Comment Archives of Keith Hazelton's Provisional Truth

Those of us ensconced in "reality-based" communities, relegated to watching the actors on the stage of this administration create and define history for us and the world, often wonder who makes up that core of support for the current occupiers of the White House, and what, exactly, are they thinking?

Johann Hari, writing for UK's The Independent earlier this month, had the pleasure (?) of embarking on a fantastic voyage with 500 or so readers of The National Review for a cruise of the Pacific West Coast from San Diego to Puerto Vallarta.

The armchair Neo-cons, for whom Fox News is the only source of "fair and balanced" information - the truth, of course - in a godless liberal morass of main stream media, well-off and lily-white save one passenger of African extraction, represent that unshakable remnant of Republican allegiance that keeps the president's poll numbers above 25 percent.

On-board this cruise, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the Global War on Terrorism in general have been astonishing successes. Global warming does not exist - a "hoax" as proclaimed by Oklahoma's senior senator Jim Inhofe - and its adherents only want to use the threat of a dying planet to raise taxes and further regulate and control the private lives of the citizenry.

Read Hari's entire harrowing account here, but below are some of the more interesting and colorful comments from Hari's fellow travelers.

It goes downhill from there. Read Hari's entire account and decide for yourself. It almost would be humorous if it wasn't so frightening.

The American Empire retreated a step yesterday, if only temporarily, when the President's sweeping immigration bill failed to garner sufficient votes in the U.S. Senate. The bill, which would have provided amnesty and a path to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, evidently offered something for everyone to hate, conservatives and liberals alike, as it became loaded with amendments and side proposals to address the complexity of what originally was perceived to be a simple set of immigration issues.

One such proposal, entitled (apparently with little sense of irony) DREAM, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, would have created America's first true mercenary element within our armed forces.

DREAM would have applied to an estimated 750,000 undocumented residents of military age, and stipulated that those who arrived in the United States before age 16, graduated from high school, and meet other qualifications could immediately enter the path to citizenship in exchange for at least two years' service in the armed forces.

The fine print, of course, being the requirement to survive two years of military service, as one can only imagine that units of immigrant-soldiers would be deployed to the hottest of global hot spots, currently Afghanistan and Iraq, but who knows where next.

And if a primary goal of illegal immigrant soldiers would be to live for those two years of military service, not necessarily to unconditionally defend America's programs to export democracy and freedom to hostile lands, how motivated would be these troops to blindly enter harm's way?

Currently about 35,000 non-citizens (permanent resident aliens - "green card" holders) serve in America's armed forces and more than a quarter of those are granted citizenship each year, but undocumented illegal immigrants are prohibited from military service.

DREAM would have changed this, taking the American Empire a step closer to imitating empires past, including everyone's favorite overworked comparison, the Roman Empire.

Yet what other analogy fits? Rome under its emperors, as meticulously documented by Edward Gibbon in his exhaustive "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," began to rely extensively on mercenary recruits, mostly from conquered lands, first to supplement then to "outsource" its military units.

According to Gibbon, prior to the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, the republic's military was reserved for Roman citizens who had a country to love, property to defend, and some role in enacting those laws which it was in their interest and duty to maintain. An honorable military leadership, albeit from a privileged class, commanding unyielding citizens, possessing “arms, (protective) of property, and collecting into constitutional assemblies, forms the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution,” Gibbon notes, and that “patriotism is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of a free government of which we are members.”

Such sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the Roman republic almost invincible, he writes, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary forces in the era of the emperors (27 BCE – 476 CE), during which “war was gradually improved into an art, and (then) degraded into a trade,” as the military became composed more of hired soldiers from throughout the empire in need of jobs than of Roman citizens defending a homeland.

Perhaps empires, like stars, are destined - ordained by history and physics - to follow certain stages, from birth to growth to some bright period of luminescence, only to progress in one of several variations all leading to a contracted, cold ending unrecognizable to its previous form.

As of yesterday, however, the American Empire, has retreated one step from the path of the Roman Empire and other empires past. Given the sustained interest among many to create a true mercenary element within our military, by recruiting illegal immigrants and rewarding them with American citizenship for those fortunate enough to survive the experience, DREAM will not disappear, despite the June 28, 2007 defeat of the comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Dan Gardiner is a Canadian writer whose work often appears in the Ottawa Citizen, the largest circulation newspaper of Canada's capital. This essay was his response to an April 28, 2007 editorial published in the Ottawa Citizen by Robert Sibley entitled, “The Dangers of Militant Atheism.”

Sibley's editorial focused upon a growing number of non-fiction works whose authors, the like of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), observe our human tendency toward wholehearted and unquestioning belief in things not seen, contrasting them to religious fanatics of all stripes as their aspiritual opposites, equally zealous and unbending.

