiaries above legal and democratic scrutiny.

The ramifications are both far-reaching and deeply unsettling. Fundamental rights—freedom of speech, assembly, impartial justice—are eroding beneath an unprecedented assault from within. The social contract that binds citizen to state frays as trust in government evaporates. Economic upheaval, exacerbated by deliberate sabotage of labor markets and global trade ties, fuels widespread misery and desperation ripe for authoritarian exploitation.

At the heart of this report is a synthesis of extensive and corroborative evidence. It brings together the findings of exhaustive legal investigations that expose a culture of contempt and defiance for judicial authority; congressional records documenting vocal protests against lawlessness; nuanced economic analyses uncovering intentional infliction of damage on the American workforce and markets; and exhaustive political commentaries detailing the calculated sidelining of democratic norms. The administration’s actions clearly demonstrate a deliberate strategy of economic sabotage used as a mechanism to consolidate control.

This report situates these elements in concert, providing a comprehensive and multidimensional indictment of a regime that has not only broken the law but has warped the very framework of democracy itself. The assembled evidence paints a disturbing portrait: America is not merely struggling with governance challenges but is actively being transformed into a lawless authoritarian regime—the full consequences of which threaten the liberties and lives of future generations.

Economic Sabotage: Foundations of Authoritarian Control

The initial and perhaps most insidious front in this lawless authoritarian project is the calculated sabotage of the U.S. economy, a weaponized assault intended to unravel social cohesion, obliterate public confidence, and pave the way for unchecked executive supremacy. Far from an unintended side effect, this economic destruction reflects a meticulously orchestrated five-step strategy that actively weaponizes labor, trade, finance, institutions, and wealth concentration to undermine American democratic resilience.

Shrinking the Labor Force: Engineering a National Crisis

The Trump administration’s uncompromising crackdown on immigration has manifested not only as harsh border policies but as a ruthless campaign targeting millions of undocumented workers vital to the functioning of critical industries. These workers, who historically make up roughly 50% of the agricultural labor force, construction crews, hospitality sectors, and essential services, have been subjected to mass deportations, aggressive workplace raids, heightened employer sanctions, and restrictive visa policies, including a prohibitive $100,000 one-time fee on H-1B visas. October 2025 investigative reports reveal this campaign has directly precipitated catastrophic labor shortages nationwide, with declining foreign-born workers leading to unharvested crops, slowed construction, and record staffing crises in hospitality and other sectors. The Labor Department has officially acknowledged that these policies risk a severe labor shortage exacerbated by the near total cessation of illegal immigration inflows, while studies project the U.S. workforce will shrink by 6.8 million by 2028 and 15.7 million by 2035 due to combined effects of reduced legal immigration, increased deportations, and visa restrictions. These disruptions trigger food insecurity, inflation of prices, and supply chain chaos disproportionately impacting working families, heightening societal anxiety and economic precariousness.​

Trade Isolationism: Severing America’s Global Lifelines

The administration’s retreat from internationalism compounds economic destruction in dramatic and unprecedented ways. Unilateral tariffs imposed on critical partners such as China, the European Union, Mexico, and Canada obliterate decades-long, carefully negotiated trade alliances and provoke retaliatory tariffs that severely cripple American exporters. In 2025, the Trump administration enacted tariffs at levels not seen since the Great Depression, including a baseline 10 percent import tariff on all countries plus reciprocal tariffs initially set at 34 percent on Chinese goods, which were quickly escalated to over 125 percent amid retaliatory rounds. These punitive tariffs have devastated industries ranging from automotive and steel manufacturing to agriculture, especially soybean farmers who have lost vital export markets due to China’s retaliatory tariff hikes. Many American firms face insolvency or are forced to offshore production to avoid tariff burdens, undermining domestic manufacturing capacity and jobs.​

Equally damaging is the administration’s abandonment of multilateral trade frameworks such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The withdrawal from such agreements alienates traditional allies and accelerates their shift toward China-led blocs like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), eroding America’s historical position as the “indispensable nation” in global commerce and geopolitics. This pivot to isolationism debilitates both export-driven sectors and broader economic growth, fueling investor uncertainty and worsening economic pain for working-class Americans who depend on stable manufacturing and trade-linked jobs.​

These aggressive trade policies, marked by retaliatory spirals and strategic disengagement, stoke fears of sustained economic decline and geopolitical marginalization, underscoring a central pillar of the authoritarian economic sabotage blueprint.

Financial and Monetary Destabilization: Eroding the Bedrock

Destabilizing the financial system is a cornerstone in the authoritarian blueprint observed in the Trump administration’s tactics. This campaign attacks the very foundation of American economic stability and global financial hegemony, with dangerous consequences for millions of citizens.

The administration has repeatedly undermined the Federal Reserve’s independence—a long-established pillar of economic governance—by publicly attacking and seeking to remove key Fed officials who resist politically motivated calls for interest rate cuts and stimulative policies. Economist Lisa Cook, appointed by President Biden to the Fed Board of Governors, faced unsubstantiated allegations and an unprecedented removal attempt by Trump, which she is legally challenging. This blatant political interference threatens to weaponize monetary policy, making it subject to short-term political whims rather than long-term economic stability.​

The shadow of a U.S. debt default looms large amidst political brinkmanship, as Trump uses refusal to raise the debt ceiling as a coercive tool in an ongoing power struggle. The potential default risks immediate global financial chaos, since the U.S. dollar underpins the international monetary system. Capital flight and rising borrowing costs are already observable trends as investors question the country’s fiscal prudence and political stability.​

Domestically, millions of American households face the erosion of their retirement security as inflation soars and real interest rates fluctuate unpredictably. Deregulation of banking, the rapid growth of unregulated cryptocurrency markets, and removal of safeguards have magnified systemic financial vulnerabilities, making devastating market crashes more likely. These factors collectively drive profound uncertainty through all levels of the economy.​

This financial erosion, far from incidental, is a calculated move to destabilize public faith in governance and economic institutions. It paves the way for the imposition of extraordinary emergency powers, justified by the need to “restore order” amid crisis. The undermining of central bank independence is not unique globally, but the outsized significance of the Federal Reserve’s role means that these assaults carry risks well beyond American borders.​

Weakening and Partisan Control of Institutions: Sabotage from Within

The collapse of democratic governance under the current administration is deeply rooted in the systematic weakening and politicization of America’s institutions—a shadowy sabotage that parallels the visible economic and political decay. Federal agencies once responsible for enforcing economic fairness, protecting workers, and negotiating fair trade have been weakened through sustained budget cuts, orchestrated staffing purges, and the placement of ideologically motivated appointees whose primary loyalty lies with the executive rather than the law.​​

Key regulatory institutions have experienced capture by commercial and political interests, transforming from impartial watchdogs into tools of partisan enrichment and ideological control. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has been stripped of its enforcement powers while rolling back decades of pollution and climate regulations, directly threatening public health and the environment. Similarly, labor protections are undermined by appointing industry-aligned officials who actively obstruct union organizing and worker safety initiatives.​

Agricultural support agencies, critical for sustaining family farms and rural economies, have failed to provide assistance amid escalating labor shortages and trade conflicts, forcing many farms into financial distress or bankruptcy. The Department of Commerce’s evisceration through budget cuts and leadership changes has handicapped the administration’s ability to negotiate meaningful trade deals, exacerbating ongoing trade wars and creating policy incoherence harmful to American exporters and consumers alike.​​

Furthermore, the judiciary and law enforcement agencies have become increasingly politicized. Courts face relentless pressure to align rulings with executive interests, prosecutors have weaponized charges against political opponents, and law enforcement agencies prioritize political loyalty over public safety and impartial justice. This corrosive politicization erodes public trust in essential institutions, fostering cynicism and disengagement among the citizenry.​​

Compounding these institutional failures, intrusive regulatory rollbacks imperil essential consumer protections across sectors from finance to food safety, leaving Americans vulnerable to corporate malfeasance and systemic neglect. With institutional checks disabled and civil society delegitimized, the United States is increasingly incapable of meaningfully responding to economic crises, social inequalities, or public health emergencies.​

This governance vacuum, cannibalizing itself from within, leaves the executive branch as the sole remaining functional pillar of state power. The consolidation of authority thus becomes a self-fulfilling cycle—weak institutions force more centralization, which further weakens the broader democratic ecosystem, paving the way for entrenched authoritarianism.

Consolidation of Wealth and Political Power: Oligarchic Authoritarianism

In the chaotic economic landscape wrought by the Trump administration’s policies, an alarming concentration of wealth and political influence has accelerated among a narrow oligarchic elite, many with direct and personal ties to the regime. This consolidation acts both as a consequence and a catalyst for the autocratic transformation underway.

Tax policies enacted over the past two years have disproportionately favored billionaires and multinational corporations, instituting sweeping permanent tax cuts that decimated state revenue streams and reduced funding for public services essential to social stability. These fiscal policies were deliberately designed to funnel wealth upwards amid greater societal deprivation, exacerbating inequality and social polarization.​​

Deregulation has played a key role in enabling these oligarchs to accrue assets at distressed or artificially undervalued prices amid market collapses and economic dislocation. Wall Street deregulation, coupled with weakened antitrust enforcement, has facilitated a wave of mergers and acquisitions concentrating economic power within a handful of financial and industrial conglomerates closely aligned with Trump’s inner circle. This consolidation mimics patterns observed in hybrid authoritarian states where political insiders exploit crises to entrench economic control.​

Moreover, the administration’s systemic economic sabotage—through labor shortages, trade isolation, financial destabilization, and institutional weakening—is not random but serves the self-interest of this oligarchic class. Economic destruction compels policy shifts favoring austerity, deregulation, and privatization that entrench elite privilege, effectively insulating the ruling class from democratic accountability. This self-serving economic architecture subsidizes political repression by underwriting security apparatuses used to suppress worker and citizen dissent.​

The result is a hybrid authoritarian political economy—a permanently embedded oligarchy wielding state power for private gain while dismantling the pluralistic checks essential to democracy. This consolidation is not merely economic but political, as these elites gain disproportionate influence over policymaking via direct channels to executive offices, lobbying, and regulatory capture. This system structurally marginalizes ordinary citizens, rendering democratic processes nominal and hollow.

This orchestration of wealth concentration sustained through authoritarian means presents a grave challenge to social justice, political renewal, and the foundational ideals of America’s constitutional democracy. The permanence of such an oligarchic state threatens to foreclose future political alternatives and heralds an era of entrenched autocratic rule masked by electoral facades.

Judicial Accountability: An Overwhelming Record of Contempt

The lawlessness of the Trump administration unravels most starkly in the courts, where an unprecedented series of judicial findings reveal a pattern of blatant disregard for lawful authority and constitutional order. The exhaustive report, “The Presumption of Regularity in Trump Administration Litigation,” documents this era-defining assault on American judicial norms in chilling detail, underscoring the depths to which the executive branch has sunk.

