As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make. This is a sampling of what one finds:

* Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren.
* Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.
* Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
* Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

There are some lovely photos accompanying the article, including one showing what a darkened street in Colorado looks like as a result of not being able to afford street lights. Read the article to revel in the details of this widespread misery. Meanwhile, the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest — the ones who caused these problems in the first place — continues to thrive. Let’s recall what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson said last year in The Atlantic about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues:

‘Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or — here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique — the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk — at least until the riots grow too large’.

The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.

UPDATE: It’s probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning: “Back to Stone Age” — which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.”

Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights – or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State – that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

A mate of mine now lives in Thailand and as you probably know, there are escalating riots as the ex prime minister has had $2.7 billion frozen; obviously he has heaps more to pay the massive number of people and this is an indication of how the rich – be they corporate or political – are trying to make the people pay for their opulent lifestyles.

Migration by one people into another’s country is as old as man; resources are exploited and when the carcass is stripped, the people are left to fight over scraps while the wealthy – with well funded security / police / army jostle to be the big fish in a now little sea. Problem is, there are fewer places to run.

In America the people are starting to get the idea that all is not right despite what Wall Street might try to portray, it’s like going to the movies, a stupefying campaign run to hypnotize the masses. Spain has its financial problems, as have Ireland and Iceland, but Greece is the real hot bed at present.  Goldman Sachs is rumoured to be behind the financial figures that saw Greece enter the EU and now the wheels are falling off and unlike the American Lemmings, the Greeks will not cop it.

One must wonder how well it is going for most EU members, considering the French are likewise taking action at the loss of jobs. Britain is the next domino and they too share a diverse and often marginalised populace. Will it escalate like Greece, where 3 people were killed after protesters set fire to a bank?  The real problem is that if they were homeless people and the blood letting begins, death starts having less relevance than the cause, and when that happens, all bets – for civil exchanges – will be off. Austerity measures by government are usually the result of too much borrowings by said government and corporations via banks who keep stirring the pot so nobody knows what’s cooking.

World news prepares a mindset in people in what to do if their government acts irresponsibly (which is pretty much 97% of the time). Corporate government is all about accessing public funds to provide a living, but thats never enough, the standard goes higher, family and friends are invited to quaff at the trough and they want more and introduce their friends. So watching the Greeks kick government and corporate arse will be educational even though unintended.

As people lose jobs and their standard of living is reduced – to keep the Goldman Sachs and other bankers in bullion – they have little else to but take to the streets; the commercial building set on fire saw tens of thousands of Greeks marching to parliament, which intends deep budget cuts in return for billions of euros in EU/IMF aid, but what for … just to continue the charade of growth ?

Will whomever takes over from Gordon Brown (England) end up faced with what the Greek socialist government (that came into power in October last year) end has to contend with and the answer is yes. In Greece, hundreds of striking demonstrators pelted police with rocks, chunks of marble and bottles, set rubbish bins on fire and tried repeatedly to storm parliament, shortly before lawmakers began a debate on the belt-tightening measures.  The protesters were repelled by police in full riot gear hurling repeated rounds of tear gas and flash bombs, and smoke wafted through blocks of central Athens.

Masked youths threw petrol bombs, broke shop windows and shouted “Murderers” and “Burn the parliament”, in a sign of swelling public anger at the government’s plans for painful wage and pension cutbacks as a huge plume of dark grey smoke rose over the central Stadiou Avenue where the two-storey commercial building, which houses a branch of the Marfin bank, was burning. Officials said two other buildings in the centre of the capital had been set on fire during the protest.

So as parts of the UK’s air travel is restricted by volcano ash, in Greece aviation workers are staging their third joint strike this year, grounding flights, shutting shops and bringing public transport to a standstill.  The Greek government is chasing 30 billion Euros in new savings, so there will be deep cuts in wages and pensions and a rise in value-added tax (VAT / GST).

Whilst many of us worry about the planet we live on and our impact from an environmental perspective, we should also consider that making significant changes to the Earth through mining and using resources also plays a part in the ripple effect.

Many locals in Iceland believe the Katla Volcano, which is near Eyjafjallajokull volcano could erupt in the next week or so.

Because there is no reliable forecasting or ‘accurate data’ to project eruptions, people try to join the dots, using past occurrences and their own theories (which usually are stated after the fact or projections are made each way to cover the bases), so the following are various views.

* Eruptions and ash disturbance from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano might be waking up its neighbor, Katla (activity at Katla has risen 200% in the last two days), which could be globally devastating. Geophysicists at Iceland’s Institute of Earth Sciences call Katla a vicious volcano that will be locally and globally damaging. Katla’s last eruption started in 1821 along side an eruption at Eyjafjallajokull (Katla has a pattern of erupting in sequence with Eyjafjallajokull).

