Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein

Posted on September 20, 2007
Filed Under Politics, Economics | Leave a Comment


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: failure | forecasting | reality

Team Bush intends to ‘transform the Middle East’

Posted on September 17, 2007
Filed Under Politics | Leave a Comment

Team Bush intends to ‘transform the Middle East’

By Marko Beljac - posted Monday, 17 September 2007

Whatever one may think about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq and the underlying assumptions underpinning policy it is increasingly clear that the invasion has been a disaster.

Generally speaking it is taken to be a fiasco based on the impact that Iraq has had on US regional and global interests. That the invasion has been a disaster for the population, with a high number of deaths as a direct and indirect consequence of the invasion and the large outflow of refugees, is beside the point. Critics intone that they wish the US is able to achieve its objective, creating a stable neo-colonial dependency in the oil rich region, but that reality, unfortunately, intrudes.

It seems that we might be sliding into another fiasco for recent strategic developments in the Middle East can be read as preparation for a two-front war with the United States striking Iran and Israel striking Syria. This would have its ironies given that one of the important factors underpinning the emergence of a strategic partnership between Iran and Syria was US support for Saddam’s aggression against Iran.

Recent months have seen increasing calls in Washington from hard-line “conservatives” for some form of military action against Iran. President Bush has also sharpened the rhetoric against Iran accusing Tehran of laying the Middle East under a “shadow of nuclear holocaust”. His usage of the term is ironic. During the Clinton administration United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), in a very revealing document on the “essentials of post cold war deterrence”, stated that US nuclear weapons cast a “shadow” over any conflict in which the US is engaged in.

Not much noticed in Bush’s statements is the more ominous declaration that Washington will “confront this danger before it is too late”. This is a clear reference to the doctrine of preventive war that was used to buttress the invasion of Iraq. If the administration is conducting policy with reference to the Bush doctrine then military action is a distinct possibility.

The interesting thing about the ramping up of war-like rhetoric is that it is inversely correlated with what is happening with Iran’s nuclear program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in its latest report on the implementation of safeguards in Iran, notes that Iran’s uranium enrichment activities have slowed. The IAEA has revealed that, as of August, Iran has twelve 164 machine gas centrifuge cascades in operation and that the Iranians have fed 690kg of uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) into these cascades over recent months. That is a very low amount and in fact represents a slowing down in Iran’s program.

Speculation is rife about the reasons for this which range from inherent structural limitations on Iran’s centrifuge technology, the purity of Iranian origin UF6 (which tends to damage the centrifuges), to political considerations in order to forestall further sanctions with a combination of these being most likely.

The same slow down has been observed in construction of the IR-40 heavy water moderated research reactor.

In other words in two of the most sensitive aspects of Iran’s nuclear program Iran has put the brakes on.

Also, Iran has just reached an agreement with the IAEA on a timetable to resolve all the outstanding issues that the agency has with regards to Tehran’s nuclear activities. Initially the fact of the agreement was all that was publicly available and the US was quick to declare it inadequate. Even western diplomats, as quoted by the sober Financial Times, correctly saw this “as an attempt to de-rail the process”. However the IAEA in its safeguards report noted that it represented “significant progress” and greatly increases co-operation between Iran and the agency.

The agreement is not perfect. Although the IAEA has stated that there is no diversion from Iran’s declared nuclear facilities to military programs nonetheless Iran has no Additional Protocols with the Agency, which are directed at uncovering non declared nuclear facilities.

In other words, the United States has moved up a gear on Iran precisely when progress in diplomacy has been made and when the Iranian nuclear program has slowed. This demonstrates that the upsurge in rhetoric is not correlated with Iranian nuclear activity.

But Washington has dispensed more than just rhetoric.

The United States has deployed PAC-3 ballistic missile interceptors in the region (not meant for Iraqi insurgents) along with extra mine sweepers. Washington also has two aircraft carrier battle groups deployed in the Persian Gulf. One aspect that may be Iran focused is work on the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) a massive bomb slated for the B-2 bomber and designed to hit hard targets.

The Natanz enrichment complex is vulnerable to current US penetrator munitions but Iran has just recently constructed a tunnel complex in a mountain near Natanz. Later this year the Pentagon may accelerate development of the MOP for early 2008, in line with reported time lines for a bombing campaign.

Reports have emerged that the US is planning a three-day bombing campaign against 1,200 targets designed to severely degrade Iranian military power in the context of “containment”. Hardliners have used phrases such as “rapid dominance” that suggest we might be in for “shock and awe” part two. Some comments are suggestive that the operation may well be under the direction of Strategic Command, rather than Central Command, as a part of “global strike”. This would be an innovation in strategic planning.

In fact the recent, highly publicised, accidental B-52 flight carrying six Advanced Cruise Missiles armed with the W80-1 nuclear warhead may well have occurred not because of lax practice but because “global strike” has lowered safety standards. If so, that would be ominous. Leading analysts Ted Postol and Pavel Podvig have pointed out that “global strike” programs increase the risk of accidental nuclear war. Indeed even STRATCOM commanders have conceded that it poses a “manageable” risk of accidental nuclear war. Are we going to set a dangerous precedent?

There have also appeared a number of other concrete steps that the US has taken with respect to Iran. Firstly, President Bush has signed off on a covert action program, ostensibly “non lethal”, against Iran that includes support for Jundallah, a group that has conducted bombings inside Iran. Of course, this would not prevent Washington from declaring Iran to be a front in the “global war on terror” at the appropriate time.