Willful Disregard of Judicial Orders

At least 20 documented cases involve explicit, willful defiance of court mandates. The administration has repeatedly ignored injunctions, refused to halt illegal deportations, and failed to deliver court-ordered documents or testimony. Among the most stark examples is the case overseen by Judge James E. Boasberg, who found probable cause to hold administration officials in criminal contempt for covertly deporting dozens of Venezuelan migrants to detention in El Salvador, despite clear judicial orders prohibiting such actions. The judge lamented the administration’s “deliberate or reckless disregard” of binding commands and open defiance that threatens the very integrity of the judiciary.​​

Other critical cases include the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which led to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling mandating his return and expedited testimony from government officials under oath. Federal courts have also repeatedly enjoined unlawful political interference in university research funding, collective bargaining, and agency conduct—actions routinely ignored or delayed by the executive branch.​

This sustained refusal to comply undermines the foundational principle that no branch of government stands above the law. Legal scholars warn the nation teeters on a constitutional crisis as executive disobedience erodes judicial authority at an unprecedented scale.​

Misleading and False Government Representations

More than 40 cases reveal disturbing patterns of the administration submitting false, misleading, or deliberately obfuscatory information to courts to evade accountability. Judges have scathingly dismissed affidavits as “disingenuous,” “patently incredible,” or worse, leaving courts skeptical of virtually every factual claim from executive counsel. The administration has employed elaborate legal smokescreens, mischaracterizations of precedents, and assertion of state secrets as pretexts to avoid transparency.​​

Examples include attempts to withhold evidence related to migrant deportations, inconsistent sworn declarations undermining litigation integrity, and egregiously misleading testimony on the scope and rationale of politically motivated enforcement actions. The use of legal process itself is weaponized to mislead courts and forestall justice.​

Arbitrary and Retaliatory Administrative Actions

At least 50 rulings expose administrative conduct as arbitrary, capricious, or retaliatory in defiance of law. These include executive orders targeting specific law firms and universities, punitive suspensions and cancellations of federal grants without due process, and rollbacks of labor protections enforced without statutory authority. Courts have repeatedly enjoined such actions, finding them intended not to serve policy goals but to punish critics and consolidate power.​​

The consequences extend beyond immediate litigants, undermining entire sectors of civil society, hampering scientific research, and weakening democratic governance itself. The judiciary’s condemnation signals that these are not aberrations but a sustained pattern of authoritarian governance through executive fiat.​

Profound Constitutional Crisis

Altogether, this torrent of judicial findings represents a constitutional crisis of historic proportions. The executive’s persistent contempt for orders and courts threatens to dismantle the balance of powers so carefully designed to protect freedoms and legal recourse. Judges themselves have faced harassment and threats, politically charged defamation, and assaults on judicial independence, reflecting the toxic environment cultivated by the regime’s disregard for the rule of law.​

Legal experts warn that continued erosion of judicial authority places the entire constitutional order at risk, potentially inaugurating a state where executive rule is unchecked by laws or courts—a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.​

Weaponization of State Power: Political Repression and Civil Rights Erosion

The authoritarian surge under President Donald Trump is most palpably witnessed in its ruthless weaponization of state power to suppress dissent and erode civil rights. Senator Jeff Merkley’s stirring Senate floor protest captures this human cost, but the situation on the ground paints an even more harrowing picture of a regime remaking the United States into a militarized, repressive state.

Militarized Federal Agents: Policing Through Intimidation and Force

Across major cities such as Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Trump’s administration has deployed heavily armed, masked federal agents operating with alarming impunity and often lacking clear legal authority. In Portland, the federalization of 200 members of the Oregon National Guard followed inflammatory presidential rhetoric painting the city as “war ravaged” and “under siege,” despite weeks of largely peaceful protests.​

These federal forces have engaged in raw displays of force, including throwing tear gas and firing pepper balls at peaceful demonstrators and journalists, targeting people who attempt to record their actions, and staging provocative “false flag”-style operations purporting to quell riots that independent observers say never occurred. Notably, the administration pushed to permanently bypass court orders restraining military deployments, increasingly militarizing urban spaces and eroding traditional policing boundaries.​​

In Chicago, federal agents equipped with rifles patrol tourist districts and black neighborhoods alike, arresting individuals without warrants, including US citizens, and creating a climate of fear and intimidation that chills both protest and ordinary life. Governors of states like California, Oregon, and Illinois have vocally criticized and legally challenged these deployments as illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military forces’ use for civilian law enforcement but have faced aggressive federal pushback.​

Political Repression Through Legal Mechanisms

Beyond brute force, the Trump administration weaponizes a panoply of government agencies to quash political dissent and academic freedom. The Department of Justice pursues politically motivated prosecutions of activists, journalists, and opponents. Broadcasting regulators and communications authorities leverage licensing power to manipulate media content, suppressing narratives critical of the administration.​​

Grant-giving agencies and federal research bodies suspend or cancel funding to universities and nonprofit organizations that engage in critiques of the regime. These punitive moves are often executed via form letters citing vague justifications without due process, fostering a culture of fear and self-censorship across civil society sectors and academic institutions.​​

Together, these tactics create a chilling environment where free expression, assembly, and the ability to challenge power—a triad central to democratic participation—are systematically stifled under the guise of legal authority or public safety. The state’s monopoly on coercive power increasingly serves narrow political interests rather than justice or the common good.​​

This weaponization of state power signals a grim trajectory not only for democracy but for civil society’s very capacity to exist without fear. Militarization, political prosecutions, media control, and funding retaliation combine into a repressive toolkit aimed at extinguishing dissent and consolidating a starkly authoritarian state.

Predictions: America at the End of the Trump Presidency

If left unimpeded, the trajectory under President Donald Trump threatens to culminate in the transformation of the United States into a hybrid autocracy—a state where ostensibly democratic institutions remain but are hollowed out, subordinated, and manipulated to serve entrenched authoritarian rule. The following grim outcomes are likely as this trajectory deepens:

Entrenched Executive Dominance Erasing Electoral Fairness and Checks/Balances

Trump’s administration pursues an extreme concentration of presidential power that eclipses traditional separation of powers. Through weakened accountability mechanisms, politicization of independent agencies, and targeted purges in the civil service, presidential authority becomes supreme within the executive branch itself. The administration has systematically sought to dominate the judicial and legislative branches, as well as state governments, creating a national political apparatus with scant meaningful checks.​

This executive dominance plays out most perilously in electoral processes. Voting rights are aggressively curtailed through restrictive policies, disinformation campaigns, and politicized administration of voting infrastructure. The administration’s actions—including demands for proof-of-citizenship requirements, manipulative redistricting to undermine opposition districts, and rollback of election protection mechanisms—weaponize executive power to disenfranchise millions and erode the integrity of the vote.​

Weakened or Co-opted Judiciary Yielding Nominal Legal Oversight

The judiciary, already strained by backlogged dockets and political pressures, risks becoming a ceremonial rubber stamp rather than an effective forum for redress. With strategic appointments favoring loyalists, attacks on judges who defy administration interests, and persistent flouting of court orders, judicial independence deteriorates. The erosion of judicial oversight paves the way for unchecked executive actions, undermining the legal safeguards essential for democratic governance.​​

Systematic Suppression of Dissent with Militarized Policing and Curtailed Free Speech

The deployment of militarized federal agents broadly across American cities under spurious claims of “law and order” has ushered in a new era of domestic repression. Peaceful protests are reclassified as violent uprisings to legitimize paramilitary intervention, while heavy-handed tactics—tear gas, kinetic munitions, warrantless arrests—punish lawful dissent.​

Free expression, assembly, and the press are increasingly restricted through legal harassment, funding cuts to academic and civic institutions, and regulatory manipulation. This suppression creates a political climate steeped in fear and self-censorship, diminishing fundamental freedoms foundational to democracy.​​

Economic Stratification with Oligarchic Elites Controlling Key Sectors

Economic policies further insulate wealth and power among an elite oligarchy closely aligned with the regime. Deregulation, market manipulation, and monopolization create barriers to competition while rolling back labor, environmental, and consumer protections. This oligarchic consolidation not only deepens inequality but forms the economic underpinning of the authoritarian state, where economic revanchism bolsters political control.​​

Persistent Social Unrest Met with State Violence but Lacking Institutional Redress

As inequality amplifies and political freedoms contract, social unrest is likely to increase. However, the state’s increased reliance on militarized policing and legal repression ensures that protest movements will meet heightened violence and criminalization, while traditional mechanisms of accountability and social redress remain weak or absent. This cycle threatens to exacerbate social polarization and fracture national cohesion.​

This dystopian forecast, drawn from detailed analysis and comparative political science perspectives, reveals that the foundations of American constitutional democracy and the rule-based international order it anchors are at severe risk of collapse. Experts widely consider this trajectory a transition towards competitive authoritarianism, echoing the political erosion seen in other democracies that have yielded to autocratic leaders.​

Despite this dire outlook, scholars and democracy advocates also emphasize the importance of resilience within American institutions and civil society, which can, through sustained engagement and collective action, stem and eventually reverse authoritarian tides. Preventing this worst-case scenario will require broad coalitions dedicated to defending democratic norms, judicial independence, voting rights, and political freedoms.

Reference List:

The Apex of Corruption: The Trump Administration in Historical Perspective

07 Tuesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Introduction

Corruption in government, at its core, is the abuse of public power for personal gain. The United States has long prided itself on checks and balances that constrain such abuses, yet recent years have seen mounting evidence that those guardrails are eroding. Evaluating the Trump administration’s record, particularly in the context of self-enrichment and historical precedent, reveals a level and style of corruption unmatched by any previous presidency. Supported by watchdog reports, global indices, and independent investigators, this essay explores the scale, mechanisms, and historic comparisons of corruption and self-enrichment under Donald Trump, culminating in a portrait of a presidency that has rewritten the boundaries of what is possible—and permissible—at the pinnacle of American power.

Corruption Under Trump: Patterns and Metrics

Historic Decline in US Integrity Rankings

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, widely considered the gold standard for merit-based integrity analysis, now ranks the United States at its lowest ever position—65 out of 100—with ranks dropping to 28th worldwide. This decline is driven by high-profile scandals, weakened ethics enforcement, politicized justice, and, especially, direct presidential self-enrichment.

Systematic Self-Enrichment

What sets the Trump administration apart is not just the politicization or patronage typical of earlier machine politics, but the scale and directness of self-enrichment. Estimates from Rolling Stone, NBC, Forbes, and The New Yorker all now converge on a dollar sum—$3.4 billion and counting—accrued directly by Trump and his family during the presidency, not after retirement.

  • Trump Properties and Political Spending: Federal agencies, political campaigns, and lobbying groups have spent hundreds of millions at Trump-branded properties. CREW(Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) and OpenSecrets report direct spending exceeding $130 million since Trump first took office, with at least $900,000 more spent since his 2025 re-election.

  • Business Expansion & Asset Value: Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization, and other properties have generated direct revenue spikes of at least $125 million each, often through White House events, international summits, and official delegations. Branding, digital ventures, and post-2025 book deals add tens of millions to the total.

  • Cryptocurrency and Financial Schemes: New business vehicles, including World Liberty Financial and digital asset schemes, contributed at least $1 billion in personal/family profits throughout 2025, fueled by deregulation and government promotion.

Comparative Table: Presidential Enrichment

President Estimated Enrichment (2023 USD) Sources/Method
Ulysses S. Grant <$1 million Salary, minor cabinet frauds
Warren G. Harding <$10 million Teapot Dome, Ohio Gang
Richard Nixon <$20 million Slush fund, estate gains, post-resignation
Ronald Reagan ~$5 million Book deals, speaking
Bill Clinton ~$100 million+ Book deals, speaking after office
Barack Obama ~$70 million+ Book/production deals post-office
Donald Trump $3.4 billion+ and rising Properties, business, crypto, speaking, direct perks

No president has personally enriched himself or his family to such a degree, so brazenly and so directly from public office, as Donald Trump. Figures such as Grant, Harding, and Nixon had corruption within their circles, but not the systematic blend of public and private benefit, nor the scale—by orders of magnitude—achieved in the Trump era.

The Methods of Enrichment

  • Direct Use of Office: Government events at Trump properties; lobbying and campaign expenditures funneled to owned hotels and golf courses.