However, Katla is a) different as it is much larger and it will make the present eruptions in Iceland look mild in comparison; b) despite being nearby, is not on the same local magma system that another two and c) being under a larger ice cap is more dangerous with a magma chamber 100 times larger. Eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland. and it isn’t even the only active volcano right now.

With the impacts of ash affecting air traffic and subsequent food shortages, perhaps we humans may undergo some behavioural changes; claims that the use of trains, ferries and video conferencing has skyrocketed as planes have been grounded. What happens to our emission targets, do we factor in natural and reduce ours further; will government/s finally see the need for major action on climate change, as pressure from people and businesses, and a recognition of the effect on economic development opportunities ?

The grounding of over 63,000 flights (over four days) has ‘saved’ 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than the annual emissions of >many developing countries. Aviation is responsible for about 2% of global emissions of CO2 but accounts for a much higher proportion of emissions in European nations. Aircraft are responsible for more than 6% of Britain’s CO2 emissions. On a normal day of 28,000 flights in European airspace, about
560,000 tonnes of CO2 is emitted.

* A post on another forum was this ‘What I find interesting is my pet hobby following the coronal mass ejections and solar flares NOW striking the earth after a quiet time cycle of 11 years. When these massive pressure waves strike the earth they cause stress on the tectonic plates and you get earthquakes and volcanos. If this volcano blows as predicted you could get another mini ice age as we did in the 1600s. Maybe some major cauldara like Yellowstone will blow and North America will disappear. Anyway if the Iceland volcano blows as expected you could see a devastation of northern Europe and of course global economy would go down the tubes too’.

Dave Kimble refuted this ‘prophecy’ by saying ‘I would have thought that if there was a relationship between solar flares (which are easily measured) and earthquakes, it would have been discovered ages ago and we would have heard about it. Since the numbers of flares go through cycles, the earthquakes would go through cycles too.
The Sun and Moon gravitational fields interacting produce tides which are up to +/- 2 metres in the open ocean and I think +/- 75 mm on the “solid” ocean floor, so you would expect earthquakes to occur more at full and new moon. But according to USGS they don’t. Yes, there are examples that do, but they are self-selected data and not statistically valid. I think the solar flare relationship would be the same.’

* Another post titled ‘Mashers Fault and the Seismicity Anticipated to be Stimulated by the Proposed Open Pit Mine at Olympic Dam’ points to human intereference at …
http://cranswick.net/MashersSeismicityAnticipatedOlympicDam/

Now we have an actual event, the magnitude 5.2 20APR2010 Kalgoorlie Earthquake http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2010vhab.php,
that may provide further evidence for the potential of open pit mines in intraplate environments to induce/trigger significant seismicity. As the the global economy digs itself deeper into deeper holes in the fruitless pursuit of happiness, we can expect that more earthquakes will be stimulated, i.e., induce/triggered.

With earthquakes occurring more around the world, maybe the Americans could (be stupid enough to) try and fix the problem like their movie set in California where they fixed the threat of The Big One by letting off 4 nukes in holes drilled into the fault line – it welded the crack together.

Maybe Iceland could give that a shot or have the Americans do (thought it would probably cost them more than they currently owe); Iceland is in so much in debt anyway it might be easier to walk away and meld into the populace of Norway.

So what is leading this and similar trends and sees the population barrow pushed around so enthusiastically ?

Well I will tell you … in my opinion, corporations have fully extended themselves and desperately need more consumers to meet their profit/sales projections.

Is it just happening here or is it elsewhere ?

It’s happening everywhere.

We main-stream consumers have borrowed all we can and want to borrow and corporations have prodded local, state and federal governments into spending on higher profit margin capital infrastructures and they are geared to build more, trouble is, everywhere around the world things are slowing down as money availability shrinks. But its more than just shrink, what is happening is people are taking stock of the situation and considering their exposure; afterall, all the banks around the world have lost trillions of $ and governments around the world have – at the direction of the banks to make the public feel secure – underwritten the banks losses and effectively moved them from corporate debt to public debt, by making the governments give/lend/guarantee their performance.

But governments – afterall – get their money the same place the bankls do, from the people; problem is though, if the people don’t have the money, where does it come from ? We know that various States in the USA have started issuing IOU’s as there is no money to pay out and revenue (from taxes, land taxes, sales, rates etc) has dropped. So the game is up, people want to see what is what and they recognize that much of the development going on around them is just a facade, an illusion for them to believe its business as usual and they can let go of their money as more is in the pipeline; trouble is, there is not.

