The authors contributing to Fleeing Vesuvius represent an impressive range of expertise. Six are economists, four environmental scientists, three specialists in green commerce and marketing, two architects, two community organizers, one an environmental engineer, one a psychotherapist and one a former corporate attorney. Others have backgrounds in appropriate technology, ethics and local government. All are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.

The first two sections of Fleeing Vesuvius define the problem by outlining the scientific, technological and economic parameters of fossil fuel depletion. The last five focus on solutions, with examples from Europe and North America of pioneering programs local groups and communities are undertaking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.

The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Industrialization and Capitalism

Fleeing Vesuvius deliberately emphasizes fossil fuel depletion more than climate change, owing to the major role it played (according to the authors) in the 2008 economic collapse. The first and most important section of the book, “Energy Availability” addresses the economics of fossil fuel depletion. It lays out hard truths about the link between cheap fossil fuels, industrialization, capitalism and money. We are always taught that the industrial revolution of the late 18th century was the result of British technological innovation, the view promoted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil and natural gas, in running the giant machines that replaced human labor.

In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years. He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible – an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it. By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

The other side of this argument is that industrialization and capitalism will eventually cease when fossil fuel becomes too prohibitively expensive to support it. In fact,

Douthwaite argues that the skyrocketing cost of oil ($148 a barrel) and food – not speculation in subprime mortgage derivates – were the root cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

The End of Industrial Agriculture

Part I of Fleeing Vesuvius also looks at the link between cheap fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. In addition to the fossil fuel energy required for farm machinery, food processing and transportation to market, oil and natural gas are essential in the production of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are an essential feature of industrial scale agriculture. Doing without them means returning to an era where people produced food and other basic needs with manure, human labor and draft animals. Prior to the industrial revolution, these primitive methods fed a global population of two billion. Many economists question whether it’s possible to provide for our current global population of seven billion without relying on fossil fuels.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

In the essay entitled “Future Energy Availability,” environmental physicist Chris Vernon explains the link between Peak Oil and Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI is defined as the amount of energy that must be expended to extract or produce surplus energy for business or household use. Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have reached the point where the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract have been used up. More importantly, owing to the enormous amount of energy required to produce some forms of renewal energy, renewable sources will never have the ability of fossil fuels to produce abundant cheap energy. Although wind, especially off-shore wind, and tidal energy have great promise, energy from these sources will remain quite costly for the foreseeable future. This leads Vernon to draw the conclusion that humankind will have no choice but to downsize their energy intensive lifestyles.

Money and Energy Scarcity

The main focus of the second section of Fleeing Vesuvius, “Innovation in business, money and finance,” is the link between energy availability and money. In it, Richard Douthwaite looks at our current debt based monetary system, which started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He explains how banks create money out of thin air every time they approve a new loan and why continuous economic growth is necessary in order to pay off the debt created in this way. When economic growth stalls, as it did in 2008, the debt becomes unpayable.

With the end of cheap energy, according to Douthwaite, global leaders must accept that the era of continuous economic growth has also ended. This means our current debt-based system of money creation must also be scrapped. In addition to calling for government to remove control of money creation from private banks, Douthwaite also supports the creation of regional and local currencies. This preserves the ability of low income groups to trade products and services when the national currency is in short supply due to recession and deflation.

The Transition to a Fossil Energy-Free Society

The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle. There are two somewhat technical essays on using biochar as a carbon sink and the importance of soil mineral content in localized food production. Other essays look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions, including the innovative “Cap and Share” approach put forward by Fiesta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) in 2008. This would require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. As fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs on to consumers, they, in turn, begin to seek out renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills.

Part 5 “Changing the way we live” includes an excellent essay by community organizer Davie Phillip describing some of the accomplishments of the worldwide Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins (in Ireland and the UK) in 2002.

Part 6 “Changing the Way We Think” addresses the apathy and inertia that prevents most of the developing world from taking serious measures to address the catastrophic economic, ecological and resource crises we presently face. In “Cultivating hope and managing despair,” psychotherapist John Sharry compares this widespread apathy and inertia to Kubler Ross’s stages of grief in bereavement or impending loss (denial, anger, depression, acceptance). The impending collapse of our current way of life is the worst loss any of us can imagine. It should be no surprise that the initial response to such news is denial. Sharry suggests that Kubler Ross has left out an essential step between depression and acceptance – namely, the hopeful and constructive activity which is often necessary before full acceptance can occur.

Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue in which different authors give suggestions for specific steps people can take on an individual, community, national and international level in preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system.

The North American edition of Fleeing Vesuvius has a preface by Richard Heinberg, author of the End of Growth and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.This edition also contains an appendix, “Should the US try to avoid a financial meltdown?”, a dialogue between two of the economists who contributed essays (Richard Douthwaite and Tom Konrad).

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared amid thunderous applause and a standing ovation from Congress, “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Similar to sanctions legislation signed into law by Obama on December 31, the EU-approved measures ban imports on future and existing contracts beginning July 1 of crude oil, petrochemical products; as well, the measures forbid the export of equipment and technology to Iran’s energy sector.

The EU sanctions also hit Iran’s Central Bank, freezing its assets. Also on Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat; a sign that the administration intends to further isolate Iran from the global financial system.

The New York Times claimed that the EU’s “phased” ban on oil purchases “was needed to help force a shift in policy and avert the risk of military strikes against Tehran.”

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters that in order to “avoid any military solution, which could have irreparable consequences, we have decided to go further down the path of sanctions.”

“It is a good decision that sends a strong message and which I hope will persuade Iran that it must change its position,” Juppé said, “change its line and accept the dialogue that we propose.”

Writing in Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar rejected the foolish notion that the West is interested in defusing the crisis.

“The EU defends its strategy–or economic war–as the only way to avert ‘chaos in the Middle East.’ Yet the economic war may end up sparking the full-blown war it is theoretically trying to avert; talk about an array of unintended consequences waiting in the wings.

“The EU insists on spinning its so-called ‘dual track’ approach towards Iran,” Escobar averred. “Stripped of spin, dual track essentially translates in practice as ‘shut up, bow to our sanctions, stop enriching uranium and sit on the table to negotiate on our terms’”

“Senior EU officials,” The Guardian disclosed, “concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west.”

Reflecting the growing danger to the world economy by this stunt, “oil prices rose on Monday after the European Union agreed to ban imports of Iranian crude,” Reuters reported.

“Brent March crude rose 72 cents to settle at $110.58 a barrel, having reached $111.36 intraday but unable to threaten front-month Brent’s 200-day moving average of $112.19.” One analyst warned, “heaven knows what will happen between now and the first of July” when the EU’s date for full implementation of the embargo takes effect.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned “that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 percent if Iran halts oil exports as a result of U.S. and European Union sanctions,” Reuters disclosed.

Accordingly, if the Islamic Republic stops exporting oil to the EU and other countries that join the “attack Iran” coalition of the feckless, “it would likely trigger an ‘initial’ oil price jump of 20 to 30 percent, or about $20 to $30 a barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.”

“In addition the oil embargo, the EU also decided to freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank, arguing that the aim was to choke off funding for the nuclear programme,” according to The Guardian. The EU’s move against Iran’s Central Bank follow policies put in place by the United States.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” an unnamed “senior diplomat” The Guardian. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

The Guardian also informed us that “David Cameron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a joint statement calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.”

“Our message is clear,” the statement read. “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people”–a diplomatic cliché that generally means: do what we say or else–”but the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. We will not accept Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

In a day filled with joint statements by imperial shills, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Henry Kissinger’s wunderkind in Obama’s cabinet) and Secretary of State Hillary (bomb the Libyans back to the Stone Age) Clinton said that “the measures agreed to today by the EU Foreign Affairs Council are another strong step in the international effort to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran. This new, concerted pressure will sharpen the choice for Iran’s leaders and increase their cost of defiance of basic international obligations.”

Commenting on the slow-motion apocalypse in progress, Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent: “Bring on the sanctions. Send in the Clowns.”

More Israeli Threats

How did America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” react?

According to Debkafile, a right-wing publication privy to leaks from Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that a “new round of sanctions will not stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon … stressing that Israel’s hand was always near the trigger.”

Barak’s comments were “aimed at cooling the optimistic notes emanating from Washington, Europe and some Israeli circles Monday after the European Union foreign ministers approved an oil embargo against Iran from July 1 and froze its central bank’s assets.”

The Defense Minister said “that because Iran had not stopped developing a nuclear weapon Israel had not removed any options from the table. We say this ‘very seriously,’ he stressed.”

Barak’s noxious statements were amplified in a lengthy piece published this week in The New York Times.

Titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?,” Ronen Bergman, a political analyst with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper who, like Debkafile, has cozy ties to Israeli defense mavens, wrote: “After speaking to many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Speaking at the Davos economic summit on Friday, Barak warned “that a situation could be rapidly reached when even ‘surgical’ military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. ‘We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons’,” The Independent reported.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear,” Barak said. “It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them.”

Barak’s message to Washington and the “international community”: “We’re ready to attack, now!”

‘Europe Will Burn in the Fire of Iran’s Oil Wells’

The new sanctions, coupled with escalating threats from Israel and the West are hardly “bridge builders” aimed at resuscitating stalled talks, but in fact are economic acts of war designed to force Iran into a corner.

Rejecting demands to “dialogue” with guns pointed at their heads, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Kowsari, the deputy leader of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee told Press TV that “in the event of US ‘military adventurism’ in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will respond in the shortest possible time by making the entire world unsafe for Americans.”

Kowsari reiterated Iran’s long-standing promise to “definitely” close the strategic Strait of Hormuz “if there is a disruption in the sales of the country’s crude, stressing that the “US and its allies will not be able to reopen the strategic waterway.”

Hardly fazed by Western threats, and apparently ready to take “preemptive” measures of their own, Seyyed Emad Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s parliamentary Energy Commission said on Friday that “Iran has the world’s third biggest oil reserves and cannot be eliminated from global energy equations,” Press TV reported.

Hosseini said that parliament “is considering a plan to completely stop oil exports to EU members which will initially paralyze the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece.”

“Iran is powerful [as a country] and oil sanctions imposed by European countries will only harm the European Union.” Hosseini added, “Europe will definitely lose its oil war with Iran because European countries are grappling with numerous domestic challenges and disruption of Iran oil flow will lead to the escalation of domestic pressure and crisis in EU member states.”

On Saturday, Fars News Agency reported that “members of the Iranian parliament finalized a draft bill on cutting the country’s oil exports to the European states in retaliation for the EU’s oil ban against Tehran.”

Nasser Soudani, the vice chairman of the parliamentary Energy Commission told Fars that “the bill has 4 articles, including one which states that the Islamic Republic of Iran will cut all oil exports to the European states until they end their oil sanctions against the country.”

Soudani told Fars earlier this week when the oil cut-off bill was introduced, “Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.” Take that, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy!

Driving home the point, Bloomberg News reported Friday that “Fitch Ratings cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and three other euro-area countries, saying they lack financing flexibility in the face of the regional debt crisis.”

In addition to Italy and Spain, the ratings agency also downgraded the credit worthiness of Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus. And with Greece currently negotiating with creditors on how to avoid a default, soaring oil prices would severely impact the ability of EU countries to climb out of the economic ditch and is a further sign that the 2008 capitalist economic crisis is accelerating.

Commenting, Asia Times Online political analyst Pepe Escobar again warned: “According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1–and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this preemptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude.”

“Not surprisingly,” Escobar averred, “the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves.”

“Greece,” Asia Times pointed out, “already facing the abyss–has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default–and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain–and beyond).”

Not that any of this matters to the Americans who are exacerbating the manufactured “Iran crisis,” partially as a hammer to beat down their EU competitors–under the tattered flag of Western “unity”–while gambling that war and their delusional hope for “regime change” in Iran will bring them one step closer to energy hegemony in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Eyes Wide Shut

Which brings us back to Iran’s “red line.”

“Tehran has repeatedly said that it would close Hormuz only if–and we should repeat–only if Iran is blocked from exporting its oil,” Asia Times warned.

“This would represent a deathblow to the Iranian economy–totally dependent on oil exports–not to mention the regime controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regime change is the real agenda of Washington and its European poodles– but that cannot be spelled out to global public opinion,” Pepe Escobar noted.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Press TV that “in the absence of Iranian supply, oil prices will go up and they (the Western states) know it. However, Iran will never allow itself to be in a situation in which it cannot sell oil but other regional states can.”

And how did the global godfather react to Tehran’s warning? Why with more bellicose rhetoric of course! The United States and their “partners” have pledged to “do what needs to done” to keep the strategic waterway open, U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder warned.

The ambassador added: “These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.”

The Defense Department announced last week that it will maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers despite budget constraints, as a threat to Iran but also to geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

Russia Today reported that “with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.”

Ramping things up even further, Interfax reported Thursday that the U.S. “plans to deploy a third convoy of warships led by USS Enterprise to the Gulf in March.”

“The country’s second aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group entered the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz last Sunday, accompanied by UK and French warships.”

Last Saturday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Enterprise, that “the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran,” the Associated Press reported.

While Iran reiterated its threat to close the narrow Strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, Tehran has done so as a defensive response to an aggressive military build-up along their borders, the assassination of scientists, terrorist bombings of defense facilities, surveillance overflights by U.S. and Israeli drones and economic sanctions by the West that could crater their economy.

“That’s what this carrier is all about,” Panetta blustered. “That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

Yet despite Israeli threats to “go it alone,” they do not possess the assets capable of mounting a decisive military offensive against the Islamic Republic.

On Thursday, Time Magazine reported that an unnamed “senior security official” told Netanyahu’s cabinet last fall that the prospects for “success” were “not altogether encouraging.”

“‘I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,’ the official quoted a senior commander as saying. ‘If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way’.”

Short of launching a preemptive nuclear first strike on Iran, the Israelis will heel when the master whistles. Only the United States has the requisite military assets capable of inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, but they are well-aware of the risks an Iranian counterstrike would pose.

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya cautioned: “U.S. naval strength, which includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled and unmatched by any other naval power. Primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are nonetheless vulnerable.”

Noting the findings of a Pentagon war game, Millennium Challenge 2002, Nazemroaya wrote that “even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.”

During that $250 million war game, the “scenario hypothetically pitted the Blue Team (representing US warships) against a Red Team that launched a coordinated assault using swarming boats and missiles–the kind of tactics Iran might employ,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Red Team commander, Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, told The New York Times back in 2008 that “the sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack.”

“The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes,” Van Riper told the Times. “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” the general cautioned.

“Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare recognizes that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has little chance of winning any face-to-face military contest with powerful enemies like the United States,” the Monitor noted.

“Instead,” journalist Scott Peterson averred, “Iran aims to ‘exploit enemy vulnerabilities through the used of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft, to mount surprise attacks at unexpected times and places’ which will ‘ultimately destroy technologically superior enemy forces,’ writes Iranian military expert Fariborz Haghshenass in a 2008 study based on published doctrines of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Part of Iran’s strategy includes decentralized decision-making.”

A “former European diplomat” told the Monitor that “the entire [IRGC] structure–if you look at how air defense is organized, the land forces, the combination of the Basij [militia] and the [IRGC]–this is all geared toward what they call the Mosaic Strategy, where you have individual military units who have a great deal of independence to decide what they can do without referring back to the center.”

“When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles,” the Times grimly observed, “it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.”

Nazemroaya warned, “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

Undeterred by warnings from their own military experts, Washington and Tel Aviv are heading towards the edge of the cliff and seem eager to jump.

On Friday, Russia Today disclosed that the mysteriously “delayed” Austere Challenge 12 joint missile defense exercise with Israel “originally slated for this spring, will be scheduled for October 2012.”

Amid conflicting reports that first had the Obama administration, and then the Israelis, postponing the exercise, allegedly because “a series of events,” according to Inter Press Service, “impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.” On the other hand however, Debkafile averred that Netanyahu called it off “as a mark of Israel’s disapproval for the administration’s apparent hesitancy.”

Well, it’s on again.

As Russia Today reported, the drill will “signal a surge of American troops to Israel by the thousands” and Iranian authorities “fear that the exercise will try out more than just the missile capabilities of the allies. Also being put to the test is Iran’s patience.”

“Now after a brief delay,” RT averred, “America will send thousands of troops and its anti-missile defense systems to Israel, albeit a few months later than planned.”

“With the exercise back in the books, it could mean that an eventual war between the US and Iran is still in the works–and now the world has a timeline to see it through.”

Indications are that Washington’s timeline is shrinking as the Pentagon accelerates plans to rush new weapons into the deployment phase.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that “Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.”

“The 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.”

However, “initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.”

“The push boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” the Journal disclosed.

Having already spent some $300 million for 20 bombs, designed by military-industrial-complex heavyweight Boeing, the Pentagon sought an additional $82 million this month in a secret request to Congress.

Warning of the “grave consequences” of a U.S.-led attack on Iran, last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described “the scenario Russia and the global community could face if things in the Middle East, especially in Iran, get out of hand,” Russia Today informed us.

“As for the chances that this disaster (a military attack against Iran) could occur, this question would be better addressed to those who keep mentioning this as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said in a comment apparently intended for Israel and the United States. “The consequences will be really grave, and we are seriously concerned about this.”

Pointedly, the Foreign Minister said “this will not be an easy walk, and it’s impossible to calculate all of the possible consequences.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that “Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.”

Braggadocio aside, unlike the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise, American forces will not have the luxury of a “do-over” if events really do spin out of control.

Some things should be uninvented – DES, HRT, GMOs, hexachlorophene in infants’ soap, nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, etc. Now a new threat, the Smart Grid and Smart Meters. If these are good ideas, why is the free market not providing them? Why the need for taxpayer funding? The fact that this industry must depend on taxpayer money is just one of many reasons it is suspect.

The May 20, 2011 Sandia Labs News Release reported that 69.3 Million has been granted for Smart Meter implementation in Vermont.

During a December 2011 news conference Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin and Senator Bernie Sanders announced their support of a 15 million dollar government grant to Sandia Labs. The grant is to be used for implementation of Smart Meter technology in Vermont. This is a perfect example of Corporate Welfare. Sandia has a long, fascinating history.

From the Sandia website:

…Sandia National Laboratories’ roots lie in World War II’s Manhattan Project and its history reflects the changing national security needs of postwar America. Sandia’s original emphasis on ordnance engineering — turning the nuclear physics packages created by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into deployable weapons — expanded into new areas as national security requirements changed. In addition to ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile, Sandia applied the expertise it acquired in weapons work to a variety of related areas such as energy research…

Is it really a good idea to put the national electric grid under the control of any corporation? How about a corporation with a history of war and destruction? There are many unanswered questions.

The Smart Grid is the opposite of the movement toward sustainable communities and transition towns. Control of the grid should be local. When power outaqes occur, and they will, the smaller the area of the black-out the better. The larger the area, the more difficult it is for any emergency response. This puts large populations at risk for property damage and death. In September 2011 a large power outage affected more than 5 million people in California, Arizona, and Mexico. In recent years, an ice storm caused a large power outage in northern New York State. Farmers were among those affected. Eventually farmers were able to access generators for milking machines on rural farms.

One of the big issues in Vermont is the lack of generators. When power goes out, individual home owners are on their own. Some home owners have purchased generators. Most cannot afford the high price. Estimates range upwards of $5000 for a hard wired generator that will allow a furnace to heat a home and prevent property damage. The damage caused by frozen pipes can be extensive. Also, there are health concerns for those who need electricity to power medical devices.

One of the most relevant questions is: why do we need a Smart Grid? Who will benefit? The first duty of a corporation is to its share holders. Profit and the bottom line trump consumer protection. In Vermont there is a history of this. For example, CVPS moved all of its emergency repair vehicles out of Bennington. The vehicles are now garaged many miles away in Sunderland. This decision to garage the vehicles in a less densely populated area was based on the corporate bottom line. That is understandable. It is not the duty of corporations to be benevolent. This is the way the capitalistic system works. The move of the vehicles has placed many homes at risk – especially during winter storms. This risk continues today.