  • Patronage and Political Appointments: Rewarding supporters with regulatory benefits, tax breaks, or favorable contracts tied to Trump family businesses.

  • Foreign Deals and Emoluments: International delegations, foreign governments and businesses spend at Trump holdings or invest in Trump legal entities while deals are debated or awarded through U.S. policy.

  • Family Brand Multiplication: Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. have launched new ventures, luxury developments, and media products leveraging sitting presidential brand and direct access.

Dismantling Safeguards

  • Ethics Office Defunding: The Office of Government Ethics saw funding and authority cut, leaving White House financial disclosures untested and enforcement hamstrung.

  • Anti-Corruption Law Rollbacks: DOJ anti-corruption and anti-bribery enforcement were axed; whistleblower protections weakened; watchdog agencies either defunded or placed under loyal appointees.

  • Removals and Retaliation: Inspectors general, ethics lawyers, and regulatory directors were purged or sidelined; agency heads replaced with loyalists lacking experience but with ties to Trump businesses or donors.

  • Normalization of Conflict: Scandals no longer led to investigation, resignation, or reform—self-dealing became expected, normalized, and legally insulated.

Pardons and Legal Protection

Trump’s use of presidential pardons and commutations has at times appeared designed to reward political allies, obstruct investigations, remove legal risk from business partners, and punish rivals. Previous presidents used such powers sparingly and with some attention to non-partisan norms; Trump’s approach is more systematic and transactional than anything seen previously, even compared to Nixon’s Watergate era.

Historical Context and Comparison

  • Grant and Harding: Notorious for “cabinet” corruption and bribery, but the scale was tiny by today’s standards and consequences followed (jail, resignation, public scandal).

  • Nixon: Abused office for political gain, obstructed justice, but personal financial windfall was limited and ultimately sanctioned by Congress and courts.

  • Clinton and Obama: Earned significant sums post-office via books and speaking, but not through mixing official business with private profit.

  • Trump: Redefined the boundaries by enriching himself and his family massively during his term, with public money, campaign dollars, and international deals flowing openly.

No precedent in modern or historical U.S. presidencies remotely approaches Trump’s blend of personal profit and systematic undermining of the anti-corruption regime. The open intertwining of government operation and family wealth is an anomaly, not a continuation, of historical corruption.

Global and Systemic Impact

The effect goes beyond dollars: the U.S. now ranks at its lowest ever position on Transparency International’s index, and is viewed as a declining benchmark in global anti-corruption efforts. The Trump administration’s de-prioritization of anti-corruption programs has worsened overseas bribery and emboldened oligarchs worldwide.

Conclusion

The Trump administration is the most corrupt in modern American history—by every available measure. Over $3.4 billion in personal and family enrichment, the ongoing dissolution of anti-corruption law and oversight, and the normalization of self-dealing have pushed the United States into territory more familiar to “machine politics” and oligarchic states than any previous democracy. Past presidents have faced scandals, and some saw cronies profit, but never as openly, habitually, and systematically as under Donald Trump.

At root, this marks more than just the failure of ethical leadership—it is the purposeful reengineering of government for profit and favor. Where earlier presidencies saw checks and balances eventually prevail, the current regime’s durability and scale threaten to permanently change the ethical boundaries of American public life.

Beyond domestic governance, this corruption fundamentally undermines the stability and resilience of modern civilization itself. The betrayal of public trust and redirection of resources from the common good into private hands exacerbates social fragmentation, weakens democratic institutions, and accelerates environmental and economic crises. When governance becomes a tool for personal enrichment rather than public service, the capacity for collective action falters at precisely the moment civilization faces complex, interconnected challenges demanding unified responses.

Unchecked corruption and institutional decay feed cycles of polarization, mistrust, and gridlock that stall critical decisions on climate adaptation, public health, and social justice. This erosion compounds systemic inequalities and alienates citizens from democratic participation, paving a perilous path toward broader societal collapse. The Trump-era corruption, thus, is not only a political or ethical crisis but a key accelerant in the unraveling of modern civilization’s foundations.

Far from offering hope, the current trajectory signals a grim future wherein corruption and institutional collapse accelerate the unraveling of Earth’s life-support systems. Impending climate chaos intensifies resource scarcity and extreme weather, while mass extinctions threaten to dismantle the ecological fabric that sustains humanity. In this context, the hollowing out of governance—transformed into a vehicle for private gain and factional power—renders effective collective action nearly impossible. The erosion of public trust and political paralysis exacerbate crises that require urgent, unified responses, pushing civilization closer to irreversible breakdown.

No longer can democratic integrity or cultural norms be taken for granted; the corrosion seeded by unchecked corruption at this historic scale imperils not just a system of government but the very foundations of civilized life on a fragile planet. This is a decisive moment: continuing on the current path risks cementing a dystopian legacy of collapse, inequality, and environmental ruin.

Key References

A Second Trump Term Will Prove Even More Deadly For Americans

25 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in Peak Oil

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” ~ Trump

Who would have guessed that a reality TV “star”, con-artist, and political hack would be the one person to shake America’s institutions of government to their core? Then again, Hitler was a down-and-out artist before he became a dictator. Lots of people warned that this time with D.J. Trump would come even before he finagled his way into the White House. From his days of swindling hundreds, if not thousands, of small business contractors and workers to laundering money and defrauding the U.S. government, his tenure as president has been no less riddled with corruption, back-stabbing, lying, and cheating. Since Trump cannot retain power through the traditional means of tinpot dictators via military coup, he is using an army of lawyers who will question every mail-in ballot and use every legal maneuver in an attempt to render the 2020 election results null and void. This summer, Trump began a campaign to sabotage mail-in voting after falsely claiming it was fraught with fraud and then hiring one of his unscrupulous cronies, GOP Megadonor Louis DeJoy, to cripple the U.S. postal service. However, the GOP plan to destroy majority rule really kicked into gear with their ‘gerrymandering on steroids’ strategy which was hatched more than a decade ago when right-wing strategists concluded that taking over state legislatures would enable them to redraw districts and control the outcome of elections.

Over the last four years, Trump has amassed a laundry list of skuldugery such as abusing his high office to delegitimize any reporting critical of his administration by labeling it “fake news”, exacerbating an atmosphere of doubt, mistrust, and suspicion of the government by perpetuating numerous conspiracy theories, stoking racial tensions with incendiary rhetoric while ignoring the mounting anger over police brutality, perverting the rule of law by stacking the courts with unqualified GOP-friendly judges, installing a henchman named William Barr to run the DOJ and help give the president autocratic powers, and politicizing science by censoring government researchers and dismantling science-based health and safety protections. All of these tactics have been used by dictators of foreign countries to eliminate opposition leaders and control the population. Muzzling of scientists is a global problem that is getting worse. Trump has single handedly made the US a pariah on the world stage as he cozies up to dictators while belittling and undercutting traditional Western allies. In fact, America’s reputation in the world is the lowest it’s been since such surveys began two decades ago. There’s no hiding that Trump would love nothing more than to turn America into a Russian-style dictatorship where he could rule for life, rob the public purse at will, and kill dissidents with impunity.

Had Trump properly handled the pandemic that continues to upend the economy and ravage people’s lives, 90% of U.S. coronavirus pandemic fatalities could have been prevented. Life would be drastically different from what we are experiencing today. By January 2021, pandemic fatalities in the U.S. are projected to more than double from their current number of over 200,000. This will be Trump’s macabre achievement for his criminally negligent handling of this pandemic. He was able to do much more than when he proclaimed he could stand on 5th Avenue, shoot someone, and get away with it. In fact, due to his lack of leadership, downplaying of the virus, obfuscation of CDC reporting, and failure to enact a coherent national plan, he will have killed more Americans than whom died in World War II. By comparison, that’s twenty-five to fifty times the number of Americans who die on average in any given year from the flu. Trump may blame China, the WHO, Democrats, or anyone else for unleashing this plague, but it was his deliberate and willful abdication of his duty as president to protect public health and safety that has created his coronavirus killing fields. Who hasn’t heard the Bob Woodward tapes from early February 2020 of Trump explicitly saying that the virus is much more deadly than any strenuous flu and extremely contagious? All the while he has downplayed the danger to the public, even going so far as to say it was a “hoax” by the Democrats? To this very day, he perpetuates these lies while corralling his cult followers into close quarters for his self-aggrandizing MAGA rallies. His followers are oblivious to the fact that they serve as nothing more than disposable props at these grotesque events. He mocks masks, the most effectiive tool we have against the virus. He likes to claim that his China travel ban saved many lives but, like so many things he says, the opposite is true. His ban had many holes and actually may have worsened the outbreak in the United States. In addition, Trump’s downplaying of the virus has allowed it to fester in the U.S. and likely mutate into a more contagious strain; whether it transforms into something more deadly is all a matter of a genetic roll of the dice. Experts are fearing a double whammy from both the flu and the COVID-19 coronavirus this winter.

With historic megafires raging along the entire west coast in the new normal of inferno seasons, Trump tells climate scientists directly to their face that “it will get colder, just wait and see” and “I don’t think science knows about climate.” In the meantime, he’ll be spending millions shoring up his golf course properties from the rising seas. Over eight feet of sea level rise is already locked in from Antarctic ice melt alone, even if Paris climate agreements are fulfilled. As Biden says, Trump is a “climate arsonist.” At this point, I cannot help but view anyone who supports this catastrophic president as anything other than a traitor to their own country.

At a time where compassion and honesty are most in need as our civilization runs headlong into the limits of a finite planet, the world appears to be going in the opposite direction of more magical thinking, selfish nationalism, and diminishing human rights. The destruction Trump has done is real and four more years of him will guarantee further damage for decades to come. For instance, many of the dozens of environmental regulations that Trump has rolled back will likely be permanently cemented into place by Trump-appointed judges. These rollbacks are already causing countless premature deaths in the U.S. The amount of carbon his legislative actions will have put into the atmosphere by 2035 is estimated to be the equivalent of Russia’s annual emissions. The EPA will become a shell of its former self, having been completely usurped by corporate interests to pollute without restraint. Other countries are already following America’s lead of completely disregarding the threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Any semblance of democracy will be shredded as Trump’s swamp of greed, corruption, and white nationalism runs amok. Conspiracy theories will run rampant as daily life becomes ever more precarious in a climate of fear and science becomes completely subjugated by economy, polity, and religion. There is a prescient quote from Carl Sagan that warns of the dystopian world we are well on our way to creating:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 

I shudder to think of the hellscape that awaits us with another term of Trumpian chaos. There are only two choices before us in our American corporatocracy, so let’s be pragmatic about our dire situation. I’ll take take Biden, the corporate friendly centrist who has a plan to contain the virus and a two trillion dollar climate change strategy, any day of the week over Trump, a corporate fascist masquerading as a populist who never had any national plan to effectively contain the virus and believes climate change is a hoax. Of course there are many other issues that make Biden the sane choice between the two. It’s comical how the Right-wing propaganda machine has painted Biden as some sort of bumbling socialist puppet, especially when you consider that Wall Street’s own analysts say that a Biden administration would be neutral to positive for them. Under Trump’s direction, the very wealthy were given big tax breaks that allowed them to pay less than the working class for the first time in history. And due to Trump’s gross mismanagement, our government’s budget deficit will soon exceed the size of the nation’s entire economy for the first time since World War II. A growing body count of dead Americans that rivals the biggest war fatalities in our nation’s history is happening as a result of Trump’s sociopathic response. Trump’s latest hairbrained scheme is to allow the American population to build herd immunity to the novel virus. Never mind that in the process we would incur fatalities in the millions and collapse the healthcare system which would raise the death toll even higher, or the fact that scientists doubt the population would even ever be able to reach such levels of immunity. Someone, please tell me how Trump has made America great again.