Apart from the debacle of the stimulus for insulation and school development programs in Australia, a quick look around the world will quickly reveal that problems are not an aberration but the norm.  America has been borrowing money from the future for years and long been paying interest from recent investments in their government bonds; when will the ‘investors’ wake up or are they also part of the great scam ? We know the UK is nigh on broke, so how can they afford to keep buying USA bonds ?

Last week, USA Treasury bond auctions were poorly received, an indication there is too much debt and very little fiscal restraint. Bob Froelich (senior managing director at The Hartford in Simsbury, Conn) suggests ’this is the last leg of money coming off the sidelines, the final rotation into the bond market; this is the beginning of the end; the bond market is a bubble and it’s getting ready to burst’.

Ireland’s ‘Worst Fears Surpassed’ as Ireland’s banks may need at least 31.8 billion Euros in new capital after a real- estate slump left them crippled by mounting bad loans. on the first block of loans it is buying from lenders, and the financial regulator set new capital targets.

Junk bond sales have surged to records every month since December as companies contend with “wall of maturity” over the next few years, prompting a rush to refinance debt ahead of the quickly approaching repayment deadlines. In February, U.S. high-yield bond sales posted their busiest month on record, with $15.8 billion of new issuance, strategists said. For bankrupt companies, “high-yield is a real option,” said Mark Podgainy, senior director in the New York office of Getzler Henrich & Associates. “How long will the market be favorable for that to take place? For this year, as long as Fed keeps rates low.”

Bank of Spain Sees Lower GDP, Bigger Budget Gap Than Government
Spain’s economy will grow half as much as the government forecasts next year, making the deficit- cutting process slower than the Finance Ministry expects, the Bank of Spain said. Spain’s gross domestic product will grow 0.8 percent next year, the Bank of Spain said in its monthly bulletin in Madrid today. That compares with a government forecast of 1.8 percent.

New York Suspends Construction Projects In Fiscal Crisis
Gov. David Paterson is suspending hundreds of current and new construction projects because of New York’s budget woes, including a highway to Fort Drum and a major interchange on Long Island. Paterson administration officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that all projects not paid for by federal economic stimulus funds will be delayed until the Legislature and the governor agree on a 2010-11 budget or emergency funding.

Portuguese Central Bank Almost Halves Growth Forecasts
The Portuguese economy, facing a debt crisis closely watched by financial markets, is set to grow by 0.4 percent this year the central bank said on Tuesday, almost halving an earlier estimate. The bank, which had forecast growth of 0.7 percent previously, said the recovery could be held back particularly by proposed budget cuts.

Rescue Fears Trigger Greek Bond Sell-Off
Yields on Monday’s €5bn syndicated bond rose more than a quarter of a percentage point to 6.30 per cent, a big sell-off for a new issue. Yields have an inverse relation with prices. The bond was trading 3.5 percentage points over German Bunds which is close to a record premium for Greek bonds. Greece’s unexpected sale of 12-year bonds – a re-opening of an earlier issue due to mature in 2022 – raised only €390m, less than the sale’s €1bn upper limit.

Chavez Cash Crunch Looms on Oil, Morgan Stanley Says Venezuela now faces the risk that oil prices won’t rise enough in coming years to offset declines in production, forcing it to use savings to fund spending, the report said. “Venezuela may be hard pressed to avoid its day of reckoning,” analysts Giuliana Pardelli and Daniel Volberg said.

From Bucolic Bliss To ‘Gated Ghetto’ (Hemet, CA)
They bought their 5,000-square-foot house for $440,000 in 2006. It’s probably worth about $170,000 now….. There are dozens of places like Willowalk, and they are turning into America’s newest slums, says Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. With home values at a fraction of their peak, he said, it no longer makes sense to live so far from the commercial centers where jobs are concentrated.

France’s budget deficit hits record high
“France’s public deficit reached 7.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009, its highest level ever and more than twice the maximum agreed for members of the European Union. The French budget deficit hit 144.8 billion euros last year, according to figures released by national statistics office Insee on Wednesday.
The increase soared to 80.1 billion euros more than 2008′s.
Insee attributes France’s growing deficit to a sharp drop in government revenues and a simultaneous increase in public spending.
Over the same period, France’s public debt rose to 1.489 trillion euros or 77.6 per cent of GDP, up from 67.5 per cent in 2008.
Insee forecasts that debt will increase again in 2010, reaching 83.2 per cent of GDP this year and 87.1 per cent in 2012. Debt levels will not begin to fall until 2013, according to the statistics office.”