The US has placed quiet pressure on financial institutions to stop doing business with Iran that goes beyond multilateral sanctions. Such actions are hurting Iran’s oil industry and provide added incentive for Iran to pursue its nuclear program.

This is a serious issue. We now know that the financial sanctions that Washington placed on North Korea were based on the false pretence that North Korea was money laundering through a small bank. These sanctions were put in place immediately after a key agreement was reached in six-party talks with North Korea. Clearly this was an “attempt to derail the process”: an attempt that was quite successful given that North Korea went on to test, successfully or not, a nuclear weapon. Some 90 per cent, if not more, of the plutonium that North Korea re-processed for its weapons program occurred after 2003.

The combination of military pressure, covert action and financial sanctions only increases the incentive for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. This demonstrates that nuclear proliferation is not a very high priority so far as policy is concerned.

In fact even mainstream press reports speak of what has been long known by observers namely that US policy is strengthening the hand of hardliners in Tehran and serving to provide the cover under which reformists can be sidelined.

But what of Syria? It might well be that Syria is in the crosshairs as well.

What is particularly noteworthy in relation to Syria is how certain, highly dubious, intelligence reports have tried to link Damascus with the broader Iranian nuclear crisis. These reports, whose origins are Israeli, suggest that Syria and North Korea are engaging in joint activity to construct a “nuclear installation” to produce “fissile material” for a nuclear weapon. These reports do not focus on plutonium for if they did so they would lack all credibility. Rather it is stated that North Korea is helping Syria to build a uranium enrichment plant. This story relies heavily on allegations about North Korea’s own enrichment program however these allegations, though often repeated, are false. The allegations on North Korea are based on questionable extrapolations of aluminum tube orders, as with Iraq.

The real significance of this story is not the content but the clear attempt to link Syria with the regional nuclear crisis.

Last week it was revealed that the Israeli air force dropped munitions over Syrian territory during an incursion, most likely to manoeuvre in the face of Syrian counter measures. The flight path of the aircraft was such that it would have flown to the closest point between Syria and Iran. Speculation was rife with the Israeli press reporting that the aircraft may have been testing Syrian air defences or scouting ballistic missile launch sites.. More details have emerged however. It appears that it was an actual airstrike with speculation now focusing on the likely targets including a joint Syrian-Iranian missile installation, according to Arab reports. All this is consistent with planning for an air campaign.

There has also been interesting developments on the ballistic missile front. Israel has been working on its own Arrow high altitude area defence system that is designed to intercept Iranian medium range missiles. But in recent times Israel has sought PAC-3 interceptors from the United States precisely for Syrian contingencies. Syria’s missiles represent the main deterrent that Damascus has against Israel.

PAC-3 and Arrow BMD systems would match a two-front contingency involving both Syria and Iran. Following the latest Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when Israel failed to secure the region of Lebanon south of the Litani River, the Israeli press reports that Tel Aviv has embarked on a major military upgrade program with Syria very much in mind. There have appeared repeated statements about the possibility of war with Syria although there has been a recent drawback of military exercises on the Golan Heights, the likely front in any land war.

When Bashar Assad succeeded his father there was much talk about liberal reforms but external pressure has seen Assad get a bad case of cold feet. The same dynamic has been observed in Iran, as noted.

Team Bush has repeatedly spoken of transforming the Middle East. The above actions are all consistent with planning centered upon a two-front war against Iran and Syria. That does not mean that such will be the case, or that it will be simultaneous, but it should be readily apparent that we could be sliding into just such an outcome.

Being alive to the possibility would help to prevent us from getting into such a conflict, the likely consequences of which would not be pretty, to say the least.

Marko Beljac is a Monash University PhD student . He maintains the blog Science and Global Security. He is co-author of An Illusion of Protection: The Unavoidable Limitations of Safeguards on Nuclear Materials and the Export of Australian Uranium to China. Marko tutored under Professor Joe Camilleri at Latrobe University.

Credit: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6378

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: liberty | forecasting | war

The Factor of Four: Preparing Yourself for Economic Meltdown

Posted on September 14, 2007
Filed Under Economics | Leave a Comment

The Factor of Four: Preparing Yourself for Economic Meltdown

By Dave Pollard, originally published June 21, 2005

The cover story of this month’s Atlantic is editor James Fallows’ Countdown to a Meltdown, a look at the implications of reckless Bush-Greenspan economic policies for the next generation. The only thing that isn’t entirely credible to any student of history about Fallows’ portrait of coming economic collapse is the date — while he sees it coming quickly and convulsively by 2016, I believe it will take a full generation to play itself out, and I would have been happier to see his scenario placed closer to the centennial of the last horrific depression, which was also caused by reckless economic mismanagement — 2029. But aside from the date, you need only read the history books (and the very recent history of countries like Argentina) to see the rationale, and even the inevitability, of Fallows’ predictions.