Why the rush to an unproven technology? Will the cost per kilowatt go down for the consumer? Will there be privacy concerns? Who will have access to power consumption data of individual homes? For anyone with access, it will be easy to see which homes are occupied and when they are unoccupied. Will every home now need to be protected with battery powered burglar alarm systems?

Besides questions about the Grid, there are questions about Smart Meters. In some areas of the country they are illegal. There are questions about the synergistic consequences of additional EMF pollution in the environment. There have been reports of health devices and other electronic equipment being affected. Some believe that Smart Meters can cause cancer. All of the science is not yet in. It will take years. In the meantime, should people be used as guinea pigs for this big experiment? How much more would be accomplished if the science and money were dedicated to conservation and alternative sources of power? Every dollar spent on the Smart Grid is a dollar that is not available for other efforts.

There is another issue: that of the lack of a democratic process. In Vermont those who opt-out of the Smart Meter implementation will be charged an additional fee every month. It is reported that in Maine there is a one-time $40 opt-out fee. Op-out fees feel a little like blackmail. So far, the people have had no say in this controversy.

Maybe the most important reason to oppose Smart Grid technology, is that it places too much power in the hands of too few. Imagine bringing down the grid and the chaos that would result. No power. No refrigeration for the food supply in the summer. No heat to keep people alive in the northeast during winter. No transportation. No gas – it could not be pumped. No water – it could not be pumped.

A terrorist attack on the grid, is not the issue. Mistakes happen. Disgruntled workers react. Maybe the most sure thing is that technology fails. Sooner or later all technology fails. This is not a zero defects industry. If the unplanned shutdown damages large industrial turbines and generators, it could take many months to replace them. Think about many months without electricity.

Maybe the Smart Grid will be the greatest political-engineering feat of all time, or maybe not. Imagine just one flick of the switch and the entire system is brought down. This could be the end of everything – the real Armageddon. No food. No communication. No Internet. No life as we know it. Engineered back to the Stone Age without the survival skills that our Stone Age ancestors had.

So said 64-year-old Chieko Shiina, a member of the group Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and a traditional farmer from Miyagi Prefecture, in reference to nuclear radiation, as I sat inside the tent on the floor across from her on Day 102 of the sit-in.  In years gone by she would have been 100 miles north on her farm tending her crops and doing such things as fermenting rice to make sake, harvesting leaves to make tea or manufacturing tatami mats.  However, her farm, in southern Miyagi Prefecture is just north of Fukushima and so, while Chieko’s farm is not in an evacuation area, it is too heavily contaminated with radiation for her to farm or sell her products: “I cannot let people eat these things.”

The tent encampment where we met is directly outside the Tokyo headquarters of METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and began on September 11, the six month anniversary of the combined disasters of the March 11 genpatsu shinsai, a new term that combines a catastrophic quake with a nuclear disaster. Mothers from Fukushima traveled to Tokyo and launched the sit-in with the slogan “We Stood Up to Sit Down,” as they demanded that the Japanese government provide accurate information on the levels of radiation, better protection, and expansion of the evacuation zone for their children.

Over the last three months, the sit-in has become an organizing hub for the anti-nuclear people’s resistance in Japan as well as other protest movements against free trade agreements, the American military base in Okinawa, and the movement to stop any alteration of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prevents Japanese troops from being deployed offensively beyond the shores of Japan.  For these reasons, the camp has been regularly targeted for harassment by groups from the Japanese Right.

While large protests of delegations from Fukushima and around the country occur regularly, Chieko is there full-time, braving the elements and frigid temperatures of winter time Tokyo.  She intends to continue the encampment for 10 months and 10 days, the length of time that Japanese traditionally consider that a mother carryies a child as she believes that “the style of fighting should be derived from life” and “that is why it is 10 months and 10 days.”  Emblazoned across the top of one of the many hand-outs at the camp is her slogan: “Women are Pregnant with the Future.”

Another woman I met there, Hisako Tsuruta, told me why she had joined the sit-in: “I am 73 years old, but I can still move and I can still walk.  I need to act before I perish.  I have been building this society of destruction and pollution since the Second World War and I didn’t say anything before, so I am responsible.  Now I must make change.”

Echoing the language of the Occupy Movement, [a large banner at the encampment proclaims “We are the 99%”], Hisako was keen to make broader connections to environmental and social problems that could only be solved by the people acting in unison:

We are all the same, people cannot eat, don’t have jobs, there’s money for war but not people.  Within ourselves we have the power to solve these problems.  With people’s collaboration we can do anything; politicians should leave these problems to us to solve.  People are making the connections and so there is hope in the world.  Before, the image of Fukushima women was quiet, not emotional, now they start to stand up – and sat in.  Even if we lose, we must resist.

The theme of resistance was in the air at a meeting I attended between government representatives of NISA and METI and environmental organizations such as Green Action, Friends of the Earth (Japan) and the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, (CNIC).  Over 150 people, representing 125 organizations had endorsed two demands and were there to grill the government functionaries about cracked pipes between the reactors and the coolant system at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

As a result of scheduled maintenance, safety concerns and popular protests, only 8 of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are currently operational and producing power.  Due to energy conservation efforts, there are nevertheless no blackouts.  This fact had not escaped the people in the room, who questioned what the need for any nuclear power was if, through a combination of energy conservation and a switch to clean, renewable energy, nuclear power in Japan, which previously supplied over 30% of electrical demand, could easily be made entirely redundant.  The room broke into strong applause when Ryoichi Hattori, Social Democrat member of the House of Representatives, came to the microphone to ask why this summer, rather than restarting any reactors, they couldn’t all be shut down and the Japanese people would see how they could live without any nuclear power.

Despite this, the government and NISA is pushing to restart some of the reactors early next year after completion of “stress tests” that they claim will show that the reactors are safe to operate, even in the event of another earthquake.  Environmental and other concerned citizen groups contend that the stress tests are based on a faulty and potentially fatal premise: that the earthquake itself did not cause pipes to crack and release steam and radiation, even before the tsunami hit.

Activists were there to present their two demands and provide evidence to back up their claim that pipes were indeed damaged by the earthquake, thereby invalidating the basis of the stress tests which are based on reactor earthquake-resistance analysis that rules out pipe damage from the earthquake.  If the stress tests on the reactors that the government wants to restart are without foundation and based on incorrect analysis, then none of the idled nuclear plants should be restarted.

The backdrop to the discussion and contributing to the tension in the air and the intensity of the meeting is the continuing disaster at Fukushima that has so negatively impacted the 80,000 evacuees and led to Chieko being forced from her farm, as well as those who are still trying to live nearby outside the official evacuation area but are scared of the radiation and unsure of whether it’s actually safe for themselves or their children.

Three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi are now known to have suffered meltdowns of the highly radioactive fuel rods, with the strong possibility of some fuel melting through the inner containment vessel and pooling on the reactor floor.  Elevated radiation levels have shown up in food staples such as rice and milk in Fukushima prefecture, an area known for its agriculture and a significant farming region of Japan as radiation vented to the atmosphere when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off two of the reactor buildings after the reactors lost electricity and therefore coolant.

Radioactive plutonium, the most toxic element known to humanity and one that does not exist on earth – it is only manufactured inside nuclear reactors as part of the fission of the uranium fuel – [EPA states: "Plutonium is considered a man-made element, although scientists have found trace amounts of naturally occurring plutonium produced under highly unusual geologic circumstances." -- Ed.] has been detected far from the plant itself, indicating beyond doubt that the inner and outer containment structures have been ruptured and the core of at least one reactor has been exposed.  The dumping of vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into the oceans has also occurred as workers at the plant struggled to prevent further explosions by keeping the fuel rods cool and were forced to release the largest ever amounts of radiation into the sea when they ran out of storage space.  As the plants are still leaking, groundwater continues to become contaminated and because of the extremely high levels of radiation inside the plant and all of the wrecked equipment it’s still impossible to know the full extent of the damage to the cores and how badly melted they are.  Despite this, the new Japanese Prime Minister Noda declared on December 16 that the reactors were now stable and in “cold shutdown” and the nuclear crisis had “been resolved” which brought heavy editorial criticism from the Japan Times under the title “Nuclear Crisis Far From Resolved.”

Hence, the two demands at the meeting were that there should be no publishing of a report on the accident until all of the facts were collected, and secondly, that until the government knows the exact causes of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants, they should not restart any of the inactive nuclear reactors around the country.

Local activist groups are also pushing for an enlarged evacuation zone and better compensation for those forced to relocate and who have lost their jobs along with their homes.  The four hour meeting grew increasingly fractious as it became apparent that the government bureaucrats were not in a position to relay any fresh information or answer any questions from the floor.

The meeting brought strong reminders of a similar meeting in New York in late spring that I attended between community members and the US’s equivalent of NISA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  At that meeting, 600 attendees grew increasingly enraged by the lack of real information or space for dialogue from NRC representatives until local activists took over the meeting and ran it in a democratic manner where people were allowed to present evidence against the 36 year old Indian Point nuclear power plant and finally have a say in how energy would, or would not, be produced in their community.

After one ministerial representative had repeatedly read aloud the exact same non-answer to people’s questioning, Ryoichi Hattori demanded that he be replaced by someone who could answer the people’s questions as they had the right to be informed.

A lower level bureaucrat was replaced, another quickly came in and eventually it was admitted that the government cannot confirm whether the pipes were cracked by the earthquake, nor can they rule out that the cracks were made worse by the tsunami.  Not at all to the reassurance of anyone there, the new bureaucrat said that this was partly because the government had not yet received all of the necessary information from the plant’s operator and owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the infamous TEPCO, and that they were not sure that they would get all of the information in the future.

In Japan, the term “nuclear energy village” refers to the tight connections between the government, the government’s regulatory body, NISA and nuclear corporations such as TEPCO which, to all intents and purposes, regulate themselves, a point highlighted by a New York Times investigative report detailing the “culture of complicity” and corruption by TEPCO at Fukushima-Daiichi that undermined safety at the plant.

As the Japanese government seeks to sweep the nuclear disaster under the rug, and maintain Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy, continuing to put the Japanese people, who live on a volcanically and geologically active island in tremendous danger, it is clear that only the combined pressure of valiant fighters like Chieko Shiina will force the government to rethink its pro-corporate energy policy and move Japan toward a renewable and safe energy future.  As she told me, “it’s human nature to fight.  And this fight is international.  The actions to change the system make you change.  Both are important and necessary.  This unequal power structure will lead to change, but we must fight”.

Tomorrow, I travel to Fukushima to spend Christmas in the radiation zone, speaking with those most directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

As William Blum documented in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1953′s CIA-organized coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, guilty of the “crime” of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, may have “saved” Iran from a nonexistent “Red Menace,” but it left that oil-rich nation in proverbial “safe hands” — those of the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Similarly today, a nonexistent “nuclear threat” is the pretext being used by Washington to install a “friendly” regime in Tehran and undercut geopolitical rivals China and Russia in the process, thereby “securing” the country’s vast petrochemical wealth for American multinationals.

As the U.S. and Israel ramp-up covert operations against Iran, the Pentagon “has laid out its most explicit cyberwarfare policy to date, stating that if directed by the president, it will launch ‘offensive cyber operations’ in response to hostile acts,” according to The Washington Post.

Citing “a long-overdue report to Congress released late Monday,” we’re informed that “hostile acts may include ‘significant cyber attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military’,” unnamed Defense Department officials stated.

However, Air Force General Robert Kehler, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) told Reuters, “I do not believe that we need new explicit authorities to conduct offensive operations of any kind.”

The Pentagon report, which is still not publicly available, asserts: “We reserve the right to use all necessary means — diplomatic, informational, military and economic — to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests.”

Washington’s “interests,” which first and foremost include “securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia” as the World Socialist Web Site observed, may lead the crisis-ridden U.S. Empire “to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East … as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.”

Recent media reports suggest, however, that offensive cyber operations are only part of Washington’s multi-pronged strategy to soften-up the Islamic Republic’s defenses as a prelude to “regime change.”

Terrorist Proxies

For the better part of six decades, terrorist proxies have done America’s dirty work. Hardly relics of the Cold War past, U.S. and allied secret state agencies are using such forces to carry out attacks inside Iran today.

Asia Times Online reported that “deadly explosions at a military base about 60 kilometers southwest of Tehran, coinciding with the suspicious death of the son of a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, have triggered speculation in Iran on whether or not these are connected to recent United States threats to resort to extrajudicial executions of IRGC leaders.”

And Time Magazine, a frequent outlet for sanctioned leaks from the Pentagon, reported that the blast at the Iranian missile base west of Tehran, which killed upwards of 40 people according to the latest estimates, including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program, was described as the work “of Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad.”

An unnamed “Western intelligence source” told reporter Karl Vick: “‘Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,’ adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. ‘There are more bullets in the magazine,’ the official says.”

While Iranian officials insist that the huge blast was an “accident,” multiple accounts in the corporate press and among independent analysts provide strong evidence for the claim that Israel and their terrorist cat’s paw, the bizarre political cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were responsible for the attack.

Richard Silverstein, a left-wing analyst who writes for the Tikun Olam web site, said that the blast was a sign that “the face of the Israeli terror machine may have reared its ugly head in the world.”

Citing “an Israeli source with extensive senior political and military experience,” Silverstein’s correspondent provided “an exclusive report that it was the work of the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK.”

Hardly a stranger to controversial reporting, Silverstein published excerpts of secret FBI transcripts leaked to him by the heroic whistleblower Shamai Leibowitz. Those wiretapped conversations of Israeli diplomats caught spying on the U.S., “described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran.”

In a Truthout piece, Silverstein wrote that Leibowitz, a former IDF soldier who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, “explained that he was convinced from his work on these recordings that the Israel foreign ministry and its officials in this country were responsible for a perception management campaign directed against Iran. He worried that such an effort might end with either Israel or the US attacking Iran and that this would be a disaster for both countries.”

Unfortunately, while Leibowitz sits in a U.S. prison, his warnings are all but ignored.

According to Silverstein’s latest account, “it is widely known within intelligence circles that the Israelis use the MEK for varied acts of espionage and terror ranging from fraudulent Iranian memos alleging work on nuclear trigger devices to assassinations of nuclear scientists and bombings of sensitive military installations.”

Silverstein noted that “a similar act of sabotage happened a little more than a year ago at another IRG missile base which killed nearly 20.”

Terrorist attacks targeting defense installations coupled with the murder of Iranian scientist, five “targeted killings” have occurred since 2010, aren’t the only aggressive actions underway.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that “a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases … have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.”

According to the Post, “suspicions have been raised in Iran by what industry experts say is a fivefold increase in explosions at refineries and gas pipelines since 2010.”

With Iran’s oil industry under a strict sanctions regime by the West, maintenance of this critical industrial sector has undoubtedly suffered neglect due to the lack of spare parts.

However, “suspicions that covert action might already be underway were raised when four key gas pipelines exploded simultaneously in different locations in Qom Province in April,” the Post disclosed.

“Lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency that the blasts were the work of ‘terrorists’ and were ‘organized by the enemies of the Islamic Republic’,” hardly an exaggerated charge given present tensions.

Whether or not these attacks were the handiwork of Mossad, their MEK proxies or even CIA paramilitary officers and Pentagon Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) commandos, as Seymour Hersh revealed more than three years ago in The New Yorker, it is clear that Washington and Tel Aviv are “preparing the battlespace” on multiple fronts.

‘Collapse the Iranian Economy’

Along with covert operations and terrorist attacks inside the Islamic Republic, on the political front, a bipartisan consensus has clearly emerged in Washington in favor of strangling the Iranian economy.

Indeed, congressional grifters are threatening to crater Iran’s Central Bank, an unvarnished act of war. IPS reported that neocon Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), “a key pro-Israel senator,” has offered legislation “that would effectively ban international financial companies that do business with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from participating in the U.S. economy.”

“Dubbed the ‘nuclear option’ by its critics,” Jim Lobe reported that “the measure, which was introduced Thursday in the form of an amendment to the 2012 defence authorisation bill, is designed to ‘collapse the Iranian economy’… by making it virtually impossible for Tehran to sell its oil.”

However, “independent experts,” Lobe wrote, “including some officials in the administration of President Barack Obama, say the impact of such legislation, if it became law, could spark a major spike in global oil prices that would push Washington’s allies in Europe even deeper into recession and destroy the dwindling chances for economic recovery here.”

That amendment was introduced as tensions were brought to a boil over allegations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its latest report that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano claims the Agency has “identified outstanding issues related to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme and actions required of Iran to resolve these.”

“Since 2002,” Amano averred, “the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile, about which the Agency has regularly received new information.”

However, despite the fact that the “Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities,” to wit, that such materials have not been covertly channeled towards military programs, Amano, reprising former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous gaff that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” the IAEA “is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Far from being an independent “nuclear watchdog,” the IAEA under Amano’s stewardship has been transformed into a highly-politicized and pliable organization eager to do Washington’s bidding.

As a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies cheerily reported:

Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.  (emphasis added)

Although the new report “offered little that was not already known by experts about Iran’s nuclear programme” IPS averred, “it cited what it alleged was new evidence that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ since 2003 — the date when most analysts believe it abandoned a centralised effort to build a nuclear bomb’.”

But as the United States, with the connivance of corporate media, bury the conclusions of not one, but two National Intelligence Estimates issued by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, it is clear to any objective observer that “nonproliferation” is a cover for aggressive geopolitical machinations by Washington.

Both estimates, roundly denounced by U.S. neoconservatives and media commentators when they were published, insisted that “in fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” a finding intelligence analysts judged with “high confidence.”

In contrast, the highly-politicized IAEA report is a provocative document whose timing neatly corresponds with the imposition of a new round of economic sanctions meant to crater the Iranian economy. Never mind that even according to the IAEA’s own biased reporting, they could find no evidence that Iran had diverted nuclear materials from civilian programs (power generation, medical isotopes) to alleged military initiatives.

Indeed, with sinister allusions that hint darkly at “undeclared nuclear materials,” the agency fails to provide a single scrap of evidence that diverted stockpiles even exist.

Another key allegation made by the Agency that Iran had constructed an “explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion,” was denounced by former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley as “highly misleading,” according to an IPS report filed by investigative journalist Gareth Porter.

With “information provided by Member States,” presumably Israel and the United States, the IAEA said it “had ‘confirmed’ that a ‘large cylindrical object’ housed at the same complex had been ‘designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives’. That amount of explosives, it said, would be ‘appropriate’ for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons programme,” Porter wrote. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” the former nuclear inspector said.

But as Mark Twain famously wrote, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is certainly proving to be the case with the IAEA under Yukiya Amano.

Another player “solidly in the U.S. court” is David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, D.C. “think tank” funded by the elitist Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

In an earlier piece for IPS, Porter demolished Albright’s “sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.”

“But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives,” Porter wrote.

“In fact,” Porter averred, “Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.”

“It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright … who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed ‘Member State’ on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.”

It is no small irony, that Albright, corporate media’s go-to guy on all things nuclear, penned an alarmist screed in 2002 entitled, “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?”, an article which lent “scientific” credence to false claims made by the Bush White House against Iraq.

As investigative journalist Robert Parry pointed out on the Consortium News web site, “Albright’s nuclear warning about Iraq coincided with the start of the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign to rally Congress and the American people to war with talk about ‘the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’.”

“Yet,” Parry noted, “when the Washington Post cited Albright on Monday, as the key source of a front-page article about Iran’s supposed progress toward reaching ‘nuclear capability,’ all the history of Albright’s role in the Iraq fiasco disappeared.”