Strapped Cities Struggling to Fund Water Treatment Upgrades
“There are 16,000 publicly owned wastewater treatment plants in the United States that operate 100,000 major pumping stations, 600,000 miles of sanitary sewers and 200,000 miles of storm sewers, according to U.S. EPA. That system received a grade of D- from the American Society of Civil Engineers in its latest “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” The society noted that billions of gallons of untreated wastewater is discharged each year because of lagging investments.
Hornback said many communities would be facing a difficult challenge even if the economy were more robust. Communities historically “undervalue” their water and sewer services, charging users less than is needed to keep the systems operating to modern standards.  “The pipes in the ground are in some cases over 100 years old,” he said.”
“The conference report, written by senior adviser Richard Anderson, estimates that local governments will have to spend between $2.5 trillion and $4.8 trillion over the next 20 years to fulfill those demands for improved water and sewer systems.
There is a “vague and false confidence among Congress that they have already addressed the issue by granting $60 billion to cities over two decades ago to build water infrastructure when the cost in a single year (2008) is over $40 billion in capital investments and another $50 billion for operations and maintenance,” Anderson wrote. “A more thorough understanding of how much is spent on public water and wastewater is a necessary first step in establishing a framework for a National Strategy.”"

[How will our capital cities infrastructure fare ?]

USA States Are Insolvent; Soon They May Be Illiquid (Blog)
“The chart below shows three types of debt:
• Explicit state borrowing, in the form of general obligations bonds and other debt.
• The market value of unfunded state employee pension obligations; this is generally several times higher than the value states themselves acknowledge.
• States’ shares of the total federal debt: these are calculated by assuming that states bear the federal debt in the same proportion to which they pay overall federal income taxes, such that high income taxes will tend to carry proportionately more than low-income states.”

“All these debts are expressed as a percentage of state gross domestic product, as a way of showing each state’s ability to service the debt.
When combined, the picture is grim. The average state has a combined debt of 104 percent of GDP, with the 10 worst states each having total debts exceeding 128 percent of GDP. That’s around where Greece was when the music stopped.
What separates states, and the United States in general, from Greece is that while we clearly have a solvency problem—our total liabilities far exceed our total assets—we don’t yet have a liquidity problem, where we can’t produce the dollars today needed to fund current obligations. But that state of affairs won’t go on forever. As the Times story notes, states like California are speeding up tax collections and delaying payments in order to keep current on their payments. And this won’t necessarily get easier over time.
While I’m an optimist by nature, it’s getting harder and harder to see a smooth transition out of these problems.”

Japan Bankruptcies Set for Eight-Year High After JAL Collapse

China’s Stocks Fall, Worst Quarter Since Entering Bear Market

State, local pension plans dropped $179 billion even before markets crashed

Croatia’s public debt reaches record-breaking level

Municipal debt set to double in five years (Finland)

German Banks May Face Losses on Southern Europe

My tip is be wary of any company offering shares in the foreseable future and or any government making any organization ’public’ (how can the public own something and then be sold shares – a la Telstra – in the same company ?)

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd.

I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward.
They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent.
They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable.
They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity.

The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die. The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation.

There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right.
Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people.
If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.
“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government.

The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced.

Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead-RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood. © 2010 TruthDig.com

Nations go crazy. It’s terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.

China had a psychotic break in the 1960s in its “cultural revolution,” provoked by the mad neo-emperor Mao. He sent cadres of Chinese baby boomer youths rampaging across the land, turned every institution upside down and let millions starve. Mao’s China lacked the ability then to export this mischief, but enough of his own people suffered.

Cambodia was the next humdinger of a national nervous breakdown when the Paris-educated classic marxist Pol Pot decided to make the world’s biggest omelette by cracking a million eggs. He took everybody wearing eyeglasses, everybody who appeared to have a thought in his or her head, and sent them out to the bush to be worked to death, or shot in ditches, or disposed of otherwise. The mounds of skulls remain to tell the tale.

Lately we’ve had the Hutu-Tutsi genocides in Rwanda, the craziness in former Yugoslavia, the cruelty of Darfur, the international suicide-bomber craze (including today’s blasts in Moscow). Surely, I’ve left a few out… but these are minor episodes compared to what be coming next. Am I the only one who senses it might be America’s turn to go nuts? I don’t mean a family squabble, like the Boomer-Hippie-Vietnam uproar that was essentially an adolescent rebellion against bad parenting in the national household. I mean a genuine descent into madness, with the very high probability of persecution, violence, murder, and mayhem — all more or less sponsored by various authorities and institutions.

The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking such a dangerous episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful practical problems and challenges. They’re in the process, right now, of transforming themselves from the party of “no” to the party of no decency, no common sense, no ideas, no conception of the public interest and no respect for the traditions that they pretend to stand for, like due process of law. In the days since the passage of health care reform, they’ve gone as far as inciting mobs to violence against their fellow congressmen and senators — bricks thrown through windows, death threats made, coffins placed in the yards of their adversaries. One day soon, somebody with a gun or an explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice himself to become the Tea Party’s first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall in some blue district.

