•TPC•

By Stephen Lendman

6/6/07

Near the end of WW II, Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi King ibn Saud on the USS Quincy. It began a six decade relationship guaranteeing US access to what his State Department called a “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history” - the region’s oil and huge amount of it in Saudi Arabia. Today, the Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proved oil reserves (around 675 billion barrels) and the Caspian basin an estimated 270 billion barrels more plus one-eighth of the world’s natural gas reserves. It explains a lot about why we’re at war with Iraq and Afghanistan and plan maintaining control over both countries. We want a permanent military presence in them aimed at controlling both regions’ proved energy reserves with puppet regimes, masquerading as democracies, beholden to Washington as client states. They’re in place to observe what their ousted predecessors ignored: the rules of imperial management, especially Rule One - we’re boss and what we say goes.

The Bush administration is “boss” writ large. It intends ruling the world by force, saying so in its National Security Strategy (NSS) in 2002, then updated in even stronger terms in 2006. It plainly states our newly claimed sovereign right allowed no other country - the right to wage preventive wars against perceived threats or any nations daring to challenge our status as lord and master of the universe. Key to the strategy is controlling the world’s energy reserves starting with the Middle East and Central Asia’s vast amount outside Russia and China with enough military strength to control their own, at least for now. These resources give us veto power over which nations will or won’t get them and assures Big Oil gets the lion’s share of the profits.

In Iraq, the new “Hydrocarbon Law,” if it passes the puppet parliament, is a shameless scheme to rape and plunder the country’s oil treasure. It’s a blueprint for privatization giving foreign investors (meaning US and UK mainly) a bonanza of resources, leaving Iraqis a sliver for themselves. Its complex provisions give the Iraqi National Oil Company exclusive control of just 17 of the country’s 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered deposits set aside for foreign investors. It’s even worse with Big Oil free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest anything in Iraq’s economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies. Foreign investors would be granted long-term contracts up to 35 years, dispossessing Iraq of its own resources in a scheme to steal them.

That’s what launched our road to war in 1991 having nothing to do with Saddam threatening anyone. It hasn’t stopped since. The Bush (preventive war) Doctrine spelled out our intentions in June, 2002. It then became NSS policy in September getting us directly embroiled in the Middle East and Central Asia and indirectly with proxy forces in countries like Somalia so other oil-rich African nations (like Sudan) get the message either accede to our will or you’re next in the target queue.

With the world’s energy supplies finite, the US heavily dependent on imports, and “peak oil” near or approaching, “security” for America means assuring a sustainable supply of what we can’t do without. It includes waging wars to get it, protect it, and defend the maritime trade routes over which it travels. That means energy’s partnered with predatory New World Order globalization, militarism, wars, ecological recklessness, and now an extremist US administration willing to risk Armageddon for world dominance. Central to its plan is first controlling essential resources everywhere, at any cost, starting with oil and where most of it is located in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The New “Great Game” and Perils From It

The new “Great Game’s” begun, but this time the stakes are greater than ever as explained above. The old one lasted nearly 100 years pitting the British Empire against Tsarist Russia when the issue wasn’t oil. This time, it’s the US with help from Israel, Britain, the West, and satellite states like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan challenging Russia and China with today’s weapons and technology on both sides making earlier ones look like toys. At stake is more than oil. It’s planet earth with survival of all life on it issue number one twice over.

Resources and wars for them means militarism is increasing, peace declining, and the planet’s ability to sustain life front and center, if anyone’s paying attention. They’d better be because beyond the point of no return, there’s no second chance the way Einstein explained after the atom was split. His famous quote on future wars was: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Under a worst case scenario, it’s more dire than that. There may be nothing left but resilient beetles and bacteria in the wake of a nuclear holocaust meaning even a new stone age is way in the future, if at all. The threat is real and once nearly happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. We later learned a miracle saved us at the 40th anniversary October, 2002 summit meeting in Havana attended by the US and Russia along with host country Cuba. For the first time, we were told how close we came to nuclear Armageddon. Devastation was avoided only because Soviet submarine captain Vasily Arkhipov countermanded his order to fire nuclear-tipped torpedoes when Russian submarines were attacked by US destroyers near Kennedy’s “quarantine” line. Had he done it, only our imagination can speculate what might have followed and whether planet earth, or at least a big part of it, would have survived.

Now we’re back to square one, but this time a rogue administration, with 19 months left in office, marauds the earth endangering all life on it. It claims unilateral rights in its Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 to use first strike nuclear weapons as part of our “imperial grand strategy” to rule the world through discretionary preventive wars against nations we claim threaten our security, because we said so.

Orwell would love words like “security” and “stability” meaning we’re boss so other countries better subordinate their interests to ours, or else. To avoid misunderstandings, we spell it out further. The May, 2000 Joint Vision 2020 claims a unilateral right to control all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems. It gives us the right to use overwhelming force against any nation challenging our dominance with all present and future weapons in our arsenal including powerful nuclear ones.

Here’s the danger. The Bush administration effectively threw out the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) over 180 nations are signatories to including the US. Under NPT’s Article VI, nuclear nations pledged to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons because having them heightens the risk they’ll be used endangering the planet. That doesn’t concern Washington now developing new ones, ignoring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It’s no longer hampered by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty either, and it rescinded and subverted the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. In addition, it won’t consider a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty preventing additions to present stockpiles already way too high, and spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined, plans big future increases, and is unrestrained using the weapons it has.