The article is still on the newsstands, and hence not yet available online, but in essence it sees three deliberate Bush-Greenspan policies leading to economic collapse in 2009:

The collapse scenario identifies a number of changes that occur like falling dominoes. What is interesting is that, much like the articles I have read about Peak Oil, about the non-sustainability of low interest rates, and about coming bubble burst in housing prices and (again) in stock markets, there is a recurrent ‘Factor of Four’ in this scenario1:

Fallows’ thesis is that, even more than economic bungling, the Bush-Greenspan ideology of government doing as little as possible (other than pursuing insanely expensive foreign imperialistic wars and trampling on civil liberties) will soon lead to an America that has squandered all four of its competitive advantages:

  • A healthy rate of savings, providing resiliency in the face of downturns
  • Investment in good public infrastructure (e.g. in health care and transportation)
  • Investment in education (and in the key assets — people and knowledge — of value in the 21st century)
  • Investment in innovation (e.g. in real research)

It seems to me that progressives’ inability to explain to the average voter the importance of these competitive advantages (not easy in our dumbed-down world, but doable) is one of the key reasons they are, at least in the US, in the political wilderness2.

The consequence of this “every man for himself” doctrine is that in the event of a severe economic downturn (and there is evidence it has already begun if you look at the real indicators and not the phony ones like GNP), the vast majority will be “priced out of any chance for real opportunity”. The consequence of a population (a global population, because the US will take down most of the rest of the world with it) which is without hope of climbing out of desperate circumstances is almost too horrible to imagine — we need only look to Afghanistan, Rwanda, Palestine, or Darfur to see what happens when people just give up trying.

Fallows suggests that only the rich and powerful elite will be immune to, and separated from, the effects of this economic collapse. Shielded by security guards in their homes, limos, penthouse offices and retirement villas from the staggering masses, they will be oblivious to it all (my grandparents regularly handed out food and other essentials to house-to-house beggars in the 1930s, to the great consternation of some of their peers and neighbours, who feared hordes of others would follow — they didn’t).

But it seems to me that there’s a second way to insulate yourself from the impact of economic collapse, other than by becoming fabulously wealthy. And that is to be prepared. If you knew that in ten years the Factor of Four would be upon us, and the eight drastic changes in rates and prices bulleted above would then be in effect, what would you do starting now to prepare for it?

The obvious steps:

You don’t need to do any of these things tomorrow, but it would be prudent to think seriously about doing them over the next few years. Think of it being like betting on a gambler in a casino who’s on a roll, tossing sevens and elevens one after the other. If you cash out of the living-beyond-your-means lottery too early, you’ll probably kick yourself for losing faith too soon, for not hanging in a little longer. But there’s lots of evidence from history that the consequences of cashing out too late will be much worse. And alas, as with all gambles, you’ll only know whether you did the right thing in hindsight.

A final thought from Fallows’ article, and it’s about education. He quotes Danish executive Niels Christian Nielsen, a Director of companies on both sides of the Atlantic, from a U.Cal presentation earlier this year on the subject:

The big difference between Europe and America is the proportion of people who come out of the [education] system really not being functional for any serious role. In Finland that is maybe 2-3%. In Europe in general maybe 15 or 20%. For the United States at least 30%, maybe more. In spite of all the press, Americans really don’t get the education difference. They generally still feel this is a well-educated country and workforce. They just don’t see how far the country is falling behind.

These two main themes from Fallows’ scenario — how reckless economic policy is leading inevitably to economic meltdown, and the importance of having a government that sets a good example of economic responsibility and public investment for the benefit of all its citizens — are inextricably intertwined. Bush’s failure on both counts threatens not only to lead to the ignominious end of the world’s last superpower, but to drag the rest of the world needlessly into a long period of great suffering and deprivation in the process.

Notes:
1. One qualification about the Factor of Four, in case any economists or other number crunchers are reading this — the rates and prices above are subject to continuous adjustment for changes in supply and demand. Because the domino effect will lower demand, prices that spike to quadruple current levels will fall off as a result of this adjustment, so in some cases the net effect may be closer to a Factor of Two or Three. Fallows’ scenario reflects this. But if we’re trying to visualize how such a change will affect our economy and our lives, thinking in terms of today’s purchasing power, it still makes sense to use the Factor of Four.
2. I suspect that Europeans and Canadians take for granted the importance of these things, but do not really understand why they’re important — which is why it is not unthinkable that Bush-Greenspan thinking could happen elsewhere (as it did with Thatcherism), even without the religious undercurrent. That’s something for us outside the US to think about seriously.

Credit: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/06/21.html

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: collapse | forecasting

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth

Posted on September 14, 2007
Filed Under Proposals, Economics | Leave a Comment

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth

by Ran Prieur
December 19, 2004

1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The “world as we know it” is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.

Our little world is doomed because it’s built on a foundation of taking from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we’ve been going into debt and calling it “progress,” exterminating and calling it “development,” stealing and calling it “wealth,” shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it “evolution.” We’re just about done. We’re not just running out of cheap oil — which is used to make and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent of 200 slaves. We’re also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any time now. We’re running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We’re coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are looking forward to “armageddon” or the “rapture”? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.

In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV’s will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.

This is not the “doom” scenario. I’m not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they’re noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don’t, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don’t let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.

2. Abandon hope. I don’t mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a better world is possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is going to save us even if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:

Jesus is coming. If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming back to save us. He said, “This generation shall not pass.” That was 2000 years ago. Stop waiting for that bus and get walking.

The Mayan calendar is ending. Some people who scoff at Christian prophecies still manage to believe something equally religious and a lot less specific about what’s going to happen. At least Jesus preached peace and enlightenment — the Mayans were a warlike people who crashed their civilization by cutting down the forests of the Yucatan and exhausting their farmland. That’s what we should be studying, not their calendar and its alleged message that a better world is coming very soon and with little effort on our part. Now the Mayan calendar gurus will say that it does take effort and we have a choice to go either way, but go back to 1988 and read what 2004 was supposed to look like, and it’s obvious that we’ve already failed.