Republican leaders’ avidity to ally themselves with the followers of hate-monger entertainers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and the Fox News gang is only the beginning of the process that will lead to a political convulsion possibly worse than the one that started at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, 1861. If it comes, it will certainly be a far more incoherent conflict. The guerilla forces of the radical right will not know whether they are fighting for WalMart, or the Financial Services arm of General Electric, or against abortions, or for bigger and better freeways, or the rights of thoracic surgeons to drive families into bankruptcy, or against the idea of climate change, or evolution, or Jews-in-the-media, or their neighbors having something they feel envious about….

In the background, of course, is an economy just barely holding together with political baling wire and duct tape. It has very poor prospects for continuing in the way it was designed to run, on cheap oil and revolving debt. The upshot is an economy now destined for permanent contraction, and nobody has a plan for managing that contraction — which will include awful failures in food production, in disintegrating water systems, electric grids, roadway systems, schools… really anything that requires ongoing public investment. It includes a financial system that cannot come up with capital deployable for productive purpose, or currencies that can be relied on to hold value, or markets that function without interference.

For its part, the Democratic Party has done a poor job of clearly articulating the realities of these things, and in actions like bailouts they’ve given the false impression that the nation can somehow engineer a return to the reckless hedonism of the late 20th century. My guess is that the situation is so desperate now that President Obama and his supporters can’t risk telling the truth about the comprehensive contraction we face. The health care reform act was a tortured way of dealing with some of this indirectly. It will absolutely lead to a kind of health care “rationing,” but rationing is unavoidable in an economy where there is less of everything that people need, and fewer resources to spread around.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Republicans would prefer to see the rationing accomplished by money-grubbing health insurance companies denying coverage to policy-holders who get sick, or by the bankrupting of households (i.e. losers who deserve to die anyway), while the Democrats want to at least try to distribute what we can a little more fairly. The larger failure of both factions to emulate better systems running in sister societies like Canada and France is something that history will judge.

I was in favor of the health care reform act for the reason of that basic difference between the Right and the Left. For all its flaws — and perhaps even the prospect that we are too far gone in national bankruptcy to ever get all its provisions running — I believe it was necessary for our national morale to pass the bill, to prove that we could do something besides remain stuck in paralysis and bickering indefinitely. And it was necessary to smack down the Party of Cruelty, to inform ourselves that we are not quite ready to go completely crazy.

Whatever his flaws, omissions, and failures, I’m impressed with President Obama’s ability to conduct himself like an adult, like a good father, in the face of the most unseemly provocations by his red-faced adversaries John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and all the other apoplectic opportunists trying so desperately to turn the United States into a high-definition Jesus tele-theocracy of Perpetual NASCAR. As economic conditions worsen — I believe they will — I hope Mr. Obama can discipline these maniacs. I would like to see him start by instructing his attorney general to look into the connection between Republican officials (including staff members) and the threats of violence and murder that were made last week around the country.

Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said – forty three years ago next month – that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.  At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.  Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000. At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.  [Australian governments have long benefited corporate sponsors and followed policy agendas set by big business; banks - having lost millions in poor investment strategies - would gladly bankrupt  any individual for making those same investments, yet ran to the government for financial backing; the baby bonus and increased immigration is purely about more consumers rather than providing for the retiring aged]

Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions; there are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.  [How many lobbyists and advisers wisper in the ear of the State and Federal governments to push their corporate profit making plans ?]

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.  The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture. At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage (sic) but also to be killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world’s police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world – much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela – combined. The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.  The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses. Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

It is time.   Bill Quigley

Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley77@gmail.com

Funny thing is though, with all this continued investment, growth and politicians talking up the ‘recovery’ around the world … world trade actually fell by 12% last year, the biggest drop since the Second World War according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

America has been fudging the figures for so long, even they don’t know where fact ends and fiction starts, but in Australia we know the federal government has been talking up the economy and the Reserve Bank has been pretending that that don’t have the same agenda (that they are poles apart) but raising interest rates ‘because of economic growth, when all along they – and we - know that it has been money the federal government has been borrowing and pumping into the system to make it appear  their is growth; that is barely 0.2% growth is ‘growth.

But there figures you just can’t fudge and the level of trade between nations – which had been expected to decline by 10% in 2009 – has had a sharp fall says Pascal Lamy (the Director-General) of the WTO.

Negotiations which began in 2001 and currently at a standstill, were aimed at removing barriers to trade for poor nations by striking a deal that would cut agriculture subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods.

These talks have been hampered by disagreements on how much America and Europe should reduce farm aid and the extent to which developing countries such as India and China should lower tariffs.