This Way Out

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire

≈ 100 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Who’s got a hand on the crackdown?
Who’s got the word on the double talk?
Hands on the wheel in a flash of steel
We got a secret letter with a government seal
……
Nerves are pinched but the heads are calm
The cargo’s all loaded and the red light’s on
Check the map, you navigator sap
Or we’ll all end up with our heads in our lap

Only with capitalism does commodity exchange become the universal source of social interaction through the commodification of labor power, value then becomes the defining principle of social reproduction.

There are many criticisms against Capitalism, but not much in the way of concrete alternatives. I’ve just finished reading Professor Peter Hudis’ book “The Alternative to Capitalism”, and while he does not offer much specificity in the way of concrete alternatives, he does offer a useful and provocative analysis of Marx’s theories pertaining to what might come next. The book is unique in that it distills down and interprets thousands of pages of Marx’s writing into a handful of useful conclusions that illustrate what Marx envisioned in a post Capitalist society.

Below is a recent podcast in which Professor Hudis is interviewed, and this gives a quick overview of the concepts and conclusions of his vision of a post Capitalist society.

http://fromalpha2omega.podomatic.com/entry/2014-08-16T14_40_49-07_00

The central argument in Hudis’ reading of Marx is that any Post Capitalist society that is to succeed must at first recognize, then dismantle, the system of value production. This differs significantly from conventional anti-capitalist thinking which suggests that the capitalist mode of production and the system of private property ownership are principally responsible for the contradictions and subsequent failures in Capitalism.

Additionally, he points out that Marx expressly disagreed with the popularized notion that to achieve this, the ownership of the means of production must transfer to the State. Marx was very clear that ownership of the means of production must not belong to the Capitalist, nor the State, rather, to those in the involved with the actual production process.

Hudis suggests that these palliative measures are not only misplaced, but wrong.

To dive further into what is being said here, some discussion of the meaning of the phrase value production is in order.

Value production in a capitalist society means that all social relations are governed by the drive to augment and increase value, with no regard for human needs or capacities.

This suggests (and Hudis does a good supporting his thesis with an academically rigorous approach in his book) that the essence of the perpetually expanding nature of Capital, the expansion that consumes resources and poisons the planet, stems from this fundamental conclusion.

Value is not material wealth, it is wealth computed in terms of money. As Hudis points out, once such a system of value production becomes the dominant form of social relations, the drive to constantly increase value becomes unstoppable.

Drilling deeper into the construct of value production, what comes forward is that one of the key contributors to this unstoppable force is the notion of socially necessary labor time. On this subject, it becomes evident that not even the Capitalists themselves have control of the system, as even they are not able to manage the forces that control production. Time becomes inverted, the predicate becomes the subject, and the whole process leads to the incredulous discovery that the products we produce control all of human relations.

And it was always supposed to be the other way around.

The concept of socially necessary labor time dictates several key factors, principally, that goods are produced in accordance with average labor inputs, and any production labor in excess of the social average is wasted and deemed not useful. This means that Capitalists that engage in production are not in control of their exchange values, this is communicated by the market and discovered when goods reach the point of sale. It is then that the Capitalist determines if his goods are competitively priced, and if he can monetize his exchange value. If another firm has produced the same commodity using less labor (or cheaper labor) at the same quality, then the original capitalist will not be able to monetize his surplus value.

This uncertainty, coupled with the intrinsic self expansive nature of Capital, sets into motion a destructive and unstoppable cycle of ever decreasing inputs of labor time.

Time, in the pursuit of commodity production, becomes our master, we work longer, faster, to achieve the same standard of living.

These factors were not present in pre-capitalist societies. And Hudis argues that they cannot be present in any post Capitalist society either. These conditions of value production in general, and of socially necessary labor time in particular are unique to Capitalism.

We see in the news today disturbing events, loss of personal liberties, privacy issues, destruction of the planet and wanton disregard for resource depletion- it is hard to know which bogey to fear first and foremost.

Most disturbing to me is the almost footnoted mention in the news media of the egregious tax avoidance strategies being employed by large multi-nationals. Companies like Tesla are now dictating terms and conditions which they will require to build production factories in a specific state. They are in effect competitively bidding individual states against each other to maximize the tax deferments and various other concessions as a condition of doing business.

Tesla has negotiated approximately $1.25 Bn dollars worth of concessions, and some analysts are claiming the return on investment for the number of jobs created is a fiction.

Additionally, these tactics are by no means limited to inside the US, there is a battle royale raging in countries like Ireland, where Apple has effectively negotiated terms that reduce their effective tax liabilities to around 2%. By their own admission, there is ‘no scientific or numerical basis’ for their arguments, meaning they just drove the best bargain they thought they could get away with, and Ireland signed up- not wanting to risk the ~6,000 jobs that Apple has in Cork County.

While many are content to lament the State’s complicity in the machinations of Capital, these events indicate something new and much more dangerous- Capital is now overtly dictating terms to the State and holding monopoly power over the State to insure conditions of production that are favorable to Capital. Again, the predicate becomes the subject, as we see an inversion of the production relations. This is very dangerous.

Next we can envision corporate sanctioned labor camps for those deemed unemployable, subsuming the State unemployment programs with privatized “camps” as an extension of the massive prison system- with better wall colors and more frequent conjugal visits.

Social relations will be transformed to support only matters of production relations, education further diluted to rote training farms, subsidized and wholly captured by the large multi-nationals, and hard wired to provide curriculum and performance standards beholden only to their interests.

The hand maidens of Capital have successfully employed an “Arsonists in Fire Chief Hats” strategy wherein they have systematically dismantled any regulatory components of the State, and then cry foul when the hobbled remains proves ineffective at its intended role.

The only logical conclusion in this outcome is of course further privatization, drowning government in the proverbial bathtub so that Capital may advance beyond its perch as owner of all assets into its newly expanded role as owner of all labor.

Capitalist Industrial Civilization = M.A.D.

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

картинки-Просто-картинки-смешные картинки-фотоприколы_3354663262

“This, then, is the legacy we leave to future generations so that we can turn on our lights and computers or make nuclear weapons… Have we, the human species, the ability to mature psychologically in time to avert these catastrophes, or, is it in fact, too late?” ~ Dr. Helen Caldicott

Radical, wide-scale planning should have been executed decades ago in response to the Limits to Growth study. Instead, we carried on with business-as-usual as the natural world underwent cataclysmic, mass extinction level changes. Every day, the insanity of capitalist industrial civilization(CIC) is on full display as we entertain ourselves with the illusion of token political gestures towards “sustainability”. None of it changes our death march over the cliff of extinction. Nature died long ago with man’s discovery of fossil fuels which fed his terminal overshoot. Any isolated pockets of remaining wilderness are trampled underfoot, amounting to no more than a mere novelty destination commercialized by the tourist industry.

Enslaved to his own self-destructive technology, CIC continues to toxify and irradiate the planet, plasticize the oceans, and disrupt the chemical conditions that allow for life. A society that dehumanizes everything with the fetishization of technology and money will always see disaster as a money-making opportunity. Anthropogenic climate disruption is no exception. Competition amongst nations and corporations for economic/military supremacy, wealth, and power demands that the energy resources to be exploited first are those with the highest available ERoEI, i.e. fossil fuels. The charts bear out this cutthroat strategy and so do the actions of nation states who have made it a legal duty to maximize greenhouse gases. Giving up the competitive advantage of coal, oil, and gas ensures you will be eaten alive in the global economy. Thus nation states are locked into a capitalist race to the grave. The nasty greenhouse gas-emitting side effects of these fuels are simply another negative externality quietly pushed onto future generations. However, physical reality will eventually overtake a fake mass-media culture consumed by the idolatry of materialism and greed. The Earth doesn’t bail out a species that continuously spends more than it saves. Instead, the biospheric slate is wiped clean to make way for the next bout of evolutionary events.

bgp_980491cd513de893df43bc6501d0c855

Like radiation, GHG’s are seemingly invisible yet their effects are all too real. Because of the lag period involved in anthropogenic climate disruption, their devastating environmental costs will never be fully appreciated in time to avert disaster. Adding up the land, air, ice, and ocean warming data, a study from last year found that in recent decades the earth has been heating up at a rate of 250 trillion Joules per second. This is equivalent to:

    • Detonating four Hiroshima atomic bombs per second
    • Experiencing two Hurricane Sandys per second
    • Enduring four 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes per second
    • Being struck by 500,000 lightning bolts per second
    • Exploding more than eight Big Ben towers, with every inch packed full of dynamite, per second

For the Fox-news-befuddled masses, such analogies are meaningless because the threat is not in their face. In their conspiracy-addled minds, climate change is a socialist plot to ruin the American economy and undermine capitalism itself. To the genuflecting masses of capitalism, the mythical free market is seen as an all-powerful, self-regulating mechanism of the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe. Man-made constructs are inanimate and artificial, yet we cling to them as if they were immutable laws of nature.

272

Keeping industrial civilization chugging along in the face of planetary ecological collapse is eerily similar to the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence called M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), as commenter James explained:

Our competitive growth is MAD and considered on a geological time scale is only slightly slower than a sudden launch of nuclear missiles which may also eventually occur. We kid ourselves when we think that we’ll be fine as long as we never have a nuclear exchange, that sustainability is a possibility if we prevent nuclear war…

…This planet has the Big C, civilization, and it will torture its denizens as they struggle to maintain normalcy while the onslaught of malnutrition, decay and chaos drive them mad.

Do you think Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney are going to ameliorate the conditions of your decline? Ever wonder what it’s like to be a human sacrifice?

Capitalist carbon man’s unwavering faith in the powers of technology ensures that Big C’s omnicidal, energy-slurping $46 trillion-dollar infrastructure(U.S.A. only) and its array of mechanized contraptions cranks onward, squeezing out the last drop of resources from a spent Earth. Human cannon fodder will continue to be shoveled into Iraq and the Middle East to keep the fossil fuel furnaces burning. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex will protect its financial coffers at the expense of the destitute masses and a habitable planet. When it comes to money, there is no loyalty to anyone or anything in the land of the FEE and home of the bamboozled. Just like countless Wall Street predators who have passed through the revolving corporate/government door, former NSA chief Keith Alexander is now getting in on the action to exploit his national security credentials. 

A simple lesson not learned from the two recent epic industrial disasters:

Collusion between big business, government and industry is hardly restricted to Japan. In every country, the health and safety of working people in their workplaces and their communities are routinely subordinated to the dictates of profit. Moreover, the past three decades of market restructuring have led to the systematic erosion of the limited regulations that previously existed. In many instances, regulatory bodies have been cut back or replaced by corporate “self-regulation”.

Fukushima is just one of the major disasters that have exposed the criminal character of capitalism. One year earlier, an explosion at the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and created the worst environmental catastrophe in US history. The Bush and Obama administrations fast-tracked the project, which proceeded without an environmental impact study, despite public concern and opposition. In the wake of the oil spill, the Obama administration acted as a virtual attorney for BP, assisting the energy giant to minimise the economic and political fallout. From the outset, the White House made clear that the disaster would not impede further offshore oil projects—including by BP.

The Japanese government, first under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, has performed a similar service for TEPCO—providing a huge bailout for the company and limiting the payouts to small businesses and individuals whose lives have been devastated…

…The real lesson that should be drawn from the report’s revelations is the incompatibility between capitalism and even the most elementary needs of humanity for a healthy and secure environment….

