Yes, you Can, But if you do I'll break your arm ...

In the words of the Plutocracy's puppets: "Suck it up."

Okay, that was a bit harsh, but when my mother used that phrase to try and get us kids to differentiate between the meaning of the phrases "Can I?", and "May I?", she was just trying to cause confusion in our little brains, so as to make us think, and we all ended up attaining adulthood with our limbs intact. But when John Abraham uses the term in his rebuttal to Matt Ridey's article in the WSJ denying the dire impacts of Climate Change, he makes the same error that we did as children. By stating in his concluding remarks that,   "By investing in smart, renewable energy, we can create the economy of the future", he apparently has forgotten that what we CAN do and what is actually possible for us TO do are as far from one another as my mother's radical statement implied.

Why I believe this is because Abraham uses his own form of Denial when he insists on his belief that the world can just decide to change the way in which it obtains and uses natural resources, specifically, in this case, energy resources. As my perception of history in the latter part of the 20'th century deviates substantially from that of my fellows, I feel I should start with a quick synopsis of it, because it is as radically different from the MSM version as it is from Howard Zinn's.

Because my Grandfather owned and ran The Wannalancit Garage in Lowell, Massachusetts, I was aware of cars and motorization and the associated smells and dangers and complexities from a younger age than most of my peers, and I noticed things, such as the Joads' possession, despite their crushing poverty, of an automobile. This contradiction, and its continuation into every aspect of American culture, has fascinated me ever since. The movies and TV are replete with it. Somehow people without the wherewithal to buy food, always have the means to purchase petrol. There's no dilemma, such as that faced by the Maggie Smith-portrayed character in "Private Functions", of having a vehicle, but no funds to buy 'juice', as she called it, such that, in that film, they sold the very tires from under it, as rubber was also in short supply, and therefore one could get a good price for it, presumably allowing one to pay far less when the car could actually be driven, and buying new tires then.

What all this meant was that, when I first heard Lord Curzon's exclamation that we won the War(s) "On a wave of American oil", and put that together with the truism that Capitalism is basically economic warfare, I came up with what, to me, was the natural correlation, that we won the economic War on a wave of American Oil. Sooooo in 1971, when the US reached peak oil, and could consequently no longer flood the world with its overproduction, bringing prices down so low as to rid the oil industry of its competitors (OPEC is not very original; they learned that ploy form us) the Nixon decision to go off the gold standard, and the subsequent Arab oil embargo, were all related phenomena in my mind, and all implied the same thing: that US supremacy economically was challenged because at it's heart, it was a petroleum-based ascendancy, one that derived huge benefit from the fact that those who occupied the land under which that oil was found, had simply been pushed off it like so much topsoil onto reservations.

So although Watergate is given priority as the main reason a Jimmy Carter presidency was made possible, the Nixon environmental regulations and EPA and other Republican supported mandates that took into account the fact that there were actually people choking on the fumes, and getting cancer from the byproducts of industrialization, the oil interests liked the JC approach to Saudi Arabia, that echoed FDR's so much that it became known as "The Carter Doctrine", and stated that any threat to the intensely conservative Islamic Saudi regime (the adjectives conveniently left out) would be considered an attack on American interests (a statement Putin and his cronies would be wise to dust off and remind the world of, seeing's how there was no cultural, religious, military, or political reason for this umbrella protection, it was a pure power grab based on only one resource: OIL).

But the Iranian Revolution and Reaganism created a more appealing set of circumstances for what was still referred to as "The Seven Sisters" and the rest of the upper class of America, and Ronnie was made president in his stead, and here is where the US took, not only Carter's installation of solar arrays off the Whitehouse roof, but an irreversible step toward complete hegemony and domination of the world that heretofore had been unparalleled and indeed, impossible, for any state that wished to call itself a Democracy.

The growth in the size of the Federal government that took place under Ronald Reagan, all financed with massive amounts of debt, while simultaneously clamping down on the private sector, via the Fed's control on interests rates that gave ascendancy of badly run, but state-funded, via the DOD, enterprises, by a president that ran on the platform of 'getting the government off our backs", and the propagator of the sentence, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", as a harbinger of snafu's, over Companies that had no Federal contracts, caused the failure of so many businesses that the country was pushed into recession, even as the government sector flowered from the unprecedented flow of funds, from the "fiscally conservative" Republicans' militarism and greed. Because, to bring about his intended denouement of the Soviet Union, it was always part of the plan to effect a huge financialization of the economy, as, just as we think of Dick Cheney as the real power behind GW, it was his father, the former director of the CIA, who ran real policy behind the Reagan administration albeit in a much more 'behind the black curtain' style, his invisibility cloak kept snug around him.

Because what all this militarism was about, what all this investment was about, as reflected in his childish admiration for Margaret Thatcher, was an overarching plan to intensify oil exploration to such a degree that the world would be awash with the stuff, enabling the US to once again bring the price down so dramatically as to crash the USSR economy and crush the liberal Welfare State by depriving it of its revenue, and restore the Aristocracy to its pre-WW2 ascendancy. Because, although you and I were unaware of the Hubbert curve, and its implications for the future of wealth production and distribution, and the attendant dangers of Climate Change that such a a pell-mell rush to dig up and burn as many fossil fuels in as little time as possible, would engender, the Rich, my dear friends, were not. They knew full well what Hubbert's curve meant, and to them what it meant was a need to consolidate their power, tighten their grip on government, buy up every form of public discourse, and mute all opposition to their activities, even to the extent that before the outcry against the 1% became commonplace, any one, such as I, who gave voice to what was being done right under our collective noses, was, not only unheeded, but disdainfully ridiculed, never more so than by academics, and the left, to whom, anything hinting of finance, money, currency, or the markets, was just tooo pithy for them to  have to condescend to  understand. Like manual labor itself, it was simply beneath them, and so they fell right in line behind most of Reaganism and its destruction of working class jobs, because, well, we should all be CPA's and screenwriters, and software engineers, as those jobs would never be the provenance of anyone in third world countries, their citizens being all uneducated and all.

So, Mr. Abraham, whereas "By investing in smart, renewable energy, we CAN create the economy of the future", the fact remains, as the debacle of the Obama presidency is proving, we won't, because now that Democracy has been irretrievably destroyed, and been replaced by a Plutocracy of individuals for whom the entire economy of the globe is run, there is no reason for anyone in a position of power to facilitate the transition from something that works, because as long as they are in ascendancy, for all intents and purposes, from their point of view, it works, to something that is entirely suspect. That the rest of we undeserving peons are left out of this new Neue Weltordnung, is not only not a problem, it's part of the final solution, as explained by this Offer-ing of Chris Hedges:

"Offer, the author of “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950,” for 25 years has explored the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. Neoclassical economics, he says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting pain.” As we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, accompanied by economic stagnation and decline, this neoclassical model is ominous. It is used to justify the escalation world-wide of repression, all supposedly as an effort to sustain a vision that does not, and never has, or will, correspond to the real world.

So, Mr. Abrahams, we can, but no, we may not, and if we try, they will break much more than our arms, because, thanks to us, they have unlimited arms to array against anyone who has the temerity to oppose their Neue Weltordnung.