The German economy (the biggest in Europe), had stagnated in the fourth quarter of last year after 0.7 per cent growth in GDP between July and September, adding further pressure to the Euro, which has been battered by recent weeks over Greece’s ability to reduce its debt. It has also dimmed hopes that Germany might be able to bail out Greece, as Germany’s public deficit was revised upwards to €79.3 billion / 3.3% of GDP.  Under the European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact, EU members are supposed to run deficits no larger than 3% of GDP and work towards a balance or even a surplus in times of economic growth.

While the Euro has fallen 10% against the USA$ since the end of November 2009 amid growing worries about the debt problems of Greece and other highly indebted eurozone countries such as Portugal and Spain, one must wonder how and why every country’s debt is growing, yet they all appear to have such viable company value / returns – reflected in share values – yet business everywhere is depressed and even more worrying is the fact that the USA$ is really worth far less than the value accorded it by exchange rates.  As I have said previously, if the Americans thought they could borrow money endlessly and print money faster than Zimbabwe to write down the value of their debt, is this how the finance ministers around the world intend to counter this move, by devaluing their own currencies … if other countries around the world have refused or been unable to repay monies borrowed via the IMF and World Bank and these debts have been written off, why not the USA ?

Who said dishonesty doesn’t pay?

Nature, 426-427 (28 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463426a; Published online 27 January 2010 titled ‘Research on global sun block needed now’ by David W. Keith1, Edward Parson2 & M. Granger Morgan3

Geoengineering studies of solar-radiation management should begin urgently, argue David W. Keith, Edward Parson and M. Granger Morgan — before a rogue state (USA ?) decides to act alone.

Summary

Field testing is required to understand the risks of solar-radiation management (SRM)

Linked activities must create norms and understanding for international governance of SRM

If SRM is unworkable, the sooner we know, the less moral hazard it poses. The idea of deliberately manipulating Earth’s energy balance to offset human-driven climate change strikes many as dangerous hubris.

Solar-radiation management (SRM), a proposed form of geoengineering, aims to reduce Earth’s absorption of solar energy by, for example, adding light-scattering aerosols to the upper atmosphere or increasing the lifetime and reflectivity of low-altitude clouds. Many scientists have argued against research on SRM, saying that developing the capability to perform such tasks will reduce the political will to lower greenhouse-gas emissions. We think that the risks of not doing research outweigh the risks of doing it. SRM may be the only human response that can fend off rapid and high-consequence climate impacts. Furthermore, the potential of unilateral deployment of SRM poses environmental and geopolitical risks that can be managed best by developing widely shared knowledge, risk assessment and norms of governance.

SRM has three essential characteristics: it is cheap, fast and imperfect. Long-established estimates show that SRM could offset this century’s global average temperature rise at least 100 times more cheaply than emissions cuts. A few grams of sulphate particles in the stratosphere could offset the radiative forcing of a tonne of atmospheric carbon dioxide. At about US$1,000 a tonne for aerosol delivery, that adds up to just billions of dollars per year. This low price tag is attractive, but it raises the risks of single groups acting alone, and of facile cheerleading that could promote exclusive reliance on SRM.

Solar-radiation management has three essential characteristics: it is cheap, fast and imperfect. RM could alter the global climate within months — as suggested by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which cooled the globe about 0.5 °C in less than a year by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. In contrast, because of the carbon cycle’s inertia, even a massive programme of emission cuts or CO2 removal will take many decades to slow global warming discernibly. SRM’s speed provides strong grounds to pursue it as a hedge against the real but unlikely possibility that climate is much more sensitive than expected to rising levels of greenhouse gases, or against extreme impacts such as major ice-sheet collapse. Because of the high level of uncertainty, even cutting emissions by an order of magnitude cannot ensure that climate effects will be held at acceptable levels.

These qualities make SRM a promising tool against climate change. But it is vital to remember that a world cooled by managing sunlight will not be the same as one cooled by lowering emissions. An SRM-cooled world would have less precipitation and less evaporation. Some areas would be more protected than others from temperature changes, creating local ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. SRM could conceivably weaken monsoon rains and winds. It would not combat ocean acidification or other CO2-driven ecosystem changes, and it would introduce other environmental risks such as delaying the recovery of the ozone hole. Initial studies1 suggest that the known risks are small, but unanticipated risks remain a serious underlying concern. If the world relies solely on SRM to limit warming, these problems will eventually pose risks as large as those from uncontrolled emissions.

To posit a binary choice between SRM and cutting emissions creates a false and dangerous dichotomy — like previous suggestions of a binary choice between mitigation and adaptation. A prudent climate strategy requires adaptation and deep cuts in global emissions. We must develop the capability to do SRM in a manner that complements such cuts, while managing the associated environmental and political risks.

