the systemic roots of a global pandemic

collapseofindustrialcivilization |  Over the ages, a number of empires have exploited and looted the resource-rich lands of Africa. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in the south. The Romans stripped their North African territory of its trees, making it their breadbasket of grain production. Originating in central Africa, malaria was likely spread to the center of the Roman Empire on their cargo ships. Passengers on their boats could have carried malaria in their bloodstream before becoming symptomatic, and water barrels on board could have harbored mosquito larvae. In fact, the DNA work of Dr. Robert Sallares has proven that the most lethal form of malaria helped topple ancient Rome. Fast forwarding to today, the blow-back from industrial agriculture and transnational corporate land grabs in Africa has now reached the shores of the hegemonic American Empire in the form of a deadly tropical disease called Ebola.

The Roman Empire seized fertile African land by brute force, but in modern times capitalist industrial civilization takes over Third World countries with the stroke of a pen. Structural adjustment loans by such tools of western power as the IMF and World Bank are signed requiring privatization of the economy and government cuts in social spending. Vast tracks of forests are cleared for mining or monoculture crop production such as palm oil. Subsistence farmers are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forced to migrate to cities in search of work. Deprived of adequate healthcare and the opportunity to earn a livable wage, these urban poor live in squalor and are driven to hunt in the surrounding forests for a cheap source of protein known as bushmeat. Fruit bats, a keystone environmental species, have been identified as an Ebola virus host that has spread the disease through bushmeat consumption, habitat destruction, and human encroachment. Thus the neoliberal agenda of ‘developed’ nations has acted to create the atmosphere from which this pandemic arose.

Due to the long history of exploitation by outside powers, native Africans are justifiably wary and prone to conspiracy theories involving intervention by Western institutions as well as their own governments which have been, to a great degree, corrupted by the resource curse. These unpleasant facts are, of course, never mentioned by the MSM because it might spark a flicker of moral compunction in the ‘developed’ world which has ended up with so much of Africa’s wealth in the form of rare earth minerals used inside electronic devices, gold and diamonds in jewelry, or petrol pumped into vehicles. The horrific realities behind conflict minerals are always kept out of sight and out of mind by the next consumer diversion.

our polity is our way of life...,

boredpanda | We are all aware of the global pollution problem, but hardly anyone realizes just how much trash we produce daily. Gregg Segal, a photographer from California, aims to show this problem through powerful imagery, photographing people lying in their weekly load of trash. His ongoing project cleverly called “7 Days of Garbage” tries to portray people from different social backgrounds to reach largest audience possible .

Segal decided to photograph the participants in front of naturalistic backgrounds to show that the garbage produced by us is effecting it directly. “Obviously, the series is guiding people toward a confrontation with the excess that’s part of their lives. I’m hoping they recognize a lot of the garbage they produce is unnecessary”, he said to Slate.

Some of the participants were too ashamed of how much garbage they produced weekly, so they edited their garbage bags. Others showed everything just the way it was resulting in nasty and very strong images, which you can see here.  Fist tap Kurman.

if a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst..,

energyskeptic | James Howard Kunstler has written that Suburbia will be the largest waste of money and physical assets in human history.

The end of the age of oil means that just about everything will be useless too.  Below is just the transportation component of private and government assets.

$6.1 Trillion dollars of Transportation equipment and structures.

Total private and public fixed assets were $46.4 trillion in 2011 (current U.S. dollars). Transportation equipment and structures (private and public) accounted for nearly 12% percent of the total.

The components of transportation fixed assets and their values are

• private transportation equipment ($1.04 trillion)
• private transportation structures ($680 billion)
• government transportation structures ($3.77 trillion)

Fixed assets include both passenger and freight transportation. See the Bureau of Economic Analysis at www.bea.gov/national/FA2004/index.asp, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b.

2011 Private Sector Transportation Equipment1 1,037 Transportation Structures2 680 Public Sector Highways 3,132 Transportation Structures2 635 Federal 15 State and Local 621

1 Includes trucks, truck trailers, buses, automobiles, aircraft, ships, boats, and railroad equipment.

2 Includes physical structures for all modes of transportation. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Economic Accounts, Fixed Assests Tables, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b

a glow in the dark

shalereporter | Here’s a problematic fracking by-product that never occurred to me: radioactive socks.

When I first read the phrase I thought of of weary drillers trudging out of fracking fields late at night, invisible but for a glowing green inch of material between their shoes and trouser hems. But then I kept reading and discovered the socks in question were actually filter socks, which look like tube socks designed for an elephant.