As things now stand, that’s an agenda for disaster according to former NATO planner, Michael McGwire. He thinks “a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable” by intent, accident or because, sooner or later, terrorist/rogue groups will get hold of nuclear weapons or materials and use them. Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison agrees in his 2004 book, “Nuclear Terrorism,” saying “consensus in the national security community (is that a) dirty bomb (attack is) inevitable,” and/or one with nuclear bombs, unless all fissionable materials are secured. At present they’re not.

This raises the specter Noam Chomsky developed in his 2003 book, “Hegemony or Survival.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez admired it enough to hold it up during his impassioned September, 2006 speech before the UN General Assembly. In the book, Chomsky cited the work of Ernst Mayr he called “one of the great figures of contemporary biology” who said human higher intelligence is no guarantee of our survival. He noted beetles and bacteria have been far more successful surviving than we’re likely to be, especially since “the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years” or about how long we’ve been around.

Mayr feared we might use our “alloted time” to destroy ourselves taking planetary life with us. Chomsky observed we have the means to do it, may recklessly try them out in real time, and if so, may become the only species ever to deliberately make ourselves extinct. Chomsky went further in his 2006 book, “Failed States,” addressing the three issues he believes are of greatest concern - “the threat of nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world’s only superpower is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of (causing) these catastrophes” by its recklessness.

In the book, Chomsky raises a fourth issue heightening the overall risk further. He wrote the “American system” is in danger of losing its “historic values (of) equality, liberty and meaningful democracy” because of the course it’s on. And in his newest book, “Interventions,” he quotes Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell saying 50 years ago when waging nuclear war was unthinkable under Dwight Eisenhower: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?”

The Environmental Threat to Our Survival

Human activity has consequences for the environment. It’s been mostly negative in the face of technological advances that should be as friendly to the earth as to the profits industrial corporations get from them. Instead, the opposite is true because Wall Street only cares about next quarter’s bottom line, Washington wants unchallengeable military dominance and the right to use it freely, and threatening planetary life from wars or ecological havoc is someone else’s problem later on - provided there is one.

Jared Diamond, for one, studied the way societies fail or survive in his 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” that hold lessons for the planet overall. He says ecological devastation brought down earlier failed ones citing one or more proximate causes:

– deforestation and habitat destruction;

– soil degradation through erosion, salinization or fertility decline;

– water management problems;

– over-hunting and/or fishing;

– over-population growth;

– increased per capita impact on the environment; and

– the impact of exotic species on native plant and animal ones.

In modern industrial states, add to these contaminated air water and soil from toxic chemicals, biological agents and radioactive pollutants creating irremediable hazards threatening human survival. And to these add the inexorable warming of the earth’s air and surface from fossil fuel burning greenhouse gas emissions causing:

– arctic ice cap melting;

– rising sea levels;

– changed rainfall patterns;

– increased frequency and intensity of weather extremes like floods, droughts, killer heat waves, wildfires, and hurricanes and cyclones.

– a plague of infectious diseases;

– water scarcity;

– agricultural disruption and loss of arable land;

– as many as one-third of plant and animal species extinct by 2050, according to some predictions; and

– increasing disease, displacement and economic losses from natural calamities like hurricanes, other extreme weather-related events, lowering of ocean pH, reductions in the ozone layer, and the possible introduction of new phenomena unseen before or never extreme enough to threaten human life or environmental sustainability that will when we experience them.

Is global warming a threat to the planet? The debate is over beyond increasing state-of-the-art knowledge further. The scientific community is almost unanimous except for outliers in it allied to the Bush administration, Big Oil or Big Chemical willing to say anything if it pays enough. These fraudsters spurn what scientific academies from all G-8 countries plus China, India and Brazil acknowledged prior to the 2005 G-8 summit in Perthshire, Scotland. Their alarming low-key statement read: “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Bush administration’s failure to address what’s now accepted as fact means America may one day face the dark future Peter Tatchell wrote about last November in the London Guardian after joining 20,000 protesters at a Saturday rally in Britain’s capital. They “call(ed) for urgent international action to halt global warming” with Tatchell disturbed one million weren’t in the streets demanding it.

He painted a grim picture of life in the UK with a glimpse of what’s ahead for the US and other nations, especially in coastal areas, if drastic remediable action isn’t undertaken soon. He began by calling “unchecked climate change….likely to be a thousand times worse than the horrors of Iraq. By 2080, England may no longer be green and pleasant. Instead, we’ll probably be living in a brown, sunburnt country (like the Australian outback or US desert southwest).”

He described a scenario only Hollywood filmmakers might conceive - scorching drought, unpredictable semi-tropical downpours, flash floods with coastal cities waste-deep in water, rising sea levels and tidal surges turning streets into canals “with much of low-lying London becoming a British version of Venice,” and all of London, Manchester and Liverpool frequently swamped by rising sea levels and tidal surges. This is the England he sees in less than eight decades unless global warming is stopped.