Structuring a society to reward the most sociopathic and ruthless amongst us, create grotesque levels of inequality and political disenfranchisement, deify material wealth as the primary metric of success, privatize and profitize war, and use the planet as a garbage dump for toxic waste is a recipe for disaster.

banksy-street-graffiti-art-06

Humans have thrown into the geological evolutionary processes of Earth several long-lived and very disruptive monkey wrenches. There are three which are noteworthy and will outlive us all in the deep time of planetary history:

    • Anthopogenic climate disruption will essentially last forever, according to Professor David Archer of Chicago University and his associates. He says “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.”

Snap 2014-06-27 at 11.07.57

    • Nuclear Waste from the production of nuclear power and nuclear bombs lasts essentially until the end of time. Coal-fired electric plants produce their own witch’s brew of radioactive waste as well. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are produced every year with 70,000 tons now sitting at some 100 temporary sites across the country. A permanent disposal site has yet to be established to store the fatal stuff. The recent egregious, Homer Simpson-esque mishaps and incompetence at America’s only radioactive waste repository located in New Mexico don’t inspire any confidence that we can store this stuff safely even for a brief period, let alone for the thousands of years required. We’re too busy fracking around that fragile site to worry about any long-term consequences. Humans have sufficiently booby-trapped the planet that in the dying days of the Anthropocene, your chance of survival is the same as winning the Lotto.

A few of the deadly radioisotopes that can be found in nuclear waste are the following:

– uranium 238 (half-life 4.468 billion years)
– uranium 235 (half-life 700 million years)
– plutonium 244 (half-life 80 million years)
– iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years)
– neptunium-237 (half-life two million years)
– plutonium 242 (half-life 373,300 years)
– technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years)
– plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of processing mined uranium for fuel in nuclear energy plants and as a component for nuclear bombs. Depleted uranium contains U-234, U-235, U-236, and U-238. Only two countries have acknowledged using depleted uranium in their weaponry, the US and UK, for its armor-piercing advantages. Only one country, Belgium, has banned its use. A couple of years ago, New Zealand put forth a bill to ban DU munitions, but it failed by one vote. The Dutch peace group PAX recently confirmed that the U.S. fired DU munitions into Iraqi civilian populations.

Once a DU shell impacts a target, it aerosolizes into a fine gas or mist which can then travel in the air for miles. These radioactive particles can get kicked up again and again by the wind or other disturbances after they have settled on the ground or in the sand. Once inhaled by humans, DNA is damaged and the ensuing cell mutations lead to cancer. For an example of the havoc depleted uranium has wreaked on the health of returning soldiers, watch this video. Investigative reporter Dr Nafeez Ahmed recently reported how the World Health Organization tried to cover up the horrific, lingering effects of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. For those Middle East countries, the use of these radioactive DU munitions by Western forces constitutes an under-the-radar nuclear scourge with cancers, birth defects, and chronic ill-health affecting generations upon generations into the distant future.

1f54a1f78c6a

I suppose one could add plastics to the list of unimaginably long-lasting pollutants to the list. Microscopic particles of the stuff can be found at any beach and even in mountaintop lakes. And of course the scars from massive strip mining operations will remain as an indelible reminder of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for energy. Scientists didn’t declare this the Anthropocene Epoch for nothing; we have certainly left our mark like no other species before or since, literally terraforming the Earth into a planet inhospitable to ourselves. Perhaps aliens will pay a visit after the dust has all settled. They’ll surely shake their heads in disgust at the poisonous wreckage left behind by our fossil-fueled madness before zooming off into the night skies in search of a planet that has intelligent life.

 

Radioactive Wastelands at the End of the Anthropocene

13 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution

≈ 70 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

BeFunky_1301218709698.jpg

A History of Cover-Ups and Ineptitude Leads to Catastrophe

One of the most costly, self-inflicted wounds engineered by techno-capitalist man is the never-ending Fukushima nuclear disaster. The groundwork for epic failure at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began in the 1960’s when TEPCO bulldozed 25 meters off of a 35-meter-high hill in order to facilitate the delivery and set up of the plant’s large equipment, which was delivered by boat, as well as to provide easier and cheaper access to seawater used as a coolant pumped through the reactors. TEPCO then dug even further downward another 14 feet to construct the basement where emergency diesel generators would be installed. Decades later a tsunami would easily flood this area, knocking out the emergency electrical back-up generator and making nuclear meltdown a certainty.

Snap 2014-06-13 at 08.48.20In the early 1970’s, several memos circulated within the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) expressing concern over design flaws of the Mark I nuclear reactors made by General Electric, the same type installed at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Recommendations were made to stop licensing reactors with these faulty designs and the top safety official at the AEC, Jospeh Hendrie, agreed with them but rejected their implementation on the grounds that it could do irreparable damage to the nuclear industry:

“..the acceptance of pressure suppression containment concepts by all elements in the nuclear field, including Regulatory and the ACRS, is firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom. Reversal of this beloved policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power. It would throw into question the continued operation of licensed plants, would make unlicensable the G.E. and Westinghouse ice condensor plants now in review, and would generally create more turmoil than I can stand thinking about.”

The last line of defense in preventing the ionizing alpha, beta and gamma radiation and radioisotopes inside melting fuel rods from spewing out into the environment is the containment vessel. The poor design of the now ruptured Mark 1 containment vessel in Fukushima is most certainly contributing to the ongoing disaster there. The U.S. apparently has 23 reactors just like the ones that melted down in Fukushima as well as the risky storage of spent fuel rods next to the reactor building itself.

When the Tōhoku tsunami struck at Fukushima, reports describe chaos and incompetency as workers had to bring protective gear and manuals from distant buildings as well as borrow equipment from contractors. The failure of the Japanese government and TEPCO to imagine such a catastrophic event and guard against it is highlighted by the fact that this exact scenario was predicted in a Japanese magna comic book.

Years went by with only a few lone voices questioning the safety of the Fukushima nuclear plant such as former engineer Toshio Kimura who worked there:

I asked my boss back in the late ’90s what would happen if a tsunami hit the Fukushima reactors. I said, “Surely a meltdown will happen.” He said, “Kimura, you are right,” but it was made clear that the issue of a big tsunami was taboo. A few years later I quit the company because of its culture of cover-ups…

…When officials from the nuclear safety agency or the ministry came to the plant for inspections, they were entertained with drinks the night before. Then they would inspect the plant and give it a hundred per cent pass mark. Then on the way home the inspectors were given beer and snacks and taxi vouchers.

2000px-tepco_logo-svg-trans-9

Run by the Utility Gangs

Entire communities have been bought off by corporate interests to become ruled by what is known as the “nuclear village” in Japan:

Tokyo has been able to essentially buy the support, or at least the silent acquiescence, of communities by showering them with generous subsidies, payouts and jobs. In 2009 alone, Tokyo gave $1.15 billion for public works projects to communities that have electric plants, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Experts say the majority of that money goes to communities near nuclear plants.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg, experts say, as the communities also receive a host of subsidies, property and income tax revenues, compensation to individuals and even “anonymous” donations to local treasuries that are widely believed to come from plant operators.

Unquestionably, the aid has enriched rural communities that were rapidly losing jobs and people to the cities. With no substantial reserves of oil or coal, Japan relies on nuclear power for the energy needed to drive its economic machine. But critics contend that the largess has also made communities dependent on central government spending — and thus unwilling to rock the boat by pushing for robust safety measures.

In a process that critics have likened to drug addiction, the flow of easy money and higher-paying jobs quickly replaces the communities’ original economic basis, usually farming or fishing.

The Japanese news media, just as in the U.S., has also been corrupted and taken over by monied-interests:

The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country’s most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis…

…Japan’s power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan’s biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco’s ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year.

And just like in the U.S., corporations have used “donations” to capture Japan’s political system:

Members of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan since 1955 except for a year in the 1990s and for a three-year period ending in 2012, have been rewarded for their pro-nuclear stance with campaign donations from the ten giant electrical utilities that control around 96 percent of the nation’s power supply.

The largest of these, the Tokyo Electric Power Company or Tepco, formally ended its direct corporate donations in 1974. But it systematically encouraged “voluntary” donations by company executives and managers to a fund-raising entity created by the ruling party, according to a 2011 investigation by Asahi. At least 448 Tepco executives donated roughly $777,000 in total to the entity between 1995 and 2009, according to documents obtained by Asahi and shared with the Center.

Roughly 60 percent of Tepco’s executives participated, a rate similar to that at other utilities. Together, they funded $2.5 million of the party’s expenses, based on today’s exchange rates. A Tepco spokesman told Asahi that the donations were “based on the judgment of the individual and the company is not involved. We do not encourage such donations.”

The culture of complicity between the Japanese nuclear industry and the government is firmly entrenched with generations of high level bureaucrats having landed jobs at Japan’s large utility companies. This revolving door between corporations and the Japanese government mirrors that of the U.S.:

Tepco’s influence has also been enhanced by its enthusiastic participation in revolving door-employment practices similar to those involving bureaucrats and companies in Washington, D.C.

A METI report in 2011, prepared at the insistence of nuclear opponents in Japan’s tiny Communist Party, said for example that between 1960 and 2011, Tepco hired 68 high-level government officials. From 1980 to late 2011, the report said, four former top-level bureaucrats from METI’s own Agency for Natural Resources and Energy became vice presidents at other electric utilities. The practice is known here by the amusing term, amakudari, for appointees who “descended from heaven.”

Tepco officials also regularly move into key regulatory positions, part of a migration known as ama-agari, or “ascent to heaven” that has involved dozens of top utility officials. More than 100 such utility executives between 2001 and 2011 were able to keep drawing an industry paycheck while also working part-time for the government, a practice that is legal here, according to a former member of the Japanese Diet Lower House Economy and Industry Committee, who spoke on background. An official working in the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s research division, in an interview, said on condition of anonymity that the ama-agari system is “like having cops and thieves working in the same police station.”

Perhaps the most significant instance of ama-agari was the Liberal Democratic Party’s appointment in 1998 of Tokio Kano, a longtime Tepco executive, as chairman of the parliamentary committee that oversees METI and as the parliamentary secretary of science and technology. Both are posts crucial to the nuclear energy industry, and Kano used them to advance legislation enabling plutonium-based fuel to be burned in some standard reactors — not just breeders. He also pushed through a law requiring that all spent nuclear fuel be sent to Rokkasho or similar Japanese plants.

Snap 2014-06-10 at 23.06.53

Corporate Fascism in Japan

Embarrassed by the constant revelations of regulatory and governmental capture by industry, the Japanese government recently passed a state secrets law meant to intimidate and jail those who cast a prying eye into Japan’s corrupt corporatocracy. After the Japanese government restarted its idled nuclear plants last year, those antagonistic towards the nuclear industry were secretly put on a watch list. The ominous experiences of independent investigative reporter Mako Oshidori with Japan’s nuclear industrial complex are reminiscent of the movie Silkwood. She discovered that she was on the government’s watch list and has now noticed an individual closely tracking her every move:

…The list included people with power in the opposition parties, such as the former prime minister Naoto Kan and the politician Ishiro Ozawa, and I was told that my name, Mako Oshidori, was listed alongside these names. A researcher who was given the list and told not to approach anybody on it was friendly with me and told me the list included my name. Soon after that a mysterious man began to follow me. This man appeared to be a member of Public Security Intelligence Agency in the Cabinet Office, which investigates various things. One of my hobbies is taking a candid shot, and I will show you the successful candid shot of this man. 