When chemical-laced water is injected into the ground during a hydraulic fracturing operation, some of it returns to the surface and must be collected. The flowback contains water, chemicals, salts, metals  and organic compounds; it all passes through filter socks, which capture the solid particles. The liquid is disposed of in various ways, and filter socks are disposed of at municipal and residual waste landfills.

Unless they happen to be radioactive.

This is quite a problem in North Dakota, where naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) is common in certain parts of the Bakken shale. North Dakota landfills will not accept waste with radioactive levels higher than 5 picocuries per gram, and the average filter sock’s level ranges from five to eighty, although one did clock in at 374.

A year ago, after landfill Geiger counters began clicking incessantly, the government helpfully distributed pamphlets listing businesses that would accept radioactive waste. Since the nearest ones were in South Dakota, Colorado and Utah, this has led to a spate of radioactive sock dumping.

Thirty were found during a cleanup day at the Fort Berthold Reservation. A hundred were found in a Williston city garbage can. 250 were dropped into a container box near New Town and picked up by an unsuspecting trucker. Last spring, after the snow melted in Tioga, a “large sack of them” were found along a highway. “They appeared to have fallen off a truck,” reported a local paper, just like the radioactive rod that fell off a truck in Texas, and the radioactive gauge that fell off a truck in West Virginia.

“There are only a few places that have facilities designed to take radioactive materials, and North Dakota is not one of them,” says Kurt Rhea, the CEO of the Colorado-based radioactive waste removal company Next Generation Solutions. Rhea’s company has contracts with certain companies fracking the Bakken shale; picking up a container of waste, trucking it out of state, and disposing with it properly costs about $8,000. He guesses that approximately 20% of North Dakota's radioactive waste is being disposed of properly. What about the rest?

“Good question,” he responds.

 Noonan mayor angry over situation with radioactive filter socks

Tribe warns that children might play with illegally dumped filter socks

Book review of Prime Movers of Globalization: the History & Impact of Diesel Engines & Gas Turbines

energyskeptic | Smil makes the case that civilization is based on the billions of engines that make global trade, power plants, transportation, and much more possible.  If you are mechanically minded, you will enjoy his history of the evolution of engines. And if you are afraid to fly, this book may change your mind – airplane turbines are a wonderment, perhaps the pinnacle of engine design, and far safer than they’ve ever been before.

Containerized Ships made globalization and civilization as we know it possible

Over 80% of all cargo moved in the world travels on about 50,000 ships, which burn about 10% of the world’s oil.  They use an order of magnitude less energy than railways and two orders of magnitude less than large long-haul trucks.  Large oil tankers are very efficient fuel-wise.  A 300,000-dead-weight-ton VLCC moving Saudi oil to the USA would only use .7% of the fuel to make the 12,400 mile journey.

Marine diesel engines run on heavy bunker fuel, a black tar-like substance with lots of impurities (sulfur can be 4.5%).

Exports grew from 1% of gross world product (GWP) in 1950 to 29% in 2007.  Almost a third of the world’s wealth is now created by international trade.

My favorite book on this topic is Levinson’s “The Box”. He shows how containerization of ships, trains, and trucks made globalization possible.  For example, until containerization, the cost of transporting shoes from Chicago to Kansas City was so great that shoes were made locally.  Now you can ship shoes from China to Chicago for less than they can be made in Chicago – transportation costs are often less than 1% of the overall cost of the product.

I used to work for a shipping line, and could see that it was mainly raw materials heading from the USA to Asia (wastepaper, food, cotton), with finished goods returning.

The company I worked for had no oil tankers or break-bulk carriers, so I never realized that the main commodity shipped by weight are fossil fuels.

• Oil: 37% of all cargo on ships (Wiki Oil). 45% of the oil is from the Middle East
• Coal: 43% of all cargo on trains in the USA (Wiki Rail)
• Other essential goods: 25% (iron ore, phosphates, grain, etc.)

If anyone doubted that fossil fuels are the lifeblood of civilization, surely this dispels any doubts!

Other stats on sea-borne dry bulk commodities:

• Coal. 790 Mt. 85% of all coal exports, 75% of that for electricity generation
• Iron ore. 792 Mt. 44% of all iron ore
• Grain. 300 Mt. 19% of all cereal grains
• Bauxite and Alumina 82 Mt. 30%.
• Phosphates. 30 Mt. 20% of all phosphates.