        Those Fanatical Atheists
        By Dan Gardiner
        Published May 5, 2007, The Ottawa Citizen

Yesterday was one major religion's holy day. Today is another's. Tomorrow is a third's. So I thought this is an opportune moment to say I think all three of these faiths -- these mighty institutions, these esteemed philosophies, these ancient and honoured traditions -- are ridiculous quackery. Parted seas. Walking corpses. Nocturnal visits to Heaven. For goodness sake, people, the talking wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more plausible.

In the past, I've tried to avoid talking about religion in such sharp terms. It's not that I fear giving offence (which would be something of a limitation in my line of work). Rather, I know, as all humans do, that it's scary knowing you're going to die. And if belief in angels on high eases the existential fears of some, I won't begrudge them. Whatever gets you through the night, as a long-haired prophet once said.

But a series of books doing quite well on bestseller lists -- by Richard

Dawkins, Sam Harris and, soon, Christopher Hitchens -- argues it's time to be a lot less deferential to faith, and I have to say I find it hard to disagree. After all, we live in a time when blowing children to bits is an increasingly popular form of worship, the most powerful man on earth thinks he's got a hotline to God, and much of the electorate who gave that man his power would never consider replacing him with someone who does not believe the son of a carpenter who died 2,000 years ago sits in heaven advising presidents, fixing football games, and waiting for the day he will return to the Earth to brutally murder all unbelievers and erect a worldwide dictatorship.

Private, quiet faith is one thing. But when the guy holding the launch codes believes the end of the world could come any day and that's a good thing, those who believe lives are limited to one per customer have a problem.

Those making this case have been dubbed the "new atheists." They have also been called fanatics who are dogmatic, zealous and intolerant of other views -- the mirror image of religious extremists. As one English university dean said in the Guardian, Richard Dawkins is "just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs in the Tube."

Less Olympian thinkers have portrayed strident atheists as hacking away at the bonds of morality, which must inevitably lead to various forms of depravity ranging from the sexual to the genocidal.

Don't you know Stalin was an atheist? That's the way it goes. First you read Richard Dawkins. Then you have an abortion. Then you're putting a fresh coat of paint on the Gulag.

This frames the debate in a pleasingly symmetrical way. Over on that side are the insane religious fanatics who fly jets into skyscrapers and march around with signs saying "God Hates Fags." Over there are fanatical atheists. Between the two extremes are sensible moderates who take the Goldilocks approach to faith and reason. Not too hot. Not too cold. Lukewarm, please, keep it lukewarm.

The appeal is obvious. "All things to moderation," the Greeks sensibly advised, and this looks perfectly moderate. Whether it can withstand a little scrutiny is another matter.

The first problem for the moderate believer comes from those who like their faith hot. You've agreed God exists and that He mucks about in the world. You've agreed this book contains His holy commandments. So how do you respond when the mad religious zealot says, "hey, here on page 23, it says we should slice open unbelievers and use their guts for garters. And over here on page 75, it says we should bury homosexuals up to their necks and stuff olives up their noses. If God exists and these are his holy commandments, then shouldn't we get serious about the gutting and stuffing?"

One response is to make like a Philadelphia lawyer and spin plain words ("and yea, the Lord saith, the nose of the sodomite shall be stuffed with olives ...") until they don't say what they plainly say. But the more common response is to simply pretend the garters-and-olives passages don't exist and prattle on about how God is merciful and loving.

This is neither faithful nor reasonable. Still, as a practical matter, it will do in times of religious quiescence. But with religious zealotry in the ascendant, this non-answer is not going to keep the ranks of the nutters from swelling. And that's dangerous to us all.

Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as

Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don't, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon.

And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic on par with faith-saturated madmen who sacrifice children to an invisible spirit.

This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims ("John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper") and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important ("Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" being a notorious example).

So isn't it odd that when claims are made about matters as important as the nature of existence and our place in it we suddenly drop all expectation of proof and we respect those who make and believe claims without the slightest evidence? Why is it perfectly reasonable to roll my eyes when someone makes the bald assertion that Ringo was the greatest Beatle but it is "fundamentalist" and "fanatical" to say that, absent evidence, it is absurd to believe Muhammad was not lying or hallucinating when he claimed to have long chats with God?

Of course I realize that by asking this question I may be contributing to mass depravity and a crisis of civilization. But I thought I'd risk it. That's just the kind of fanatic I am.

It should also be obvious from this that the supposed link between Dawkinsian atheism and Stalinist butchery is pure nonsense. Yes, Stalin did not believe in God. But he believed in History, Marxism, Leninism and all sorts of Hegelian mumbo-jumbo for which he had not the slightest evidence.