_

Just as you see here, there was a time period when someone would always be near me, trying to eavesdrop on my conversation with people. As I am a professional entertainer, whoever I am talking to would ask me if the person was my manager. I would say that the person must be one of my groupies, as I have never met the person. Sometimes I would go to Fukushima Prefecture to interview different mothers. We would have meals together and talk somewhere, and when the mothers are leaving the premise to go home, an agent from the Public Security Intelligence Agency would take a photo of each mother and make a note of the license plate number of each car. Afraid of having their photos taken or the license plate numbers recorded, some Fukushima mothers would refused to be interviewed, or they would even refuse to have their stories published. An ex-agent who is knowledgeable about the work of the Public Security Intelligence Agency said that when you are visibly followed, that was meant to intimidate you. If there was one person visible, then there would be ten more. I think that is analogous to cockroaches. So, when you do a little serious investigation about the nuclear accident, you are under various pressure and it makes it more difficult to interview people. There are actually other journalists from major newspapers and television stations, other than me, who have done a lot of investigation about the nuclear accident, but the information doesn’t readily come out. That’s because the pressure is placed on them not to release the information. What I am going to tell you now might surprise you, but the Japanese people are just as surprised when I tell them the same information as it’s something they have never heard of, read in the newspaper, or seen on TV…

Despite the great tragedies with nuclear weaponry and technology that Japan has experienced with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now Fukushima, these instruments of mayhem and death are ironically becoming a key centerpiece in the Japanese economy with the current right-wing government banking on it as an export cash cow:

Exports of nuclear components and technology, as well as conventional arms, are potentially key elements of “Abenomics” and much is riding on the outcome. In 2013, Abe concluded Japan’s first nuclear reactor export agreement with Turkey for $22 billion and others are pending with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while the prime minister has also lobbied governments in Central Europe, Vietnam and Indonesia. This is a remarkable turnaround from 2011 when the prospects for post-Fukushima Japan relying on nuclear energy, let alone exporting it, looked unlikely.

The seeds for Japan’s nuclear hara-kiri were planted back in the early 1950’s when the American government hatched a propaganda campaign of developing an “atoms for peace” mission in Japan to foster pro-nuclear sentiment and help rebuild their economy using such technology. 

The Center for Public Integrity reports that Japan is leading the charge for a new nuclear industry of plutonium-based nuclear fuel with grave implications for spreading this technology and material all over the world. By October of this year, Japan will have finished a $22-billion plutonium factory in Rokkasho which will be able to produce enough plutonium per year to make 2,600 bombs. It appears Japan is lurching towards militarism in an age of end-stage capitalism:

The US-Japan Security Treaty of 1960 stipulates that an attack on Japan will be regarded as an attack on the United States. Prime Minister Abe is seeking to transform Japan’s constitution to permit engagement of the Japanese armed forces in aggressive wars. But it is difficult to imagine a resurgent military posture by Japan without tacit encouragement from Washington.

The highest stage of monopoly capitalism is fascism. The 2008 global economic crisis of capitalism, still unresolved, is forcing ill-advised and counterproductive “austerity measures” on decaying capitalist societies throughout Europe and in Japan, where Prime Minister Abe is restructuring the economy into the very pro-market system which is producing riots throughout Western Europe, as living standards deteriorate drastically, and the income inequality gap becomes an abyss.

BeFunky_AntiNuke-580.jpg

A Nuclear Bomb Explosion Versus A Nuclear Meltdown

Some ask why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and repopulated so soon after a nuclear bomb blast, yet Fukushima and Chernobyl remain unsafe to inhabit into the indefinite future. The answer lies in the vast difference of irradiating potential between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor.

Nuclear bombs are designed to cause maximum concussive damage within the shortest amount of time by creating as much energy as possible from a runaway nuclear fission reaction. Nuclear reactors on the other hand are designed to create a low-level of energy from a very controlled and sustained nuclear fission reaction. The radioactive isotopes from the fission product mixture of a nuclear bomb are relatively short-lived (<50 years) whereas those from the meltdown of a nuclear reactor are long-lived and must be stored away safely for tens of thousands of years (essentially forever). Approximate half-lives of some of the isotopes in the spent nuclear fuel are:

Snap 2014-06-14 at 18.59.27

The nuclear bombs used in World War II were detonated roughly 2,000 feet above ground and their radioisotopes were carried by the wind and dispersed over a very large area. The nuclear bomb called “Little Boy” used over Hiroshima contained only 140 pounds of fissionable material (Uranium-235) and “Fat Man” used over Nagasaki contained just 14 pounds of Plutonium-239. These are minute amounts of radioisotopes when compared to the 180 tons of nuclear fuel at Chernobyl and the staggering 1,600 tons at Fukushima. Explosions and meltdowns at nuclear reactors occur at ground level, creating more radioactive isotopes due to neutron activation with the soils while spreading their radiation across the planet, year after year after year. Today the background radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to be the same as the global average anywhere on Earth. Ground zero at Chernobyl and Fukushima won’t be habitable for 20,000 years or longer. Nuclear bombs kill hundreds of thousands of people instantly while a nuclear reactor meltdown kills people over years, decades, and generations.

Not Enough Thumbs to Plug the Nuclear Dyke

The too-big-to-fail TEPCO is now building the Great Ice Wall of Japan to stem the flow of tons of contaminated water that they have been hastily storing in hundreds of haphazardly constructed containers.

“I must say our tank assembly was slipshod work.” ~ TEPCO worker

The “experts” estimate that it will take 40 years to clean up the Fukushima mess. That would put us at the year 2054, a date that many estimate humans may well be extinct or nearly extinct. By then, ocean acidification will have doubled and the global average temperature will have risen by at least 4 to 6.5°C. The world’s oceans will have swelled 2 feet higher. I’m glad to know that the “experts” are taking into account our radically changing planet:

Nuclear plants were originally given a license to operate for 40 years, and in the late 1990s, the NRC began accepting applications to extend those licenses for an additional 20 years. While it’s not clear how many current plants will still be operating in 2100, most facilities store their nuclear waste on-site, where it can continue to emit radiation for thousands of years. There is currently no long-term national storage site for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S., as Congress cut the funding to build such a facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain in 2011. While there are no near-term plans to remove nuclear waste from the coastal plants threatened by rising seas, “the expectation is that [waste] won’t remain on-site,” said NRC Senior Public Affairs Officer Roger Hannah.

Despite the increased risk of flooding due to rising sea levels, some plant operators have not factored this into their long-term plans. In 2010, when Florida Power and Light Company applied for a license to build two additional reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead, Florida, the NRC asked the plant’s owners to explain “how potential sea-level rise due to potential future climate change is accounted for” in their plans, NRC documents show. The company declined to discuss climate change in its analysis, and used a projection that assumed a constant sea level rise of just 1 foot per century, which is 5.6 feet lower than NOAA’s worst-case projection for 2100.

 Boy, I hope that ice wall works…

The risks to the ocean, in particular, are unprecedented because there is good reason to believe that melted fuel residing in, or below, the reactor basements is in direct contact with an underground river running through the site (Nagata, 2013).

A German study modelling the effects of an uncontained core meltdown suggests the Pacific Ocean is imperiled. The “German Risk Study, Phase B” found that a core meltdown accident could result in complete failures of all structural containment, causing melted fuel to exit the reactor foundation within five days (cited in Bayer, Tromm, & Al-Omari 1989). Moreover, the study found that even in the event of an intact building foundation, passing groundwater would be in direct contact with fuel, causing leaching of fission products. Strontium leaches slower than cesium. A follow-up German study, “Dispersion of Radionuclides and Radiation Exposure after Leaching by Groundwater of a Solidified Core-Concrete Melt,” predicted that strontium contamination levels would rise exponentially years after a full melt-through located adjacent to a river (Bayer, Tromm, & Al-Omari, 1989).

The study predicted concentrations of Strontium-90 in river water would spike relatively suddenly, but maintain extraordinarily high levels of contamination for years. Strontium bio-accumulates in the human body, including the brain, and is a known genotoxin. The study’s experimental conditions are roughly similar to Daiichi’s site conditions and strontium levels have been spiking there since the summer of 2013. TEPCO just reported that strontium levels in reactor basement water ranged from 40 million to 500 million becquerels per liter (“TEPCO to Improve,” 2014).

Global Corporatocracy: Privatized Profits and Socialized Losses

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

David Cay Johnston is, as he states, not a socialist, but a capitalist who believes in fair and competitive markets and integrity. My blog concentrates quite a bit on environmental issues and David only passingly mentions the deregulation and rolling back of environmental laws in the interview below, but he has been writing about inequality since the 1960’s and does a great job of describing the “governmental capture” by multinational corporations. An overwhelming proportion of environmental destruction is being caused by these mammoth corporations that are literally a state within a state, so it’s important to make the connection between inequality/political disenfranchisement and the destruction of the environment driven by a “business aristocracy” which has usurped the institutions of society. There can be no social, environmental, and climate justice if there is no government to serve the people. Of particular interest is the interview with Steve Coll and the power that ExxonMobile wields. Three notable examples of government acting as an insurance agency for corporations while leaving a mess for the common people to deal with are the BP oil spill, TEPCO’s Fukushima disaster, and the mortgage crisis created by the Too-Big-To-Fail Banks.

Government rules and policies have been put in place to create the huge wealth gap in America:

– political economy, an amplifying feedback loop where wealth begets access to the rules in politics which begets changes in the rules which reinforce wealth.

– 45 years ago the media was staffed by blue-collar intellectuals. TV news media is now filled with people from wealthy households whose life experience tells them that things are just fine in the world. We’re not hearing about those exploiting the system for their benefit. Very little coverage of poverty as well. The U.S. has the highest % of children who go to bed hungry of any modern country.

– The most important period of determining your lifetime health and well-being is from conception to the first 6 months of life. Little to nonexistent programs and support for mothers and newborn babies in America. Just as the U.S. is neglecting its infrastructure by not maintaining and investing in it, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. There will be a price and it will be very high.

– U.S. has been living under Reaganism since 1981 in which we worship money and our measure of the country is money. The purposes of our country were written down for us in the preamble of the Constitution: justice, the general Welfare, common defense, domestic tranquility, liberties. Nothing in the preamble talks about getting rich. That’s a byproduct of these other things, but we have gotten a distorted view of what’s happening and now have 33 years of evidence that Reaganism has made the rich richer at the expense of the 90%. We are mining the 90% to benefit the super-rich rather than creating an economy that benefits everyone.

– The number one driver of this crooked system is campaign finance. There are over 100,000 people in this country whose job it is to mine the public treasury or the rules for their benefit. This corrupt system has to be changed.

– The way we think about this country and its society needs to change. The founders actually wrote a great deal about their concerns over inequality. John Adams, the second President, wrote that his fear was that a business aristocracy would arise to destroy the country, making workers mere wage earners instead of craftsmen owning their own tools. These wage earners, not being truly independent, would be manipulated into voting for policies that would benefit the business aristocracy and we would lose both our liberties and democracy. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, talks about inequality being corrosive to the very fabric of society and says that “the greatest corruption of our moral sentiments is the tendency to almost worship the rich and to hold in bad regard people who are poor.” Our politicians reflect this even though many of them will tell you at any moment how religious they are. They obviously have not studied their religious text because if they did they would know that, in the case of the Christians for example, you were required to “give all that thou hast to the poor.”

– Reaganism has led to an enormous concentration of wealth amongst a small minority who cannot possibly consume that wealth and instead are investing it in financial instruments to extract more wealth rather than investing it in the economy. We don’t have to burn more fossil fuels to grow the economy; there are other ways to do that.