And that’s just “phase one” with a nastier “phase two” ahead in the 22nd century - “a Siberian-style ice age blanketing Britain and all of Europe for most of the year, with blizzards so strong and temperatures so low that food production will almost cease and our economies will be just a shadow of what they are today.” Already we’ve had a foretaste, he noted, with recent European heat waves killing thousands and many more devastated by flash floods.

Tatchell continued saying most climatologists predict a two to five degree average global temperature increase by 2100 as things now stand. That will produce all the devastating consequences listed above an island nation like Britain won’t be able to handle - loss of “low-lying coastal and river estuary regions” shrinking and changing the country’s geography permanently and harming inland areas as well.

He noted researchers at the government’s Office of Science and Technology believe “catastrophic mega floods,” having the negative economic impact of a major war, can be expected over the next two decades, and “lower-level floods will become routine causing around ($40 billion in) damage annually.” Regular flooding in a country Britain’s size “could put two million houses and five to six million people at constant risk” making homes uninsurable and unsellable “causing a cataclysmic melt-down in house prices” in flood-prone regions and a “corresponding astronomical rise in house prices” in secure areas.

Further, millions of flooded out refugees will have to leave unusable homes behind. With no ability to pay for new accommodations, they’ll need government help to get by. And businesses, too, will suffer. Many will have to relocate to safer areas at great cost meaning job losses will follow making things even worse. Power generating plants will be hit as well including coastal nuclear reactors with potential calamitous risks from that possibility alone.

Tatchell continued with much more painting an overall picture so dire, Britain no longer will be a fit place to live in. But bad as that prospect is, poorer countries around the world will fare even worse. One billion people in river delta areas (the rice bowl parts of the countries) of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China will see their land disappear under rising sea water causing a catastrophic drop in essential food production unlikely able to be made up.

Sometime around 2100, forests will have died, plankton will be gone by rising sea temperatures, and “these two important ‘carbon sinks’ will no longer be able to absorb dioxide emissions. (In addition, higher) sea temperatures will also release….vast amounts of methane….trapped in the world’s oceans….sending temperatures soaring.” Further, the disappearance of polar ice caps will raise sea levels at least five meters removing vast areas of the earth’s land mass.

Now, imagine how much worse things may be in the US, facing future hazards this great, with a land mass 39 times greater than Britain and a population five times the size. Democrat and Republican leaders ignore the threat meaning manana is someone else’s problem.

A day of reckoning may be approaching faster than earlier thought based on information Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean wrote June 3 in the London Independent. His article is titled “Global Warming ‘Is (accelerating) Three Times Faster Than Worst Predictions’ ” according to new “starting, authoritative studies.” One of them by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) shows CO2 emissions increasing 3% a year now compared to 1.1% in the 1990s. It’s causing seas rising twice as rapidly and Arctic ice cap melting three times faster than previously believed.

The NAS report is even grimmer than this year’s “massive reports” and worst case scenario by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting their forecasts of “devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species (likely understate) the threat facing the world.” Another study by the University of California’s National Snow and Ice Data Center shows “Arctic ice has declined by 7.8 per cent a decade over the past 50 years, compared with an average estimate by IPCC computer models of 2.5 per cent.”

Sum it up everywhere, underscored by these most recent findings, and it spells apocalypse made worse with many governments having to rule by decree to control chaos and disorder. It means democracy, civil liberties, human rights and most essential amenities are out the window in tomorrow’s world sounding more like Dante’s hell on earth because today we didn’t care enough to prevent it. Moreover, it’s wishful thinking imagining new technologies will emerge solving everything. Nor will market-based economies where profits trump common sense. How could they ever improve in the future what they’ve only worsened up to now?

Change cuts both ways though, and despite the apocalyptic title of his book, “Collapse,” Jared Diamond notes his sub-title is “How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail” saying that better states his sense of things. Ending an interview published in the spring, 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, he says “We are in a horse race between the forces of destruction and….a solution. It is an exponentially accelerating race of unknown outcome (with his gut feeling being) it is up for grabs.” He continues saying we have a “fighting chance” to solve a “crisis of unsustainability….if we choose to do so (but) It will be fatal to our civilization, or near fatal, if we don’t.”

Nuclear Power Is Not the Solution

In the interview cited above, Diamond doesn’t address nuclear power, but he did in a July, 2005 public lecture in San Francisco. Mark Hertsgaard featured his comments in his August 12, 2005 Tom Paine.com and Common Dreams.org articles titled “Nukes Aren’t Green.” Diamond surprised his audience saying global warming is so grave “we need everything available to us, including nuclear power” to deal with it, disagreeing with most environmentalists believing otherwise and then some.

Nuclear power won’t solve, or even alleviate global warming, according to Helen Caldicott in her important 2006 book, “Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.” That’s aside from the catastrophic consequences from commercial reactor malfunction-caused meltdowns, terror attacks on them with the same result, or fissionable material falling into the wrong hands and used against us. Caldicott explained, contrary to government and industry propaganda, nuclear power generation discharges significant greenhouse gas emissions plus hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year.

The 103 US nuclear power plants are also sitting ducks to retaliatory terror attacks experts say will happen sooner or later. It means if one of Chicago’s 11 operating commercial reactors melts down from malfunction or attack, and the city is downwind from the fallout, the entire area will become uninhabitable forever and would have to be evacuated quickly with all possessions, including homes, left behind and lost.