Thanks to Earl Doherty at The Age of Reason for bringing Gardiner's thoughtful comments to our attention.

This story by Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg News appeared in the May 18, 2007 edition of The International Herald Tribune (Read complete story here).

Spend a worthwhile hour and view the video below courtesy of Oil, Smoke & Mirrors which may help "connect the dots" between the emerging reality of America's oil addiction, the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror now so devastatingly manifesting itself in the killing streets of Baghdad and throughout Iraq.

The tragedy of 9/11 clearly was used as a pretext to put into motion long-standing Iraq invasion plans. The Bush administration collectively, and quickly, realized as that day's horror unfolded it was to be that “catalyzing and catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor” described in the infamous Project for a New American Century's 2000 white paper “Rebuilding America's Defenses” (p.51).

Any involvement by this administration in the planning, execution or cover-up of 9/11 is unthinkable, yet certainly not impossible, abundant alternate theories to the contrary, and despite some of the opinions expressed in this video (see comments made by the former German minister of science and technology at minute 21).

Although many have concluded the Bush administration may have been aware of an impending terrorist attack on American interests somewhere in the world in the late summer of 2001 but even they could not connect the dots sufficiently to conceive of the possibility of an attack within the U.S., a growing body of evidence points to at least tacit government acceptance of an impending terrorist attack, much in the way it is now known that the Roosevelt administration knew Japan would retaliate in some fashion after a U.S. ultimatum was rejected in November 1941, allowing our entry into World War II.

Notwithstanding the truth of 9/11, it became that catalyst that now, after two centuries of republican democracy, has America slouching toward despotism – predicted by Benjamin Franklin in 1787 – in the form of a "unitary executive."

It likely will not be the (secret, unofficial) First American Triumvirate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, barring a 9/11-like incident before November 4, 2008 or January 20, 2009 which is used as a "national security" pretext to suspend the Constitution and remain in power (yes, there are contingency plans in such event as we learned after the 2004 election), but it will be helpful in the future to understand exactly how it happened while we were asleep at the wheel of "democracy."

The fascinating parallels of the present course of our American Empire to the Roman Republic's transition to dictatorship two millennia past are numerous and instructive.

From the creation of the (secret, unofficial) First Triumvirate of the Roman Republic (Julius Caesar, Pompeius Magnus and Licinius Crassus) in 60 BCE, only 17 years elapsed before an official (Second) Triumvirate was formed in 43 BCE, allying Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius and Marcus Lepidus lasting a decade. Within a few years after their political alliance disintegrated and Antony committed suicide, by 27 BCE Octavianus became emperor, Caesar Augustus, and effectively ended in one generation a republic which had stood for centuries.

For citizens and subjects of the new Roman empire, however, life went on with bread and circuses until it crumbled from within, albeit nearly five centuries later.

America is our country. We cannot allow ourselves to be tempted by economic prosperity and leisure (our bread and circuses) or to be scared by vague threats from the current enemy of choice. Such excuses will only permit, and make inevitable this slouch toward despotism.

What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton

Top

04/19/2007
April 19, 2007: Where is the Outrage?

“Plan B is to make Plan A work,” in Iraq according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, as detailed in a recent TomDispatch.com post, twistedly reminiscent of comedian George Carlin's two-step plan to become a millionaire: “First, get a million dollars...”

No doubt Plans C through Z also will be to make Plan A – “victory” – succeed in Iraq. Victory, however, is a too strong word for what has become today only a vague and nebulous concept, unlike the conclusion of the two World Wars of the last century.

Government architects of this carnage now secretly must define victory as the completion and garrisoning of at least four major, permanent military bases in Iraq and a coordinating Pentagon-like “embassy” compound within Baghdad's Green Zone, the ultimate gated community, which is to be staffed by many thousands and equipped with its own water and electricity systems and its own anti-missile defenses.

Outside this fortified embassy compound, this ultimate symbol of imperial power, and away from the Green Zone, ordinary Iraqis try only to survive each day without being exploded into fragments of bone and globs of fleshy goo or roasted alive sitting in a bus as they venture forth and return home to unpredictable, at best, water and electricity services.

(No wonder presidential candidate Senator John McCain looked so uncomfortable strolling through Baghdad's Shorja marketplace last month, despite his bullet-proof vest, 100-soldier armed escort and assault-helicopter oversight.)

In a week that began in America with the horrific murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech, leaving 33 dead including the mentally disturbed gunman who took his own life, the civilian body count in Iraq on that Monday, April 18th was more than double at 69.