Other bulk goods shipped: Steel 270 Mt, Wood 175 Mt, Coke, pig, scrap iron, mineral ores, cement 335 Mt, dry bulk agricultural products (mainly sugar, fertilizer, feed meals) 275 Mt.

That made me wonder if the life-span of the 4,300 oil tankers will be a factor in how much longer civilization will last, since they wear and rust apart within decades.  Worse yet, they’re being scrapped after only 21 years now — long before they need to because they’re so unprofitable (Bimco).  These oil carriers are so large they can comprise 91% of the weight of all ships scrapped.

On the other hand, oil has been on a plateau of production since 2005 and will soon start declining, so fewer ships will be needed.  And the exporting countries remaining are likely to keep more of their oil for themselves (Wiki ELM).

microshizzle: your privacy is our priority

 

Guardian | Skype worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video and audio conversations. 

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration. All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their co-operation with the NSA to meet their customers' privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.

In a statement, Microsoft said: "When we upgrade or update products we aren't absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands." The company reiterated its argument that it provides customer data "only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers".

In June, the Guardian revealed that the NSA claimed to have "direct access" through the Prism program to the systems of many major internet companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time. Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.

Since Prism's existence became public, Microsoft and the other companies listed on the NSA documents as providers have denied all knowledge of the program and insisted that the intelligence agencies do not have back doors into their systems.

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."

Booz-Allen - the world's most profitable spy organization

Businessweek | Booz Allen and its competitors are able to keep landing contracts and keep growing, critics charge, not because their expertise is irreplaceable but because their Rolodexes are. Name a retired senior official from the NSA or the CIA or the various military intelligence branches, and there’s a good chance he works for a contractor—most likely Booz Allen. Name a senior intelligence official serving in the government, and there’s a good chance he used to work for Booz Allen. (ODNI’s Sanders, who made the case for contractors, is now a vice president at the firm, which declined to make him available for an interview.) McConnell and others at Booz Allen are quick to point out that the contracting process has safeguards and oversight built in and that it has matured since the frenzied years just after Sept. 11. At the same time, the firm’s tendency to scoop up—and lavishly pay—high-ranking intelligence officers once they retire suggests the value it places on their address books and in having their successors inside government consider Booz Allen as part of their own retirement plans.

Rich contractor salaries create a classic public-private revolving door. They pull people from government intelligence, deplete the ranks, and put more experience and knowledge in the private sector, which makes contractors even more vital to the government. “Now you go into government for two or three years, get a clearance, and migrate to one of the high-paying contractors,” says Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. That’s what Snowden did. “You have to have a well-developed sense of patriotism to turn that money down,” Aftergood says.

As a result, says Golden, the headhunter, a common complaint in spy agencies is that “the damn contractors know more than we do.” That could have been a factor in the Snowden leak—his computer proficiency may have allowed him to access information he shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Snowden is an anomaly, though. What he did with that information—copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker—cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.

In the wake of the Snowden leak, Congress is paying more attention to contractors like Booz Allen and the role they play in intelligence gathering. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say that the ease with which Snowden was able to gain access to and divulge classified information highlights the need for greater oversight of contractors’ activities. “I’m just stunned that an individual who did not even have a high school diploma, who did not successfully complete his military service, and who is only age 29 had access to some of the most highly classified information in our government,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.) told reporters on Capitol Hill on June 11. “That’s astonishing to me, and it suggests real problems with the vetting process. The rules are not being applied well or they need to be more strict.”

Changing them, however, may be easier said than done. “At the very highest level, whether at the White House or the Pentagon, there will always be a contractor in the room,” says Golden. “And the powers that be will turn around and say, ‘That’s a brilliant plan, how do we make that work?’ And a contractor will say, ‘I can do that.’ ”

collapse of record companies not the collapse of music

Worldwide Recording Industry Revenues from Physical: $33.1 billion (2006), $30.6 billion (2007), $27.5 billion (2008), $24.6 billion (2009), $22.2 billion (2010), $19.9 billion (2011)

digitalmusicnews | The recording industry has been fractionalized over the past decade. The touring sector suffered its worst decline ever last year. And music publishers are struggling to keep things flat.

So how is the broader music industry somehow worth $168 billion? The answer comes from a broader list of music-related sectors, including those tied to consumer electronics, radio advertising, and musical instruments.  