History be damned. Congressional warmongers and corporate media who cite these fraudulent claims, are “spurred by Israel’s whisper campaign to create a sense of urgency on Capitol Hill where the Israel lobby, acting mainly through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, exerts its greatest influence,” as IPS noted, and punish Iran for the “crime” of opening its nuclear facilities to international inspection!

That “whisper campaign” has now bloomed into a full court press for war by “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike, even as public approval of Congress’s work by the American people tracks only slightly higher than the popularity enjoyed by child molesters or serial killers.

As tensions are dialed up, the United States is spearheading a relentless drive to throttle Iran’s economy. The New York Times reported that “major Western powers took significant steps on Monday to cut Iran off from the international financial system, announcing coordinated sanctions aimed at its central bank and commercial banks.”

A strict sanctions regime was also imposed on Iran’s “petrochemical and oil industries, adding to existing measures that seek to weaken the Iranian government by depriving it of its ability to refine gasoline or invest in its petroleum industry,” the Times reported.

In a move which signals that even-more stringent sanctions are on the horizon, the U.S. Treasury Department “named the Central Bank of Iran and the entire Iranian banking system as a ‘primary money laundering concern’.”

That’s rather rich coming from an administration which slapped Wachovia Bank on the wrist after that corrupt financial institution, now owned by Wells Fargo Bank, pleaded guilty to laundering as much as $378 billion for Mexico’s notorious drug cartels as Bloomberg Markets Magazine reported last year!

Going a step further, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the major imperialist powers “to freeze the assets of the central bank and suspend purchases of Iranian oil.”

The Guardian reported that Britain “went the furthest by, for the first time, cutting an entire country’s banking system off from London’s financial sector.”

Playing catch-up with war-hungry Democrats and Republicans, President Obama stated that the “new sanctions target for the first time Iran’s petrochemical sector, prohibiting the provision of goods, services and technology to this sector and authorizing penalties against any person or entity that engages in such activity.”

“They expand energy sanctions, making it more difficult for Iran to operate, maintain, and modernize its oil and gas sector,” Obama said.

“As long as Iran continues down this dangerous path, the United States will continue to find ways, both in concert with our partners and through our own actions, to isolate and increase the pressure upon the Iranian regime.”

Last summer, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a strong backer of punishing sanctions, echoed Richard Nixon’s vow to “make the economy scream” prior to the CIA’s overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and wrote in The Hill that “critics … argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

With a new round of crippling economic sanctions on tap from the West, “liberal” Democrat Sherman might just get his wish.

Targeting Civilian Infrastructure

While the Obama administration claims that their aggressive stance towards Iran is meant to promote “peace” and “help” the Iranian people achieve a “democratic transformation,” ubiquitous facts on the ground betray a far different, and uglier, reality.

Anonymous U.S. “intelligence officials” told The Daily Beast “that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.”

According to Newsweek national security correspondent Eli Lake, “Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to ‘sleep,’ effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.”

But Israel isn’t the only nation capable of launching high-tech attacks or, borrowing the Pentagon’s euphemistic language, conduct “Information Operations” (IO).

The U.S. Air Force Cyberspace & Information Operations Study Center (CIOSC) describe IO as “The integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

In this light, The Daily Beast disclosed that “Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran’s big-city electric grids, which are not ‘air-gapped’ — meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack–officials say.”

The anonymous officials cited by Lake informed us that “a highly secretive research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands, known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), discovered the weakness in Iran’s electrical grid in 2009,” the same period when Stuxnet was launched, and that Israeli and Pentagon cyberwarriors “have the capability to bring a denial-of-service attack to nodes of Iran’s command and control system that rely on the Internet.”

But as Ralph Langer, the industrial controls systems expert who first identified the Stuxnet virus warned in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, the deployment of military-grade malicious code is a “game changer” that has “opened Pandora’s box.”

Among a host of troubling questions posed by Stuxnet, Langer said: “It raises, for one, the question of how to apply cyberwar as a political decision. Is the US really willing to take down the power grid of another nation when that might mainly affect civilians?”

But as we have seen, most recently during the punishing air campaign that helped “liberate” Libya — from their petrochemical resources — the U.S. and their partners are capable of doing that and more.

Future targeting of Iran’s civilian infrastructure may, in fact, have been one of the tasks of the recently-discovered Duqu Trojan, which Israeli and U.S. “boutique arms dealers” are suspected of designing for their respective governments.

And whom, pray tell, has the means, motives and expertise to design weaponized computer code?

As BusinessWeek disclosed in July, when one of America’s cyber merchants of death, Endgame Systems, pitch their products they “bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

According to BusinessWeek, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region — the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions’.”

“A government or other entity,” journalists Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance revealed, “could launch sophisticated attacks against just about any adversary anywhere in the world for a grand total of $6 million. Ease of use is a premium. It’s cyber warfare in a box.”

Kaspersky Lab analyst Ryan Naraine, writing on the Duqu FAQ blog averred that Duqu’s “main purpose is to act as a backdoor into the system and facilitate the theft of private information. This is the main difference when compared to Stuxnet, which was created to conduct industrial sabotage.”

In other words, unlike Stuxnet, Duqu is an espionage tool which can smooth the way for future attacks such as those described by The Daily Beast.

As The Washington Post disclosed last May, while the military “needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later,” it does not need such authorization “to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities.”

According to the Post, these activities include “studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate,” and can “leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses.”

Or more likely given escalating tensions, Iranian air defenses and that nation’s power and electronic communications grid which include “emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers” who would respond to devastating air and missile attacks.

Countdown to War

We can conclude that Israel, NATO and the United States are doing far more than placing “all options on the table” with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Along with ratcheting-up bellicose rhetoric, moves to collapse the economy, an assassination and sabotage campaign targeting Iranian scientists and military installations, cyber warriors are infecting computer networks with viruses and “beacons” that will be used to attack air defense systems and civilian infrastructure.

After all, as Dave Aitel, the founder of the computer security firm Immunity told BusinessWeek, “nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky warned last year, now confirmed by CIA and Pentagon leaks to corporate media: “It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran’s nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.”

With the global economy in deep crisis as a result of capitalism’s economic meltdown, and as the first, but certainly not the last political actions by the working class threaten the financial elite’s stranglehold on power, the ruling class may very well gamble that a war with Iran is a risk worth taking.

As Chossudovsky warned in a subsequent Global Research report, “there are indications that Washington might envisage the option of an initial (US backed) attack by Israel rather than an outright US-led military operation directed against Iran.”

“The Israeli attack — although led in close liaison with the Pentagon and NATO — would be presented to public opinion as a unilateral decision by Tel Aviv. It would then be used by Washington to justify, in the eyes of world opinion,” Chossudovsky wrote, “a military intervention of the US and NATO with a view to ‘defending Israel’, rather than attacking Iran. Under existing military cooperation agreements, both the US and NATO would be ‘obligated’ to ‘defend Israel’ against Iran and Syria.”

This prescient analysis has been borne out by events. As regional tensions escalate, the USS George H.W. Bush, “the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, has reportedly parked off the Syrian coast,” The Daily Caller reported.

Earlier this week, the financial news service Zero Hedge disclosed that “the Arab League (with European and US support) are preparing to institute a no fly zone over Syria.”

“But probably the most damning evidence that the ‘western world’ is about to do the unthinkable and invade Syria,” analyst Tyler Durden wrote, “and in the process force Iran to retaliate, is the weekly naval update from Stratfor.”

According to Zero Hedge, “CVN 77 George H.W. Bush has left its traditional theater of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz, a critical choke point, where it traditionally accompanies the Stennis, and has parked… right next to Syria.”

In an earlier report, citing Kuwait’s Al Rai daily, Zero Hedge warned that “Arab jet fighters, and possibly Turkish warplanes, backed by American logistic support will implement a no fly zone in Syria’s skies, after the Arab League will issue a decision, under its Charter, calling for the protection of Syrian civilians.”

The BBC reports that the Arab League “has warned Syria it has one day to sign a deal allowing the deployment of observers or it will face economic sanctions.”

“Meanwhile,” BBC averred, “France has suggested that some sort of humanitarian protection zones,” à la Libya, “be created inside Syria.”

American moves towards Syria are fraught with dangerous implications for international peace and stability. As analyst Pepe Escobar disclosed in Asia Times Online the Arab League, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and repressive Gulf emirates, dances to Washington’s tune.

“Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated,” Escobar wrote.

“Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident,” Escobar notes, “Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.”

“From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.”

“In other words,” Zero Hedge warned, “if indeed Europe and the Western world is dead set upon an aerial campaign above Syria, then all eyes turn to the East, and specifically Russia and China, which have made it very clear they will not tolerate any intervention. And naturally the biggest unknown of all is Iran, which has said than any invasion of Syria will be dealt with swiftly and severely.”

Despite, or possibly because no credible evidence exists that Iran is building a nuclear bomb as a hedge against “regime change,” belligerent rhetoric and regional military moves targeting Syria and Iran simultaneously are danger signs that imperialism’s manufactured “nuclear crisis” is a cynical pretext for war.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home — mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major “green” corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a “bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system,” which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades…. Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies.”

The  Environment News Service reports that the “agency’s warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28-Dec. 9. ‘If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,’ IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.’” (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as “an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond.” Its members represent the world’s leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group’s approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America’s hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, the New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that “Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth.” Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year’s elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the  immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama’s delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors — such as New York State’s Andrew Cuomo — who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas “outweighs” the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that:

Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S., it will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that’s just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: “The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America’s addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore’s critique:

“President Obama,” he declared, “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change…. The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Washington’s refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades — based on economic strength and unparalleled military power — on being recognized as the world’s dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state. Uncle Sam’s leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America’s sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are “deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives,” economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country’s disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today’s gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect — given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America’s neoliberal capitalist economy, even  to protect all life on Earth — Washington’s continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At  issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington’s dithering.

We won’t be hitting empty overnight, but inevitably and soon, global demand for oil and natural gas will outstrip global extraction and supply. This situation may not sound so dire — until one considers the long-term implications. I study energy issues and have been teaching college classes on the subject for some years now. My understanding of the complexities of energy supplies and their interrelationships with the global economy, geopolitics, food production, transportation, and more, lead me to a sobering conclusion: oil depletion is truly a game changer for modern industrial societies. As evidenced by the Occupy Movement protests in U.S. cities and around the world, people everywhere are already experiencing the impacts of economic problems that stem, in part, from oil depletion — and this is just the beginning.

High prices of oil have historically translated into economic recession because oil isn’t just any commodity — it’s the driving force of the industrial world itself. If and when the global economy recovers significantly from the Great Recession, increased demand for oil will spur higher prices for this depleting resource, resulting in another economic downturn. As we approached the economic collapse in fall of 2008, oil production was running basically flat out. There was very little spare production capacity to be had in world oil markets. Oil prices spiked and placed significant economic strain on the heavily indebted, thereby contributing to the economic crisis. Given the likelihood of continued oil price volatility, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

But why can’t we simply find more oil or find effective substitutes? For one thing, we’ve waited much too long to avoid big problems, and for many reasons, simply replacing oil or finding much more of it aren’t exactly simple strategies. Understanding why this is so entails developing an understanding of the energy system as a whole within the context of broader society.

Let’s start with oil depletion. It’s a documented fact. Geologist Dr. M. King Hubbert predicted the 1970 peak in oil production in the U.S. — and yes, that’s over 40 years ago! In hindsight, peak production makes sense. Oil is nonrenewable and under pressure from the layers of rock and earth above it. The liquid oil is more than ready to escape upward through any crack or borehole that penetrates its cap rock, which means efforts needed to extract it are low at first. As more wells are drilled, production increases (and pressure within the field drops) until production peaks. After that, production declines as the oil becomes, in effect, harder to reach. Once foremost among petroleum exporting nations, the U.S. currently imports almost half of the oil it consumes. The figures were closer to 60% before the economic downturn, and a significant portion of what is counted as domestic oil supplies in these figures is actually biofuels, mostly corn-based ethanol. Many respected geologists who specialize in estimating oil reserves believe we have already passed the global production peak.

We have a problem — and the fixes cited by technological optimists don’t offer complete solutions. Simply finding a lot more oil is not an option. Global oil discoveries peaked in the middle 1960s. If this trend could be reversed by using technological advancements, there’s little doubt it would have been by now. The globe has been pretty thoroughly explored by petroleum geologists, and new finds typically don’t compare well in size to earlier ones.

We must also consider net energy. Early oil produced from a field requires little effort to extract, but later, the efforts required to “lift” oil from a declining field intensify so that the energy profit from the endeavor declines. Eventually, extraction becomes an energy-losing proposition. It takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than is contained in the oil extracted. At this point, oil is not an energy source at all, but an energy sink. For some energy “sources” such as hydrogen that are cited as potential major contributors to a new energy economy, the net energy picture is particularly poor. Hydrogen must be refined from natural gas or electrolyzed from water. In accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, the resulting hydrogen actually has less energy available for use than was available from the electricity or the natural gas used to create the hydrogen. While hydrogen may prove useful as a storage medium for excess energy generated from renewable sources, it’s hardly an energy source.

Some optimists cite advanced technologies employed in discovering and producing oil as the answer to our supply problems. But they do so without acknowledging that these investments also represent energy investments and that the harder we work with these new technologies, the lower our net energy return. In any case, even if we could dramatically increase flows of petroleum using these technologies, doing so would only increase the potential for an energy crash later because we’d be more quickly using up the oil we have.

Some cite energy efficiency gains as pointing the way out of our energy conundrum, noting that over time, we’ve learned to do more with less energy. But efficiency means little without reduced total usage. In a context of worldwide population and economic growth, the global energy budget is rises quickly. Perhaps the main reason we don’t easily recognize the energy crisis in our midst is because the Great Recession and its aftermath have translated into reduced production and consumption by many, sometimes through the painful process of unemployment. In the energy world, increased efficiencies also correlate with increased energy density (more energy “bang” per unit of the material used). Increased efficiencies will be harder to achieve if we attempt to drive the globalized economy with renewable energy and coal — both of which are much less energy dense than oil.

Some cite natural gas as a substitute for oil and point to shale gas deposits, particularly in the northeastern U.S., as the answer to our energy problems. As geological consultant Arthur Berman has noted with regard to the Barnett Shale in Texas, the depletion rate for shale gas wells is extremely rapid, and estimates of total gas recovery potential are likely overstated. Furthermore, releasing the gas trapped in these formations requires hydraulic fracturing, a process that uses literally millions of gallons of water per well, not to mention the injection along with that water of toxic chemicals that can contaminate drinking water through accidental spills, deficient drilling practices, and perhaps other means. Do we really want to place our bets on yet another depletable energy source that has the potential to irreversibly damage our water? We can potentially live without oil, but we can’t live without water — not a single one of us. Some suggest we may rely on natural gas shipped by tanker across the ocean. This proposition would require heavy infrastructure (and, therefore, energy) investments, not to mention that the process of super cooling and shipping gas very negatively impacts net energy ratios. Natural gas is an efficient energy source when it can be shipped to users via pipeline, not when it’s transported long distance by tanker.

Oil shale and oil sands are also inefficient in terms of net energy as compared to petroleum. Oil sands are already being exploited as conventional oil supplies decline, but they won’t make up for conventional petroleum. What’s more, mining and processing of oil sands requires the utter destruction of ecosystems that are ravaged by strip mining, uses large amounts of fresh water, and releases large quantities of carbon dioxide, thereby exacerbating climate change. Is this a direction that we really want to go? As for oil shale, it isn’t oil at all, it’s source rock — oil that hasn’t been completely “cooked” in the earth’s crust. Recent experiments with in situ processing of oil shale have required using electric heating elements to heat the source rock underground for two the three years to finish the cooking process. In an effort to avoid groundwater contamination, experimental sites have also been surrounded by a layer of frozen ground. The net energy value of the oil obtained through such processes cannot possibly approximate that for conventional oil.

Transportation is a particularly sticky problem. The United States has bet on automobiles and trucks as the mainstays for transportation. Witness our underdeveloped rail system. With the global fleet numbering 700 million plus vehicles — each requiring the equivalent of about 90 barrels of oil to fabricate — and with miniscule to nonexistent infrastructure for alternative fuels, we face real problems. Some cite coal as a possible transportation fuel. Coal can be liquefied to produce synthetic petroleum. But we in the U.S. have no infrastructure for this, and there’s little of it globally. Dependence on coal for transportation would also require massive mining efforts — and we would be relying on a source of energy much less dense than petroleum (not to mention that we would seal our fate in terms of climate disaster).

Diesel vehicles can burn biodiesel or vegetable oil, but large scale growth and production of biofuels poses challenges. It’s not likely we could run all of our cars on biofuels the way we run them today on petroleum, even if we could change all our engines to diesels. The net energy harvested from biofuels production (when there is a positive net energy return) doesn’t come anywhere close to the net energy in oil. As we saw after the huge oil price spikes in the last decade, biofuels crops also compete for land with food crops when there are pricing advantages for producers to grow fuel crops. Renewable energy generated from wind and solar comes in the form of electricity, a fuel we don’t use in large measure for transportation. If we were to run our vehicles on electricity, we’d be back to the prospect of converting the immense global fleet to electric-drive vehicles, and we’d still face the question of what to do about large-scale shipping.

What about running industrial society on renewable energy? Currently, energy generated from renewable sources other than hydroelectricity (mostly large dams) and biomass (wood, animal dung, etc.) make up less than 1% of the world’s energy budget. Bringing enough renewable energy online to run the global economy as it is would require monumental efforts — technologically, politically, and in the business sector — not to mention a whole lot of energy. Don’t get me wrong, we do need more renewable energy generation, as much as possible. Countries and communities that know this and act on their knowledge will be more resilient in the years ahead — but we still need to change the way we live.

With regard to overall supply, oil isn’t likely to disappear overnight. A gradual decline in availability is quite possible, but rising global demand intensifies the potential for shortages. A growing world population, increasing consumerism, the spread of industrialism, and growing economies require ever more oil. What’s more, any significant negative growth in the global economy caused by an energy crisis could create cascading defaults and recession. The Great Recession and its vast social fallout are perhaps a timely foreshadowing of the immense and widespread economic and social effects of oil depletion — not to mention the simultaneously occurring massive disturbance and destruction of the natural world and human societies caused by fossil-fuel-generated climate change.

Our “options” are clear: try with all our might to hold back the energy watershed that is upon us, and waste our personal energy and creativity in doing so, or change the way we live. Can we change our minds and our energy systems in time to create a better world while doing so? Can we harvest energy without contributing significantly to global warming? What energy improvements can we make to our built environments? How can we retool our economy and our communities to soften the blows of petroleum’s decline? How can we reinvent fulfilling family and community life in a context of oil depletion? These are questions we must engage. The future health and security of people and nature the world over depend on it.

The answers we construct, individually and collectively, will indeed limit our dreams — but only if our dreams are about living “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Limits to oil need not translate into limits to human creativity, limits to meaningful relationships with others and nature, or reduced personal growth. The challenges we face in the energy realm represent an opening for deep and wide ranging social change — and we need change. The dissatisfaction with the status quo evident in the Occupy Movement protests suggests we may be ready to change a lot of things, including the way we live and the dreams we have for a fulfilling life. The culture of celebrated hyper-individualism and “greed is good” may be unraveling in tandem with the emergence of the peak oil challenge. As many of us know, we are at a historic juncture. Will we find ways to run on empty with regard to oil and have full lives at the same time?

• This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

Workers first detected an ammonia leak in a water purification system about 3 p.m. Ammonia, when mixed into air, is toxic. The 30 gallons of ammonia were caught in a holding tank and posed no health risk, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC).

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil.

Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades.

It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation.