Technology will save us. If it does, it will be something we don’t even recognize as “technology” — permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or forest gardening or quantum consciousness or the next generation of the tribe. It will not be a new germ killer or resource extractor or power generator or anything to give us what we want while exempting us from being aware and respectful of other life. Anything like that will just dig us deeper in the same hole.

The system can be reformed. Yes, and it’s also not against the laws of physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said “we have to turn it around now or it will be too late.” They were right. And not only didn’t we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency, more toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war, more secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and short-sightedness. Now we’re in so deep that politicians right of Nixon are called “liberal” and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate and politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.

Also, there’s a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects, between atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and drought, between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we’re getting now are from the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before SUV’s and depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the latest generation of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around tomorrow, what’s coming is much worse.

We’re not strong enough to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost always invokes the word “hubris,” as in, “You are showing hubris, or excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast a hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don’t you know humans aren’t capable of burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride.”

In fact, we’ve already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of central and southwest Asia were once forests — ancient empires cut down the trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean. In North America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that you couldn’t row a boat through them, and the seashores were rich with seals, fishes, birds, clams, lobsters, whales. Now they’re deserts populated only by seagulls eating human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff has made dead zones in the oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing oceanic acidity, which may dissolve the shells of the plankton. If the plankton die, it’s all over.

Maybe we can’t kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to cutting life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will do so, and all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner and only kills most of us.

3. Drop Out. (See my essay How To Drop Out.) Dropping out of the present dominant system has both a mental and an economic component that go together like your two legs walking. It’s a lot of steps! Maybe you notice that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you need money. So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time, in which you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the system mentally. And so on, until you’ve changed your friends, your values, your whole life.

The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this movement, is that it’s not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint, or being righteous. It’s not a pissing contest to see who’s doing more to save the Earth — although some people will believe that’s your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It’s not even about reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast.

This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can’t even begin because they would lose their jobs. We’re always arguing to change each other’s minds, but nobody will change if they think their survival depends on not changing. Every time you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting fired for honesty and integrity, you can be sure that they already had a support network, or just a sense of their own value, outside of the system they defied. Dropping out is about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off Saruman’s tower!

4. You are here to help. In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to “succeed,” to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help — to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.

You don’t have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others “above” you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it’s OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to — the key is that you’re focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your “self,” instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren’t even that fun.

Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you’re here to win you’re not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you’re dropping out to win you’re likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.

In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can’t win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there’s nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we’re so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.

5. Learn skills. Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash — should they buy guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don’t take it too literally — there might not be any fish left!)

The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from materials at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water, making fire, trapping animals, and so on. But I don’t think we’re going all the way to the stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work, medical diagnosis, surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting, gardening, tree propagation, food preservation, diplomacy, practical chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of mechanical repair, and all kinds of teaching. As the 15th century had the Renaissance Man, we’re going to have the Postapocalypse Man or Woman, someone who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide, set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and teach history.

Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills, but that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition, adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call “being yourself” or “waking up.” Most human behavior is based neither on logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We perceive, think, and act as we’ve always done, and as we see others do. This works well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it doesn’t work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and conformity, people will call you “weird.” 20% and they’ll call you a genius, 30% and they’ll call you a saint, 40% and they’ll kill you.

6. Find your tribe. We minions of Empire think of ourselves as individualists, or as members of silly fake groups — nations, religions, races, followers of political parties and sports teams, loyal inmates of some town that’s the same as every other. In fact we’re all members of a giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not cooperative and open, but coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we could see even one percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.

You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.

I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that we’ll have plenty of time to get together geographically.

7. Get on some land. This might seem more difficult than the others, yet most people who own land have not done any of the other things — probably because buying land requires money which requires subservience to a system that makes you personally powerless. I suggest extreme frugality, which will give you valuable skills and also allow you to quickly save up money. You probably have a few more years.

If you don’t make it, it’s not the end of the world — oh wait — it is the end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land, or someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of you will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will be a need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don’t force it.

If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface water, a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less convenient would be a well that doesn’t require electricity, or dirty surface water, which you can filter and clean through sand and reed beds. At the very least you need the rainfall and skills to catch and store enough rainwater to drink and grow food. (The ancient Nabateans did it on less than four inches of rain a year.) Then you’ll need a few years to learn and adjust and get everything in order so that your tribe can live there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With luck, it won’t come to that.

8. Save part of the Earth. When I say “the Earth,” I mean the life on its surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as possible, connected in ways that maximize abundance and complexity — and not just because humans think it’s pretty or useful, but because all life is valuable on its own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals — whales, condors, pandas, salmon, spotted owls — but most of them aren’t going to make it, and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into habitats and whole systems.

So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through governments, but at the moment they’re ruled by corporations, which by definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or “profit.” You can try direct physical action against the destroyers, but it has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think we’ll see more and more activists simply killed.

My focus is direct positive action for the biosphere: adopting some land, whether by owning or squatting or stealth, and building it into a strong habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting, mulching, building the topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls, planting trees, making wetlands — a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide and migrating birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the crash.

Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the humans using it for survival, has turned into an Eden, because his students know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once thought to be random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild gardens of human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.

Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself. This and only this justifies human survival.