The next day 104 died in Iraq and Wednesday 312 (nearly 200 in Sadriyah market alone), rounding out a week in which 839 Iraqi civilians were senselessly murdered and a similar number injured as they went about their everyday lives, much as the 32 VT victims were attending to their mostly ordinary lives on anything but just another Monday in Blacksburg.

As near as anyone can determine, there were no stadium-filled memorial services nor candle-lit rallies for those 839 dead, nor any mass memorial services for the possibly more than 600,000 other men, women and children murdered in Iraq since March 19, 2003.

We rightly are outraged by the senseless killing in Blacksburg Monday. But where is the outrage over Iraqi deaths? Where is their memorial service?

We have – America has – unleashed these angels of death in the Middle East, and no amount of escalations, surges, “plus-ups,” extended rotations or wishful thinking may contain them in the future. No amount of fighting them “over there” may in the future prevent us fighting them “over here” as a consequence of our departure from rational thinking.

It is said the Nixon administration in 1969 considered an escalation of the Vietnam war that would deploy many more troops and include the use of nuclear weapons, but that such plans were dismissed in fear of protest reactions at home that could become so violent America's depleted military would be unable to contain it.

Apparently the current White House administration, despite a similarly stretched military, harbors no such fears.

What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton

Source: Information Clearinghouse.

Top

02/05/2007
February 5, 2007: The Agenda Restated by James Howard Kunstler www.kunstler.com

Since discovering James Howard Kunstler's website a year or so ago, and reading his gripping book The Long Emergency, I have admired his straightforward, almost calm approach to presenting solutions to the problems of everyday life in a localized world emerging from the messy end of a hydrocarbon-based economy, quite likely in a future near you, sooner than most are aware or are willing to contemplate.

Far from the "doom and gloom" which his critics focus upon, Mr. Kunstler offers practical recommendations for change which could, in fact, result in the simpler, more meaningful life so many of us pretend to desire.

I have reproduced his commentary from February 5, 2007, which summarizes his view of a post-hydrocarbon America, and world, and the opportunities therein.

February 5, 2007 James H. Kunstler http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html

The Agenda Restated

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton

Top

01/18/2007
January 18, 2007:
Social Insecurity 2007 and the Coming Intergenerational Battle Over Entitlements

Well, there you have it - again. Fed chief Bernanke admitted in Congressional testimony - again - that "deficits do matter" and that changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will have to be made or dire economic circumstances will result. (See transcript of AP wire story dated 01/18/2007 below.)

In my November 2006 essay Faith Based Money, I wrote, "...Bernanke warned Congress in July 2006, 'Deficits matter because they represent additions to debt that our children and grandchildren will either have to pay through higher taxes or reduced services.' Bernanke's key word is “pay,” not borrow more, and the result of higher taxes and reduced government spending generally would be a shrinking economy, which, ultimately translates to a lower standard of living."

The "transfer programs" as Bernanke refers to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid actuarily are forecast to bankrupt the nation with nearly $45 Trillion of unfunded liabilities in the next three decades as 80 million or so Baby Boomers begin drawing on the wealth transfer tap.

As we know there is no fund or "lockbox" from which to obtain this staggering amount of money, Boomers will be expecting their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fund their retirement and medical expenses through much higher wage withholding and employer matching contributions if no changes are made to the current programs.

Those alternatives are drastic and - at the moment - politically untenable, which is precisely why Dr. Bernanke offered no solutions and deferred to Congress and the White House to make the "difficult choices."

There are seven painful alternatives from which to choose, most likely requiring a combination of several, if not all:

*Uncap Social Security employee withholding and employer contributions. The 6.2% rate for both employees and employers is now not withheld for incomes greater than $97,500 for 2007 (the Medicare withholding rate of 1.45% already is uncapped). This would be viewed as a tax increase on higher-income, "wealthy" Americans and on all employers and is estimated to raise $1.4 Trillion over 10 years (not even a dent in the deficit). Reportedly the now lame-duck Bush Administration has engaged in secret bipartisan talks to do this.

*Increase the standard withholding rates for both Social Security and Medicare, now at 6.2% and 1.45%, respectively. This would be a tax increase on everyone.

*Further delay retirement age benefit eligibility, now 62 for reduced Social Security benefits and as high as 70 for younger Americans. (My full-benefit eligibility date, with a 1956 birth date, is 66 years, 4 months.)

*Eliminate the age-62 reduced-benefit Social Security option completely.

*Stop indexing Social Security payments to inflation, essentially a benefit reduction (political suicide at present).

*Reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits (also political suicide).