In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

At the Chernobyl meltdown in April 1986, about 50 workers and firefighters died lingering and horrible deaths from radiation poisoning. Because of wind patterns, about 27,000 persons in the northern hemisphere are expected to die of cancer, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. An area of about 18 miles is uninhabitable. The nuclear reactor core is now protected by a crumbling sarcophagus; a replacement is not complete. Even then, the new shield is expected to crumble within a century. The current director at Chernobyl says it could be 20,000 years until the area again becomes habitable.

In March, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of three of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16 radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima August 6, 1945.  The agency also reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was about two to three times the level of the A-bomb. The release into the air, water, and ground included about 60,000 tons of contaminated water. The half lives of Sr-90 and Cs-137 are about 30 years each. Full effects may not be known for at least two generations. Twenty-three nuclear reactors in the U.S. have the same design—and same design flaws—as the Daiichi reactor.

About five months after the Daiichi disaster, the North Anna plant in northeastern Virginia declared an alert, following a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that was felt throughout the mid-Atlantic and lower New England states. The earthquake caused building cracks and spent fuel cells in canisters to shift. The North Anna plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of only 5.9–6.2 on the Richter scale. More than 1.9 million persons live within a 50-mile radius of North Anna, according to 2010 census data.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.

Every nuclear spill affects not just those in the immediate evacuation zone but people throughout the world, as prevailing winds can carry air-borne radiation thousands of miles from the source, and the world’s water systems can put radioactive materials into the drinking supply and agriculture systems of most nations. At every nuclear disaster, the governments eventually declare the immediate area safe. But animals take far longer than humans to return to the area. If they could figure out that radioactivity released into the water, air, and ground are health hazards, certainly humans could also figure it out.

Following the disaster at Daiichi, Germany announced it was closing its 17 nuclear power plants and would expand development of solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources. About the same time, Siemens abandoned financing and building nuclear power plants, leaving only American-based Westinghouse and General Electric, which own, or have constructed, about four-fifths of the world’s nuclear plants, and the French-based Areva.

The life of the first nuclear plants was about 30–40 years; the newer plants have a 40–60 year life. After that time, they become so radioactive that the risk of radiation poison outweighs the benefits of continuing the operation. So the operators seal the plant and abandon it, carefully explaining to the public the myriad safety procedures in place and the federal regulations. The cooling and decommissioning takes 50–100 years until the plant is safe enough for individuals to walk through it without protection. More critical, there still is no safe technology of how to handle spent control rods.

The United States has no plans to abandon nuclear energy. The Obama administration has proposed financial assistance to build the first nuclear plant in three decades, and a $36 billion loan guarantee for the nuclear industry. However, the Congressional Budget Office believes there can be as much as 50 percent default.  Each plant already receives $1–1.3 billion in tax rebates and subsidies. However, in the past three years, plans to build nuclear generators have been abandoned in nine states, mostly because of what the major financiers believe to be a less than desired return on investment and higher than expected construction and maintenance costs.

A Department of Energy analysis revealed the budget for 75 of the first plants was about $45 billion, but cost overruns ran that to $145 billion. The last nuclear power plant completed was the Watts Bar plant in eastern Tennessee. Construction began in 1973 and was completed in 1996. Part of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, the Watts Bar plant cost about $8 billion to produce 1,170 mw of energy from its only reactor. Work on a second reactor was suspended in 1988 because of a lack of need for additional electricity. However, construction was resumed in 2007, with completion expected in 2013. Cost to complete the reactor, which was about 80 percent complete when work was suspended, is estimated to cost an additional $2.5 billion.

The cost to build new power plants is well over $10 billion each, with a proposed cost of about $14 billion to expand the Vogtle plant near Augusta, Ga. The first two units had cost about $9 billion.

Added to the cost of every plant is decommissioning costs, averaging about $300 million to over $1 billion, depending upon the amount of energy the plant is designed to produce. The nuclear industry proudly points to studies that show the cost to produce energy from nuclear reactors is still less expensive than the costs from coal, gas, and oil. The industry also rightly points out that nukes produce about one-fifth all energy, with no emissions, such as those from the fossil fuels.

For more than six decades, this nation essentially sold its soul for what it thought was cheap energy that may not be so cheap, and clean energy that is not so clean.

It is necessary to ask the critical question. Even if there were no human, design, and manufacturing errors; even if there could be assurance there would be no accidental leaks and spills of radioactivity; even if there became a way to safely and efficiently dispose of long-term radioactive waste; even if all of this were possible, can the nation, struggling in a recession while giving subsidies to the nuclear industry, afford to build more nuclear generating plants at the expense of solar, wind, and geothermal energy?

The amount of energy and water  required to make the oil useable, not to mention burning the oil itself, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that internationally renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said that extracting and refining the oil means it’s “essentially game over” in the global battle to avoid catastrophic climate change.  The question needs to be asked: how did we get from a president who once promised real action on climate change to a man who is complicit in the environmental crime of the century?  And having taken on that question, how should environmentalists respond?

Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100/barrel.  There’s plenty more out there but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  This explains not only the development of Canadian tar sands, which require mining two tons of tar sands to obtain a single barrel of oil, as Shell, Exxon-Mobil and that paragon of environmental responsibility, BP, are all in on the action, but also underpins the hunt for oil in deep-water deposits off-shore and in the new oil frontier of the Arctic as well as shale gas extraction from hydrofracking.

Furthermore, it brings sharply into focus the reality that under capitalism, particularly its unregulated neoliberal variant, massive transnational oil companies will not hesitate to bolster their bottom lines and appease their shareholders before any concern about the stability of the biosphere filters through into corporate head offices.

One tar sands mine in Alberta has excavated more rock and soil than was required to build the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 largest dams combined.  Mining and processing is enough to heat three million homes and such is the electricity demand, it’s helping to fuel the requirement to build another environmental and health menace: more nuclear power stations.   Water use is 349 million cubic meters annually; water that becomes so heavily contaminated that it can’t be put back in the rivers it’s bleeding dry.  It must be kept sequestered in vast lakes of highly toxic effluent that already cover 50 square kilometers and are large enough to be seen from space.  The negative impacts on indigenous land and culture, wildlife, forests, water, air and downstream pollution run on and on.

Considering some of the facts of tar sands mining, and the appalling environmental damage it will cause, this is surely an area where one would expect democratically-elected governments to step in and say: we must find an alternative.  Yet, it seems almost certain that President Obama, who has the authority to stop the pipeline without recourse to Congress, will give the green light to further expansion as Canada seeks an export market to justify further production expansion.  The Keystone XL project, a 1,700 mile pipeline that will be able to carry 700,000 barrels a day from Canada all the way down to the refineries in Texas, cutting through multiple states and risking the contamination of such essential fresh water sources as the Ogallala aquifer is essential to Canadian plans for tar sands development.

Yet we know from Wikileaks that the State Department has been in collusion with TransCanada, the pipeline company, to ensure favorable press and hired a state dept official formerly with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team to guarantee that her new department won’t look too closely at the negative environmental implications.   A company who counts TransCanada as one of their major clients, Cardno Entrix, was hired by the State Department to carry out the environmental assessment.

Desperate to retain their members’ dues base and taking a nationalist and short-term position with regard to “American jobs”, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters union, rather than actively campaigning for jobs with a real future such as those in an expanded renewable energy sector, energy conservation and infrastructure development are backing the pipeline.

Yes, we certainly need jobs, but why do we only ever get offered jobs when it’s in the interests of the fossil fuel corporations or the banks and we have to trade them off for environmental stability?  Or when the government wants young American’s to go and fight and kill other young people in far off lands?  What about the millions of jobs that could be created by manufacturing a clean energy economy, with a new energy grid, retrofitting buildings across the country for energy conservation and in building an updated and efficient sanitation system?  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of teachers we’d need to educate such a workforce.  The bankers foreclosed on our homes and the capitalists and politicians that serve them seem intent on foreclosing on the planet.

Organized by Bill McKibben of 350.org, over 1,000 people were arrested outside the White House this summer to pressure Obama into refusing to sign off on the pipeline project.  While this was a highly commendable and impressive action, it was also rather confusing as McKibben urged activists not to give up on Obama.  Despite more than two years of unremitting disappointment on environmental questions (and much else) activists were encouraged to wear their 2008 Obama campaign buttons at the protests and on their way to jail.  It was confusing because you can’t protest someone you simultaneously support and hope to build a robust and uncompromising movement for change in the teeth of corporate malfeasance and lobbying power.  Either you protest and create a large enough oppositional movement that forces a rethink of government policy, as has happened in Germany with the German government’s u-turn on nuclear power, or you weaken the movement and bamboozle your supporters with misplaced calls for loyal protest actions to get our supposed friend in the White House on the right track.

McKibben has called Obama’s upcoming decision a “watershed moment” for his presidency and environmentalists who previously enthusiastically campaigned for him have vowed to sit out his 2012 re-election campaign if he doesn’t follow through and refuse to authorize the project.  I hope they do.

In a statement that underscores the cynicism with which the Democratic Party take their most enthusiastic supporters, the New York Times quoted democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates…So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.”  In other words, the Democrats will simply run a negative campaign that only promises to be not quite as bad as the Republicans.  Meanwhile, not quite as bad as the Republicans will fry the planet just as surely as if the Republicans had been in charge of the furnaces.

So this is a watershed moment not just for Obama, but also for McKibben and the mainstream environmental movement.  Only a complete and irrevocable break with the Democratic Party will get us anywhere.  In several articles written over the lifetime of the Obama presidency, including when he had super-majorities in both houses of Congress and could have acted with purpose on environmental questions, I have argued that, despite the rhetoric, Obama’s default position would always be to side with the corporations against a rational and forward-thinking environmental program.  One that would protect health, create jobs and give us a chance of avoiding global climate meltdown.  Obama has yet to provide any evidence that my analysis is incorrect.

In a coffin that should really have received its last nail some time ago, it is highly likely that he will further confirm my analysis with his commitment to the pipeline project.  The question then will be, will the mainstream environmental organizations such as 350.org follow through, ditch the Democratic Party, make good on their promise not to campaign for an Obama second term, and help build the only thing that will save us: the construction of a broad-based but completely independent movement for real social and ecological change.

Paradoxically, the only force that might prevent President Obama from burning all his bridges to the environmental movement is Occupy Wall Street, which has already sharply moved the political narrative to the left in the United States precisely because it is independent of the two-party corporate duopoly that masquerades as democratic political choice.  Yet, if OWS continues to grow and the Democratic Party are forced to respond by tacking to the left on environmental and social issues so as not to lose every last shred of liberal credibility, it further serves to underline my argument that we will only win real change when we categorically refuse to get taken for a ride by the Democratic chariot that is hitched so firmly to the corporate horse.

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant “partner” in the “coalition”. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what’s been achieved in that time?

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC ‘impartiality’ in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been “unavoidable” and that “we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events”, struggling with “the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable.” The paper sighed that “an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect” in that “we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies.” This “hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain.”

“The trouble”, claimed the editorial, “was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan”, coalition forces “were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents.” Historically, invaders do tend to be resisted by those “shrewd and ruthless” people in “obscure corners” whose land is being occupied, and whose lives, livelihoods and resources are at risk.

“Some Afghans”, however, “were indeed ‘like us’, recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number.”

The white man’s burden is surely lightened by that happy realisation. Especially because some of these people ‘like us’ – yes, the Guardian really did say that – “may have a more important role to play” in the future. Thus reassured, “we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later.”

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war, asserted the Guardian, is that “we” stumbled into an age-old conflict not of our making:

The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity.

Now, “after 10 years of muddle and mayhem”, our “minimal common interest” – indeed, “our remaining duty”  – must be to aim at “a power-sharing settlement” involving the Taliban.

There was no hint from this supposed vanguard of critical and liberal journalism that “our remaining duty” should involve an immediate withdrawal of our forces. No hint that this country should make some attempt at restitution for the decade of “muddle and mayhem” that “we” have inflicted on yet more victims of the West’s grasping and destructive foreign policy.

The Independent’s editorial derived from a similarly tortured perspective of perplexed liberalism: “questions about what has been achieved yield far from encouraging answers” and “what little progress there has been is looking increasingly vulnerable.”

However, the editors added, “it would be a mistake to overlook the real advances that have been made”, such as “democratic elections, a written constitution and a degree of social freedom”. The paper also appealed yet again to “the issue of women’s rights – or the lack of them” as “one of the most convincing” supposed “justifications for international involvement in Afghanistan.”

There was token acknowledgement in the editorial of “Afghanistan’s vast natural resources” which, we are to believe,”could still be a source of funding and stability.” But there was only silence about the realpolitik underlying Western foreign policy; namely, that control of these huge resources was, in fact, ‘one of the most convincing’ reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan.

Instead, the editorial makes a benign-sounding but pathetic plea for the “international community” to “help realise the potential.” But for whose benefit? The corporate media would have us believe that the interests of the Afghan people would be paramount, and that they would be allowed to prosper. For the truth, we have to look elsewhere.

Turning Afghanistan Into A ‘Hub’ And ‘Conduit’ For US Interests

For example, energy analysts Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz note in a recent article in Foreign Policy in Focus, that:

Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized.

In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what is expected to be a number of tenders for the country’s oil and gas resources. As in Iraq, the contracts include production-sharing agreements that have been strongly rejected by other major oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Why have such agreements been rejected? Because they heavily favour Western oil corporations, granting extremely long-term contracts (45 years or more in the case of Afghanistan) and greater control, ownership, and profits to the companies compared to the far more common contracts that are used for the bulk – around 88 per cent – of the world’s oil.

Dellawar and Juhasz warn that:

The Afghanistan contracts, moreover, would not require foreign companies to invest earnings in the Afghan economy, partner with Afghan companies, or share new technologies.

Crucially, Afghanistan is not only important as an energy producer, but also as a potential “energy conveyer”. Negotiations are proceeding rapidly for the vital Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The pipeline has long been an important objective of Western governments and fossil fuel corporations that have had their sights on the energy-rich countries of the Caspian region. Indeed, the Bush administration made completion of the TAPI a core part of its Afghanistan war strategy.

As then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said in 2007:

One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.

Dellawar and Juhasz conclude:

If the pipeline is constructed and U.S. companies begin producing in Afghanistan, its importance to the West will only intensify, as will the desire to keep Afghanistan ‘open for business’. If Afghanistan does not have the internal capacity to provide this ‘openness’ itself, the United States and other foreign governments may feel forced to do so on its behalf – utilizing their own troops.

As ever, then, Western states and corporations are striving relentlessly to maintain control of resources and global markets, and to maximise profits for themselves, with as much force and skullduggery as they can muster. And Western media will provide intellectual cover by selling the resultant theft, slaughter and misery as “stabilisation”, “‘investment” and “the protection of human rights”.

As former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges writes:

The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

Supine Reporting In Service To The State

Regular readers may recall an alert in 2007 which compared Soviet and recent US/UK reporting on Afghanistan. The alert was a collaboration with Nikolai Lanine, who had fought with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. He had subsequently spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

As we pointed out then, if the claims of  impartiality and balance in modern professional journalism are to be believed, the similarities should have been few and far between. After all, Soviet-era media such as Pravda – meaning, ironically, “The Truth” – are a byword for state-controlled mendacity in the West. Instead, as the alert showed, the similarities were painfully precise.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an unalloyed act of aggression, an attempt to crush a perceived threat to Soviet security and power. But it was portrayed by the Soviet government, and compliant Soviet media such as Pravda and Izvestia, as an act of humanitarian intervention “to prevent the establishment of… a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression.”  Once the “terrorists” had been defeated by the Soviet army, Afghanistan would be left to become “a stable, friendly country”. Soviet “involvement” was presented as being in the best interests of the Afghan people: the focus of the Soviet government’s benevolent concern. ¹

The parallels to the media’s coverage of Western “involvement” in Afghanistan today are obvious.

Western media support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, was steadfast from the beginning. Ten years ago, as the bombs and missiles rained down, an Independent editorial described the “war”  — in reality, a massive attack on aThird World Country by the planet’s most powerful military force –  as “ultimately inevitable”. Moreover, “Washington had the right – indeed, the duty – to respond” and ”there was no question that the United States was justified in using armed force.” Piling up the insults to readers’ intelligence, the paper said that it was ”to the immense – and unexpected – credit of America that it approached the business of retaliation with such method, caution and responsibility.”

In fact, the US launched its brutal assault despite dire warnings by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) that more than seven million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread starvation if military action were initiated. In September 2001, the US government had demanded that Pakistan stop convoys of food on which much of the already starving Afghan population depended. The FAO warned of a likely ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ unless aid convoys were immediately resumed and the threat of military action terminated. Compare the grim reality with the Independent’s claim of  “caution and responsibility” underpinning the US “business of retaliation”.

Three months into the war, a rare report in the Guardian highlighted the desperation of Afghan people:

The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers’ milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. When the children’s pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. “We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat it [grass] … until we die,” said Ghalam Raza, 42, a man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.

But on the eve of war, the Guardian had told its readers:

It needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response.

The invasion was “an act of legitimate self defence to protect our nations from further attack”.

The paper offered token words of hope that Bush and Blair’s promises of food, medicine and other supplies to Afghan civilians would be honoured. Blair tried to sweet-talk the Afghans by saying that, in the past, the West had simply “walked away” from its people. But not now:

This time round we must not repeat that mistake. This conflict will not be the end… once the conflict is over we’ve then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future… We are not going to walk away again.

This is the standard, patronising rhetoric beloved of all triumphant invaders.

As defenceless Afghan civilians were being slaughtered, the Guardian editors asserted that “nothing in the world is more important right now than that [Bush and Blair] succeed”.

The Guardian even claimed that Afghanistan had brought the storm of destruction upon their own heads:

Offered the opportunity to hand over Bin Laden and to act against his networks, and pressured to do so even by those closest to them, including Pakistan, the Afghan regime has refused. There is no question, therefore, but that a monstrous injustice against America remains unassauged [sic].

In fact, even before 11 September 2001, the Taliban had offered to present bin Laden for trial following attacks on US targets in the 1990s, “but the US government showed no interest”.

Following the 11 September atrocities, the US refused to present evidence of bin Laden’s culpability to the Taliban “presumably because”, as Noam Chomsky said in an interview at the time, “that would have suggested some limit on the imperial prerogative to act without any authority”.

How genuine the Taliban offer was may never be known. But, as Chomsky points out, the brutal US stance could be put succinctly as follows:

Hand him [bin Laden] over, or else; and if you do, we may leave you alone (overthrowing the Taliban regime was a late afterthought). No government, surely not the U.S., would ever accept such a demand, unless compelled to by the threat of extreme violence. There was, then, no alternative to such [a] threat, if that was the demand, as it was. But that offers no justification for the threat of violence, or its implementation.

As for the editorial cheerleaders, press stenographers and armchair-warrior commentators who abased themselves before Western state power, they would do well to heed the cogent summary offered by WikiLeaks:

If a journalist hides the truth they are not journalists; they are partners in the crime they are hiding.

•  Part 2 will follow shortly…

1. Lyahovsky, A.A., & Zabrodin, V.M., 1991, Taini Afganskoi Voini [Secrets of the Afghan War]. Moscow: Planeta

The Washington Post reported that “The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.”

According to Post stenographers Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig, those “August 2009 e-mails released exclusively to The Washington Post,” shorthand for a controlled leak by Republican staffers, “show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal.”

In response to White House pressure, “OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.”

Solyndra, a poster-child for the administration’s PR campaign to expand “green jobs” was part of Obama’s lifeless “stimulus package” which White House flacks argued would ameliorate unemployment through tax cuts and other perks to corporations in the wake of the on-going economic meltdown.

“It was alarming,” Frank Rusco, a program director at the Government Accountability Office, told The New York Times.

GAO auditors found “Energy Department preliminary loan approvals–including the one for Solyndra–were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects.”

“They can’t really evaluate the risks without following the rules,” Rusco said.

But in Washington, the well-connected follow their own rules so it was hardly surprising that Solyndra executives hired Washington lobbyists in early 2009, retaining McBee Strategic Consulting.

“Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra’s behalf,” the Times disclosed, “including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009.”

However, despite intense pressure to approve the loan the firm’s business model in the highly-competitive solar energy market was flawed from the get-go.

Although the unique design of their solar panels may not have relied on silicon, and executives assumed their “competitors would continue to pay a relatively high price for silicon, allowing Solyndra to charge the premium required to turn a profit,” industry experts “outside the federal government, going back to 2008, were predicting silicon prices were headed for a steep fall.”

Between 2008 and 2009 when the loan was approved, sinking demand for solar energy as a result of the economic crisis, drove down the price of silicon from more than a $1000 a pound to less than $100 in the twinkling of an eye.

Despite high-profile investors, loan guarantees, a new factory, and frankly a better made, more efficient product, Solyndra was forced to sell its panels well-below production costs, seriously wounding the company.

Taxpayers and laid-off workers were left holding the bag.

Factor in the collapse of the commercial and home real estate markets, the dearth of new factory construction, and allegations of “unfair-trade complaints against China for out-sized subsidies to its clean-energy companies,” Bloomberg News averred, and the entire renewable-energy sector was in deep trouble.

“China provided $30 billion in credit to its biggest solar manufacturers last year, about 20 times the U.S. effort, Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department’s loan program, told a congressional panel Sept. 14,” Bloomberg reported.

The former socialist republic, which learned a lesson or two from other Asian “tigers” and the United States for that matter when it came to development, “frequently provides both zero-cost financing, occasionally free land and other kinds of incentives and subsidies” to its wind and solar companies, Silver told Congress.

The problem is not that the Chinese state subsidizes manufacturing but that the United States refuses to do so. Witness the near hysteria by rightist troglodytes over modest efforts by the federal government to construct a network of high-speed bullet trains across the United States.

Grifters in Congress, academia and the business press however, in thrall to Reaganite fantasies of “free trade” and “free markets” are willfully blind to the historical role played by the American state, and it was hardly an “invisible” one, in directing national priorities and resources during the period of rapid industrialization.

As readers are well aware, Antifascist Calling does not carry water for the Obama administration, a government as duplicitous as the previous Bush regime. However, there is more than a hint of a manufactured scandal by congressional Republicans over the Solyndra affair. While political blood sport may titillate Washington pundits, something far more sinister than a questionable loan is going on here.

In fact, the targets of the Republican attack machine are two-fold: discredit any government efforts to boost the industrial sector while disparaging renewable energy entirely as a potential, albeit weak threat, to the multinational energy conglomerates who provided 77% of their $18.8 million in campaign contributions to the GOP, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Contrast congressional market fundamentalist zeal here with their deafening silence when it comes to the heavily-subsidized U.S. “defense” industry, where mammoth cost overruns and mega-profits for the Military-Industrial Complex are factored in to the acquisition of weapons systems which have cost the American people trillions of dollars in investments elsewhere.

Deepening Crisis

That Solyndra went belly-up and filed for bankruptcy protection last month, laying off nearly 1,100 workers, is another sign that the global crisis which eviscerated productive sectors of the economy, continues to have disastrous effects for the vast majority of Americans.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, “census bureau figures that came out Tuesday, showing the largest number of Americans living in poverty since records began in 1959, are a damning indictment of American capitalism and the entire political system.”

The manufacturing sector, long the staple of a healthy economy, has undergone a major transformation since the 1970s. As U.S. firms, challenged by stiff competition from their capitalist rivals, sought to lower costs and increase shrinking profit margins, jobs were offloaded to low-wage platforms.

Yankee corporations however, that fled offshore to hide their assets and dodge taxes in so-called “free trade” and other “special” industrial zones where high productivity and low labor costs were guaranteed by repressive, U.S.-allied comprador regimes, made out like proverbial bandits.

As a result, entire industries withered and died, and large swathes of America’s industrial heartland were transformed into economic dead zones.

Those corporatist chickens, demented stepchildren of neoliberal globalization, have now come home to roost.

“In 2010 there were 46.2 million people–almost one out of every six residents–living below the official poverty line, including 16.4 million children,” socialist critic Jerry White wrote. “Of these nearly half, or 20 million, were described as living in deep poverty, subsisting on less than half the income the US government says is needed for basic food, shelter, clothing and utilities.”

Contrast deepening levels of poverty with administration moves to secure a “settlement” with financial elites who profited on both ends of the 2007-2008 crisis. Their reckless, and fraudulent, credit default swaps and brisk trade in worthless mortgage-backed securities have cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars with no end in sight.

But as New York Federal Reserve board member Kathryn Wylde told The New York Times, “Wall Street is our Main Street–love ‘em or hate ‘em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “In the name of the free market, they slashed taxes on the corporations and the rich, deregulated industry and the banks and backed a corporate offensive against the jobs and living standards of the working class.”

And despite the fact that “corporations and the banks are now sitting on a cash hoard of $2 trillion,” said economic gangsters are “refusing to hire any workers,” thus exacerbating the crisis for average workers through unemployment, wage deflation and the loss of basic social benefits while boosting profits.

In his latest iteration as a “fighter” for “ordinary Americans,” Obama’s budget director told The New York Times that the president’s new “deficit-reduction plan” would impose “a lot of pain,” cutting some $320 billion from Medicare and Medicaid.

That proposal would impose higher premiums and deductibles for beneficiaries while slashing payments to “teaching hospitals and rural hospitals” as well as charging “co-payments to frail homebound older people who receive home health services,” the Times reported.

Under the plan the federal government would also “reduce the growth of federal payments to states for treating low-income people under Medicaid,” effectively telling older citizens and the poor, “hurry-up and die,” the mantra of “libertarian” Tea Party loons who view the lack of affordable health care as “the price of freedom.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s Air Force Secretary Michael Donley “signaled the service is ready for a fight and vowed to ‘protect’ most big-ticket hardware programs from steep budget cuts,” including the cost-overrun-plagued F-35 fighter program, The Hill reported.

As well, Donley “placed the multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new bomber aircraft on his don’t-cut list” saying, “developing the ‘long-range strike family of systems,’ including the new bomber, is essential.”

According to the Secretary, accepting cosmetic reductions in the bloated “defense” budget will mean “we will need to accept greater risk,” if by “risk” Donley means shaving a penny or two off the share price of the largest defense corps.

Grifter’s Ball

The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) enacted by the Bush regime in 2008, and supported by then-candidate Obama and the Democrats, followed by 2009′s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the so-called “stimulus package,” were rushed through Congress under crisis conditions allegedly to “save the economy.”

In practice however, both legislative edicts were fantastic boondoggles that rewarded “too-big-to-fail” investment banks that brought on the crisis in the first place while shortchanging foreclosed homeowners and tens of millions of laid-off workers.

A so-called “stimulus” that disavowed any direct creation of jobs by government action, such as massive spending on public works and infrastructure repair as was done during the Great Depression, was doomed to fail.

This failure is borne out by an official unemployment rate of 9.1% with some 14 million people looking for work. However, the government’s broader, and more accurate index of the jobs crisis, which measures those who either stopped looking for work or are involuntary part-time workers rose to 16.2% in August, a staggering 25.3 million people.

As economist Michael Hudson observed: “From the outset in 2009, the Obama Plan has been to re-inflate the Bubble Economy by providing yet more credit (that is, debt) to bid housing and commercial real estate prices back up to pre-crash levels, not to bring debts down to the economy’s ability to pay. The result is debt deflation for the economy at large and rising unemployment–but enrichment of the wealthiest 1% of the population as economies have become even more financialized.”

How has this played out in the real world?

Marxist economist Richard Wolff wrote scant weeks before Solyndra’s collapse: “As demand for goods and services shrank fast, businesses and the rich stopped investing in production. Their investible funds were idled, and that only aggravated the crisis. The self-regulating, efficient capitalist market system proved to be the myth its critics had mocked. However, the market system did spread the US crisis quickly to Europe and beyond.”

“The bailout of casino capitalists vested a new ruling class with $13 trillion of public IOUs (including the $5.3 trillion rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) added to the national debt,” Hudson noted. “The recipients have paid out much of this gift in salaries and bonuses, and to ‘make themselves whole’ on their bad risks in default to pay off.”

“An alternative,” Hudson wrote, “would have been to prosecute them and recover what they had paid themselves as commissions for loading the economy with debt.”

The result of these reckless policies are plain as day: from rising unemployment to collapsing infrastructure, and from a steady rise in home foreclosures to increased levels of immiseration, Bush-Obama policies have benefited those who wield real power in the capitalist world: the financial oligarchs and militarists who prospered from the bailouts and “War on Terror” military spending.

But the “government could have used its equity ownership and control of the banks to provide credit and credit card services as the ‘public option’,” Hudson noted. In other words, rather than bailing-out the fraudsters, the state could have invested public funds in programs that actually benefit the public, a novel idea rejected out of hand as “socialist tinkering.”

However, Hudson averred, “this is not the agenda that the Bush-Obama administrations chose. Only Wall Street had a plan in place to unwrap when the crisis opportunity erupted.”

“Stockholders were bailed out, counterparties were saved from loss, and managers today are paying themselves bonuses as usual,” Hudson wrote. “The ‘crisis’ was turned into an opportunity to panic politicians into helping their Wall Street patrons.”

But the bailouts did far more than merely enrich the thieves, it actually exacerbated the global meltdown.

“As the crisis flared in 2008,” Wolff observed, “governments unfroze credit markets by pouring money into tottering banks and insurance companies. Governments printed and created new money to pay for part of these policies; to cover the other part governments borrowed.”

And whom, pray tell, were the American people’s new creditors? Why “the banks and insurance companies they had bailed out” of course! “Governments,” Wolff wrote, “also borrowed from the companies and rich individuals who had withheld investing in the production of goods and services and had thereby worsened the crisis.”

Is this a great system, or what!

Ponzi Republic

Not a single top executive of any Wall Street firm has been prosecuted by the federal government for their crimes. Take Goldman Sachs as a prime example, a firm which journalist Matt Taibbi memorably described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As McClatchy News investigative reporter Greg Gordon revealed, on the cusp of the housing bubble’s collapse, “Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”

Those fraudulent deals “enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.”

“Only later,” Gordon wrote, “did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk” and that “pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses.”

Taibbi recounted last spring for Rolling Stone that the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations mammoth 650-page report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, supplied “a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history–’a million fraud cases a year’ is how one former regulator puts it.”

“But the mountain of evidence,” Taibbi wrote, “collected against Goldman by [Senator Carl] Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators–details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department–stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.”

Contrast Justice Department inaction regarding Goldman Sachs, including ignoring potential perjury by Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein as Taibbi and other investigators revealed, with their zeal to lower the boom on Solyndra.

In connection with the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the FBI “executed a search warrant” on the firm September 8, the Los Angeles Times reported, “but declined to discuss what they were investigating. FBI spokesman Peter D. Lee said documents related to the search had been sealed.”

This is the same secret state agency that is curiously indifferent to far-larger grifts run by the big money boys. Keep in mind, this is the Justice Department satrapy waging covert war against the antiwar movement, illegally spying on Muslim-Americans, ginning-up phony “terror” plots through their employment of paid informants and provocateurs while allowing real terrorists, such as the network which assisted the 9/11 plotters as The Miami Herald recently disclosed, run wild in Florida. Yes, that FBI!

“Republicans,” the Los Angeles Times observed, “have seized on Solyndra’s downfall as a sign that President Obama’s stimulus and ‘green jobs’ campaign were failures.”

“They have also noted that key Obama backer George Kaiser was a major investor in Solyndra, the first company to receive a Department of Energy loan guarantee to boost alternative energy companies.” But then again, so was Madrone Capitol, a private equity fund affiliated with the powerfully-connected Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, long-time GOP supporters.

Kaiser, a Tulsa, Okla. billionaire and head of The George Kaiser Family Foundation, “holds about 35.7 percent of Solyndra, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kaiser made 16 visits to the president’s aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs,” Bloomberg News reported.

A “bundler” for Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, Kaiser raised somewhere between $50,000 to $100,000 for the campaign and contributed some $2,300 personally, according to the Federal Election Commission. What Bloomberg fails to report however, is the more than $7.5 million in campaign contributions made over the last decade by the Walton family to the Republican party and assorted right-wing causes.

While evidence of irregularities may suggest that Solyndra executives were less than forthcoming in their application for federal loans, and that well-connected billionaire donors to the president’s campaign may have helped tip the scales in their favor, their behavior, and potential losses to taxpayers, pale in comparison to the far larger, and more damaging, crimes of Wall Street con artists who continue to thumb their noses at the public and evade justice.

Crony Capitalism Gone Wild: The ‘War on Terror’

While Republican bag men for the superrich point to the Solyndra scandal, and there is something fishy going on here, as evidence of corruption in the White House, the fact is, Obama, like every president who occupied the Oval Office before him, is a wholly-owned creature of the ruling class.

Never mind that Team Obama recently abandoned plans to beef-up national air quality rules to reduce the emission of cancer-causing chemicals in smog. That move followed an intense lobbying campaign by polluters in the chemical, mining and petroleum sectors and their bipartisan congressional pets who alleged that the $90 billion price tag would “kill American jobs.” Or that the “environmental president,” in a course reversal sure to have oil industry executives jumping for joy, will soon approve plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry mega-polluting Canadian tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries.

And never mind that the White House, the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate are conspiring against the American people to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid through a congressional Supercommittee whilst continuing to bailout financial jackals to the tune of some $13 trillion, even as the Securities and Exchange Commission blithely shredded thousands of incriminating documents that let the gangsters off the hook as Rolling Stone revealed in August.

And of course, pay no attention to the expansion of the imperialist Empire’s endless wars and occupations, its extension of outsourced “War on Terror” CIA torture programs into Somalia, or that the Obama administration, as The Washington Post recently reported “is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula,” the on-going assault on civil liberties here in the heimat or mounting evidence that the provocateurs who murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 may have been given a leg up by U.S. secret state agencies as they prepared to slam hijacked passenger airliners into buildings.

What partisan hacks in both corporatist political parties will never acknowledge, let alone investigate or prosecute, are orders of magnitude greater, “War on Terror” boondoggles. Two examples:

• The National Security Agency’s multibillion dollar fiasco, Trailblazer. As The Baltimore Sun revealed, the firm that NSA chose to head the project, Science Applications International Corporation, “forged close ties to several key defense and intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Among those who have served on SAIC’s board of directors are former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Directors John M. Deutch and Robert M. Gates; and former Defense Secretaries Melvin R. Laird and William J. Perry.” As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, “SAIC is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA. SAIC, for example, managed one of the NSA’s largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005.” Indeed, the Sun’s exposure of SAIC’s shoddy work on the project, as journalist Jane Mayer disclosed in The New Yorker, led Obama’s Justice Department to prosecute whistleblower Thomas Drake, not those responsible for ripping off taxpayers or standing-up illegal driftnet spying programs. Congressional action? Zero, but SAIC walked away with the money and continues to be rewarded by the secret state and now ranks No. 6 on Washington Technology’s “Top 100″ list of largest government contractors with some $5.1 billion in Defense Department contracts.

• The Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Borders Initiative or SBInet, a failed project to construct a “virtual electronic fence” along the border with Mexico. When DHS finally pulled the plug earlier this year, SBInet’s lead contractor, Boeing Corporation, held contracts valued between $2 and $8 billion according to estimates by the Government Accountability Office. Boeing is a major “War on Terror” beneficiary, clocking-in at No. 3 on Washington Technology’s “Top 100″ list, with some $8.4 billion in revenue largely from the Defense Department. As the CIA’s torture flight “booking agent,” Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. profited handsomely from illegal Agency programs that secretly kidnapped and transferred “terrorist” suspects to foreign prisons and CIA “black sites.” Victims who tried to litigate their claims against Jeppesen in the federal courts were rebuffed by Obama’s Justice Department which asserted bogus “state secrets privilege” claims, alleging that litigating cases involving CIA kidnapping and torture would endanger “national security.” In 2008, the GAO determined that there were “significant problems” with deployed technologies. Designed to detect a “target” with radar and then use video cameras to locate illegal entries, GAO investigators found that the radars were “too slow” and were often triggered by rain and “other weather phenomena.” Information derived from sensors were to be forwarded to “command centers” where a “common operating picture” would be compiled by Customs and Border Patrol analysts and shared with other agencies. The so-called “common operating picture” would appear on computer screens as a geospatial map where “border entries” could be tracked in “real time.” Despite congressional criticism, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in January 2011, that the agency would be redirecting funding originally intended for SBInet “to a new border security technology effort.” At the time of this writing, Boeing gets to keep the boodle already doled out and will soon rake-in even more. Last month, Defense Systems reported that Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a jet-powered drone that can cruise at more than 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet, is in the running to secure multibillion contracts for the Pentagon’s next generation fleet of killer robots. “Key to its intended role,” Defense Systems informed us, “the Phantom Ray can carry up to 4,500 pounds of ordinance, extra fuel and/or sensors in its payload bays. The bays are large enough to accommodate two 2,000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite guided bombs.” There’s no word yet from the Phantom Ray’s intended targets–Somali herders and Afghan and Pakistani villagers–what they might think about Boeing’s latest technological marvel.

What lessons can we learn from the examples cited above? Not many, if we rely on corporate media.

As part of capitalism’s manufactured “debt crisis,” the Associated Press reported that the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a Washington, D.C. lobby shop which represents America’s Military-Industrial-Security Complex, claimed that cuts to the bloated “defense” budget “would have a devastating impact on a defense industry.”

To meet the challenge, AIA has launched their “Second to None” campaign and a related web site. According to industry flacks, which include usual suspects BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and dozens more, “American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration. The security of our troops, our technological future and our economic stability are all at risk. We must preserve jobs across the nation that keep our nation strong. Join us and act now before it is too late.”

Though there’s little chance AIA’s dire predictions will come to pass, alarmism sells particularly when the target audience are members of Congress.

As the bipartisan congressional Supercommittee prepares to gut the social safety net while leaving imperialism’s war budget virtually untouched, an investigation by Alternet and Salon revealed that “when it comes to the military budget,” Democrats “have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than [Arizona Senator Jon] Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel.”

“Since 2007,” investigative journalist Nick Turse wrote, “Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000.”

Indeed, “panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray … has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the supercommittee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, James Clyburn.”

“An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.”

“Before Thanksgiving,” Turse notes, “Clyburn and his supercommittee colleagues will be forced to make a clear decision for cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid or the type of budgets that have resulted in nearly $8 trillion in national security spending since 2001.”

Any bets on which way the axe will fall?

By the way, what was that $500 million loan flap to Solyndra about?

If nuclear power is so ‘safe,’ why is it that nuclear power stations are not placed where the power is most needed – in or very near large cities? Because they are dangerous. OK, if they’re dangerous, why is it the operators are not terribly interested in safety measures?

– Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog¹

Over six months have passed since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. What progress if any has been made to deal with what is surely one the worst industrial accidents in history?

The situation at the Fukushima No.1 power station site is far from being resolved. Although Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has said a “cold shutdown” of some of the reactors may be “within reach.”² Although a drastic reduction from the trillions of becquerals of radiation that were released during the darkest days of March, retired nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson who has supplied us with a steady source of reliable analyses, roughly estimates that the damaged reactors are still emitting a billion becquerals per day.³ Recently Professor Hiroaki Koide, a radiation metrology and nuclear safety expert at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, relayed the frightening assessment that:

The nuclear disaster is ongoing…. Without accurate information about what’s happening inside the reactors, there’s a need to consider various scenarios. At present, I believe that there is a possibility that massive amounts of radioactive materials will be released into the environment again. At the No. 1 reactor, there’s a chance that melted fuel has burned through the… floor of the reactor building, and has sunk into the ground. From there, radioactive materials may be seeping into the ocean and groundwater…. Recovering the melted nuclear fuel is another huge challenge. I can’t even imagine how that could be done… there is a possibility that nuclear fuel has fallen into the ground, in which case it will take 10 or 20 years to recover it. We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before.⁴

Could Professor Koide be worried that the corium (melted fuel) may reach the ground water, resulting in the classic China Syndrome?