It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the permaculture movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are rare, and classes are so expensive that the knowledge is languishing among the idle rich when it should be offered free to the world. But the idle poor can still find the books in libraries, and many of the techniques are simple. What it comes down to is seeing whole systems and paying attention and innovating, driven by the knowledge that sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there’s no limit to how far we can go beyond it.

9. Save human knowledge. When people of this age think about knowledge worth saving, they usually think about belief in the Cartesian mechanical philosophy, that dead matter is the basis of reality, and about techniques for rebuilding and using machines that dominate and separate us from other life. I’d like that knowledge to die forever, but I don’t think it works that way. Humans or any other hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted by the Black Arts, by techniques that trade subtle harm for flashy good and feed back into themselves, seducing us into power, corruption, and blindness.

Our descendants will need the intellectual artifacts to avoid this — artifacts we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example begins to fall. In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than “the Gods forbid it” or “that is not our Way.” They will need the knowledge to say something like:

“Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our “saved” time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn.”

Credit: http://ranprieur.com/essays/saveearth.html

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: collapse | forecasting | reality

The Post-Washington Dissensus

Posted on September 14, 2007
Filed Under Economics | 1 Comment

The Post-Washington Dissensus

Friday, 14 September 2007
By Walden Bello*

When two studies last year detailed how the World Bank’s research unit had been systematically manipulating data to show that neoliberal market reforms were promoting growth and reducing poverty in developing countries, development circles were not shocked. They merely saw the devastating findings of a study by American University Professor Robin Broad and a report by Princeton University Professor Angus Deaton and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Ken Rogoff as but the latest episode in the collapse of the so-called Washington Consensus.

Imposed on developing countries in the form of “structural adjustment” adjustment programs funded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the Consensus reigned until the late 1990’s, when the evidence became clear that on all key criteria of development-sustained growth, poverty reduction, and reduce inequality-it simply was not delivering. By the first half of this decade, the Consensus had undergone a process of unraveling, although neoliberalism remained the default mode for many economists and technocrats that had lost confidence in it, simply out of inertia.

The former adherents of the Consensus have gone off in divergent directions. Despite frequent references to it, there is, in fact, no “Post-Washington Consensus.”

Washington Consensus Plus

Mindful of the failures of the Washington Consensus, the IMF and the World Bank are now promoting what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has disdainfully described as the “Washington Consensus Plus” approach, that is, that market reforms, while crucial, are not enough. Financial reforms, for instance, must be “sequenced,” if we are to avoid such debacles as the Asian financial crises, which even the Fund now admits was due to massive capital inflows into countries that liberalized without strengthening their “financial infrastructure.” Mindful of the Russian descent into the hell of mafia capitalism in the 1990’s, the two institutions also now talk about the importance of accompanying market reform with institutional and legal reforms that can enforce private property and contracts. Other accompaniments of market reforms are “good governance” and policies to “develop human capital” such as female education.

This mix of market and institutional reforms were consolidated in the first years of this decade in the so-called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP’s). In contrast to what one analyst has described as the “bare knuckle neoliberalism” of structural adjustment programs, PRSP’s were not only more liberal in content but in process: they were supposed to be formulated in consultation with “stakeholders,” including civil society organizations.

Despite its icing of institutional reforms, the core of the PRSP cake remains the same macroeconomic fundamentals of trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and commercialization of land and resources at the heart of structural adjustment programs. And community consultation has been limited to well-resourced, liberal non-governmental organizations rather than broad-based social movements. PRSP’s indeed are simply second generation structural adjustment programs that seek to soften the negative impact of reforms. As IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato has admitted, the purpose of institutional reforms is “to make sure that the fruits of growth are widely shared and the poorest people are protected from the costs of adjustment” in order to prevent people from being “tempted to give up on orthodox economic policies and structural reforms.”

Neoconservative Neoliberalism

A second successor to the Washington Consensus is what one might call the “neoconservative neoliberalism.” This approach is essentially the development policy of the Bush administration. The inspiration for this strategy was provided by the famous 2000 report of a congressional commission on multilateral institutions headed by conservative academic Alan Meltzer, which proposed a radical slimming down of the World Bank. It supports-at least rhetorically–debt relief for the poorest countries on the ground that they won’t be able to pay the debt and seeks a shift from loans to grants. However, debt relief and grant aid are conditioned on how governments perform in terms of liberalizing their markets and privatizing their industries, land, and natural resources. Indeed, the main reason for preferring grants is that, in contrast to loans channeled through the World Bank, grants, as Undersecretary of State John Taylor put it, “can be tied more effectively to performance in a way that longer-term loans simply cannot.” Moreover, grants would allow pro-market reforms and aid policy generally to be more directly coordinated with Washington’s security objectives and with the agenda of US corporations. Compared to the original Washington Consensus, neoconservative neoliberalism is less doctrinaire, but in an illiberal direction, ready as it is to let the market play second fiddle to power.

Neostructuralism

A third distinctive successor to the Washington Consensus, neostructuralism, moves, in contrast, in a more liberal direction. This is an approach associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) that produced the structuralist theory of underdevelopment in the 1950’s under the leadership of the venerable Argentine economist Raul Prebisch. According to neostructuralism, neoliberal policies have simply been too costly and counterproductive. In fact, there is no trade-off between growth and equity, as the neoliberals claim, but a “synergy.” Less inequality in fact would enhance, not obstruct, economic growth by increasing political and macroeconomic stability, boosting the saving capacity of the poor, raising educational levels, and expanding aggregate demand. The neostructuralists thus propose progressive transfer payment policies that redistribute income in ways that increase the human capital or productivity of the poor, including higher spending for health, education, and housing programs. These are the kinds of programs associated with what the Mexican polemicist Jorge Castaneda has called the “Good Left” in Latin America, meaning the governments of Lula in Brazil and the Concertacion alliance in Chile.

