No More Pretending
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Delusional hope produces nothing of value. Throughout my life I have sought to see things as they are. The past few months have provided me the opportunity to ponder current events against the tapestry of history.
“We have destroyed the Holocene biosphere, and it can never be rebuilt. We have inadvertently terraformed Earth into a different planet. This act cannot be undone; it is thermodynamically irreversible.” Desdemona
I leave it to climate change deniers to explain the recent wholesale collapse of fisheries with the increase in both reef and oceanic dead zones, the desertification of the world’s most productive land and the rapid transition from forest to desert by mega-fires.
The once frozen “methane bomb” has already gone off. The Arctic permafrost is already melting.
Large areas of Earth are becoming uninhabitable to mammals and their food plants. Most charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, rhinos and whales, will become extinct in a few decades. It is entirely likely that humans will follow them into oblivion.
For sure, this will be a bumpy road to total collapse and a few will manage to arrive in luxury SUVs. The rest of us, the vast majority, will see family and friends fall as we circle the drain together.
There are still resources that could be directed towards easing the necessary scaling back of empire and civilization as we know it. Scaling back in and of itself would help a great deal, perhaps forestalling human extinction as we adapt to an Earth that every day becomes more like Mars.
While President Obama takes on the ‘fat cat’ bankers the underlying collapse of the United State financial industry has yet to be addressed. The root problem is an excessive level of debt in the system at all levels, a level of debt that exceeds capacity to pay.
The problem in a nutshell – the banks are still hiding losses – big losses. Very little of the debt securitized by the housing bubble has been written off or yet foreclosed upon.
Loans are not being made to small business people because they have no collateral to pledge. Being asked to pledge personal assets as collateral for a small business loan is standard operating procedure.
With most homes underwater, most small businesspeople have no assets to pledge as collateral. Debt problems go beyond the largest banks.
China bought zero U.S. Treasury debt in October. Now foreigners have become net sellers of U.S. Treasury debt instruments.
The problems began when raw materials producers stopped receiving parity pricing and needed to borrow in able to start a new round of production. A principle method of under-paying, paying less than parity, appears in the form of paying in debased money.
Meanwhile, here we are, nearly a year under a new administration. For feds, more get 6-figure salaries, in an attempt to keep up with debasement of U.S. money.
Seduced And Abandoned
Both Democrats and Republicans demonstrate a history of saying whatever seems required to become elected, seduce the electorate, and upon election conveniently explaining away or otherwise abandoning their earlier promises.
Everyone seems to condemn this behavior between individuals. The victims often appear unable to disengage on their own initiative. If fortunate, their family and/or friends provide counseling and intervention to help end these cycles of abuse.
Yet society as a whole suffers serial victimizations by these two mainstream political parties. Ever since the Reagan Administration identified government as the problem the resulting orgy of deregulation and bureaucratic bloating continues unabated from one election to the next.
Some wish to call them incompetent idiots. Others wish to call them lying frauds. I suggest we make peace and call them incompetent lying idiot frauds.
The system they destroy also provides all the wealth and power expended in the destruction. Literally self-destruction. It seems an entire spectrum of pathologies plague our financialized government.
Narcissism
Borderline Personality Disorder
Characteropathy
Sociopathy
Psychopathy
Witness the unnecessary pain, suffering and death. Unnecessary because it results from a financial services industry that compounds debt exponentially inevitably demands more wealth than the total sum of raw materials entering the economy.
Unnecessary because the government fails to enforce the Prompt Corrective Action Law and administers regulation in the interest of the financial services industry contrary to the interests of citizens.
This occurs simultaneously with a prison industry growing faster than it can expand, militarization of local police forces, the historic first ever active deployment of U.S. Armed Forces within the United States of America, de facto nullification of the Bill of Rights and an overall heightening of domestic security.
I hope you are debt free and likewise free from any form of wage slavery. At least that can give you a running start.
Timing The Collapse
For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.
On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.
I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.
However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.
If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.
If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.
OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.
As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.
Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.
Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.
Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.
Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.
Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.
He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.
Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.
The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.
Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.
Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.
In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.
Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.
That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.
Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.
Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.
It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.
Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.
A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.
I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.
The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.
The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.
Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.
The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.
This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.
However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.
History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.
The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.
The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.
This greatly complicates things.
Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.
All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.
In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.
Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.
Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.
Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.
Think about preparing for collapse now.
Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?
It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.
I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.
It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.
As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.
Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.
What do you think?
Jury Nullification Constitutional Right
Jury nullification is an effective way of countering prosecutorial abuse and limiting the power and intrusiveness of the legislature. The historical records indicate jury nullification played a major role in abolishing slavery, winning women’s suffrage, and the Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition.
Perhaps jury nullification will become the way the war on marijuana ends as happened in the Loren Swift case.
Juries are our last line of defense against the inappropriate use of power by the government.
Sam Smith wrote in What lawyers & judges won’t tell you about juries that according to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue “the law — its interpretation and validity — to the jury.”