Some nuclear experts are more optimistic, stating that “[e]fforts seem to be making smooth progress.” But there is still a catch-22 at work here: “Before the Fukushima crisis can be said contained, the holes and cracks from which the water and fuel are escaping must be located and sealed. But this extremely difficult task could take years because the radiation near the reactors is simply too high to let workers get near them.”⁵

The Japanese government has finally decided to take nuclear safety seriously, as evidenced when the Ground Self-Defense Force held a drill within the evacuation site “in preparation for any further large-scale emission of radioactive materials from the plant.”⁶ Could this be in preparation for Professor Koide’s scenario of possible “massive amounts of radioactive materials”?

Although some people have elected to risk their health and stay inside the evacuation zone,⁷ a 30 km up to 100 km radius around the stricken site looks to be dangerous if not uninhabitable for years to come.⁸ Decontaminating the site would cost billions of dollars and disposing of contaminated soil–estimated now to be at least 100 million cubic meters⁹ — a formidable challenge. Recently it was learned that the “Tokyo Metropolitan government has been dumping [radioactive] sludge from its water purification plants and burned ashes from the sewer sludge from the sludge plants in its landfill in Tokyo Bay at least since late May. The huge landfill is right near the Haneda Airport.”¹⁰

Over 100,000 people have been displaced by the accident and have little hope of returning to their homes¹¹ and “[m]ore than a third of residents of Fukushima Prefecture would move to avoid radiation if they could.” But those 600,000 people who would choose to move do not have the economic means to do so, and the government is not offering help.¹² An example of government schizophrenia is how health and economic issues conflict. While ecologists are studying the extent to which heavily forested Fukushima prefecture is contaminated with radioactive fallout,¹³ at the same time “Seiji Maehara, who lost his bid to become the party leader and the prime minister of Japan, has nonetheless landed on a very powerful party position as the chairman of the DPJ’s [Democratic Party of Japan] policy bureau.” Maehara is trying to promote an “eco forestry” scheme so that the stricken region can regain their economy.¹⁴ How the very area, Iitate, that received the lion’s share of radiation is going to sell “green” timber is puzzling, especially given that up to this point the government’s regime for testing of food and other materials has proven to be superficial and unreliable.

There are a number of maps over recent months that have tracked the deposition of radiation, namely cesium. My assessment from studying various charts, maps and readings from a variety of internet sources is that by far the worst is Fukushima, especially the “red band” northwest of the nuclear site. However, the eastern half of Fukushima; along with large swaths in Miyagi to the north; the eastern corner of Yamagata; most of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures have been hard hit; with radiation even spread into the beautiful mountains of Nagano. Yet many of these maps are still incomplete as the most likely contaminated areas are being measured first. There have been any number of hot spots located all over the Kanto region, including Saitama, Chiba and Tokyo, and even further to the south. These assessments do not take into account the considerable amount of radiation that went into the ocean (or to North America), both from the airborne explosions and contaminated water.

Recently I spoke with a Japanese housewife who has a five year old child and closely follows the radiation issue on Japanese internet sites. She believes the entire East Coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean from Hokkaido well down to Shikoku or Kyushu is now contaminated with radiation. This rings true with what Arnie Gunderson said months ago: Don’t eat the fish if it comes from Japan’s Pacific coastal waters. A recent Greenpeace study found a variety of radioactive elements in seaweed 30 km south of Fukushima.¹⁵

The spread of radiation has been documented by the Japanese-American blog hero, “Ex-SKF (ex-skf.blogspot.com),” who by translating Japanese news stories into English has devoted himself to exposing government corruption. The heading at the website in Japanese translates to: “Good luck Japan, don’t give up! Don’t rely on the government!” A perusal of the archives shows a trend of denial and coverup on the part of Tepco, the government and many businesses. For months we have been jarred by one scandal after another, from radioactive green tea to beef being sold all over the country without proper testing.¹⁶

Just the other day Ex-SKF wrote about a typical story:

The willful ignorance, or the determination to carry on with their lives they knew before March 11, of many Japanese is driving me crazy. A nursery school in Akita Prefecture bought turf from Ibaraki Prefecture, which is located south of Fukushima Prefecture and was doused with radioactive materials by downwind from Fukushima I Nuke Plant creating areas with high radiation, in middle of July. Small children were playing on the freshly installed turf. Then the city came and measured the air radiation level. Guess what. It was high. Duh.¹⁷

The extent of radioactive contamination depends on how you define “contaminated,” but as little as one-seventh¹⁸ up to about half of the entire eastern part of Fukushima prefecture has been doused with radiation.
For example, a “survey of 2,200 locations within a 100-kilometer (62-mile) radius of the crippled plant found that those 33 locations had cesium-137 in excess of 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the level set by the Soviet Union for forced resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Another 132 locations had a combined amount of cesium 137/134 over 555,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which the Soviet authorities called for voluntary evacuation and imposed a ban on farming.”¹⁹

Another source found that “[a]n extensive area of more than 8,000 square kilometers has accumulated cesium 137 levels of 30,000 becquerels per square meter or more…. The affected area is one-18th of about 145,000 square kilometers contaminated with cesium 137 levels of 37,000 becquerels per square meter or more following the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. The contaminated area includes about 6,000 square kilometers in Fukushima Prefecture, or nearly half of the prefecture. Fukushima Prefecture, the third largest in Japan, covers 13,782 square kilometers.”²⁰ Although less extensive damage than from Chernobyl, the future of safe farming in Japan’s narrow bread basket is now in question.²¹ Nevertheless, recent news claims that rice grown this season is “below 10 becquerals/kg” and therefore safe to eat.²² But how proper were the tests, and does anyone in their right mind think rice from northwest Fukushima is advisable to eat? How about a mad cow burger and secret cesium sauce with your coke, sir?

North Americans are also worried about unwelcome radiation traveling by wind and ocean currents as a Swiss map based on computer modeling clearly illustrates.²³ In a recent video Arnold Gunderson points out that a “tent” is being built over reactor no. 1 “to reduce the amount of radiation on site.” However, “[t]he radiation inside that tent is still going to have to go somewhere, or else it is going to build up and become lethal. So what is going to have to happen to that radiation, is it is going to be exhausted up the stack.”²⁴ This means radiation will be guided upwards into the wind where it may travel near or great distances: out of sight is out of mind. Since the winds generally blow to the west, a steady stream (for how many months or years?) is going to land in the ocean or in North America. The philosophy is: The Solution To Pollution Is Dilution, but no one can agree on what a safe dose of radiation really is. Most likely, even small doses are harmful.

Which raises the question as to just how much radiation has been, and, is still being released. As Tokyo University Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama famously testified to the Japanese Diet in late July, the radiation released from the Fukushima reactor explosions was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima atom bombs.²⁵ Estimates as to the amount of radiation that have been released vary widely. One mainstream science source has claimed “5–6% of the total from Chernobyl” yet notes that “ ‘there are still more questions than definite answers’…. High radiation levels make it impossible to directly measure damage to the melted reactor cores. Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is exactly how much radiation was released in the first ten days after the accident, when power outages hampered measurements.”²⁶ Tepco recently admitted that the amount of highly radioactive water released into the sea shortly after the accident was three times higher than previously thought.²⁷

A more realistic estimate would put the total releases at 10-20 percent of Chernobyl.²⁸ Yet for many reasons, researchers such as Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear engineer, and Chris Busby, radiation expert for the European Union, have both said that based on various criteria: “Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl.” If total releases are not has high as Chernobyl (Busby has suggested they may be much higher), other factors such as that the crisis is ongoing; the huge amount of nuclear fuel stored at the site; the power station’s siting which is not far above the ground water and in close vicinity to the ocean; proneness to further earthquakes/tsunamis; and nearby population density are all reasons for grave concern.

Scientific uncertainty, technological ineptness and political cover-up in the case of most nuclear accidents is par for the course, as anyone who has critically examined the history of the nuclear power industries in both the USA and Japan can attest. But as more people find out the truth, government and industry take actions to prevent the unwashed masses from becoming involved in substantive policy decisions.²⁹ Recently pro-nuke politician “(LDP) Secretary-General Nobuteru Ishihara stated, ‘Geiger counters costing between 40,000 and 50,000 yen ($500-600) provide patchy measurements. We have to try and stop citizens from taking their own radiation measurements.’ ”³⁰ The Global Nuclear Crime Syndicate (GNCS) is on the attack warning that “media coverage” about radiation from Fukushima could upsetting to the public. One conference egghead hooted, “[w]e’ve got to stop these sorts of reports coming out.”³¹ Oh dear me. In other words, don’t worry the people over the fact that they or their children may die an early death from cancer due to the carelessness of the GNCS.

On the other hand, I have seen some wildly inaccurate interpretations on the internet, including that “hundreds of millions of people will die” from Fukushima; that “much of northern Japan” is now uninhabitable (please consult a map); or the most crackpot idea to date — that the situation at the Fukushima power station is so serious that we must literally “nuke it” to terminate the problem. Yet, most coverage of the issue, even from many mainstream sources, has been well intentioned if not always perfectly accurate or is overly self censored.

Tepco would be happy for everyone to forget all about Fukushima so they can get back to the business of making lots of money. Their cover-up of important information was made obvious when a Diet science committee received a “heavily censored [redacted] copy of a nuclear accident operating manual for the Fukushima No. 1 power station.”³² Their message is clear: “Fuck you; we own you people and we can get away with bloody murder.”

That Tepco has huge influence and control over the media and politicians is well documented.³³ Their bribes and payoffs are legion, spending hundreds of millions of dollars “on payments known internally [to the company] as ‘funds to deal with local communities.’ ”³⁴ Tepco arrogance and greed knows no bounds, as this Asahi News editorialist writes: they intend “to raise electricity rates by a uniform 15 percent for three years starting next fiscal year [while] its employees are [only] taking a pay cut of 5 percent… I am appalled that the company is also paying bonuses, although the amount is down by half. Once the period of the rate hike is over, it intends to resume paying bonuses in full.”³⁵

In the meantime, although many folks have volunteered to help in the stricken northeast region, the majority of Japanese people have pushed the issue to the back of their minds. The fate of Fukushima residents is just their tough luck– lifestyle consumerism and self preservation take precedence. If given a choice I don’t think the Japanese would have chosen nuclear power as an energy source, that decision was foisted on them in the post WWII period. There is still a hard core group of a few thousand anti-nuke protesters who consistently make their voices heard, and we keep hearing squeaking noises from top politicians that nuclear power must be phased out and renewables phased in — hopefully the sooner the better.³⁶

1. Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog
2. No. 3 reactor cooling down: Tepco
3. Nuclear Engineer: Fukushima reactors continue to emit significant quantities of radioactive gases
4. Radiation expert says outcome of nuke crisis hard to predict, warns of further dangers
5. Plugging leaks will end crisis, not cold shutdown: analysts
6. GSDF holds emergency evacuation drill near stricken Fukushima nuclear plant
7. Fukushima man opts to be guinea pig
8. Inside Japan’s nuclear ghost zone
9. Fukushima clean-up may require removal of 100 million cubic meters of soil
10. Radioactive Landfill: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Has Been Doing It Since May
11. Over 100,000 Fukushima Prefecture residents can’t return to hometowns
12. A third of Fukushima residents would move if they could
13. Contamination of Fukushima forests being studied
14. Potentially Radioactive Lumber to Be Promoted with “Eco-Point” Incentive?
15. Radioactive manganese-54, silver-110m and cobalt-60 found in seaweed sample 30km south of Fukushima
16. Ex-SKF blog
17. Radioactive Turf in Nursery School in Akita Prefecture
18. Up to one-seventh of Fukushima may be contaminated
19. Survey Finds Radiation Over Wide Area in Japan
20. Fukushima cesium contamination widespread but less than Chernobyl
21. Cesium absorption through roots may have long-term effect on farming
    Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears
22. Radioactive Rice? ND, Says Fukushima Prefecture
23. “NEW!” atmc.jp now posting Fukushima radiation forecast maps from Swiss Meteorological Bureau
24. New Data Supports Previous Fairewinds Analysis, as Contamination Spreads in Japan and Worldwide
25. Prof. Kodama Angry about Japanese Gov.’s Gross Negligence (Part 1)
26. Fukushima Crisis Is Still Hazy
27. Radioactive release into sea estimated tripled
28. Nuclear Power’s Future In Doubt Amidst Fukushima Crisis
29. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Trial Wraps Up
30. Japanese gov’s trying to stop citizen measuring radiation
31. Fukushima media coverage ‘may be harmful’
32. TEPCO submits heavily redacted copy of Fukushima nuke accident manual
33. Censorship in Japan: The Fukushima Cover-up
34. TEPCO quietly paid 40 billion yen to areas near nuclear plants
35. TEPCO doesn’t deserve to be called a public interest company
36. Japan to reduce reliance on nuclear power?

The ease with which so many splintered greens agreed to come together is an indicator of what a disaster the dirty fuel corridor would be.  Through its sheer 1,700 mile proposed stretch from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, however, the pipeline and the protests it has prompted draw attention to a more subtle subject that affects many of the biggest issues we face.  That subject is distance: getting to Washington DC or any particular place in a continent-spanning country is extremely difficult.  The unspectacular but useful insulation that this provides to those causing harm in the world is something we have failed to properly acknowledge.

There are, of course, many reasons why it’s hard to get large numbers of people together here for an event worthy of 2011.  An openly smashed and undermined public transport system coupled with the extreme normalization of the car plays a part.  As does the criminalizing and marginalizing of protest.  A bad economy makes any kind of travel expensive, and even in the good times those who most needed to voice their discontent had a hard time getting cash together or time off work.  And in the case of environmentalism, the desire to not be seen as hypocrites who drive or fly to protests is an understandable if misguided notion.

Geographic realities, however, may appear free of blame, and to some extent, they are.  Despite the best efforts of industrialism to reshape the Earth’s crust and coasts, no human is responsible for the overall shape of the Americas or any other landmass.  But significant decisions made over centuries have dictated where people will live and of what nationality they will be.  There is irony in the fact that the past imperial expansion of Manifest Destiny, scattering populations until they started to pile up on the West coast, today provides protection to the architects of further expansion.  The American founders made no secret of their wishes to see their country bathing over a massive area; among the objections to King George III in The Declaration of Independence is his “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

It makes sense that they would seek to grow.  There is a connection between physical country size and power.  Medium-sized Western European nations managed to attain global rule through a groundbreaking form of energy exploitation that allowed them to mimic bigger places: a single barrel of oil contains the equivalent energy of five agricultural laborers, working 12 hour days, 365 days a year.  As the glorious new pathway to prosperity spread, it was, in the words of British economic historian John Clapham, inevitable that “a continent would . . . raise more coal and make more steel than one small island”¹ – thus came the rise of the United States and the USSR.  We see this today in the increasing influence (however bogeyman-style distorted by current rulers) of coal-filled China, biofuel-powered Brazil and even Harper’s Canada, which is not pushing tar sands for fun or social programs.  In this age where fossil fuels are at the epicenter of many issues, irony is compounded, as those countries most in need of dissent (mainly still the US) are the ones with the best geographic insulation.

In what way should we frame this problem?  Some may think back to that old phrase “think globally, act locally.”  As our oil-hungry and autistic economic systems² continue to unravel, local work is essential.  But the centers of power are not going to collapse politely.  Large, confrontational events are essential as well, as we have seen across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.  Simply turning our backs on the places where big decisions are made will give the players there further free reign.

The Declaration of Independence also complained that the Monarchy had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States.” Could population growth be part of the solution here?  Perhaps, but it is a very blunt instrument.  As the population rises, more space is taken up and proposals for better mass transit could emerge – but a certain density is needed, and by the time any significant impact was to be felt in this regard, the destruction of hundreds of millions more American lifestyles would be evident.  With over half the world’s people living now living in cities, it’s also obvious that we tend to live in places that are already more on the heavily populated side.  And although it’s not a direct correlation, more citizens mean you need more protesters for the same impact: this is one reason we don’t hear about China experiencing “. . . riots worse than those in England every single week.” (Another reason is we’re being groomed to think that the Chinese are a monolithic hive-mind who are going to steal our freedom or our African oil or something.)

Building better long-distance transport should remain a goal, but it would be a mammoth task to get even a modest amount of the population an improved way into D.C.  Plus, in the short term at least, high-speed rail will remain as expensive for passengers and around as polluting as cars and planes.  Dynamiting the continent into smaller pieces is probably not a popular or sensible option.  This appears to leave reshaping the arbitrary map lines in which we put so much stock, and how we relate to them.  Perhaps it is because of the presence of strong regional and state identities — coupled with the balance of state/federal power — that Americans seem more concerned about the possibility of separatism than people of other nations.  The name of the country might be a powerful sedative, but neither it nor the fact that 50 is a lovely round number should be sufficient argument for holding together.  And then there’s the memory of the civil war – an occasion when preventing a perverse practice (to stick with the usual simplistic narrative) was a good, ethical reason to overrule Southern autonomy.  Not all — or even many — conditions meet this grade.  While the politics that dominate in some states today may be ugly, they are not akin to chattel slavery.

At the risk of upsetting liberals, there is nothing inherently more progressive or effective about governments that preside over large populations and areas than those that work in one-fiftieth of that space.  Even governments of much smaller countries are often clueless about what life is like beyond a certain radius of the capital city.  Conservatives who advocate states rights are on to something (where they fall down is identity confusion).  The thought of having to win political victories in 50 (or more) separate locations as opposed to one may seem daunting, but that’s because we lie to ourselves if we think getting anything done at the current federal level is in any way easy.  If it seemed, under a revised geopolitics, that raising objections weren’t so pointless, you might even get more protesters from within any individual state than you would in making a US-wide call-out for everyone to converge on that state.

It is a prime time for this topic to be discussed, as several actions even more ambitious than the Keystone XL demonstration are coming up soon, and their success may depend in part on whether distance keeps numbers down. On September 17th a group suggesting a “US Day of Rage” wants non-violent assemblies to take place at the local and national level, demanding that the influence of money be booted out of politics.  In an associated event, the magazine Adbusters is behind a call to occupy Wall Street with a tent city on the same date making similar demands, and hopes people will stay for the long haul.  In October, the Afghanistan War goes into an 11th year, the 2012 federal austerity budget begins, and on the 6th another ongoing square takeover is planned for Freedom Plaza in D.C.  The former of these plans acknowledges that local options are necessary, though it comes with the risk of diminishing totals at the main event.

Even though protest targets and decision makers know that any number of activists suggests wider support, the likes of square occupations require physical bodies to have the desired effect.  Cautious optimism suggests that if nothing else these mobilizations will be stepping stones and warning shots, but pessimism whispers that if they do not produce results, it will harden the perception that change and revolution are things by, and for, other people in other places.  For an example of what it would be like to live in a different kind of place, see Iceland.  In November 2008 when the neoliberal dream died there, 9000 people took to the streets against banks and government, as a modest part of a more radical movement.  Mathematically adjusted, that is the equivalent of 9.5million Americans.  That many converging on the White House is physically unlikely and a logistical and safety nightmare.  That many across a continent of autonomous and easily accessible small governments would be a big moment of excess.

1. J. H. Clapham, qtd in The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money, Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, 2010, Basic Books, p38
2. The author realizes that there is a spectrum of autistic conditions; however, the use of the term to describe an intelligent but tunnel-vision economy is not his own

If we project the fully anticipated increase of unrestrained per-capita consumption/hoarding, rampant economic globalization and unrestricted propagation of 75 to 80 million newborns per annum for the foreseeable future, will someone please explain how the ‘trajectory’ of our civilization can be sustained much longer on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth? According to my admittedly simple estimations, if humankind keeps doing just as it is doing now, without beginning to do whatsoever is necessary to modify the business-as-usual course of our gigantic global economy, for example, then the Earth could not sustain life as we know it much longer.