Being focused on managing transfer payments to protect and upgrade the capacity of the poor, the neostructuralist approach does not interfere with market forces in production, unlike the policies of the “Bad Left” (meaning Hugo Chavez and friends) that intervene in production, markets, and wage policies. The neostructuralists also embrace globalization, and they say that a key objective of their reforms is to make the country more globally competitive. Because they simultaneously allegedly alleviate income disparities, upgrade the capacity of the poor, and make the work force more globally competitive, neostructuralist reforms are said to hold out the prospect of making globalization more palatable, if not popular. Neostructuralists proudly proclaim that their approach is the “high road” to globalization, in contrast to the “low road” of the neoliberals..

The problem is that neostructuralist reforms have led to what one of its most thoughtful critics, Chilean economist Fernando Leiva, calls the “heterodox paradox,” that is, in the quest for systemic or comprehensive competitiveness, the carefully crafted neostructuralist policies have actually led to “the politico-economic consolidation and regulation of neoliberal ideas and policies.” In the end, neostructuralism, like the Washington Consensus Plus approach, does not fundamentally reverse but simply mitigate the poverty and inequality-creating core neoliberal policies. The Lula government’s targeted anti-poverty program may have reduced the ranks of the poorest of the poor but institutionalized neoliberal policies continue to reproduce massive poverty, inequality, and stagnation in Latin America’s biggest economy.

Global Social Democracy

The more than residual attachment to neoliberalism of neostructuralism is less evident in the case of what we might call Global Social Democracy, an approach that has become identified with people such as economist Jeffrey Sachs, sociologist David Held, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the British charity Oxfam. Unlike the three previous approaches, this perspective acknowledges the fact that growth and equity may be in conflict, and it ostentatiously places equity above growth. It also fundamentally questions the central thesis of neoliberalism: that for all its problems, trade liberalization is beneficial in the long run. Indeed, Stiglitz says that in the long run, trade liberalization may in fact lead to a situation where “the majority of citizens may be worse off.”

Moreover, the global social democrats demand fundamental changes in the institutions and rules of global governance such as the IMF, WTO, and the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs). David Held, for instance, calls for the “reform, if not outright abolition, of the TRIPs Agreement,” while Stiglitz, says that “rich countries should simply open up their markets to poorer ones, without reciprocity and without economic or political conditionality.” Also, “middle-income countries should open up their markets to the least developed countries, and should be allowed to extend preferences to one another without extending them to the rich countries, so that they need not fear that imports might kill their nascent industries.”

The global social democrats even see the anti-globalization movement as an ally, with Sachs thanking it “for exposing the hypocrisies and glaring shortcomings of global governance and for ending years of self-congratulation by the rich and powerful.” But globalization is where the global social democrats draw the line. For like classical neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus Plus school, and neostructuralism, global social democracy sees globalization as necessary and fundamentally sound and, if managed well, as bringing benefits to most.

Indeed, the global social democrats see themselves as saving globalization from the neoliberals. This is all the more important because, contrary to an assumption that was gospel truth just a few years ago-the globalization was irreversible–the global social democrats worry that contemporary globalization is, in fact, in danger of being reversed, and they hold up as a cautionary tale about the consequences of such a development the turbulent reversal of the first wave of globalization after 1914.

To Sachs, Held, and Stiglitz, the benefits of globalization outstrip the costs, and what the world needs is a social democratic or “enlightened globalization” where global market integration proceeds but is one that is managed fairly and is accompanied by a progressive “global social integration.” The aim, as Held puts it, is to “provide the basis for a free, fair, and just world economy,” where the “values of efficient and effective global economic processes…function in a manner commensurate with self-determination, democracy, human rights, and environmental sustainability.”

Can Globalization be Humanized?

There are several problems with global social democracy’s attachment to globalization.

First of all, it is questionable that the rapid integration of markets and production that is the essence of the globalization can really take place outside a neoliberal framework whose central prescription is the tearing down of tariffs walls and the elimination of investment restrictions. Slowing down and mitigating this inherently destabilizing process, not reversing it, is the global social democratic agenda. That global social democrats have come to terms with the fundamental tendency of global market forces to spawn poverty and inequality is admitted as much by Sachs who sees social democratic globalization as “harnessing [of] the remarkable power of trade and investment while acknowledging and addressing limitations through compensatory collective action.”

Secondly, it is likewise questionable that, even if one could conceive of a globalization that takes place in a socially equitable framework, this would, in fact, be desirable. Do people really want to be part of a functionally integrated global economy where the barriers between the national and the international have disappeared? Would they not in fact prefer to be part of economies that are susceptible to local control and are buffered from the vagaries of the international economy? Indeed, the backlash against globalization stems not only from the inequalities and poverty it has created but also the sense of people that they have lost all semblance of control over the economy to impersonal international forces. One of the more resonant themes in the anti-globalization movement is its demand for an end to export-oriented growth and the creation of inwardly-oriented development strategies that are guided by the logic of subsidiarity, where the production of commodities takes place at the local and national level whenever that is possible, thus making the process susceptible to democratic regulation.