   

Take a look at this 2010 estimate from global trade group IFPI, which pegs the figure at $167.7 billion, with radio advertising squarely in the lead (larger graph here).  Recognize this business?

Forbes | From the 1960s on, the LP album gave the music industry a main product to push, and business was good. In the 1990s the widespread acceptance of the Compact Disc format gave a giant boost to the music industry in album sales. By 2007, over 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. But sales of the long playing album have decreased dramatically. In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; in 2011, that figure was down to 330.57 million. In 2000, the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60.4 million copies; in 2011, the top ten sold just 20.2 million copies.

While accounts of the “death of the music industry” have been greatly exaggerated, no one can deny that the music industry is experiencing major changes. For decades the industry relied on a business model of selling massive amounts of copies of a few albums to finance the high-cost of producing records, plugging songs to radio, and overcoming the losses from their other projects. Record companies used the clout of having access to recording studios and access to airplay on the radio to their advantage in contract negotiations with artists, which leveled their risk intake of the enormous costs and influence needed to both produce and push a record.

japan: machine orders drop, current account surplus shrinks 63%

bloomberg | Japan’s current-account surplus was the smallest for the month of May since at least 1985 and machinery orders fell the most in more than a decade.

The excess in the widest measure of trade shrank 63 percent from a year earlier to 215.1 billion yen ($2.7 billion), the Ministry of Finance said in Tokyo today. The median estimate of 24 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a surplus of 493.1 billion yen. Machinery orders, an indicator of capital spending, fell 14.8 percent in May from the previous month, the Cabinet Office said, the biggest drop since 2001.

Japan’s trade position has weakened due to growing energy imports after last year’s earthquake and nuclear meltdown and also the yen’s gain of 4.9 percent against the dollar since mid- March. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda gave approval for a restart of reactors at the Ohi nuclear plant, which resumed power generation last week, to avoid power shortages and rolling blackouts over the summer.

“Today’s machinery order drop is very large, and it may be a signal that Japanese companies are becoming cautious about investment” amid concern about a global economic slowdown, said Hiroaki Muto, a senior economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management in Tokyo. “Though exports have been slumping, we don’t expect Japan to have any major trade deficit.”

The yen traded at 79.73 against the dollar as of 2:32 p.m. in Tokyo. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average (NKY) slid 1.2 percent. Tokyo Electron Ltd. (8035) fell 5.8 percent after the company last week said orders in April-June period fell 28 percent.

80% of the world's industrial activity is now contracting

zerohedge | Tomorrow's NFP may or may not beat expectations, following some modestly better than expected employment-related data points (then again last month NFP was again supposed to come in solidly above 100K only to cross below the critical threshold), but keep one thing in mind: with the average June seasonal adjustment being a deduction of over 1 million jobs, several tens of thousands in marginal absolute job numbers + or - will be nothing but statistical noise. Furthermore, with seasonality playing such a huge role tomorrow, it is quite likely that merely the ongoing seasonal giveback will result in June being yet another subpar month. And that does not even take into account the quality assessment of the job number, which if recent trends are any indication, will be another record in part-time jobs at the expense of full-time jobs. Yet no matter where the NFP data ends up, the following chart from David Rosenberg puts a few thousand job into perspective, showing that regardless of how many part-time jobs the US service industry has added, there is a far greater problem currently developing in the world: "We now have 80% of the world posting a contraction in industrial activity." This is the second worst since the great financial crisis and only matched by last fall, when in response Europe launched a $1.3 trillion LTRO and the Fed commenced Operation Twist. Now except the occasional rate drop out of the PBOC or modest QE expansion out of the BOE (not to mention the Bank of Kenya's rate cut earlier), there is no real, unsterilized flow of money coming from central bank CTRL-P macros to stabilize the global economy. Which leaves open the question: just where will the latest spark to rekindle global growth come from? And no, 10 hours a week waitressing jobs in Topeka just won't cut it.

eerie intimations of a ghost town in the making...,

Kunstler | The techno-narcissism flowed like a melted Slurpee this torrid weekend at the annual Aspen Environment Forum where scores of scientists, media figures, authors, professors, and policy wonks convened to settle the world's hash - at least in theory. The trouble started Friday night when Stewart Brand, 74, impresario of The Whole Earth Catalog, and an economic cornucopian these days, exhorted the skittish audience to show a little goshdarn optimistic spirit about the future instead of just griping about climate change, peak oil, imploding global finance, and a few other vexing trifles. The audience's response was to not line up and buy a signed copy of his latest book.