Caldicott explains much more noting commercial plants are atom bomb factories. A 1000 megawatt reactor produces 500 pounds of plutonium annually while only 10 pounds of this most toxic of all substances are needed for a bomb powerful enough to devastate a large city. She also exposes the myth that nuclear energy is “cleaner and greener.” Although commercial reactors emit no carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary greenhouse gas causing global warming, they require a vast infrastructure, called the nuclear fuel cycle, which uses huge and rapidly growing amounts of fossil fuels. Each stage in the cycle adds to the problem starting with the largest and unavoidable energy needed to mine and mill uranium fuel needing fossil fuel to do it. Then there are the tail millings and what to do with them. They require great amounts of greenhouse-emitting fossil fuels to remediate.

Other steps in the nuclear fuel cycle also depend on fossil fuels including the conversion of uranium to hexafluoride gas prior to enrichment, the enrichment process, and the conversion of enriched uranium hexafluoride gas to fuel pellets. Then there’s nuclear plant construction, dismantling and cleanup at the end of their useful life, and all this requires huge amounts of energy. So does contaminated water cooling reactors, and the enormous problem of radioactive nuclear waste handling, transportation and disposal/storage. In sum, nuclear power isn’t the solution to global warming or anything else. Its risky technology plays nuclear Russian roulette with planet earth betting against long odds where losing means losing everything.

If that’s not bad enough, Caldicott shows how much worse it is summarized briefly below:

– the economics of nuclear power don’t add up for an expensive technology, aside from the risks involved, the pollution generated, and the cost of insuring commercial plants needing billions in government subsidies private insurers won’t cover.

– the toll on human health to uranium miners, nuclear industry workers and potentially everyone living close to reactors including those downwind from them.

– accidental or terrorist-induced nuclear core meltdowns, already addressed, in one or more of the 438 operating plants in 33 countries worldwide and huge numbers of new ones under construction or planned increasing the danger further.

– nuclear waste storage that in the US will be Yucca Mountain known to be unsafe as it’s located in an active earthquake zone unable to assure no leakage or seepage will occur for the 500,000 years needed to guarantee safety.

– Newer planned so-called Generation III, III + and Generation IV reactor designs even more dangerous than earlier ones now in operation with plans to build hundreds of them worldwide despite the safety risk.

– the unacceptable madness of nuclear weapons proliferation assuring eventually a rogue nation or group will have enough fissionable material for a crude bomb and will use it with devastating consequences.

– the unacceptable threat of nuclear war causing nuclear winter ending all life on the planet if it happens.

In light of Caldicott’s convincing case, the solution seems clear for friends of the earth and everyone else. Western and allied major nations need a cooperative joint “Manhattan-type Project” to develop safe, non-nuclear, non-greenhouse gas emitting, alternative energy sources replacing ones now used harming the planet and threatening our survival. In addition, conservation must be emphasized and wasteful western lifestyles must change voluntarily or by law because there’s no other choice.

Final Thoughts

This article addresses reckless living unmindful of the consequences. It’s about endless wars and resources they’re waged for. It’s about gaining control of what we can’t do without, but must learn to, or we’ll risk losing far more, including the planet’s ability to sustain life. If we reach that point, it won’t matter except to resilient beetles and bacteria free at last from us. Instead of being an asset, superior human intelligence has us on the brink of our own self-destruction. It proves Ernst Mayr right saying greater brain power won’t guarantee our survival even though it may have helped him live 100 years till 2005.

The human species teeters on the edge putting excess personal gratification and living for today ahead of the long-term consequences of bad behavior. That assures one day Nixon and Ford Council of Economic Advisors chairman Herb Stein’s maxim will bite us. Back then, he noted “Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.” He meant bad economic policy, but his comment applies to all excesses, especially the worst ones, and what’s worse than endless wars, the threat of nuclear ones, and the sure threat ecological havoc will destroy us if nuclear war doesn’t do it first.

We know this and can explain it in precise, sensible, scientific terms, but what good does it do when we won’t heed our own advice. The privileged are rolling in good times, but look at the problem this way. We’re all at Cinderella’s ball and have till midnight to leave or turn into pumpkins losing everything. At this ball, clocks have no hands, so guessing right plays Russian roulette with planet earth. This article asks: can we survive our resource wars? The answer is only if we stop waging them and start using our superior intelligence to protect the earth, not destroy it as we’re doing now.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at .

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen Saturdays to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com at noon US central time.

By JOE BAGEANT (see caricature above)

5/23/07

Originally published at Cold Type

Six or seven years ago I wrote my first essays about how America’s fundamentalist churches had gone batshit crazy, were casting demons out of car engine blocks and making covert plans to exchange the Constitution for the Book of Revelation. Those few readers I had at the time, mostly in urban liberal strongholds, tended to think, “Well, these hayseeds out there in the hinterlands are scary fuckers, but Joe overstates the case a bit. The god whacks can never put together the kind of political power he’s describing.” The political landscape has changed since then, and there are now more books and documentary films sounding the alarm than you can shake a stick at. Which warms the gin soaked cockles of my heart (whatever the hell heart cockles are.) It even looks as if the mighty Pinhead himself stands a chance of being impeached. Which will make about as much difference as when Clinton was impeached. Zilch. The financial mobsters will still continue tunneling their way under the national treasury. American “progressives” will continue to catalogue empire’s crimes across the blogosphere, preaching to the already coverted, and the worst elements of fundamentalist leadership will still be licking pencils and crafting legislation that will allow public stoning of queers and street buskers.