The Larger Problem

The fundamental problem with all four successors to the Washington Consensus is their failure to root their analysis in the dynamics of capitalism as a mode of production. Thus they fail to see that neoliberal globalization is not a new stage of capitalism but a desperate and unsuccessful effort to overcome the crises of overaccumulation, overproduction, and stagnation that have overtaken the central capitalist economies since the mid-seventies. By breaking the social democratic capital-labor compromise of the post-World War II period and eliminating national barriers to trade and investment, neoliberal economic policies sought to reverse the long-term squeeze on growth and profitability. This “escape to the global” has taken place against the backdrop of a broader conflict-ridden process marked by renewed inter-imperialist competition among the central capitalist powers, the rise of new capitalist centers, environmental destabilization, heightened exploitation of the South-what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession”-and rising resistance all around.

Globalization has failed to provide capital a escape route from its accumulating crises. With its failure, we are now seeing capitalist elites giving up on it and resorting to nationalist strategies of protection and state-backed competition for global markets and global resources, with the US capitalist class leading the way. This is the context that Jeffrey Sachs and other social democrats fail to appreciate when they advance their utopia: the creation of an “enlightened global capitalism” that would both promote and “humanize” globalization.

Late capitalism has an irreversible destructive logic. Instead of engaging in the impossible task of humanizing a failed globalist project, the urgent task facing us is managing the retreat from globalization so that it does not provoke the proliferation of runaway conflicts and destabilizing developments such as those that marked the end of the first wave of globalization in 1914.

*Walden Bello is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

Credit: http://www.focusweb.org/the-post-washington-dissensus.html?Itemid=1

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: failure | reality

Back To Basics: Averting Global Collapse

Posted on September 14, 2007
Filed Under Economics | Leave a Comment

Back to basics: averting global collapse

By Peter McMahon - posted [on original site] Friday, 7 September 2007

A growing number of books are appearing that present a picture of global catastrophe if civilisation does not radically change. “Big picture” experts like Martin Rees, Jared Diamond and most recently Thomas Homer-Dixon warn of total collapse if things don’t change in a hurry.

These scientists are concerned with the basic material conditions of civilisation on Earth. They are not beholden to some ideological fashion but focused on the relationships between the core global systems, environmental, technological, economic and so on. It is this broad overview that allows them to see the emergent situation and cut through the daily commentary of all-too-often vested interests.

Their message is stark: things are coming to a head, and we must generate new ideas to deal with the new situation.

Ultimately it’s about the principles on which society operates. The great debates of modernity - revelation versus rationality, religion versus science, markets versus society, war versus negotiation, and so on - have been made largely redundant. The new debate, only just getting under way, is this: how can we live decently with suddenly too many people, too few resources and too much pollution?

The roots of the problem lie in our material success. In the last two centuries industrialisation, increasingly fuelled by ever cheaper fossil fuels, has generated unprecedented growth. This then brought about the invention of a raft of information technologies which stimulated a new round of development known as “globalisation”. Despite the evidence of world wars and global depression, governments and peoples began to believe never-ending economic growth was sustainable, and that all resources, human and material, should be turned to this purpose.

This belief was of course mistaken, and now we face the reality. There are material limits to growth, and we must think up a new set of ideas to run our global civilisation.

At the core of our dilemma is a very simple problem which we have created for ourselves. We are in a race with ourselves, and our own creations, which we can only lose. As things stand we are in a self-built treadmill in which we can only go ever faster until the whole thing flies apart.

We started this race around ten millennia ago by maintaining a higher population growth than could be supported by prevailing material conditions. For hundreds of thousands of years we had lived within our natural limits, but something changed that. In forcing ourselves to develop ever more material bounty, we strapped ourselves into the treadmill, going ever faster as we try to keep ahead.

Most simply, more mouths meant the need for more food, the great Malthusian dilemma. Our first response was the invention of agriculture, which led to urbanisation and eventually civilisation. This led to organised social competition, and then competition between political entities, originally city-states and empires. This competition is at the essence of what we call politics and of war.

Politics and war kept the treadmill rolling, the hope of final peace, final security, final prosperity always just ahead. Generation after generation passed, prisoner to this dream, never facing the fact that concentrated wealth and power only generated the forces that would destroy them.

Eventually, with industrialisation, civilisation became so materially powerful it needed a more effective means of controlling the utilisation of natural resources to social purpose. Capitalism, the combination of open trading, or markets, and a common currency enabled rapid expansion of the productive capacities of civilisation.

One big problem with capitalism was that it made competition systemic. Capitalism made it impossible to rest, to simply operate at a stable state, because built into capitalism was the profit imperative. The profit imperative meant that if a business did not make as much profit as another, it would eventually fail. This logic reached its limits in the unrestricted global financial system that came to connect every person on the planet through 24-hour global currency and securities trading networks.

The logic of these mathematically-based finance systems came to outweigh all other concerns. Culture, religion, family, nature, even war became subordinated to the need to make and keep making money. This, some people said, was the end of history and our fate for ever more.

Recently, however, another product of this great civilisational project, modern science, has been sounding a warning. Basically, science tells us, there are now so many people using so much of the Earth’s natural resources, the world is running out of essential resources and space to put the waste products. The rapid depletion of fresh water and fossil fuels are the resource problems most identified, and atmospheric and oceanic pollution leading to global warming is the worst environmental problem.