– We pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. The way this happens is that corporations are limited in the amount of money they can hold in the U.S., so the corporations get around this by offshoring their money in foreign bank accounts and then turn around and buy U.S. treasuries. The interest they earn from these treasuries will eventually exceed the value of the tax on that money, when and if these corporations decide to bring the money back into the U.S.. This scheme has literally become a profit center for the corporations.

– When this country was founded, there had been only seven corporations in the old british colonial United States at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. The Boston Water Works is a good example; it was the very first one and was essentially a utility. One corporation created in the colony of New Haven was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took ten years to clean up the mess. The founders disliked and distrusted corporations, but they believed in collective bargaining because in 1792, Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law based on a study conducted by Thomas Jefferson. It was to revive and protect the cod fishing industry ravaged by the British Navy. The class of fisherman known as “sharesmen” were able to negotiate with the wealthy ship owners in order to share in the profits. Those ships who participated in sharing their profits with the fishermen were given the subsidy and those who did not were exempt from the subsidy.

– Violent, explosive rise in executive pay which diverts CEOs from the welfare of the company. All large pools of capital that are owned collectively (charitable endowments, pension funds, etc) are systematically being predated. The assets of utility companies are being worn down and stripped.

– We now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful that if they were prosecuted it would “damage the economy”. The government has become an insurance agency for the rich and powerful and the common people pay the premiums.

– We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, that we would get which is that those people who are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. The actual tax rates of the people at the very top are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1980’s, but at the same time by getting rid of unions, by having these “free trade deals” which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor, we have driven down the wages and salaries of the vast majority of Americans as well as the environmental conditions (laws to protect the environment). A whole mechanism has been put in place that favors profit over labor and when you look at the data you can see it. The returns to labor in the Fed reserve data show a marked decline and returns to capital have been rising and since 2009 it has skyrocketed. Because labor returns have gone down, there is not enough aggregate demand in the economy for people to buy goods and services. The next thought would be that capitalists would change because people have to be able to buy their goods and services. No, if you are a global capitalist it does not matter. As long as there are no riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries. We have lots of corporations now that are bigger than governments. Steve Coll’s book on ExxonMobile basically describes a private foreign service and a private military:

The scope of the market has become larger than the domain of the sovereignty of nation-states.

– The ultimate solution is very simple: the 90% of Americans who are worse off, who are back to the income level of 1966, can vote in a new government and start with the state legislatures because they are the ones that set the boundaries for the congressional districts but it will take many decades to get to a better path. The fundamental question about this division between the super-rich and everyone else is, “Are we going to revise the rules?” Right now you are seeing the rise of oligarchical thinking such as Tom Perkins saying the number of votes you should have should be based on the amount of money you have. The founders explicitly rejected that kind of thinking.

– This idea that if you make a lot of money, you should pay more in taxes is the most conservative idea in western civilization if your standard is something that’s been tested through time and works which is the classic meaning of conservative. Progressive taxation was invented 2,500 years ago in Athens when they invented democracy. The people of the city-state of Athens concluded that the only way one could become wealthy is by following the rules and laws set down to protect everyone. The infrastructure of Athens, its military, and government services that were provided to benefit everyone meant that those who did become wealthy were expected to bear a greater burden for those costs of society to ensure that Athens would endure. Society made their fortunes possible. This idea has been embraced by every classic worldly philosopher. 

– The game doesn’t just comfortably and stably go on if people don’t become active and we keep driving towards deeper and deeper hollowing out and inequality. Isn’t there a dark scenario here also?  Yes, we’re giving up on democracy and our descendents will read history books that begin with these words: “The United States of America was… ” It became a failed experiment where cynicism is used to mock anyone who is idealistic, a foolish romantic…

– We have governmental capture. We literally have a federal government that responds to the political donor class, which is a narrow group of very wealthy people, in how it taxes, how it doesn’t regulate, how it doesn’t enforce laws, how it makes trade agreements with other countries, and that imbalance should worry us a great deal. What did Plutarch tell us 2,000 years ago? “An imbalance between rich and poor is the most frequent and fatal ailment of all republics.”

PawelKuczynski_27

No Dice — Too Little, Too Late.

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

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

≈ 60 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pawe_Kuczy_ski_20

President Obama recently unveiled his plans for America to cut its CO2 emissions 30% compared to 2005 levels by 2030 “to limit warming below the 2˚C ceiling agreed by countries“, a plan that Al Gore declares “the most important step taken to combat the climate crisis in our country’s history.” I’m here to explain to you that if that is the best the human race can muster, we’re trapped in a very sad state of anthropocentric denial.

Keeping in mind that humans of industrial civilization have thus far warmed the planet by 0.85˚C in the last couple hundred years, the extreme weather events that have occurred just in the last decade, let alone in the last year, are clear evidence of an increasingly destabilized climate system. Catastrophic changes in the glacial zones of the Arctic and Antarctic have been set into motion, altering global jet streams and weather patterns as well as locking in a sea level rise that will make most coastal cities uninhabitable within a couple of generations. Thus we can see that the target of 2˚C is a totally fraudulent upper limit for anything safe; industrial civilization has already passed the point of no return into climate chaos.

From day one when he entered office, Obama was never anything but a yes man to corporate interests. As far as energy is concerned, Obama is the “clean coal” guy even though there is no such thing. Ethanol from corn is a big joke as well with a net energy of nil. Meanwhile, the increasing price of food does not get figured into the CPI. The Keystone XL pipeline is already approved and being built piece by piece while Democrats and mainstream environmentalists pretend it’s still something under consideration. Obama’s current plans include “an incentive for states to develop regional carbon-trading systems”, despite the fact that such pollution swapping schemes have historically been proven to be rife with fraud and failure. There is no “right price” for carbon. Assisting BP in covering up the largest environmental disaster in American history and allowing fracking consultants to write their environmental impact report are a couple other highlights on Obama’s record that don’t inspire confidence. When it comes to protecting the planet for future generations, both parties in our political duopoly have essentially followed the same omnicidal path. Lou at The Cost of Energy points out:

The US political system is so broken, so blatantly an open bazaar where corporations can buy public policy puppets like so many street hookers, that it’s hard to imagine any policy stronger than the new EPA proposal going into effect and not being killed by the next presidential administration or strangled by the purse strings controlled by the Congress…

Debs

The commercial, capitalist part of society has completely outstripped the interests of humanity as a whole. In the case of fossil fuels, private firms and individuals are carrying out activities which are having dire consequences for everyone, but corporations are only interested in their own advantage and in fact are required by law to place shareholders’ interests above all else with no regard to the long-term well-being of the global community and future generations.

Although CO2 emissions have fallen in the U.S. in recent years due primarily to electricity plants switching to the cheaper source of natural gas, they have jumped back up once again according to the latest reports. Demand for coal abroad has also been on the rise with the U.S. exporting its supply to meet the demand. However, most disturbing is the following graph which illustrates that in the last 164 years, no new energy source has ever stopped our expanding usage of fossil fuels. Levels of carbon extraction are perhaps a more telling indicator of the primacy of fossil fuels and the direct correlation between economic growth and global emissions than the energy statistics of any one particular country:

…as Mike Berners-Lee and I argue in The Burning Question, despite radical changes in the global energy mix over the last two centuries (and even more radical changes within individual countries) energy use and carbon emissions have undergone remarkably consistent long-term exponential growth. The implication is that there’s a technological and social feedback loop at work, with each new energy source increasing access to and demand for all the other sources. Energy begets energy.

The graph below, which shows total human energy use since 1850, reflects this. When coal use took off in the nineteenth century biomass energy didn’t decline as is often assumed. In fact it increased, helped rather than hindered by coal-powered industrialisation and globalisation. Similarly, coal use increased when society started extracting large amounts of oil – which makes sense given that oil not only proved useful for coal mining but also enabled the mass roll-out both of cars and energy-hungry suburban homes. In turn, gas and hydro helped drive technological and engineering revolutions that have made obscure oil sources more viable…

…The fact that new energy sources tend to be additional to existing ones helps explain why more gas production has dinted neither US carbon extraction nor global emissions. But critics of gas beware: the same caveat applies to genuinely low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and nuclear, or indeed increasing energy efficiency. We usually assume that installing a wind turbine or nuclear plant will reduce global emissions but that’s not necessarily true, since the fossil fuel that the clean energy system replaces may get burned elsewhere instead, perhaps kick-starting new energy feedback loops in other parts of the world and driving global carbon emissions up yet further.

In some cases there has even been talk of using low-carbon energy sources directly to increase fossil fuel flows. For example, modular nuclear reactors are being considered as a way to propel natural gas down the remote pipelines that bring energy to Europe’s homes and power plants, or for melting tar to produce oil for the world’s billion-strong car fleet. This seems crazy at first given that it would be more efficient and less polluting to use the nukes directly for producing electricity, but existing infrastructure can determine our energy choices as much as the available energy sources do…

…there’s little evidence so far that fracking, wind power, nuclear or any other technology is helping us leave any carbon in the ground. Indeed, as I wrote recently, despite all the renewable power installed so far, all the fracking rigs, all the energy efficiency gains, all the national carbon cuts, and even a collapse in average fertility levels, global emissions are still growing at the same rate today as they were in the 1850s… – link

Snap 2014-06-03 at 01.33.30

In The Biophysics of Civilization, Money = Energy, and the Inevitability of Collapse, a similar correlation was demonstrated between money (the economy) and CO2 emissions. Without fundamentally changing the economy’s dependency upon growth and profit, emissions will continue to rise and deceptive non-solutions will continue to be sold to the public. Even if all human industrial activity ceased this instant, we would still be looking at upwards of a 2.65˚C temperature rise, but capitalist industrial civilization is a superorganism that is on an unwavering trajectory. The scales have been tipped out of favor for mankind. The geologic pendulum will swing back to bring things into balance over millennia, and in the process industrial civilization will be crush beneath the iron hand of natural law.

One look inside the self-serving and hypocritical mind of those running in society’s elite circles will tell you there is no chance for any radical departure from the moribund thinking which keeps the rotted status quo in place.

[Nate Hagens: …from a (good?) friend of mine – married to a billionaire, very connected, energy investment guy – i sent him the EPA announcement]

Nate,

You have seen the movie Idiocracy, right?  Well President Mountain Dew Commacho in that movie is a better leader than BO.  At least Commacho knew sometimes you need to listen to smart people & put them in charge.

Long story short, the presidency is in meltdown mode.  Everyone has figured out what I told you…he is a bad guy.  Whether you definition of “bad guy” is a person who used his skin color to get where he is in DC then holding the US hostage to his bitter, bigoted edicts; or just a lucky ne’er do well who wanted to save the world, but instead made it worse.   HE IS DONE! <<<the exclamation point is Carney quitting.

Nate, none of what he does means squat (especially the agencies like EPA)…dems/repub know it.  Next elections will save the economy for 20-30 more years…I know you & I disagree on the timeline.  I hope, and pray, you are wrong…but I do know your logic is correct.

Best,

Jxxxxx

Buy coal/BTU tomorrow on the dip.

Like the radiation from Fukushima, CO2 emissions are invisible and their calamitous effects can play out over generations. The masses simply can’t stomach hard reality when they are entranced by a techno-capitalist wonderland of mental distractions and virtual reality pitfalls.