But in looking back, I realize I’ve used a very broad brush in painting American fundamentalism, over simplified some complex things, because painting any big picture of a big nation must necessarily be rendered with the largest brushes in the artists’ bundle.

Yet, broad strokes or not, America is an extremely religious nation, especially for an alleged member of “The First World,” with all the implications of social progress the term implies—or once did. And we will remain a religious place for a long while yet. So when it comes to social change, a religious country is what we have to work with. Not a socialist nation, not a particularly moral nation, and certainly not a spiritually liberated nation, but a religious one that seems especially prone to fervid kitschy expression (hell, what in America isn’t kitsch?) such as being “born again in the blood” or “raptured up” or mega-churches that resemble Wal-Mart stores, but with lousy parking arrangements.

Nonetheless, even as half of the voting public has come to gag at the term “born again,” millions are genuinely “born again” in the spirit—that same spirit that so many educated American leftists who talk of world liberation deny exists. It’s OK for Latin Americans to practice fundamental Catholic Christianity with great devotion (brown peoples are suckers for that but white American fundamentalists, well, that’s another matter. As the left sees it, what they need is a good public stoning.

The implication among the thinking classes is that, collectively as a people, we are above such archaic “superstition” as religious fundamentalism, although they are willing to allow that modern American fundamentalism may indeed resemble Hitler’s nationalized Christianity that so appealed to the Germanity of a homogenic bunch of 1930s fundamentalist Lutherans with a prejudice against the most obvious minority available, the Jews. We are probably far too diverse for that, no matter what the holocaust industry says. Let me say I am not a Jewish media conspiracy freak. I simply believe that some groups have come to excel in certain American endeavors, and some have come to excel in others, owing to dint of history, culture and circumstance.

When it comes to excelling in certain endeavors, my own people, the Scots Irish, excel at killing dark skinned peoples on distant shores and being intractable lovers of the surliest forms of freedom, plus worshipping a fundamentalist God that means real business. We all have our talents and liabilities. In any case, we mean-spirited seed of John Calvin, who produced George W. Bush of Kennebunkport, Texas, not to mention nearly every stump jumping redneck demagogue preacher and politician in American history, should at least get credit for producing Mark Twain and Robert Mitchum. Bill Clinton and Jane Fonda too, though both are starting to smell a little too gamey to claim of late.

We’re all Americans, some of whom attempt to think and some of whom refuse to, which in either case leads to its own prejudices, depending upon the socio-political pressures of the times. It appears now that among thinking Americans the last acceptable prejudice is anti-Christian fundamentalism—along with anti-redneckism, (but we ‘necks could give a shit and have even become defiantly proud of the label. Question: How many NASCAR Jesus born again American flag stickers can fit on the bumper of classic “I don’t have the money to restore it yet” Ford Galaxy? Answer: twenty one, if you overlap them at the edges. I’m not shitting you here. That’s an actual count. The result of redneck exploration of spatial relationships.

Choices in learning: Starbucks or Sing Sing?

Joke as I may though, I have witnessed men and women be quite convincingly born again, shed old selves and become different and better human beings for the rest of their lives. The most recent was a one-eyed ex-con crack dealer named Jerry who studied nutritional science in prison, then upon release lived with his mom while he worked as a dishwasher and fry cook to accumulate money so he could go to Africa and save babies from malnutrition. Now if a man like Jerry, who is a Charismatic Holiness Pentecostal—which is about as fundamentalist as you can get—can be that born again, moved to genuine ecstatic and absolute belief in the promise of liberation through the elimination of human suffering, (which, by the way, is a fundamental Buddhist principle) then others can also be born again into on-the-ground liberation of the kind we lefties claim to admire, the kind that is shaping a new Latin America.

Jerry has done just that. He says “My liberation came while I was in solitary lockup, after raping a white dude so I could stay protected by my gang.” Today I called the bar-restaurant where he washed dishes. The manager said he’d left the country, but didn’t know where to. Jerry is proof that any man may arrive at inner liberation by his own solitary path, but most are led to it, and all arrive along one of humanity’s many roads of human suffering, both material and inner, that instill inner peace and compassion.

Upon surface observation these days, it is difficult to believe that not all American fundamentalist Christians are lacking in the compassion their leadership only mimics on the television screen. Yet millions of them donate billions toward what they are told provides heath care and sustenance to the world’s indigenous peoples, but which is used to sponsor religious demagoguery in unseen corners of the world. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of fundamentalists solely interested in conversion of vulnerable Second and Third World strangers, plenty of “churchy folks” who cannot get enough of video footage of their sponsored missionary’s ministry unto the Hottentotts or “Keechee” Indians of Latin America. “Look at’em eat with their fingers, Janet, and they let them little babies run around with their ding dongs hanging out.”

In the world’s big picture, however—the unedited version we are never allowed to see in American media—most American fundamentalists are being screwed blue by the same global economic pillage as, say, the Quiche Indians of Guatemala. Working class American fundamentalists suffer extractive capitalism’s vampirism the same as the Third World, but by a more incremental yet nonetheless relentless process. A scam is a scam and while you may blame the victims for ignorance, you cannot blame them for trust and good will toward men.