Science also tells us that the complexity of our civilisation is causing basic problems. Mostly that complexity comes from the scale of our global socio-economic system, the sheer numbers of diverse people and things involved. In particular, the interconnected systems we have created to control and power this civilisation are increasingly at risk. Electrical power grids, the Internet and the global economy share a similar vulnerability to accidental or deliberate systemic damage.

There are also threats from the products of science itself. The construction of super weapons, nuclear, biological, and so on, is one aspect, but the overall risk added by advances in things like genetic manipulation of species (including humans) and machine intelligence also loom ever larger. We are reaching the point where we can no longer understand let alone control the technologies we build.

So far the logic of seeking profit has outweighed the logic of averting collapse, and little or nothing has been done about these threats. Our various institutions - some of which, like the family or religions, are millennia old, while others, like the state or business firm, are only a few centuries old - are unable to respond.

Most importantly, those institutions which were tasked with generating and interpreting new information and decision-making - academia, the media and governments - have become moribund. They were captured by vested interests pursuing profits, and steadily neglected their proper roles as they made their own grab for wealth and status.

What we need is a new balance in all aspects of life. We need to end the human population explosion, and the associated growth in exploitation of resources. We need to develop a new economy not based on endless growth. We need to bring as many people as possible into information flows and decision-making processes. We need to recover a sense of meaning, of social solidarity, beyond material gain and social status.

Fortunately, there are a multitude of good ideas out there about how to do these things (such as those of our own Geoff Davies), but we must immediately start to really invest our best efforts.

We are an extraordinarily wealthy civilisation, and we can solve all our problems and create a new and better world. But we cannot do this without radical change, without fundamentally new ideas, and we must act now. Otherwise, we will lose everything we have created over the long millennia.

The Germans called 1946 the Year Zero. Huddling in their ruins, once the most civilised people on earth, they had fallen to irrational beliefs that exploited their fear. Too many young men were dead, too many young women were prostitutes, everyone did what they had to to survive. And they all wondered how it could have come to this.

But the German people at least had the Allies to help them out of the mess. Dying in the billions as the complex natural systems reset themselves under the weight of climate change, as food supplies collapse and water dries up, as even more die when desperate states fight over the remnants of food and oil, we won’t have any one to give us a hand. There’ll be no second chance for our civilisation, and so we’d best get on with saving it.

Dr Peter McMahon is a professional writer, researcher and teacher. He has worked in a range of jobs from ore miner to political consultant.

Credit: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6345

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: failure | collapse | forecasting

Ignorance Is Bliss

Posted on September 6, 2007
Filed Under Proposals | 1 Comment

We all like certainty. It makes us feel secure and seems to protect us from irrational fears and suspicions.

We learn from an early age that when we question our parents or older friends and siblings, we can be given categorical and apparently immovable answers.

As we grow older, news broadcasts seem to state facts and politicians and pundits make statements which seem like they are speaking with a credible certainty.

If we have a religious belief, this will usually give us a set of answers to the difficulties of life which are not open to question.

For most people, science seems to have a basis in very rigid facts. The point that everything is a theory capable of being disproved is normally missed.

However, does this apparent need to know, to be certain, to rigidly hold that your certainties are more valid than an opponent’s cause problems, or are we dependent upon the process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis in order to get anywhere?

Should we start admitting and requiring that our leaders and cultural icons also admit that we simply do not know?


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: ignorance | reality | humility

State Security Should Override Individual Liberty

Posted on September 5, 2007
Filed Under Freedom | Leave a Comment

The entire UK population and every visitor to Britain should be put on the national DNA database, Lord Justice Sedley said today.

See the full article in The Guardian here.

See precis and comment here.

The argument is that, as a country, we have DNA records on file for many people, but these have been collected by the police when investigating crimes. In order to make the system fair and to extend the assistance which DNA records provide in fighting crime, we should have a database of everyone in the country, both residents and visitors.

Britain already has the largest DNA database of any country in the world, along, incidentally, with the largest number of CCTV or ’spy’ cameras of any country on earth.

This is a logical extension of the government’s plan to have compulsory national identity cards, which will carry biometric information about the person to whom the card applies.

So, is it the case that we are living in dangerous times and in order for both the public and state to be protected, we should all, as individuals, be prepared to cede some liberties in order to achieve greater security?

Does the use of science, technology and linking each person to a vast database make us safer, or is it simply the beginning of state sponsored repression?


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: Liberty | Law | State

The High Cost of Success

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Economics | 33 Comments

On September 2, 2007 Jeremy Seabrook wrote an article in the Guardian entitled “A Rich Man’s World”.

It put forward the idea that the perpetual drive for economic success within a substantially unregulated framework, where governments act as unquestioning facilitators for business interests is actually the cause of many ills in society. By pursuing economic goals under the misapprehension that they automatically lead to social benefits, governments and business are colluding to make the lives of the people who become the servants and supplicants of the money machine worthless and futile.

Clearly, there can be no expectation that either governments or businesses will see the problems they are creating, as they are both entwined within the same spiral of damaging cause and effect.

It therefore becomes necessary for people to start making plans for how to correct the problem being created and lead the culprits of government and business onto a more virtuous path.

So, is the proposition true and what is to be done?


Please remember to look in the "Recently Written" column for new debates. Feel free to start new debates by using the "Contact" page.

Go to the ideas section where there is further opportunity to get into tussles with others.

Tags: success | failure