The Aspen Institute is supported by a bizarre array of corporate donors and individuals ranging from the secretive, devious, extreme right-wing Koch brothers to Goldman Sachs, to Michael Eisner to Duke Energy. The mission of the Environment Forum is divided about equally between publicizing the gathering horrors of climate change and promoting an ethos of wishful thinking that all the problems of mankind will yield to technological rescue remedies.

It's a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might be considered valuable.

industrial scars...,

significant UK light crude refinery to shutdown this week...,

No doubt closing due to a multitude of interlinked factors. But basically not making profits for the owners anymore. The raw material is changing. While still nominally called "oil" it is moving to the heavy stuff rather than the light, easily refined oils of the recent past. To continue in business Coryton needs a major rebuild. They are probably not prepared to invest millions in a site that, in a few years, will have nothing to sell. Plus the markets are shifting. China, India are buying up the oil while the tired old economy of the UK has not got the financial clout to buy increasingly expensive oil. The chilling statement here, one that reverberates, full of portent for the coming days, is simply, "The plant will run out of crude oil to refine, and there are no ships on the way".

Guardian | The UK's financially strapped Coryton refinery will run out of crude oil and shut down in phases beginning by the middle of next week, its joint administrator has said.

The prospects of finding a buyer for Coryton look increasingly remote, warned Steven Pearson of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The refinery was one of several owned by Petroplus, Europe's largest independent refiner, before it declared insolvency.

Pearson said: "The plant will run out of crude oil to refine, and there are no ships on the way," adding that staff would remain for the time being to help shut the plant safely. "We will not announce any immediate redundancies – we'll have more detail in a week's time."

The plant employs 900 people including contractors.

modern myths that destroy humanity

automaticearth | “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

I'd like to take this opportunity to comment on an oldie but a goodie from the Indian environmentalist, Vandan Shiva. In her brief article for Odewire, "Two myths that keep the world poor", Shiva tears apart the logic of Harvard economist and neoliberal (-feudal), economic "shock therapy" advocate Jeffrey Sachs with all the force one would expect from the God of destruction. It was in response to a book written by Sachs called The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, which featured all the nonsensical arguments that “liberal progressives” like to spout off in magazines and on television these days.

They proffer the same kind of fundamental myth that Nietzsche identified crawling through the bowels of modern religions such as Christianity – if one toils hard enough on Earth, and accepts one’s designated roles in society, he/she will be rewarded in Heaven. If that is God’s [Blankfein’s] given truth, then there is no need to radically alter the system or fight for justice/equality, right? Shiva first explains why global poverty is not a function of people being "left behind", as if they had been ten minutes late to the train station, but rather of people being held up for nearly all their wealth/resources at gunpoint.

Two myths that keep the world poor

But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.”

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

Shiva introduces the inconvenient history that people like Sachs continue to ignore to this very day, as they demonize the millions of new people slipping into poverty every week and accuse them of not being productive, creative, innovative, responsible or hard-working enough. And perhaps there are elements of truth to it, but it is far from the whole story. That is exactly the dynamic we now see occurring between the EU politicians/bureaucrats, their media spin machines and the peripheral populations.

The Greeks are lazy, unproductive welfare queens, and they must be taught by Germany and their other Western neighbors how to start growing their economy again through a complete gutting of public safety nets, pensions and wage protections. This mentality is at the root of every policy being recommended and pursued by the EU, ECB and IMF. It is the reason why they not only have zero chance of working, but will inevitably make the situation worse for most people involved.

It is not a mentality that is just confined to the elite circles of academics and policymakers, though. Just tell the next person you meet that “economic growth” is not necessarily a solution to our systemic crises (assuming they are even aware of those), and is actually the problem in many ways, and see what kind of reaction you get. Shiva goes on to explain how this deeply-rooted mentality is based on two fundamental myths relating to "growth".

First, the destruction of nature and of people’s ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction.

The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs’ analysis.

The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then it doesn’t contribute to GDP, and therefore does not contribute towards “growth”.

People are perceived as “poor” if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.

Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily mean a low quality of life. On the contrary, by their very nature economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of life—when measured in terms of access to good food and water, opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of meaning in people’s lives. Because these poor don’t share in the perceived benefits of economic growth, however, they are portrayed as those “left behind”.