148

Endlessly Apologizing for a Self-Destructive System

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

occupytoronto-021

Although I agree with much of what J. H. Kunstler has to say, particularly on his analysis of energy and his critiques of American suburbia, when it comes to his views on the human-made system that is driving this entire train wreck, he gets it dead wrong. Here is a quote from his last blog post:

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

…It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay…

Kunstler is perpetuating a deep-seated myth about capitalism that many in American society repeat. Laying the blame on those victimized by an economic system, which by design exploits, disenfranchises, and discards its subjects, overlooks the fact that the problem is the system itself. Capitalism is not an ethical system, and its overriding force of motivation is always the bottom line. Inequality, conflict, and regulatory corruption are all part and parcel of capitalism. History has borne this out numerous times. Unless someone steps in to break them up, monopolies are the natural result of unbridled capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Winner-take-all

Corporate money greases the wheels of the political system which then passes regulations discouraging competition and favoring large corporations. Regulatory capture is inevitably what happens when successful capitalists amass wealth and buy off the political class whose lifeblood is, after all, money. Under the present system, we will never see a candidate elected to office without a substantial war chest of funds stuffed with corporate ‘donations‘. Government does the bidding of capitalists, not vise versa. We saw this in spades with the election of Obama when all his campaign promises of “hope and change” evaporated into thin air as he filled his cabinet with Wall Street and Goldman Sachs cronies. Who wrote the legislation for Obama’s healthcare reform? — lobbyists for the healthcare industrial complex where, not surprisingly, “the big bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.” The corruption that Kunstler decries is not an aberration of capitalism, but a natural feature of it:

…What chiefly drives this sort of political corruption today is capitalism’s structure. For many capitalist enterprises, competitive and other pressures exist to increase profits, growth rates, and/or market share. Their boards and top managers seek to find cheaper produced inputs and cheaper labor power, to extract more output from their workers, to sell their outputs at the highest possible prices and to find more profitable technologies. The structure provides them with every incentive of financial gain and/or career security and advancement to behave in those ways. Thus, boards and top managers seek the maximum obtainable assistance of government officials in all these areas and also try to pay the least possible portion of their net revenues as taxes. Boards of directors tap their corporations’ profits to corrupt mostly the top echelons of the government bureaucracy, those needed to make advantageous official decisions.

Individual capitalists act to corrupt government officials to serve their enterprise’s needs. Grouped into associations, they do likewise for their industries. When organized as a whole (in “chambers of commerce” or “manufacturers alliances,” etc.), they corrupt to secure their class interests. When such corruption is not secret, capitalists articulate their demands to corrupted officials as “good for the economy or society as a whole.” Such phrases constitute the “appropriate language” that enables officials publicly to disguise and hopefully to legitimate their corrupt acts.

Strict moral codes, regulations and laws have been imposed to prevent individual or grouped capitalists from corrupting government officials. Evidence suggests, however, that neither civic-minded ethics, nor regulations nor laws have come close to ending capitalists’ corruption. Countless government courts, commissions, etc., have hardly ended official complicities in that corruption. Mainstream economics mostly proceeds in its analyses and policy prescriptions as if rampant corruption did not exist. Mass media tend to treat capitalist corruption (at least in their home countries) as exceptional and government efforts to stop it as serious. These, too, are further examples of that “appropriate language” with which modern capitalist societies mask systemic corruption.
~ Richard D Wolff

Noam Chomsky uses the acronym RECD (Really Existing Capitalist Democracy, pronounced ‘wrecked‘) to describe the capitalism that exists in the real world, and he doesn’t hold out much hope for civilization surviving it. Any sort of idyllic form of capitalism only exists in people’s heads and is kept alive by the myth of laissez-faire capitalism (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

Myth of a free market

BeFunky_null_12.jpg

A democracy cannot exist without an informed and intelligent electorate, and when corporations and monied interests intentionally spin the news, the populous are reduced to conspiracy mongers and what Gore Vidal scoffingly called ‘consumer-depositors’ in thrall to the financial elite. Alas, the institution intended to educate the public, aka the Fourth Estate, on matters of vital importance has been thoroughly dismantled and perverted by capitalism. The internet, the last bastion of independent and alternative news, is soon to follow suite (Mindful Economics, Joel Magnuson):

media

If the masses are unable to see through the spin and distortion propagated by a class of greedy parasites, there is one entity that will not suffer the fate of the dispossessed, dying quietly in some dark corner. The Earth is not so forgiving to such continued capitalist assaults, and it’s not fooled by propaganda such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Since pre-industrial times, the global temperature has ‘only’ risen 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and we can already see the havoc to civilization’s infrastructure that climate chaos is wreaking. With forecasts of average global temperature to be many fold greater by mid century, it would seem that only a miracle will save us.

Systemic Disorder published an important essay yesterday on the systematic destruction of labor rights throughout the world. How long will these myths about capitalism persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current system, calling it everything but capitalism. No matter how often capitalism fails, no matter how many people it kills, it is religiously touted as the only and the best economic system available despite its flaws. Will humans continue to amuse themselves to death, defending a systemically self-destructive system?

…

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah

And when they found our shadows
Grouped ’round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death . . .

…

Born into Dystopia

01 Saturday Mar 2014

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

≈ 126 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mutlu_Y_llar

I’m middle-aged and my nine-to-five work routine keeps the financial wolves at bay; as with most Americans, I’m dependent on every paycheck. Being fully aware of mankind’s global ecological overshoot definitely puts an extra twist into my daily outlook when I head off for work. How long will my job be around as the pressures of peak oil and climate change mount? Of course we’re all riding the crest of the largest bubble in history, i.e. human overpopulation, where enough people are added each day to fill a large city with every single inhabitant becoming a new source of pollution and CO2 emissions. This past year seems to be a real seminal point in the breakdown of modern agriculture with several major breadbasket regions getting hit hard by record drought such as California and Brazil. There is no adapting to this kind of extreme weather in which snowpack, seasonal rain showers, and aquifers dry up and then when moisture does come, it’s delivered in torrential floods. And yet a sea of hungry mouths continue to arrive each day. Very few of these new parents are aware of the inevitable mass starvation on the horizon. How could they know when unending economic growth is demanded by their governments, environmentalists and investigative journalists are treated as terrorists, and truth-tellers are silenced? So our predicament will be handled in the most ad hoc and chaotic manner, think Katrina or Fukushima. We were all born into this dysfunctional, irredeemable system, and there’s no escaping the long arm of industrial civilization…

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves.”
~ Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

The gears of the corporate state continue to grind onward while the plastic people go about their artificial lives oblivious to the strange rattling in the engine compartment. There really is no “carefree living” these days while you wish you could ‘unknow’ the dark thoughts of the wicked that is coming. No one or no thing is coming to save us.

Per the optimal foraging theory, humans are only following basic biological urges by burning the most optimal and high EROEI energy sources available to them – fossil fuels. The situation is complicated further by all the numerous mental traps humans subconsciously employ to avoid uncomfortable truths. Infighting between vested interests jockying to protect their slice of the pie is yet another gremlin in the engine. I really find little comfort in the thought that no matter how much damage we humans exact on the environment, life will eventually return to the planet. This seems to absolve us from acting as the so-called sentient and wise beings we claim to be. We might as well drop the pretenses and acknowledge the self-inflicted damage wrought by our technocapitalism. Its insidious mechanisms are busy digging a mass grave for everyone:

Snap 2014-03-01 at 09.37.23

Philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson called it the Technopathocracy of modern society. This dehumanizing system we live under offers the illusion of choice while also inculcating into the populace its antisocial nature, for instance cutthroat competition as “normal” and “healthy”. What the psychopathic elite deem as positive values becomes normalized:

Snap 2014-03-01 at 10.31.38

While we’re on the subject of technology, a few interesting factoids on E-waste:

  • It represents 2 percent of America’s trash in landfills, but equals 70 percent of overall toxic waste.
  • 20 to 50 million metric tons of e-waste are disposed worldwide every year.
  • Only 12.5 percent of e-waste is currently recycled
  • 80 to 85 percent of electronic products were discarded in landfills or incinerators, which can release certain toxics into the air.
  • It takes 539 pounds of fossil fuel, 48 pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water to manufacture one computer and monitor

It has been recently reported in the news that e-waste is a “global time bomb“, a “threat to mankind“, and a “growing toxic nightmare” with hundreds of millions of people threatened worldwide by its noxious pollution:

“[It] is the world’s fastest growing waste stream, rising by 3 to 5 per cent every year, due to the decreased lifespan of the average computer from six years to two,” says Wong.
“In countries such as Australia the disposal of e-waste in landfills generates a potent leachate, which has high concentrations of flame retardant chemicals and heavy metals. These can migrate through soils and groundwater and eventually reach people.”
Wong says developed countries often send e-waste to developing countries in Asia and Africa for recycling, taking advantage of these countries’ lower cost of labour and lower environmental regulation.
But, he says, in these countries e-waste is processed to remove precious materials such as gold, silver and platinum, under “extremely primitive conditions”, leading to extensive pollution of air, water, food and people.
“The toxic chemicals generated through open burning of e-waste include PCDD, PBDEs, PAHs, PCBs and heavy metals,” says Wong. “[These] have given rise to serious environmental contamination.”
“Some of these toxic chemicals are known to build up in fish especially, which may then be traded locally and around the world.”
Wong says that science has now clearly demonstrated the risk of these toxic chemicals being passed on to the next generation, while babies are still in the womb, or in their mother’s milk.
“At the same time these e-waste contaminated sites are extremely hard to clean up due to the complex chemical mixtures they contain,” he says.

E-waste is simply one more positive feedback loop in our technocapitalist system that is overwhelming the planet like plastic waste in the oceans and GHG’s in the atmosphere. Mathematician Eric Schechter succinctly explains a few major flaws in capitalism which guarantee our own death by ecocide if the system is allowed to continue on its course:

“We must overthrow the system before ecocide kills us all. And if we throw out the plutocracy without changing our culture, the culture will just generate a new plutocracy. All parts of the system are interconnected, so we must change every aspect of our lives — in effect, we are part of what we must overthrow; we must change ourselves.”

Some Major Flaws of Capitalism:

  • If we were all valued members of the economy, rising productivity would theoretically make us all affluent, but under capitalism, just the opposite happens. The benefits of increased productivity are pocketed by the handful of people who control the workplace — the owners, the management executives, etc. Workers are seen as expendable tools.
  • Market fundamentalists claim that everyone profits from a “voluntary trade,” because they exchange something they value less for something they value more. But it doesn’t really work out that way. The wealthy keep the much larger portion of the profit S-P, and the poor’s portion will be just barely enough for survival. The wealthy get wealthier, because they have the bargaining power and only engage in deals that make them wealthier; they decline any other deals.
  • Greed is built into the system. A corporation is compelled, both by competition and by its legal charter, to maximize profits by any means available, disregarding or even concealing harm to workers, consumers, and the rest of the world. Fines for breaking rules generally are smaller than the profits obtained from such misbehavior, and so such fines are simply viewed as a part of the normal cost of doing business. Any CEO who finds scruples is quickly fired and replaced. Externalized costs are omitted from our measurements and calculations. We are taught to see our interests as separate, and the well-being of the community is not the responsibility of anyone in particular. The commons gets privatized and plundered, and as a result the ecosystem is dying.
  • The accumulation of capital corrupts all levers of government. Once upon a time, some of us believed that the market could be regulated and kept moral by government. But we were mistaken — it’s inevitable that the wealthy will capture the government. After all, wealth can be used for influence.

So as long as the system stays intact, we’re all along for the suicide ride over the cliff. Certainly anyone who is half awake can see that despite all the Rio Earth Summits and talk of “going green” over the last several decades, our path to the graveyard is all but written in stone. The human species will snuff itself out with the help of a socio-economic ideology that all the brainwashed people worship.

Sit back and enjoy the ride…

“Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.”
~ Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors
Have Taken Over the Ship

IMG_0422