*Institute a "Means Test" for Social Security and Medicare benefits. This will be the most controversial alternative, which, in effect, will "punish" those Americans who have successfully accumulated or inherited a pile of money deemed sufficient by the Government to deny them any return of the Social Security and Medicare tax money they have paid into the systems over their careers. It will "reward" those who foolishly have saved no money or lost their 401k funds in stock market crashes. Benefits will be scaled from 0% for the very well-off to 100% for the destitute and some percentage in between for the rest of us. So when it's time to visit the Social Security office to begin the process of collecting benefits, in addition to a birth certificate and other ID, retirees also will be required to bring tax returns and audited financial statements of assets and net worth and a government clerk will input your financial data on a computer and calculate what percentage of the "normal" benefit you will be eligible to receive. (And don't try to hide any assets or income! The penalties will be severe.)

I think our children and grandchildren collectively will say to us Boomers, "Sorry about your luck, you should have saved more money when you had the chance. Maybe you shouldn't have bought us all those iPods and X-Boxes and designer jeans and expensive vacations and useless college educations." The next two generations already cynically believe they will see no retirement benefits when it's their turn, and perhaps with valid reason as Dr. Bernanke observed.

January 18, 2007 Transcript of AP wire report

Washington (AP) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on January 18th that the economy could be gravely hurt if the nation's fiscal house is not put in order and Social Security and Medicare aren't revamped. "If early and meaningful action is not taken, the U.S. economy could be seriously weakened," Bernanke said in prepared testimony to the Senate Budget Committee.

It marked the Fed chief's most extensive comments to date on the challenges facing the United States with the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers, the oldest of whom will start retiring next year. This huge wave of retirees will hit the U.S. budget as well as the economy, he said.

Absent policy changes by Congress and the White House, rising budget deficits are likely in the years ahead to increase the amount of federal debt outstanding to unprecedented levels, Bernanke said. That could propel interest rates for consumers and businesses upward, which would be a worrisome development, he said. "Thus a vicious cycle may develop in which large deficits lead to rapid growth in debt and interest payments, which in turn adds to subsequent deficits," he said.

The budget deficit last year totaled $248 billion, a four-year low. But forecasts call for the deficit to worsen for the 2007 budget year. The Congressional Budget Office is projecting $286 billion in red ink, while the White House is predicting an even bigger shortfall of $339 billion. Bernanke said that economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nation's impending fiscal problems.

The Fed chief steered away from offering solutions. Fixing the problems, he said, will take persistence and a willingness by Congress and the White House to make difficult choices.

"In the end, the fundamental decision that Congress, the administration and the American people must confront is how large a share of the nation's economic resources to devote to federal government programs, including transfer programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," he said.

What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton

Top

December 20, 2006: The Age of Mammals 12/20/2006

TomDispatch.com posted this year-end 2006 piece, "Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century," by Rebecca Solnit (© 2006 by Rebecca Solnit) which offers her fascinating, plausible look at what might be our near-term future.

Well-researched and thoroughly documented, Solnit's alternate future presents a detailed account of life on Earth in 2025, "gone-local" following a global energy resource war in 2009 and a severe economic dislocation which followed.

The Age of Mammals

Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
By Rebecca Solnit

[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]

The View from the Grass

I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries -- the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad -- much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early twenty-first century version might have been called "localism" or maybe "anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.

That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald's, globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways -- the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.

You can see it in the countless local-economy projects -- wind-power stations, farmer's markets, local enviro organizations, food co-ops -- that were already proliferating, hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars swept the whole Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the Great Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming container ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled water, sweatshop garments, and other gratuitous commodities.

The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade of the century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low, suddenly elevated the status of peasant immigrants from what was then called "the undeveloped world," particularly Mexico and Southeast Asia. They taught the less agriculturally skilled, in suddenly greening North American cities, to cultivate the victory gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then beginning to sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but only if you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used the high-windowed structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The crisis spelled an end to the epidemic of American obesity, both by cutting calories and obliging so many Americans to actually move around on foot and bike and work with their hands.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyite origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy, while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for -- and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all fell -- than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as early as 2004-2007, several states, led by California, began setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.

In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously agreed to join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing emissions -- a direct rejection of national policy -- at a national meeting in Seattle. Librarians across the country publicly refused to comply with the USA-Patriot Act, and small towns nationwide condemned the measure in the years before many of those towns also condemned what historians now call the U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.

It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these small entities to fight back, to form local administrations and set local regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they joined the journey to a viable future. And when their withdrawal was finished, so was the Republic.

Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being are buried in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital -- known as the Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human Arlington to the south, which will receive the remains of a few more nostalgic officers from the Gulf Wars, then close for good. The whole histor