Indeed, the disease is continuously being offered as the cure right now. On the surface and in the spin rooms, they call it more "growth", more credit availability, more "innovation", etc., but, make no mistake, it is really more wealth extraction, more monopolization/centralization of industry and resources, more unproductive debt burdens, more environmental destruction, more slavery and more genocide. Only those with narrow, goal-seeked or malicious perspectives will fail to see how all of those things are extremely inter-connected.

proof of the u.s. greater depression

eftdailynews | It has become increasingly difficult to engage in credible economic analysis, especially with respect to the U.S. economy. The problem: ever more limited sources of uncorrupted data, while the farcical “official statistics” have long since been totally divorced from the real world.

Fortunately we have been presented with some raw, uncorrupted data which demonstrates in conclusive terms that the U.S. economy is literally shriveling before our eyes: a 21^st century economy with plummeting energy consumption, and even a declining use of electricity.

As I was sifting through all of Bloomberg’s propaganda on the latest U.S. trade numbers (and trying to latch onto a few facts), I came across one very peculiar passage:

…American companies also bought more consumer household items, automobiles and parts, and crude oil from overseas.

Exports increased 0.7 percent to $178.8 billion, boosted by record sales of petroleum to buyers overseas. That caused the trade gap excluding petroleum to widen even more than the deficit overall…

The great U.S. economy, the largest oil-glutton in the history of humanity (by several multiples) is now a “net energy exporter”. How can this be possible? The U.S. economy has contracted so severely (already) that the only way that U.S. refineries can sell all the petroleum products they produce is to sell them to the growing economies of “emerging market” nations.

Reflecting the broad-based collapse of the U.S. economy, these refineries are now exporting all categories of petroleum products: diesel, jet fuel, and even gasoline are now being exported in large quantities, month-after-month by U.S. refineries. Recall that it was only four, short years ago that many American politicians were alarmed by the crisis of the “lack of U.S. refining capacity”. No new refineries have been constructed in the U.S. in more than 30 years, and at that time those refineries were straining to meet the demand of solely the U.S. domestic market. With that domestic market collapsing, these refineries are now straining to find enough foreign buyers to unload all of their inventories.

Given these facts alone, it is utterly absurd for the U.S. government to pretend that the U.S. economy is growing. Note that the government claims that most of this growth is occurring in agriculture and manufacturing – both very energy-intensive industries. There’s no doubt that the energy-intensive agriculture sector is thriving, a result of a growing global “appetite” and Wall Street-induced shortages in most commodities. So with the large U.S. agriculture sector gobbling up more energy than ever, what does that say about the rest of the (decaying) U.S. economy?

Let us not forget that the U.S. population continues to grow. More people using much, much, less energy; and this is called a “growing economy”? Absurd. Even more absurd, this steadily growing population has been using much less electricity, going back to around 2007.

Mark Lundeen provided a very detailed analysis of the consumption of U.S. electricity in a recent commentary. It shows U.S. electrical consumption peaking in approximately 2006, and then beginning a distinct decline starting in 2007. Yes, power demand has “bounced back” somewhat from the worst of the collapse – but at levels still more than 3% lower than in 2007. Put another way, the supposed "U.S. Economic Recovery" has only resulted in roughly half of that lost demand being restored.

to everyone feeling screwed over by the economy

permaculture | To everyone feeling screwed over by the economy,

We are told that our problem is that there aren’t enough jobs. This message is everywhere. The media gauges our plight with regularly updated unemployment statistics. Politicians debate theatrically over who can create more work. People everywhere clamor for scarce positions at factories and corporations.

I’d like to point out the great irony of this situation — people hate their jobs. How many people do you know who love their job? The truth is, most of us who have ordinary jobs can barely tolerate them. All else being equal, we’d rather not do them.

Work ethic is something this society takes pride in. But, if we are honest, we will confess that we call ourselves ‘hard working’ primarily to rationalize the daily abuses, deprivations, and indignities of the workplace. Work ethic is the only ethic most of us satisfy at our jobs. I think we can agree that most of our jobs aren’t making the world a better place.

So here we are, bickering and begging to fill roles we hate.

We should remember, that ‘employed’ is just another word for ‘used’. Just as you might employ a hammer and nails, your employer employs, or uses, you. The term ‘used’ very aptly describes our relationship with our employers. Like prostitutes, we resign ourselves to fake relationships for an empty cash return. In a healthy relationship, our devotions are reciprocated in kind. But in a relationship of use and abuse, the best you can expect is a cash settlement.