Now hold onto your drawers and get this. Some working class fundamentalists are beginning to get a sense of what even the most educated of Americans seem congenitally blind to—the inevitable brutality of capitalism’s march through history—mainly because it is marching in their direction this time, creating bankruptcy, lost homes, credit meltdowns, and job insecurity for the hardest working, most obedient and faithful people in America—the traditional working class. Just like their brothers in the Third World, the economic “cures” they are subjected to always turn out to be worse than the sickness. Some now notice that when unemployment rises, so does the stock market, and when real wages drop the “economy” soars, according to the news reports. All sorts of folks are beginning to disabuse themselves of the notion that the American economy and the American people are the same thing. As in: “I work like hell, get paid and I buy stuff and I pay taxes. Ain’t that the fucking economy?” Or as one very dedicated local blue collar fundamentalist put it a while back when I was writing my book, “The big guys have always had it all over the little feller, but it’s gettin’ entawrly out of hand. Sooner or later somethin’s gotta be done to give a workin man a chance again. This ain’t what Our Lord intended.”

Even Catholics get the blues

Now if we can get past the damned “Catholic thing” that is so lodged in American heads regarding liberation theology, and overcome modern science’s poo-pooing of theology and all things spiritual, we can see a distinct linkage of liberation and theology, and the need for it in America. If devout Catholic villagers in Ecuador, Venezuela, Lima, Bolivia and Oaxaca can rise up, as they indeed are, then so can Christians in a Christian nation. Maybe not in droves—hell, even Catholics didn’t pull that off—but it’s not only probable, but eventually inevitable, as ecological and economic collapse accelerate around us. The fundie End Times stuff can only be stretched so far before it snaps and hard core reality slaps fundamentalist Christians across the chops. Such catastrophe is just as visible from the First Baptist Church as it is from the Greens headquarters here in Virginia (where you might be surprised to know that we have conservative “Christian Greens,” in favor of auditing the Pentagon, a light rail system and balancing the budget.)

Reckoning will come though, and it will come like it always does for the human race, too late, and long after the princes of the earth have absconded with the goods. For Americans it will come when the secret militias in this country start cracking open their basement arms caches, and exercise those skills learned in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the perimeter of the Empire’s last desperate efforts on behalf of the richest of the rich. By then however, it will be too late for a thin network of firepower and explosives to do much except add its members to the official terrorist list, along side scores of Muslim cab drivers and halal meat vendors.

Good news for working mooks

The good news is that genuine human liberation for ordinary humanity can come much sooner than catastrophe. And in coming it will require real leaders, born of and among the lost and wasted lifetimes of toil—not from the political theorists, nor the meaninglessly educated hothouse plants from the managing classes. Working class liberation leaders are beginning to evolve from the sons and daughters of Baptist truck drivers or 55-year old Wal-Mart greeters with varicose veins and no health insurance. I get emails from them and I find them in corners of American politics such as West Virginia’s emerging but understandably as yet disoriented Mountain Party. Liberation’s future leadership is out there right now, stocking the shelves of the supermarkets tonight, buffing the floors of the nation’s universities and banks, checking on the calf-cow pairs in the late season snows of Montana, and likely as not they are gun owning, non-drinking Christians doing solitary jobs with lots of time to think. And they experience things like loneliness, modern alienation, and an inner emptiness within that now quaint concept called the soul. Which drives so many of them to the last place that even addresses the souls of people such as themselves—fundamentalist churches.

Cheer up dammit! It’s only the end of the world.

If we want to practice or actualize liberation, we gotta do it on liberation’s own turf—the soul of man. Which is rooted in this earth and nowhere else. Morality and justice is an organic thing, not a legal, or political or philosophical one. The reptilian brain takeover of America is not the entire movie, just the most savage scene near the end of our national production of a secular techno-illusion. For fully sentient Americans, entertaining electronic diversion and the illusion of material abundance cannot relieve the unbearable pressures of life in a techno-secular nation, one divorced from the organic morality and spirituality that comes with contact with the natural world.

Busting through the delusional veil of any imperial state culture always spells acceptance of more tough news for its clueless citizenry. In our case it means reconnection with the earth, and embracing the suffering and eventual death it provides every living thing as a matter of physics and cosmic order. That’s where it begins and ends. Everything in between, the NGOs, the Internet, the theologians, and all the political theories in the world are just the signal static, the self-enforced interference between ourselves and the only worthwhile goals left in a doomed Empire—and all empires eventually meet their doom—humility, compassion and reconnection with the spirit.

After all, it is not the coursing energy of the human spirit that is doomed. It never has been and never will be so long as a single newborn baby still squalls out “I AM!” immediately upon its delivery, even into this most recent issuance of “the world” we have allowed to happen in the name of reason, progress, science, democracy—feel free to pick your own pious scientific, political or religious excuse. It does not matter. The animating forces of the universe seem unmoved by the collision of planets and implosions of supernova, much less the outbreak of a temporarily virulent virus called man on a speck of cosmic dust we call earth.