The path through this thicket involves two activities that must both begin immediately: a carefully designed, incremental, transparent and international programme of SRM research; and linked activities to create norms and understanding for international governance of SRM

Research so far has consisted largely of a handful of climate-model studies, using very simple parameterization of aerosol microphysics. More complex models should be developed, and linked to global climate models. Field tests will be needed, such as generating and tracking stratospheric aerosols to block sunlight, and dispersing sea-salt aerosols to brighten marine clouds. Such tests can be small: releasing tonnes, not megatonnes, of material.

Dearth of data

Decades of upper-atmosphere research — such as that done to investigate the effect of supersonic passenger aircraft — has produced a mass of relevant science. But, except for a recent, small Russian test, there have been no field tests of SRM. Until now, there has been essentially no government research funding available for SRM anywhere in the world; although a few programmes for geoengineering have begun in the past few months. The environmental hazards of SRM cannot be assessed without knowing the specific techniques that might be used, and it is impossible to identify and develop techniques without field testing.

It is often assumed, for example, that a suitable distribution of stratospheric sulphate aerosols can be produced by releasing sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere. In fact, new simulations2 of aerosol physics suggest that the resultant aerosol size distribution would be skewed to large particles that are relatively ineffective. Several aerosol compositions and delivery methods may offer a way around this problem, but choosing between them and quantifying their environmental effects will require in-situ testing. NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude research plane might be used to release aerosols into the stratosphere, and to fly through the plume to assess the effects. Such tests take years to plan and cost millions of dollars.

It would be reckless to conduct the first large-scale SRM tests in an emergency. Experiments should expand gradually to scales big enough to produce barely detectable climate effects and reveal unexpected problems, yet small enough (of the order of hundreds of kilotonnes) to limit risks. The ability to detect the climatic response to SRM grows with the test’s duration, so starting sooner reduces the scale of experiments needed to give detectable results by any future date — say by 2030. A later start delays when results will be known, or requires a bigger intervention to detect the response (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Turning down the heat.

A model3 shows how quickly solar-radiation management (SRM) might alter global temperature, and how conditions might rebound after the geoengineering stops.

High resolution image and legend (57K)

SRM research should not be entrusted exclusively to either its proponents or its adversaries. Instead, there may be value in a ‘blue team/red team’ method, in which one team is charged to propose an approach that is as effective and low-risk as possible, and the other works to identify all the ways in which it can fail. Such an adversarial approach may increase the quality and utility of information available to future decision-makers, who might have to decide on SRM deployment in conditions of urgency or even panic. An international research budget growing from about $10 million to $1 billion annually over this decade would probably be sufficient to build the capability to deploy SRM and greatly improve the understanding of its risks.

It is a healthy sign that a common first response to geoengineering is revulsion.

Global governance

Building responsibly towards future SRM capability will also require surmounting new problems of international governance. These are quite unlike the problems of emissions governance, in which the main challenge is motivating contributions to a costly shared goal. For SRM, the main problem will be establishing legitimate collective control over an activity that some might seek to do unilaterally. Such a unilateral challenge could arise in many forms and from many quarters. At one extreme, a state might decide that avoiding the effects of climate change on its people takes precedence over the environmental concerns of SRM and begin injecting sulphur into the stratosphere, with no prior risk assessment or international consultation. If this were a small state, it could be quickly stopped by the intervention of larger nations. If it were a major state, that might not be possible.

Alternatively, a nation might grow frustrated at the pace of international cooperation and establish a national programme of gradually expanding research and field tests. This might be linked to a distinguished international advisory board, including leading scientists and retired politicians of global stature. It is plausible that, after exhausting other avenues to limit climate risks, such a nation might decide to begin a gradual, well-monitored programme of SRM deployment, even without any international agreement on its regulation. In this case, one nation — which need not be a large and rich industrialized country — would effectively seize the initiative on global climate, making it extremely difficult for other powers to restrain it.

No existing treaty or institution is well suited to SRM governance. Given current uncertainties, immediate negotiation of a treaty is probably not advisable. Hasty pursuit of international regulation would risk locking in commitments that might soon be seen as wrong-headed, such as a total ban on research or testing, or burdensome vetting of even innocuous research projects.

A better approach would be to build international cooperation and norms from the bottom up, as knowledge and experience develop — as happened, for example, with the landmine treaty, which emerged from action by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A first step might be a transparent, loosely coordinated international programme supporting research and risk assessments by multiple independent teams. Simultaneously, informal consultations on risk assessment, acceptability, regulation and governance could engage broad groups of experts and stakeholders such as former government officials and NGO leaders. Iterative links between emerging governance and ongoing scientific and technical research would be the core of this bottom-up approach.