It appears that all the chatter in the mass media regarding an already accepted event, a “demographic transition” in the coming four decades, during which time humankind will pursue a path to the future marked by underdeveloped countries not following the path of the overdeveloped countries but instead “leap-frogging” traditional economic growth activities and automatically squeezing through a ‘bottleneck’ to population stabilization around 2050, is nothing more than wishful and magical thinking. Where is the science to support these ideas? Although it has not been sensibly and openly discussed, extant scientific evidence appears to directly contradict demographic transition theory in such a way that I am led to believe that this theory is a product of preternatural thinking and inadequate research. Please note that the demographic transition theory could be supported by unscientific evidence that is widely known to be ideologically based, politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed.

Unfortunately, in the face of all the elective mutism and willful denial of what the human population is doing on our watch, many too many top rank scientists have adopted a code of silence, apparently at the behest of super-rich and powerful greedmongers who rule the world in our time. Scientists have got to find adequate ways of communicating to humanity about what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species are primarily the result of the colossal current scale and fully expected growth of human consumption, production and propagation activities worldwide. When taken together, these global overgrowth activities of the human species appear to be occurring synergistically, proceeding at breakneck speed, and moving fast toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort unless, of course, the world’s huge, ever expanding, artificially designed, man-made global political economy continues to rush headlong toward the monolithic ‘Wall’ called UNSUSTAINABILITY, at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.

If this representation of the human-driven global predicament is somehow on the right track, then it seems that responsible and humane efforts made by a conscious human community to slow the world-engulfing overgrowth activities of the human population would be a step in the direction of sustainability. Either we will choose to take a “road less traveled by” toward sustainability while there is still time or else become one of many species to be victimized by of our soon to become, somehow patently unsustainable presence on Earth, I suppose.

Ours is a truly complex world — with interlocking systems of finance and debt, globalized supply chains for commodities and products, highly specialized social roles and professions, and multiple technologies that tightly interface with and depend upon one another. For people living in modern societies, there is virtually no escape from dependency — technology dependency, food dependency, oil dependency — you name it. What’s more, we actively participate in maintaining and expanding social systems that circumscribe our potential. These systems limit our autonomy, our choices, our development, and our authentic engagement with others and the world.

So what is this dependency that is enforced upon us, and who is doing the enforcing?

Let’s start with the first part of the question. At the heart of the issue is the fact that huge numbers of us globally no longer have direct access to the earth’s productive capacities in ways that would allow us to meet our essential needs in localized, self governed ways as families and communities. We don’t have the land and the water to grow our own food, and if we do, we probably don’t have the knowledge to earn our entire living directly from the land. Virtually all of us are heavily dependent on earning wages as a means to provide ourselves and our loved ones with what we need to live.

We also can’t fix most of the machines upon which we rely. We need computers to build the computers that we use at work and in our day-to-day lives. We require the services of lawyers who defend our legal interests and speak for us amid the complex web of laws that surround our business relationships, our physical and spiritual unions — and the dissolution of these unions.

We need specialists of all kinds to do complex work for us, and many of us have undergone extensive training in order to perform highly complex work for others. While learning and doing this complex work, we often don’t have time to care for our own children, let alone grow gardens and care for farm animals.

But, you might ask, haven’t people always depended on one another? Yes, of course. In fact, our social nature has been an essential factor in our ability to live in diverse, challenging environments, and most of us would agree that relationships with those we count on are at the heart of the joy of being human through love and friendship.

And, you might ask, doesn’t our ability to specialize form a foundation for technological advancement? Absolutely. But as we all know, technological advancement isn’t an unqualified good. It has its costs. We all can think of some of these costs to our health, to nature, and to our relationships.

The point I am making is that most of us are almost entirely dependent on the money system for our very survival, and this dependence has proven to be extremely profitable for industries of all kinds.

Take the food industry for example. If you can, through economic and land policy, effectively remove vast numbers of money-poor but mostly self-sufficient subsistence farmers from the land and make them dependent upon purchased food — even if their purchases are small on an individual basis — the sum of these millions of new food consumers presents a huge opportunity for money making in agribusiness. Similarly, if you can privatize and monopolize the water supply and force everyone including the poor to purchase their water — even if each pays very little — again, you’ve created a huge money making opportunity for water services corporations.

Dependency feeds the money-based economic system. Self-sufficiency does not. Therefore, creating dependency quite literally pays — at least for some — and those in a position to create money making opportunities by enforcing dependency use their economic and political influence to do so. Their actions dispossess vast numbers of people worldwide and simultaneously concentrate global wealth and power. Here we also see part of the answer to the question of who is enforcing dependency.

Debt as Enforced Dependency

Debt also enforces subservience and dependence. Anyone who has struggled to service credit card debt or make a regular car or house payment knows this. When you’re in debt, your time is not your own. You must sell your time in the wage marketplace so that you can service your debts. Debt, in fact, is one of the foremost mechanisms for enforcing the dependency of both individuals and entire nations.

Debt is also the very currency of our economic system. The money that we struggle to earn comes into existence through debt. Commercial banks create money out of nothing when they credit the account of an individual or business with borrowed money. Only a small portion of the lent money came to the bank through deposits. Without debt, money would not exist in its current form. And so, as we create the substance that sustains us in the globalized, industrial world, we simultaneously create the conditions for our own enslavement. It’s important to understand, though, that money can be created in other ways besides through debt. That just isn’t done now in the current economic system. Having the power to create money out of nothing and the right to confiscate real property (collateral) in the case of a debt default gives banks an incredible amount of power in modern economies and societies.

In taking out a loan, a business, an individual, or a nation also expresses faith in a growing economy — more products and services sold to more people at prices that allow repayment of the debt plus the interest incurred. This faith has been well placed in many cases in a world with plenty of energy in the form of fossil fuels, but global oil supplies appear to have peaked, and fossil fueled economic growth is coming to an end.

For many nations in the Global South, however, due to a combination of factors, their bets on future economic growth didn’t work out so well with regard to repayment of their external debts. Globally, debt has enforced the subservience of economically and politically weak nations to relatively powerful industrialized nations, foremost among these being the United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.

One problem debtor nations in the Global South face is that their debts are often dollar-denominated. They can’t be repaid in their national currency, so in order to repay, debtor nations must export raw materials and other products to earn the dollars needed to service their debts.

Furthermore, following the oil price shocks in the 1970s and much as a result of the declining value of the dollar at that same time, interest rates were raised sharply in the United States. A global recession ensued, and the adjustable rate loans of debtor nations in the Global South ratcheted up sharply, precipitating a debt crisis.

As a result of the defaults, the International Monetary Fund required structural adjustment programs (SAPs) as a condition for the reorganization of external debt in the Global South. The austerity measures and free trade regimes of SAPs tended to open up domestic markets to outside competition. Banks, farms, businesses of all kinds often found that they could not survive in steep competition with large and sophisticated global corporations, and many folded. Furthermore, taxes that might have been collected from domestic businesses were lost as the profits of global corporations were repatriated abroad.

Furthermore, as part of an SAP, a country was usually required by the IMF to raise its domestic interest rates far above those of banks located in more stable economies. This meant that people trying to start businesses, purchase homes, or borrow money for any other purpose within their own nations in the Global South were placed at a distinct disadvantage to those able to borrow money elsewhere in order to bring their business into a new market. Global corporations found great money making opportunities in these debt-ridden countries. They could expand their global market share while domestic economies faltered.

To make matters even worse for the Global South, they have to deal with the petrodollar standard. Most people in the U.S. know nothing about this standard, but it has a huge effect globally. Every individual, company, or nation wanting to purchase oil from OPEC must do so using U.S. dollars. This standard heightens demand for the dollar and, therefore, supports its value. It also means that all nations who import oil from OPEC nations must export commodities and products to the U.S. in order to obtain the dollars needed for these purchases.

SAPs and the petrodollar standard virtually ensure that nations in the Global South will export their natural wealth in the form of trees, minerals, agricultural products, and more. It’s basically colonialism all over again, but without the need for dominant nations to plant any flags.

Recognizing Enforced Dependency: A Starting Point for a Better Future

Those of us in the industrialized world, in many cases, would rather not know the extent to which we, too, have been colonized. We want to feel like our future is bright and we’re in charge of our own destiny. And we’ve assimilated cultural myths that support this notion into the very fiber of our being. One such myth is the notion of progress — the idea that we in industrialized societies have more choices and more opportunities than people of any other civilization or “primitive” society, past or present. If this story is true, it follows that we have little to complain about.

We’re also told that the cream always rises to the top, an explanation of the world as we experience it that diffuses resistance to hierarchical control in schools, the workplace, political structures — everywhere. This myth also provides a convenient explanation for the relative dominance of industrialized countries in the world economy and the inability of the Global South to solve its vast social problems.

We might be more comfortable, in a sense, limiting our vision to internalized myths. Seeing past these myths requires us to apply our energies to learning about systemic biases built into the global economy. It also requires us to develop empathy for others caught in the webs of global economic and political structures. Perhaps the part that is most difficult, though, is that this project requires a willingness to critique oneself and one’s culture — and a healthy measure of humility.

But I believe learning to recognize enforced dependency as an organizing principle in the modern, globalized world is well worth it because this knowledge truly is power. And I think most of us would agree that we need the power to make big changes. Understanding enforced dependency is a powerful starting point for a new clear vision that can see through cultural myths and the mystification of manipulators who benefit from all of us quietly playing their game of business as usual.

Recognizing how we and others have been colonized within the globalized world helps us see behind the divide-and-conquer strategies of many leaders, strategies that divert our attention to casting blame on other victims of systemic problems instead of paying attention to the systemic problems themselves. Knowing that forces beyond our control have left millions with very limited choices in attempting to better their lives provides fertile ground in which to cultivate empathy and solidarity rather than hatred and blame as we move through difficult times that promise to prove increasingly challenging as climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and other crises converge in often mutually reinforcing ways. This knowledge can help us build solidarity among all of those whose positions are slipping dangerously toward poverty and powerlessness as the global economic crisis deepens.

In a truly globalized world like the one in which we live, there really is nowhere to run or hide that will allow us to escape all of the ravages of rapidly converging crises. And so, we must face each other. In crisis, will we face each other as enemies or as partners? I hope it will be increasingly as partners. And if we are to be partners, we need to know each other and our respective histories.

That’s where learning about how and why dependency is enforced on diverse people globally comes into play. The specific manifestations vary regarding how people worldwide experience enforced dependency, but understanding the organizing principles of this phenomenon that affect us all allows us to see how our individual stories are living variations on a theme.

Breaking Free from Enforced Dependency

The global economy upon which most of us depend for our very survival isn’t sustainable. We simply can’t maintain a debt-and-interest-based money system that requires infinite growth within the bounds of a limited Earth.

So who is this system of enforced dependency serving anyway? Well, it serves all of us who participate in it in some ways, but it’s proving to be less and less reliable in satisfying our needs, and the system is sure to become increasingly unstable as the oil supply crisis deepens and as other crises including climate change continue to unfold. The system is already failing millions who realize they must emigrate from their homes for a chance at living life with some measure of material wellbeing.

Where can we go from here? The rest of this series on “Living and Learning Sustainability” offers a response to this question. For now, we can start by considering how we can reduce our dependency and become more resilient with regard to the basics of life — our food, our water, our energy. How can we produce these things more locally? What do we need to learn to do so? There are many actions that we can take, and all of our actions must match the possibilities inherent in the places we live: our ecosystems and our communities.

What is sustainability anyway? We’ll focus on this last question in next month’s segment. Doing so will help us prepare for a future in which we not only survive, but maintain and advance the best of our humanness within an increasingly unstable world.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

During a bilateral meeting in early August, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird discussed issues pertaining to the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere. Also high on the agenda was U.S.- Canada relations. This included the declaration, Beyond the Border: Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness issued by U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper back in February of this year. At a news conference following her meeting with Minister Baird, Secretary Clinton stressed that, “it’s critical that we ensure our border remains a safe, vibrant connector of people, trade, and energy. And today, the minister and I discussed other ways to expand trade and investment; for example, by reducing unnecessary regulations.” It is interesting that Clinton brought up energy as this is also an integral part of North American integration which is being further advanced through the U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue, as well as other initiatives.

Another issue that came up during Clinton and Baird’s meeting was the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. If approved, it would carry oil sands crude from the province of Alberta and pass through the U.S. states of Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas to delivery points in Oklahoma and Texas, at the Gulf of Mexico. While addressing a question at a joint news conference about delays on coming to a decision on the pipeline, Secretary Clinton said, “We are leaving no stone unturned in this process and we expect to make a decision on the permit before the end of this year.” Several months back, the Environmental Protection Agency expressed concerns about environmental impacts associated with the project, as well as the level of analysis and information being provided. With the State Department’s recent release of its Final Environmental Impact Statement, the Keystone XL pipeline has moved one step closer to a final decision. The review period will now go, “beyond environmental impact, taking into account economic, energy security, (and) foreign policy.” While there continues to be vocal opposition to the project, it is being touted as important for future U.S. energy security.

In May of this year, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a series of hearings which, among other things, examined legislation concerning the North American-Made Energy Security Act. The bill called on, “the President to expedite the consideration and approval of the construction and operation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.” With regards to oil consumption, it acknowledged that, “While a significant portion of imports are derived from allies such as Canada and Mexico, the United States remains vulnerable to substantial supply disruptions created by geopolitical tumult in major producing nations.” It goes on to say. “The development and delivery of oil and gas from Canada to the United States is in the national interest of the United States.” The bill also stated, “Continued development of North American energy resources, including Canadian oil, increases domestic refiners’ access to stable and reliable sources of crude and improves certainty of fuel supply for the Department of Defense.” In other words, more Canadian oil is needed to fuel the U.S. war machine. This all ties in with the perimeter security deal and further removing trade barriers. It is part of U.S. efforts to secure more access and control of Canadian resources.

The Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) was created at the same time as President Obama and Prime Minister Harper signed the Beyond the Border declaration. The RCC aims to further advance regulatory harmonization in a wide range of areas. While the border security and regulatory cooperation discussions are separate, they do go hand in hand. In June, the RCC held its first meeting which centered around the development of a joint action plan and the creation of working groups in key sectors. The Terms of Reference for the RCC establishes the mandate and principles by which it will carry forth. When an action plan is completed it, “will outline activities for a period of up to two years. At the end of the two-year period, Canada and the United States will review the work of the RCC and consider the adoption of a new Action Plan.” While this is a bilateral initiative, “The United States and Canada will seek, to the extent possible, to coordinate the RCC’s activities with the work of the U.S.-Mexico High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Council when the three governments identify regulatory issues of common interest in North America.” At some point, these dual-bilateral councils could come together to form a single continental regulatory body.

On August 15, 2011, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano met with Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, “to discuss the ongoing partnership between the United States and Canada to work collaboratively on our shared vision for perimeter security and strengthen information sharing to better combat cross-border crime, while expediting legitimate trade and travel.” The bilateral meeting was an opportunity to review progress being made on an action plan that is being developed by the Beyond the Border Working Group. The Toronto Star reported that Napolitano and Toews also discussed increasing joint border operations such as the Shiprider program which allows law enforcement officials from both countries to operate together. Secretary Napolitano explained. “We’re looking at expanding that kind of basic concept to other areas where we can do more by way of joint law enforcement operation, intelligence gathering and … joint policing.” This would also further build off of the Integrated Border Enforcement Team Program, a bi-national initiative which is comprised of both Canadian and American law enforcement agencies. Eventually, you could see the creation of a joint U.S.-Canada organization managing the border.

Following his meeting with Secretary Napolitano, Minister Towes also announced that Prime Minister Harper and U.S. President Obama will meet in early fall where they will be updated and provide further directions on plans for a North American security perimeter. There are fears that any deal reached could be lopsided with Canada giving up more than it gains. Over the last number of years, Canada has already enacted many U.S. security measures. As part of a continental security perimeter arrangement, Canada could be forced to comply with any new U.S. requirements, regardless of the risks they may pose to privacy and civil liberties.

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

— Michele Bachmann, 1/26/05, testifying against a bill to raise the minimum wage and advocating the elimination of the minimum wage altogether

Dark economic clouds are dissipating into an emerging blue sky of opportunity.

Democracy functions best when we have an active citizenry.

— Rick Perry

Election of poorly equipped persons to highest office reveals a larger problem – a sizable portion of the electorate, possibly fifty percent, subscribe to the simplistic economic thinking that thwarts economic recovery – “It’s the government’s fault,” “Only business can create jobs,” “Get the government out of our lives,” and the latest, “We only have to return to God.”

And what thinketh the other fifty percent? Well, the Wall Street Journal has a huge and trusting readership who use its words to plan their economic futures. Combine Tea Party, Libertarian, and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) subscriptions, and we have, with some overlap, economic thought that defies analysis because there is no thought to analyze.

Tea Party proposals for economic growth are self-refuted due to their lack of depth, slogans and simplistic expressions.

Libertarian economics derives from libertarian philosophy, a single-minded approach to all issues. The economics have been challenged in a previous article by the writer:

How to Create an Economic Downfall, exactly what these miscreants are preparing for their nation.

Close association between Wall Street Journal and barren right wing economic ideologues are revealed in a WSJ editorial. Each line of the editorial is either a self-refutation, an inaccuracy, a distortion, a made-up issue, or an outright deception. Is that serious? Yes, it is serious – the electorate is almost entirely captured by inadequate economic proposals that will sink America. And the politicos think only of catering to the electorate; not educating it with sensible policies, and only interested in winning an election. The United States is moving towards an economic sinkhole in which the Tea Party and Wall Street Journal complement one another.

Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2011 Editorial:

These examples show that China is no ‘miracle.’ Running a trade surplus while accumulating and sterilizing foreign reserves succeeds for a time. But inflation is only deferred, and the more that is stored up, the worse the hangover afterward. Investments that were predicated on the good times lasting forever must then be written off. Subsidized exports must shrink to a more appropriate share of the economy. There is some irony here in that one of the reasons Beijing has refused to change its monetary arrangements is that it doesn’t want to repeat the experience of Japan. That was understandable during the Asian monetary turmoil of the late 1990s and again during the panic of 2008-2009. But in economics what can’t continue won’t. Tokyo pursued a policy of reserve accumulation for too long, making a difficult transition inevitable. Stagflation is a warning to Beijing that it is running out of time to avoid that fate.

— Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

China is no “miracle”.

If we speak of a German miracle and Japanese miracle, then certainly China deserves the expression China miracle. Like all the others, the ‘miracle’ was actually worthwhile economic policies.

Running a trade surplus while accumulating and sterilizing foreign reserves succeeds for a time.

Does the patronizing WSJ believe the Peoples Republic government, which has steered a totally deprived nation to become the second largest economy in only thirty years, doesn’t know the care of foreign reserves? Meanwhile, the country is growing at a rapid rate.

Does China sterilize foreign reserve? Doesn’t the government buy the dollars, increase its money supply and invest the dollars in foreign assets?

Inflation is only deferred, and the more that is stored up, the worse the hangover afterward.

In 1995, China had a 25% inflation rate and a minuscule trade balance. Now it has a 6% inflation rate and a major positive trade balance. A 6% inflation rate is already a relatively high rate and so the government is not storing up anything.

Subsidized exports must shrink to a more appropriate share of the economy.

Does China subsidize exports more than other nations?

“According to the GATT/WTO trade agreements, a country with a value added tax (VAT) such as China can legally rebate to its exporters the VAT taxes they pay on exports. US manufacturers face this problem when competing with the Chinese, but also with the Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans and many other nations.”