As it happens, today is “Earth Day,” that media trivialized and co-opted celebration of our bio-planet. Earth Day 2007 would have passed unnoticed in my household but for our local newspaper’s announcement that “The Winchester Host Lions Club will create an American flag of blooms,” and that six other organizations will be planting red, white, and blue flowers in the park, “As part of the statewide celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown.” Mother Earth is evidently associated in the local mind with an English joint stock company exporting a gaggle of armed English farmers and Polish woodcutters to a malaria ridden Virginia swamp, with the idea of turning a profit from their miserable toil and deaths. By the time Thomas Jefferson was born they had managed to turn hundreds of thousands of acres into a burned out wasteland of soil erosion (both Washington and Jefferson’s biggest agricultural problem) and eliminate several native species, including some human ones.

Exactly one month prior to this Earth Day 2007, I was standing in the coral sand of a tiny atoll in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean at night amid several other vanishing species. Less than a hundred feet at its longest point, its sands were scattered here and there with the bleached skeletons of ancient lobster traps and sea turtle shells, and etched by the tracks and tailings of turtles, small birds, and all sorts of strange crawlies from the tide pool. Swarms of translucent little crabs with huge black and white target-like eyes on stems coming out of their heads scurried furtively, avoiding the cormorants and other kinds of birds hugging the atoll against the same sturdy winds that once carried disease and guns into the new world and Spanish gold away from it. During the day the sun on that sand was blinding. But at night there was just that wind and absolute blackness with millions of stars and the cries of birds.

Seldom have I ever felt the presence of the earth’s spirit and the terrible beauty of creation so strongly, where the world flourishes and struggles and dies right before your eyes. Thousands of colorful worms go by in the shallow water, winking on and off and schools of tropical fish are plainly visible right at the water’s edge, their fate hanging with the frigate birds suspended overhead.

And while standing there—frankly, taking a nocturnal piss—the wind rose and grew stronger. And as I closed my eyes against the billowing coral sand, that wind blew away all the flesh from my bones. Then blew away the very bones themselves. And what I was left with the core of selfness, just the awareness of awareness that center of humanness that exists in pure duration before any thought or word is even formed, the unarticulated stuff that exists in the womb of woman and in that great frothing amniotic soup of the mother of us all—the sea. It was just me and the overarching black canopy of the world, as if god’s own infinite bowl of stars itself had been overturned, dumping them upon my fallible and pitifully meaningless outer self—the one presently engaged in pompous scribbling about the liberation of man, yet unable to save a single one of those tiny crabs or glowing sea worms in the tide pools from their own destinies, from their return to the sea via the gullet of a vanishing petrel.

Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts with stones, determined to “conquer the wilderness,” hammering at both matter and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we pulled down mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the day of deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen light, illuminating not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of trade and finance and greed during what has come to pass for peace, when our darkest commercial cannibalism feasts upon the naked wondrous bodies of the innocents. And now destruction dances in infinite rooms, singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open the celestial clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god.

For all that the study of history could have taught an amnesiac America about the fall of empires and civilizations, it is doubtful it can prepare anyone for what is fast coming upon us, because it has never happened before and by definition can only happen once. Though the Wiccan priestess, the fundamentalist preacher, the rabbi, and environmental biologist call it by different names—as if renaming an apocalypse made much difference—we need a liberated theology, epistemology, or ontology (again, that obsession with naming rather things than doing things.) Something to liberate “the within” of we who find ourselves traveling together amid gathering darkness toward the long promised kingdom of sanity and justice. That kingdom which rests at the end of no mortal road, but was always within us. Just like Jesus and Buddha and the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood said it was.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book, , from Random House Crown about working class America, scheduled for spring 2007 release. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found at: http://www.joebageant.com/. Feel free to contact him at: .

Copyright 2007 by Joe Bageant

by Carolyn Baker

5/17/07

Speaking Truth to Power

On Monday, residents of the Borderplex, as we call the region that encompasses far West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Mexico, awoke to a beautiful spring morning. No ecovillages, intentional communities, or new urbanism exist in our region, and living as I do in a rural area, I still own an internal combustion vehicle, and periodically, as all such monstrosities do, it needs a tune-up. Driving along a winding country road on the way to visit my mechanic on that lovely morning, drinking in the green fields of our newly-flourishing alfalfa crops and feeling extraordinarily grateful to be surrounded by farmland, I noticed that traffic was slowing and coming to a halt. A car accident? I wondered. No, off to the side of the road were parents and teachers carrying signs which read, “Celebrate with the class of 2007!!” County sheriff patrol cars, lights flashing, flanked what appeared to be a parade. Soon a barrage of cars on the opposite side of the road approached, honking horns and weaving back and forth in their lane—the cars adorned with shaving cream graffiti like “The Class Of 2007 Rocks” and “We Did It!” Inside the cars were seniors from a nearby high school, also covered in shaving cream, honking, screaming, swerving their cars out of their lane and onto the shoulder and back. On my side of the road, gridlock. Nothing to do but wait and sit aghast at the site I was beholding. I turned off the ignition and pondered how much gasoline was being mindlessly guzzled right before my eyes.

Not only were at least 50 cars involved in the senior celebration, but behind them followed at least 20 school busses, half-empty, heading in the direction of the high school. Why were the busses half-empty? Because the other half of what would have been a full load were participating in the oil-sucking parade of cars in front of the busses. Now, lest anyone think I’m just an old curmudgeon, graduation is one of my favorite times of the year. I love to see young people blowing off steam—so reminiscent of my own youthful partying days—and celebrating academic success. But these days I can only witness youth through the tears in my own eyes as I wonder if they will be alive in ten years and if they are, what will happen to their grandchildren in thirty years.