Opinions about SRM are changing rapidly. Only a few years ago, many scientists opposed open discussion of the topic. Many now support model-based research, but field testing of the sort we advocate here is contentious and will probably grow more so. The main argument against SRM research is that it would undermine the already-inadequate resolve to cut emissions. We are keenly aware of this ‘moral hazard’, but sceptical that suppressing SRM research would in fact raise commitment to mitigation.

Indeed, with the possibility of SRM now widely recognized, failing to subject it to serious research and risk assessment may well pose the greater threat to mitigation efforts, by allowing implicit reliance on SRM without scrutiny of its actual requirements, limitations and risks. If SRM proves to be unworkable or poses unacceptable risks, the sooner we know this, the less of a moral hazard it poses; if it is effective, we gain a useful additional tool to limit climate damages.

Further reading

Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty (Royal Society, 2009); available at http://royalsociety.org/geoengineeringclimate.

Blackstock, J. J. et al. Climate Engineering Responses to Climate Emergencies (Novim, 2009); available at http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.5140.pdf.

Izrael, Y. A. et al. Russian Meteorology and Hydrology 34, 265–273 (2009).

Victor, D. G., Granger Morgan, M., Apt, J., Steinbruner, J. & Ricke, K. Foreign Affairs 88, 64–76 (2009).

Top of pageReferences

Tilmes, S., Garcia, R. R., Kinnison, D. E., Gettelman, A. & Rasch, P. J. J.
Geophys. Res. 114, D12305 (2009). | Article | ChemPort |
Heckendorn, P. et al. Environ. Res. Lett. 4, 045108 (2009). | Article |
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Robock, A., Oman, L. & Stenchikov, G. J. Geophys. Res. 113, D16101 (2008). |
Article | ChemPort |

Top of pageDavid W. Keith is director of the energy and environmental
systems group at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4,
Canada. He has commercial interests in a carbon dioxide extraction
technology and does academic research on SRM.
Email: keith@ucalgary.ca
Edward Parson is professor of law and natural resources and environment at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1215, USA.
M. Granger Morgan is head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy
at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.

As banks around the world showed, Gordon Gecko was their idol and no avenue of extracting $’s from anyone anywhere, from local governments, the retired and pension funds put there for those who – after a life-time’s work – could live a comfortable life.

Stupidly, these bankers and other corporate heavyweights and their minions aka politicians and senior bureaucrats didn’t pay attention to other regions / countries that had likewise been stripped bare; the people fought back, firstly by civil disobedience, then sabotaging, then whats good for the goose is good for the gander stealing things ‘back’ and then threats, then kidnapping and taking the law into their own hands and even murder.
We have entire social structures that ‘live in the future’; by this I mean we are encouraged to borrow from a better future to enjoy some of it now and we are encouraged to put money aside for the future which in all probability will never come. The number of places you can visit in ‘its natural state’ are few and far between; and already over-populated regions found anywhere around the world show that high-rise living is the norm.      

The more visible – plane cash compared to a bus crash is – collapse is the USA and Japan is also showing signs of falling over as is Britain, but the bus crash and ripple effect on the EU is Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, which has the ability to raise doubt about the Euro, by putting European institutional arrangements on the line.

At the January 18, 2009, the Eurozone finance ministers kept pressure on Greece to fulfill its commitment to cut its budget deficit below 3% of GDP by 2012 which is estimated at close to 13% of GDP in 2009. Because the Eurozone is a monetary union with a no-bail-out clause, rather than a political or fiscal union with the associated fiscal federalism, budget cuts to contain the explosion of Greek public debt are urgently needed. In 2010, a sustainable fiscal adjustment must be delivered to restore policy credibility, market confidence and ECB/EU member-state solidarity. The problem is, the Greek government – like every other government around the world in self-protection mode – knows that if the populace knows its living beyond its means and has to tighten its belt, the depth of the living by borrowing from the future will  will come as a massive shock; and remember that even in this modern day, piracy is alive and well in Greek waters.

Three coinciding events have brought this to a head, the shortage of funds caused by the Dubai default, a common systemic risk factor and a severe cyclical and structural deterioration in public finances. Greece faces a Hobson’s Choice: whether to accept social pain with financial and economic stability, or instability.

Whatever it chooses, Greece will face economic pain and difficult socio-political fallout and  even inciting social unrest. If the debt becomes unfinanceable in the primary market or if Greece elects to exit the euro and devalue and redenominate its liabilities (a la Argentina), this could render its banking system insolvent and tip it into economic and financial isolation and decline, also with dire socio-political consequences.

As Greece is not an isolated island, disenfranchised Greek nationals and immigrants will look further afield, placing more stress on surrounding countries in not too dissimilar positions.