San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi noted that “jury nullification is a constitutional right that every individual person who is called for jury duty possesses, and unless we appreciate that right, we will lose it because the courts will take it from us.”
“I think jury nullification is going to be part of the answer regarding states’ rights in future cases,” said former jury foreman Charles Sackett.
Clay S. Conrad wrote the 1998 book Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, that
Central to the history of trial by jury is the right of jurors to vote “not guilty” if the law is unjust or unjustly applied.
When jurors acquit a factually guilty defendant, we say that the jury “nullified” the law. The Founding Fathers believed that juries in criminal trials had a role to play as the “conscience of the community,” and relied on juries’ “nullifying” to hold the government to the principles of the Constitution.
Yet over the last century and a half, this power of jurors has been derided and ignored by American courts, to the point that today few jurors are aware that an important part of their role is, in the words of the Supreme Court, to “prevent oppression by the government.”
The Words of the Founding Fathers
Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction…
if exercising their judgement with discretion and honesty
they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
– Alexander Hamilton, 1804
It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty to find the verdict
according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience,
though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
–John Adams, 1771
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1789
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made
by men of their choice, if the laws are so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood;
if they… undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows
what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow
– James Madison
Find out more at these links:
- FIJA : The Fully Informed Jury Association
- The Jury Rights Project
- History of Jury Nullification
- Juror’s Handbook
- The Citizen’s Rulebook
- Jury Nullification and the Rule of Law
- Jury Nullification : The Top Secret Constitutional Right
- An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852)
- CRFC – Jury Nullification
- What Lawyers and Judges Won’t Tell You About Juries
- Jury Nullification Bibliography
“If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant’s natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.” — Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone
“For more than six hundred years– that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215–there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such law.” –Lysander Spooner, The Right of Juries
If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence. — 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969
Every jury in the land is tampered with and falsely instructed by the judge when it is told that it must accept as the law that which has been given to them, or that they can decide only the facts of the case. — Lord Denham, O’Connell v Rex (1884)
The jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both the law and the facts. — Justice Holmes, Homing v District of Columbia, 138 (1920)
When a jury acquits a defendant even though he or she clearly appears to be guilty, the acquittal conveys significant information about community attitudes and provides a guideline for future prosecutorial discretion…Because of the high acquittal rate in prohibition cases in the 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition laws could not be enforced. The repeal of these laws is traceable to the refusal of juries to convict those accused of alcohol traffic. — Sheflin and Van Dyke, Law and Contemporary Problems, 43, No. 4, 1980
Resilience Economics
Useful Resilience Economics needs more than theoretical responses to scenario sketches. Thought experiments will not be enough to get you moving towards a more secure economic status today.
The current economic collapse appears unique within the history of economic collapses because we have lost our inherent safety net that traditionally cushioned downturns. The very same so-called “Masters of The Universe” who drove the current economy into the wall have already cannibalized our ability to weather failure gracefully especially in the United States and Europe.
The decades of economic attacks upon family farms leave us vulnerable to a very hard landing in which millions will suffer death through the deprivation of essential food and shelter. During the Great Depression of the 1930s many of the urban homeless and unemployed factory workers found sanctuary on the family farm.
We may now only look back with fond nostalgia at how we lived a couple of generations ago. In hindsight the wisdom of Raw Material Economics proves itself.
As long as we have adequate food and shelter the micro-production of goods and intellectual content can provide for the rest of us. Gone are the days of relying upon those “too big to fail” for our well-being.
The current crop of academically educated economists only argue about how to best preserve the current financial system with all of its structural inequities and invitations for fraud. They are not prepared to consider an egalitarian diverse decentralized distributed economics that possesses intrinsic resilience.
Unfortunately, current administration policies continue the practice of punishing family farmers for the benefit of the financial services industry. Unless you have income from off the farm, you will have to wait until the current economic collapse deepens before re-establishing family farms becomes feasible.
Until then, it promises to be a very bumpy ride and expect to see a great deal of volatility in all markets. Still you have options over the short term and while they exist now would be a good time to explore them.
First, if you now depend upon those “too big to fail” for your income, including all branches of government, the dominant banks and the multinational corporations, now is the time to act on an exit plan. While some employers may be able to restructure their businesses to offer a measure of economic security to employees, these smaller companies will be targeted by government taxmen eager to take away profits and hostile takeovers by predatory corporations.
Second, traditional passive income from investments will become increasingly unreliable and ultimately insufficient as the current economic collapse deepens. You must find a way to become productive while maintaining control over your pricing to be able to respond to deflation, inflation, stagflation and whatever other curve balls the banksters throw.
Of course, a total collapse or even near total collapse will have us all scrambling for food and shelter while those who have stockpiled and continue to hoard will be faced with increasing physical security demands. Police and the armed forces will be the last elements of the status quo to collapse and they will be looking for stockpiled food themselves.