Throughout this same Borderplex, gas is now inching daily toward $3.50. Although surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland, major grocery chains in the region sell nothing but produce from Chile and California, and cotton, one of the principal crops of this region, consumes inordinate quantities of water. What is more, those green alfalfa fields I spoke of earlier, will be harvested and bailed for hay to feed cows in non-organic, highly unsanitary mega-dairies in the area which also consume quantities of water even more gargantuan than the cotton crops and pollute the land and water with toxic animal waste. A nearby town of 80,000 is committed to tripling its population in twenty years, and another, forty miles south, will soon be deluged by an influx of perhaps 100,000 military personnel and their dependents—all of this in an area of the United States which all experts agree will be facing horrendous water issues within the next decade.

Like many of you, I am researching relocation which is one of the most daunting tasks we face given our individual needs and the limited choices we have in terms of climate change, availability of water, arable land, and a host of other issues. In fact, how many communities, including those in California, are seriously addressing drought, funding and constructing community gardens, placing a moratorium on housing construction, instituting new urbanism, educating their elementary and high school students regarding oil depletion (so that graduation celebrations can occur without consuming vast quantities of oil), mandating recycling, or funding and constructing light rail transportation? I’m not saying such communities do not exist; what I’m saying is that they are still too few, and that what they are offering in most cases is too little, too late to avert catastrophe.

Last weekend when I flipped the TV channel to CNN, I saw a map that demonstrated that almost one-fourth of the United States was on fire at that moment—this at the end of the same week that horrific tornadoes devastated parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. It was also the same week that U.S. governors again lamented as they did earlier this year, that due to the huge segment of National Guard troops that have been deployed to Iraq, their states lack the manpower and equipment to even begin to address natural disasters.

As an historian, I often wonder just when historians a hundred years from now, if there are any left on planet Earth, will date the beginning of collapse. Will they mark its beginning with 9/11, Katrina, the declaration by an aggregation of scientists from dozens of nations that global warming is indeed occurring, the disappearance of the honey bees, the plasticizing of the oceans, the current deaths of hundreds of seals in California from the toxicity of ocean waters, the bursting of the housing bubble, the extinction of another 30% of species beyond the current 30% extinction rate, the first nuclear terrorist attack on a U.S. city, the proliferation of pandemics worldwide, World War III, the crash of the U.S. stock market, the inundation of coastlines and entire nations with rising oceans? Or maybe today, as scientists confirmed that a chunk of ice in Antarctica the size of the state of California, had melted?

Collapse is not in the future; it is happening in this moment, and unequivocally, the overwhelming majority of Americans are unprepared, will be uncompensated or assisted in whatever pain and suffering collapse inflicts on them, and will remain clueless and in denial of it until they have lost everything except their own lives. Allstate Insurance has stopped writing policies in California for fire and earthquake damage. How many more insurance companies will follow suit in every state in the nation?

I do not claim to be an expert on collapse, but I am quite certain that the custodians of empire are. They have engineered collapse over several decades, and will be essentially unscathed by it—if they can control the resultant chaos. I don’t wish to speculate about what form that control will take, but I don’t need to. They are making it abundantly clear that while they are unwilling to do anything to prevent climate chaos, the devastating consequences of Peak Oil, and economic Armageddon, they are formulating elaborate plans to control and contain an unruly and traumatized population.

And because collapse is happening now, those who have written prophetically of its symptoms and characteristics have become historians as I stated in a 2006 article. So much of what the individuals I praised in that article have spoken and written for so many years is now unfolding before our eyes.

If you’ve been following the Truth To Power website recently, or if you are a Truth To Power news subscriber, you may have noticed that collapse and preparation for it have become the principal focus. It is, in my opinion, the hub of all current and future events. Daily I receive news stories on a variety of topics such as impeachment, Gonzo-gate, and (sigh!) presidential candidates from readers who apparently did not read my infamous article, “Why I Will Not Vote In 2004”. Some stories grab my attention; some don’t because if one has an astute “map”, it rapidly becomes apparent that endless war, scandal, rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, descent into fascism, and economic cataclysm are issues that not only radiate from the hub of collapse but also cannot be reversed by any of the means upon which we have relied in the past. In fact, collapse may be both the problem AND the ultimate “solution”.

If you want to hear that collapse is not happening, don’t visit this website. If you need voices and opinions that affirm your denial of the reality of collapse or believe that a magic bullet exists to prevent or alleviate it, please look elsewhere. I do not claim to have the entire map; but I do have pieces of it, and so do you, and so do many other prophet-historians. If you care about preparing yourself and those you love for the realities of Peak Oil, climate chaos, global economic meltdown, and the terrifying but all-too likely extinction of life on this planet, then I invite you to share your pieces of the map. We need to build lifeboats, and we need to come clean in our consciousness so that we can inhabit them without further wounding each other or throwing each other overboard as we sail through terribly uncertain waters.

The distinction between prophet and historian becomes more blurred with each passing day. Collapse is happening, and it’s happening NOW