It should not surprise us, then, that politicians and other powerful people will laud our enthusiasm for employment and champion that cause. To the elite, unemployment is a crises because it means that the population is insufficiently used. An unused population is unprofitable, and potentially unruly. So, when the wealthy come to our rescue, they do it with jobs. As the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation slogan goes, "We believe that all people deserve the chance to lead healthy productive lives." (emphasis mine)

Employment has become almost inseparable from other values like responsibility and human welfare. In our culture, promoting employment has become synonymous with supporting families, communities, and countries. At a time when we are so utterly reliant on employment and the economy for our survival, being anti-job is like being anti-life. Who but the laziest and most unrealistic sort of hippie would oppose jobs?

But let us not forget; people were not always so dependent on employment or the economy for survival. In fact, we’ve been hunter/gatherers for most of our existence. Money, the economy, and even farming are relatively recent contrivances. We made them up. And, until very recent history, jobs were merely part of a mixed strategy used by families to make a living. Hunting, gathering, gardening, crafting, gifting, cooperation, trade, and self-employment, are all perfectly viable ways to make a living. Our grandparents recognized that money wasn’t always the most effective way to meet a need. Living by paycheck alone was a thing for the urban wealthy.

At periods in history, it’s been possible for some people to use currency to maintain an affluence disproportionate to the real value of their work. We may be nearing the close of such a period. Unfortunately, alternatives to employment are growing scarce.

externalities and the non-negotiable way of life...,

vtcommons | A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and you can’t withdraw. Well, at this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternate” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we haven’t even had to give up all of our empathy (only enough of it to not stop the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. And unless we’ve found a way to leave the planet—which would be an odious abrogation of responsibility anyway—we can’t leave. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary, for a number of reasons, including, but not restricted to, the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power will kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world. None of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet: any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Making this bind even tighter is the fact that we’ve been systematically trained to identify more closely with industrial capitalism than with life itself, and to care more about industrial capitalism than about life itself. To convince yourself of this, simply contrast how much routine attention is paid to the height of the stock market versus that paid to the health of the natural world, and contrast the response by the government to the collapse of the economy versus that paid to the collapse of the natural world. Here’s a tangible example: a forty-year study of songbird populations recently revealed what we all know, which is that many are collapsing, as are so many populations of so many wild beings. Bobwhites, down more than 80 percent. Whippoorwills, down 70 percent. Boreal chickadees, 60 percent. Rufous hummingbirds, almost 60 percent. And the response in public by a mainstream environmentalist (Carol Browner, former head of the EPA, former head of Audubon, and current Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change) was to tell us this is not an emergency. I can guarantee that if the stock market or GNP declined 80 percent, we would constantly hear that this is an emergency. It’s a measure of the grotesque, irredeemable, and near-complete insanity of this culture that GNP is deemed more important than life, and more to the point, it’s a measure of how much most of us have been trained to identify more with the economy than with the real world.

So because we’ve been taught to identify more closely with the industrial economy than with life itself, the continued existence of the industrial economy must never be questioned, much less threatened. Further, since we must always be disallowed from realizing that the problem is the culture, not us (just as in any abusive situation all people must always be disallowed from realizing that the problems are caused by the abuser, not the victims), many of us make the very reasonable choice to “fight back” by decreasing our involvement in the industrial economy, by “living simply so that others may simply live.” So we eat less. We drive less. We don’t own a car. We take shorter showers. We live more and more simply. We feel more and more pure. The bottom line is that we are doing what we know we can control.

Living simply is a good thing to do. Sadly, it in no way stops this culture from killing the planet. In no way is it a sufficient response to this culture’s destructiveness. In no way is it a substitute for actively and effectively resisting actions and policies that harm our (and others’) habitat. That’s why I brought up activists living in Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and so on: in those circumstances we can easily see that personal simple living would have been insufficient to bring about social change. It can be much more difficult to see that when we don’t have the perspective history brings.

the peak oil crisis: contagion

FCNP | With every passing day it is becoming more apparent that the crisis of the depletion of cheap oil has become deeply enmeshed in the European debt crises.

The sequence of events is well known. Greece's economy is imploding; the government can no longer pay its bills without continuing bailouts from the EU; at some point Greece will have to default on at least part of the $430 billion it owes to mostly European banks. Such a default would in turn do severe damage to the viability of many major European Banks which are already suffering a liquidity shortage from the slowing global economy. It is widely believed that these problems quickly would spread to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and now Belgium which are too large to ever be bailed out by France and Germany. Credit Default Swaps would kick in and, taken to the extreme, the world could conceivably not have much of a banking system left.