The issue remains of determining what to do between now and a very possible then. Without a doubt having an independent income based upon your own productive capacity will likely become necessary.
While climate change, resource depletion and unsupportable population levels will certainly complicate the issue, realistically there seems very little you or I can do about that. At least if you maintain the capability to produce at parity, that is the sale of your production not only supports your existence but also allows you enough profit to begin another round of production without debt while saving enough to survive unexpected events, then you may have a future.
Maintaining mobility ability is a bonus that could literally become lifesaving. For example, areas of the Oregon coast that once appeared desirable because of the local abundance of seafood are now adjacent to growing oceanic dead zones devoid of any sea life at all.
Expect volatility in all aspects of life. With all of this in mind, an online business seems to be a good bet to me.
If running an online business seems to be beyond your capacity then you owe it to yourself to honestly investigate it because all sorts of people have learned how to run an online business. Now would be a good time to start.
Understanding Our Economic Crisis
Nick Gillespie narrates this video sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, and Reason.tv that clearly shows our current economic situation.
While it seems most available information focuses attention upon the segments of the economy that appear to be responsible for this mess few possess the willingness to look upon the economy as a whole.
Here I wish to look upon the economy as a whole.
Money used to be things, commodities, that could be traded for anything else because everyone recognized and accepted their value. Precious metals eventually became the commodity of choice to use as money but throughout history almost any other thing you can imagine became used as money someplace sometime.
The concept of money, commodities with universally recognized value, is really straight forward and simple. If people harvest or produce something lacking a widespread market then trading it for something else of equal value with a widespread market opens up new trade opportunities for them.
Trade became so dependent upon money that local bullies, Priest-Kings with armies, reserved the right to issue money for themselves and with this monoply in hand controlled trade. You would think that this control over money allows Priest-King with armies to do or have anything but it was not enough.
To get more out of money, Priest-Kings came up with the idea of debasement. Since the local bullies controlled the money they changed the precious metal content of money whenever they wished.
For example, the Roman denarius originally contained about 4.5 grams of nearly pure silver. Under the Claudio-Julian Emperors the denarius contained about 4 grams of silver.
Nero reduced the silver content of the denarius to 3.8 grams. By the second half of the third century the denarius contained only about 2% silver and was replaced.
Under Diocletian (c. December 22, 244 – December 3, 311) taxes increased and extra coins were minted to pay for the military expansion intended to secure the empire. The resulting inflation debased the money and the empire’s mercenaries ended up sacking Rome for payment.
More recently, the U.S. dime was 90% silver until 1964. Starting in 1965 it no longer has any silver in it.
The Invention of Paper Money
The Chinese, inventors of the printing press, also invented paper money. During the reign of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and heir to the Mongol Empire, paper money became their predominant medium of trade.
The unbacked currency of Toghan Temur (r. 1333-70) produced a hyperinflationary spiral and the Han-Chinese people revolted due to the dynasty’s oppressive security state. The Mongols lost most of China to the Ming rebels in 1368 and fled to their homeland Mongolia.
The Great Debasement
In 1544, Henry VIII of England , King and head of the Church of England, reduced the silver in minted coins by about 50% and repeated this to a lesser extent the following year. The resulting long term inflation crisis threatened landowners’ wealth which pushed them to institute enclosure.
The enclosure movement essentially completed the destruction of the medieval peasant community and manorial serfdom in England. Capitalism and wage labor developed to replace manorial serfdom.
Eventually English colonies in North America rebelled against new laws prohibiting them from issuing their own money and requiring them to borrow money at interest from the Bank of England. The rebellious colonies also rejected the possibility of rule by Priest-Kings and attempted to preserve these gains for future generations with the Bill of Rights.
The following 8 minute segment from the movie Zeitgeist:Addendum provides an excellent overview of what happened next.
The financial services industry, like all powerful industries before them, demanded increasingly “handout-minded” Presidents and Representatives who inevitably mortgaged the country’s future in order to win reelection. Elections today are won with money provided directly by the financial services industry, indirectly through their lobbies and spent by their political action committees.
William K. Black most recently brought this issue to national attention.
The United States of America, founded by slave owners on stolen land, securing its empire with professionalized armed forces and mercenaries, now practices money debasement through quantitative easing.
This, along with the loss of rights to the encroaching security state, seems no different than the end phase experienced by other empires. If this were all there is, then we could all expect to go on to establishing new societies in the future.
The things that are different this time involve the global exhaustion of nonrenewable resources and world wide climate change in the face of unprecedented population levels. Without a doubt these issues complicate matters a great deal.
If you have ever thought about becoming independent from reliance upon an employer, now would be a good time to act. If you have never thought about it, now would be a good time to start thinking about it.
Personally, nothing within the boundaries of the law seems as feasible as establishing an online business. How long that remains feasible is anybody’s guess but by the time that becomes unfeasible we will be experiencing the total collapse of industrialized civilization.
And that will be the subject of another atticle.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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