Charging China with manipulating its currency in order to favor exports is not easily proven. The moderately high six percent inflation rate offsets other factors that push the Renminbi to an increased value. Nevertheless, the Renminbi is still not an international currency whose value can be comfortably compared with other currencies. As for, general subsidies, they are no more than the U.S. subsidies for its agricultural industry, which floods the world market with foodstuffs, which are competitive due to the subsidies.

Economist Eswar Prasad of Cornell University argues that cheap credit and subsidized land and energy further enhance the price competitiveness of Chinese exports.

Cheap credit? Has Eswar Prasad confused nations?

Similar to the policies of other industrialized nations during the economic slowdown, Beijing originated stimulus plans with easier credit to invigorate the economy. Unlike other industrialized nations, the Chinese stimulus maintained a low unemployment rate (4.5%) and an escalated GDP growth (9%).

The benchmark interest rate in China was last reported at 6.56 percent.

The benchmark interest rate in the United States was last reported at 0.25 percent.

The Cornell university economist is comparing a minor green technology trade dispute with the United States, which Beijing has settled by agreeing to stop subsidizing wind power firms that use domestic parts at the expense of imports,

Examine the U.S. government assistance to the energy sector.

U.S. government support for renewable energy may plunge from record levels, setting back the use of wind and solar power before they can compete on their own with oil, gas and coal. Written into the federal tax code are benefits valued at $24.2 billion for renewable energy and efficiency incentives through 2014, compared with an estimated $17.9 billion for the oil, gas, and coal industries, according to a December report by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Direct spending, tax breaks and research funding pushed federal renewable-energy subsidies to $14.7 billion in 2010, according to Alan Beamon, director of the Energy Information Administration Office of Electric, Coal, Nuclear and Renewables Analysis. Project developers are lining up for subsidies approved in the 2009 stimulus bill as incentives expire and the deficit-reduction deal dims prospects for future backing of solar panels and wind farms.

…an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.

There is some irony here in that one of the reasons Beijing has refused to change its monetary arrangements is that it doesn’t want to repeat the experience of Japan.

What “experience of Japan?” From 2008, until the Tsunami crippled its production, Japan’s GDP rose from $4.3 trillion to $5.5 trillion. During the same interval, U.S. GDP rose from $14 trillion to $14.3 trillion with a slight dip in 2010. Has the WSJ been told this reason by Chinese officials, or is it originating this thought, and using a reference to Beijing to confirm it? The economic development of China is much different than that of already developed Japan; why should policies be similar?

In economics what can’t continue won’t.

Profound statement, similar to those of Michelle Bachmann.

Tokyo pursued a policy of reserve accumulation for too long, making a difficult transition inevitable.

Japan is a resource deficient nation, which needs to export to obtain funds to import raw materials and energy supplies. Foreign competition forced its corporations, similar to those in the United States, to move production offshore. External production limits domestic money supply and domestic consumption. Japan incorporated is doing what it has to do and not what the WSJ wants it to do, and doing it successfully. Nothing wrong with having the third largest economy in the world.

Stagflation is a warning to Beijing that it is running out of time to avoid that fate.

Stagflation is when the economy experiences slow GDP growth (stagnation) with high inflation. Japan, to whom the WSJ is telling China it might soon resemble, has exhibited moderate GDP growth with deflation.

Meanwhile the U.S. retains slow economic growth with slow inflation and exhibits characteristics that tend to no growth and hyperinflation.

Does one editorial from the Wall Street Journal mean much? The WSJ influences a significant portion of the shakers and makers in America. Every editorial characterizes its approach to the economic dilemma. Prevarications, deceptive remarks, illogical reasoning, and distorting facts to advance an agenda skew the dialogue. Although the Bush administration’s policies headed the nation towards an obvious economic downfall, the WSJ never presented any alarm. Now it’s warning the People’s Republic it’s going to soon be in trouble. The editorial implication is that all is right in America, and if it isn’t, it’s China’s fault.

The reality: Measures needed to reduce unemployment to acceptable levels and provide sufficient economic growth refute the slogans that guide the population’s concepts of a beneficial economic system. Unfortunately, these measures invite more government intervention in the economy, which means they will neither be advanced by hypocritical politicians nor accepted by a disillusioned electorate. Popular economic media, together with the Tea and Libertarian Parties, drive the population to politicians whose policies create consistent high unemployment and perpetual stagflation to the U.S. economy. The confused population will continue to rail against the predicament and blame the government and China.

In a study that reveals the GOP pledge to protect business interests at all costs, the Center for Media and Democracy recently analyzed 800 bills supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This secretive group consists of big businesses and conservatives who influence state legislatures around the country to lower wages and taxes on business, and weaken environmental protection that could crimp profits.

Undoing efforts to address climate change is a major priority of ALEC sponsors such as Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, AT&T and Peabody Energy. For example, they created a model law – State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives – that is being introduced by state lawmakers to curb carbon reduction mandates and overturn cap-and-trade deals.

The GOP’s efforts don’t stop here. Because they believe private property should be the basis for environmental policy, owners become the only protection for the environment. According to the GOP, only self-regulation and a laissez-faire market can provide protection. Toward this end, House Republicans created a rider for the 2012 appropriations bill (H.R. 2584), consisting of items to weaken environmental regulations by cutting funding and rolling back rules.

While the Senate would have to confirm the changes and President Obama would have to sign the bill, it’s unlikely that such changes will pass. The bill continues to change; nevertheless, the attempt reveals GOP plans to roll back environmental protections agreed upon by both parties over the past 40 years. The GOP promises more jobs and recovery from the current depression as a reward for such actions.

“Many of us think that overregulation from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is at the heart of our stalled economy,” said Mike Simpson, Republican from Idaho. The bill cuts up to 18 percent of the funding from the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior and the EPA, and was voted out of committee by House Republicans.

The bill is loaded with a promise to business to end regulation and leaves only the profit motive to determine the use of land, water and wildlife.

By blocking regulations the GOP would allow:

– Automobiles to stop increasing gas mileage after 2016, and allow them to spew fine particles that cause cancer into the air.

– Pesticide manufacturers to use false and misleading information on their labels, and chemical companies and agriculture to dump pesticides into the waterways.

– Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

– The cement industry to pump cancer-causing dust into the air.

– Increased levels of arsenic, formaldehyde and other cancer-causing substances in the air, soil, drinking water, and sediment, as well as allow increased ammonia emissions from power plants.

– Oil conglomerates to ignore health-based air quality standards offshore, and make it more expensive for citizens to challenge government actions regulating oil extraction companies.

– Increased storm water discharge from commercial and residential construction sites, mountain top removal water to run off into streams, and prohibit the EPA from forcing Florida to enforce the state’s Water Quality Standards.

– Increased ash from the burning of coal, and methane from manure piles.

– Lawsuits over grazing on public lands to proceed more easily, livestock to move freely across government grazing land, and prevent reviews of grazing permits.

– Alaskan western red and yellow cedar to be cut and sold for shipment overseas.

– Unlisted endangered animals to be hunted and killed, and wolves to be de-listed from protection.

– Endangering of bighorn sheep by allowing more livestock to graze in their habitat.

In addition, the GOP would:

– Eliminate the regulation of livestock waste runoff or disposal.

– Allow greenhouse gas producers, such as coal plants, to continue emitting for one year, and bar lawsuits during this time.

– Prohibit funding for listing or protecting any new animal species under the Endangered Species Act.

– Block any updates to the Clean Water Act, and prevent regulation of cool water intake facilities.

– Limit public appeals of Forest Service timber harvest plans.

– Provide financial breaks for mining companies, and prevent any new hard rock mining regulations.

– Allow Texas to implement its own cap-and-trade system without Federal input.

– Prevent boat inspection safety checks on the Yukon River.

– Prevent the EPA from adopting water ballast requirements that stop the intrusion of invasive species into the Great Lakes.

– Force the EPA to ignore Clean Air Rules for power plants, and ignore the public health benefits of the Clean Air Act.

– Block the designation of Federal land to be set aside as wilderness areas.

– Require detailed records to be kept and quarterly reports on any gas or oil permits not allowed.

These efforts make it clear that Republicans ignore the role of deregulation of financial institutions that sunk the economy and robbed millions of Americans of their jobs and their savings.

They hope voters will forget President Bush and the Republican role in this disaster, blame the depression on Obama, and give them the presidency in 2012. They destroyed the economy once and they can do it again-this time taking the environment with it.

It’s all still phrased as a temporary down-turn; they have to call it that or fundamental questions would be asked. Even so, the most optimistic among us realize something is wildly wrong, even if they dare not give the feeling words.

We are the ones who will witness breathtaking change. Every history buff has an era they would like to have been witness to. Would anyone wish to observe our moment? Ours may be the most profound and rapid unraveling to ever color this globe.

We have so many crises converging upon us, like several flood-swollen rivers finding a confluence. It’s conceivable that our problems can be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, but it’s the sheer number and severity of all the factors together which point to a very different world emerging. A dark synergy.

We have built a consumer-driven economy that relies on infinite growth. The folly of this is that it was implemented on a finite planet! Growth is needed in this system; new bubbles have to be inflated. It’s the way of things until the very system devours all that can be had.

The steroid for all this growth has been that of Peak Oil. No longer in the realm of oddball conjecture, respected entities like the International Energy Agency consider that we reached the peak of easily available oil in 2006, and that we are now on the downhill slope. That is not to say that we are going to be out of oil rapidly. It’s that we now are left with oil that is more difficult and dangerous to slurp up.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a perfect example of this. You don’t drill 35,000 feet into the seabed (for comparison Mount Everest is 29,029 feet) if the easy stuff is still to be had. On the opposite end of availability, the Seneca would utilize oil that was available at the surface long ago. They used it for medicinal purposes as they scooped it up with baskets. Babylon was even said to have an asphalt type material within its walls.

We have to drill halfway to hell for it now. No adequate response has been formulated to transition to anything else in quantity, so issues such as food distribution, petro-chemical agriculture techniques, they are all going to become increasingly costly. This puts all of the population at risk. This is what happens when the oil industry is the government (or can at least buy it when necessary).

The easy energy available in the form of petroleum had many branching repercussions in the last century. New inventions arrived at an exponential pace. The problem is that we are now reaching an effect known as the Law of Diminished Returns.

A common example of this effect is that of antibiotic usage. When penicillin became widely available, it was nothing short of a miracle. This happy time has passed, and now due to the promiscuous quality inherent to bacteria, there is ever emerging resistance that we cannot adequately treat. We have a few Gorillacillins that try to thwart these newly outfitted germs, but every year brings us closer to a moment when the return on antibiotics is diminished to the point that we will be essentially back to the era prior to them. This was anticipated and warned against, but we still let it occur. It’s continuing as we speak, especially in the agricultural sector.

Animals are given “maintenance” doses of antibiotics to enable squalid conditions that would normally not be feasible. This is a perfect breeding ground for new resistant qualities to emerge. We will have to maneuver in this new environment with a sense of being part of the natural world, including the microbial. Perhaps this new vulnerable role will mark Peak Hubris, but I doubt it.

Of course, the monster of all shattered future scenarios comes via climate change. If you are still stubborn enough to dispute that this is in play, please just speak to some of your local gardeners. You can bet they have noticed the shifts and the strangeness. People can fight all they want about the causes, but it won’t stop them from having to deal with the reality of it. Climate change has happened in the past, and it’s instructive to look at the human cost of those incidents.  Our changes look to be more drastic than the historical precedents we can study, however.

Around 985 the Norse branched out, settling in southern Greenland. They did this during a relatively warm era, and for a time their colony prospered. But the “Little Ice Age” period began a few hundred years later, causing the colony to dwindle and ultimately fail. The unfortunate souls watched their world become colder and more hostile and unfortunately they did not adapt as the Inuit did. They completely vanished, most likely due to clinging to a way of life that only worked during warmer times.

We are looking at an even more radical change in weather stability with our overall warming trend. If we don’t respond in a nimble manner (as did the Inuit) our fate will likely resemble the Norse colonists.

A very bizarre theory (but frankly plausible) is that the witchcraft hysteria of those centuries was exacerbated by the climate change. Women were considered to be tied to nature more than men (and obviously this was not viewed in a positive sense during these times) and single women were often accused of using their witchcraft to play havoc with the weather. Cold spells and hail decreased crop yields and it was common to place blame in strange places. Hard times and erratic weather are not “crucibles” for enlightened societal behavior.

As if climate change, peak oil, and diminished returns weren’t enough to deal with, we are entering these dangerous times with some of the most venal characters in history leading the way. Political discourse has been relegated to nonsense as the uber-wealthy continue to solidify a new divine right.

It’s difficult to imagine our present day leaders taking on the moral imperative to solve these problems. It’s a reign of narcissism with little eye to the future. Can you picture Bush and Obama conversing by letters in their old age, exploring topics like Adams and Jefferson? I can’t either.

This is to say that we have danger and fright stalking our futures. That damn “may you live in interesting times” curse from an ancient Chinese passive aggressive — well, that’s the fortune for each and every one of us.

The problems are daunting and to be certain, there aren’t going to be easy answers. But one thing is clear; if we make no attempt to steer the collapse in the most equitable way possible, we could very well be looking at a return to something that resembles a feudal society, one with walled off enclaves for the very wealthy and misery for the great majority. They haven’t the right to cause this to happen. We must be focused and know that the upheavals are pending. We can’t be distracted by the short term ploys and the nonsensical behavior that passes for leadership.

The complexity of the issues should not frighten us into submission. It simply means that the status quo cannot continue and a time of collapse and failure of the old ideas opens the possibility for something different. We can try for a system a little less corrosive to the environment and the soul. Tolerating anything less may herald an extinction level event for our kind.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde

We are facing terrible monsters and hard choices in the near future, but we must never think that we only deserve the gutter.

The documentary follows the exploits of climate activists in the UK during the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, giving an unprecedented insight into the passion and motives of those who risk arrest in the name of environmental justice. Focusing on six different individuals within the movement, filmmaker Emily James submerged herself in the networks of Climate Camp and Plane Stupid over the period of a year to document their clandestine activities. The result is a roving, humorous and motivating account of the tireless energy that sees mostly young, twenty-something protesters close down banks, prevent airport expansion, and blockade polluting factories.

One of the film’s undoubted stars, Marina Pepper — a charismatic, middle-aged woman from Brighton who always carries a tea pot to demonstrations to provide refreshments for activists and the police – summed up the spirit of civil disobedience from the first opening shots. “I’m a domestic extremist”, she says. Asked what that means, she says: “You would have to ask Special Branch. I’m considered extreme because I’ve gone well beyond recycling and walking my kids to school. I don’t mind putting my body in the way, and I don’t mind being arrested.” Later in the film, Marina is seen with other protestors outside the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight, attempting to prevent the wind turbine company from closure back in 2009 – until the activists were unceremoniously evicted by police after four months of living in the middle of a roundabout.

Does It Do Any Good?

In one moment, asked by the camera if “all of this does any good?”, Marina struggles for a painfully long time to formulate an answer. “I think you can’t do nothing”, she eventually says. “That wouldn’t have done any good. One of the problems is if people realise there’s a problem and they think they can’t do anything, that’s so depressing, that’s suicidally depressing, that is roll-over-and-die depressing. But if you think you can make a difference, by putting your body in the way, then that’s empowering. So you are actually taking back control of your life, even though all of those decisions are taken by politicians over there. So, yes, it has done good.” In a Q&A with the film’s director after the screening, we were told that Marina had been evicted from a guerrilla garden project in a disused local school (converted into a sustainable allotment to prevent it being demolished for housing) that very morning.

It is a theme that is explored throughout the documentary; does civil disobedience on behalf of a nebulous, intangible goal of saving the planet do any good in the face of formidable corporate and state power? Or are the climate activists who break the law on behalf of a greater good too idealistic, impractical and naive to believe that the world can be changed through the defiance of a relatively few crusading individuals? The film’s answer is made clear in its portrayal of the creativity, street savviness and organisational ability of those who take part in protest stunts and demonstrations.

At the Camp for Climate Action held in South London during the summer of 2009, for example, activists are filmed sitting in a circle as they plan a secretive direct action at a certain unmentionable bank. Batteries are taken out of mobile phones to prevent the watching police, perched on a high rise crane in the corner of the field, from listening in. The next morning, cameras run alongside protesters as they successfully blockade the Royal Bank of Scotland in Central London by locking themselves to the entrance, while other “arrestables” (the term given to those willing to break the law) superglue themselves to the bank’s trading floor. The intention, according to organisers, was to transform RBS into the “Royal Bank of Sustainability” and force it to stop investing in fossil fuel projects – hence the banners unfurled outside that read “RBS: Under New Ownership” and  “Ethical Renovation in Progress”.

Another protest filmed in action was the infamous ‘Great Climate Swoop’ of October 2009. Unlike the more covert missions, the attempted siege of Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station was advertised online beforehand and responded to by many hundreds of protestors across the country. Although the plans for a people-led takeover of the plant were foiled by a massive police presence and mass arrests on the day, the success of organising the event through twitter and other websites – as well as the success of generating widespread media coverage, however biased – remains a testament to the kind of non-hierarchical, grassroots organising that has come to define informal protest movements worldwide.

‘I hope I Can Add Something Positive’

Against the charges of impracticality or unrealistic expectations that are often levelled against activists, the film is peppered throughout with snappy quotes by the different protestors that shed light on their motivations. Ellie, a Cambridge University student who is filmed chaining herself to the home of ex-Business Secretary Peter Mandelson during one suffragette-style protest, says at one point: “Mass civil disobedience is necessary when the law is unjust… the damage [polluting industries] are causing is a billion times worse.” Rowan, another young protester who was filmed closing down a coal power station before getting arrested, says: “Of course it’s futile, but you have to have to hope… you never know if you will win or lose.” Or as another activist simply put it, a campaigner for Plane Stupid who moved house to a noisy village called Sipson that would have been obliterated if a third runway was built at Heathrow airport; “When my life is over, I hope I can add something positive, rather than just take something negative away”.

The documentary culminates at Copenhagen in December 2009 when government ministers gathered for the pivotal UN climate talks. Rather than focusing on NGO pressure groups and negotiations within the conference halls of the summit, the scene of action becomes a legalised squat north of the city where teams of activists have formed the so-called Bike Bloc. The plan, as widely advertised beforehand through the internet, was to utilise the hundreds of abandoned bicycles in Denmark’s capital and transform them into a protest cavalry – a “machine of creative resistance” that could join the thousands of international activists who intended to shut down the UN conference for a day and transform it into a ‘People’s Summit for Climate Justice’.

What happened at the Reclaim Power! action on December 16th is now well known; a colossal Danish police pepper-sprayed crowds outside the conference centre, beat up many of the frontline demonstrators with small clubs, arrested hundreds of people on the street and captured most of the Bike Bloc protesters before they even set off. But the film’s footage manages to capture the spirit of resilience and self-belief that characterised the activist groups in Copenhagen, despite the failure of world leaders to produce any binding commitment to tackle climate change. One protestor describes the atmosphere inside the cages where hundreds of protestors were interned for the day; it was like an international collaboration, he says, in which everyone sang each others’ chants of solidarity and defiance in different languages against the authoritarian policing.

By the end of the film, you could say that ‘Just Do It’ has a fairly clear political message. As the film’s director herself admitted; “There was interest [from broadcasters] if I was going to be cynical about the subject matter. But these people are heroes. Yes, it’s a sympathetic portrait. But everything I make is propaganda, so fuck it.” Before the credits roll at the end, you are reminded that the UK energy company E.ON cancelled plans to build a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth; plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport were scrapped by the government; and Danish courts eventually ruled that the detention of nearly 2,000 protesters during the UN climate summit was illegal. Protest tactics work, is the implication. Or in Marina’s final words: “There’s more to life than what you shop”.

• The film opens on 15th July at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London, and then tours cinemas in the UK throughout the summer. Check out the website for international screenings.