What is most disconcerting is that many believe that unless all this is settled in the next few weeks, the deluge will begin. Obviously the Europeans do not want to see their financial system collapse and are scrambling to find a solution. EU leaders have given themselves a deadline of October 23rd to come up with a plan to settle the Greek debt question and then recapitalize the European banks that will have to take heavy losses on Greek and possibly other nations' sovereign debts. One of the many issues involved in this crisis, of course, is how much of these heavy losses will be absorbed by the banks making the loans, and how much will be absorbed by the taxpayers of the better-off Eurozone states. London and Washington are putting heavy pressure on the EU to settle this issue, realizing the havoc that would ensue should there be even a partial meltdown of the EU banking system.

There is a big systemic problem going on here. So long as 17 sovereign states and their parliaments have to approve major actions the likelihood that there will be quick and decisive solution to all this seems remote. As we have seen with the Greek situation over the last two years, there is very little the Eurozone as a collective can do to enforce new and highly unpopular economic and social policies on the members, short of kicking them out of the Eurozone and suffering the consequences of a hard default. Despite all the optimism in the financial press and rising equity prices, it seem that in reality there is very little the EU can do to effect a long-term solution.

urbanized

Video - Urbanized - A documentary about the design of cities

Urbanized is currently screening at film festivals and special events in North America and Europe, ticket info here: http://urbanizedfilm.com/screenings More international events will be announced soon.

Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) returns with the final documentary in his design film trilogy. Urbanized focuses on the design of cities, and features some of the world's foremost architects, planners, policymakers, and thinkers, including Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Jan Gehl, Oscar Niemeyer, Amanda Burden, Enrique Peñalosa, Yung Ho Chang, Alejandro Aravena, Eduardo Paes, Rahul Mehrotra, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Ricky Burdett, James Corner, Michael Sorkin, Bruce Katz, Candy Chang, Edgar Pieterse, and many more, including extraordinary citizens who have changed their cities.

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Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? And how does the design of our cities affect our lives? By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects in dozens of cities around the world, from massive infrastructure initiatives to temporary interventions, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities. Fist tap Dale.

the seige on gaddafi's fuel supply

BBCNews | The BBC has learned that David Cameron set up a secret unit within Whitehall to mount covert economic operations against Colonel Gaddafi.

The so-called "Libya oil cell" helped block fuel supplies to Tripoli while ensuring that petrol and diesel continued to get through to the rebels in the east.

Whitehall officials said the unit - made up of a handful of civil servants, ministers and military figures - played a crucial role in starving the regime's war effort of fuel while making sure that the rebels could continue taking the fight to Gaddafi.

The unit was the brain child of the international development minister, Alan Duncan.
Discreet operation

The former oil trader convinced the prime minister in April that part of the solution to the conflict lay in oil. He persuaded the national security council that Gaddafi would defeat the rebels unless they got access to fuel and he was deprived of it.

So the secret cell was established in two discreet operations rooms in the Foreign Office where intelligence about oil and fuel movements was gathered and information and advice provided to the government and Nato.

The unit was headed up initially by a senior admiral, and then later by a senior government official, both of whom attended national security council meetings.

The cell advised Nato to blockade the port of Zawiya to prevent smugglers bringing in tankers full of fuel for Gaddafi's war effort.

They helped identify which oil tankers that Nato should interdict. They also helped locate other routes the smugglers were using to get fuel into Libya overland from Tunisia and Algeria.

The cell also provided intelligence to the rebels so they could cut off the supply of crude oil from the Nafusa mountains to Gaddafi's refinery at Zawiya.
'Tap turned off'

It also ensured that the sanctions regime against Libya was redrawn so that the rebels could get access to fuel from overseas.

And it encouraged London-based oil traders to sell fuel to the rebels in Benghazi by trying to minimise the risk they would take by having to wait for payment. It also ensured that the oil traders knew who to contact within the rebel hierarchy.

One Whitehall source said: "If you didn't have the fuel, you couldn't win the war. So our aim was to starve the west of fuel and make sure the rebels could keep going.

"Gaddafi had lots of crude but he couldn't refine it. So he had to rely on imported fuel. And we turned off that tap."

It emerged last night that Mr Duncan had once worked with Vitol, the oil company that provided fuel to the rebels. But Whitehall sources said there was no conflict of interest because the Libya oil cell had no commercial relationship with the company.