Gang Green is Setting In.

I admit it ... I'm addicted. But not to opioids, synthetic or otherwise. I'm not more fiend, nor a wild fenfen, I don't stick pins in my trauma doll or smack my heroine. No, what I'm addicted to is crosswords puzzles. But buying a Crossword puzzle book somehow takes the fun out of it, so I rely on our local rag's (The San Francisco Examiner) reprints of the best: The New York Times puzzle, edited by Will Shortz, with credit given to the actual creators of the puzzles via tiny print beneath the grid (Shouldn't it be the other way around?  Shortz edits ALL the puzzles, whereas the creators change daily and are the actual, ya know, Creators of the puzzles ... but such is power: it knows nothing of fairness or justice which must be imposed by a higher power).

And sometimes, even in something as inconsequential as a crossword, you uncover that which they most try to avoid: controversy. Or perhaps I make it up myself. But since a crossword puzzle is at its heart, a study of language, syntax, punctuation and grammar, it often can be illuminating as to how the meaning of certain phrases can, with a mere shift in emphasis, be completely changed, enabling  you to perceive how malleable language really is. I believe there is currently a movie in general release called, You Get Me, a title that, taken as it is meant to be taken, means that you understand what drives me, but if, should you pronounce it, You get ME, instead of, You GET me, changes "you" from the the protagonist to the booby prize.

The clue that got me in the puzzle I'm referring to was, "Stop wasting energy, say". The correct answer to which was, "Go Green".

Seriously?

Even in a crossword puzzle, can anyone actually say that with a straight face?

Can it be possible - even conceivable - that they  have confused us with that gang of backward children they've been playing tricks on - that they have the same contempt for us that  they have for them?

In the past decade I have lived in books, immersed myself in online essays and blogs, existing on data and compilations of statistics on energy resources as a Trappist monk lives in his faith. I have no other world, no other life. So I’m nobody’s fool in regards to energy usage – least of all Will Shortz'.

So when I read even a line of, not just nonsense, but deliberately repeated snippets of propaganda regurgitated as grist for the crossword mill, my hackles are raised, my sense of Truth insulted, my enjoyment of a treasured pastime sullied by the use of a crossword puzzle as a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably, even tragically, not true.

Only the rich Nations' citizens can afford motorized personal transport. 

A million new units /year is not exactly an indicator that going green will stop energy waste. No reduction in that number of units is even contemplated, (Au contraire) only the energy source that powers them is at issue, the usage of which rarely amounts, over their entire lifespan, to the amount of energy consumed in their production.

The first so-called Green Revolution was the answer to Malthusians. Using the new miracle of fossil-fueled agriculture to mechanize both the planting and harvesting processes, and supply nitrogen fertilizer, it stripped the prairies of their stabilizing topsoil and plant growth and thereby created the Dustbowl. To bring about their Green Revolution, they used so much DDT and other poisons on crops that it required a Silent Spring to snap down on its rampant use and careless application; it created, and to this day continues to enlarge, various dead zones in the oceans with the runoff of those expensively derived fertilizers into waters once rich with life, but soon enough emptied of any vestige of it but a rank growth of slime and muck; it destroyed agricultural regimes that fed populations for centuries, replacing them with unsustainable practices that more resembled a methamphetamine high than any sane activity ventured into for the purpose of improving man's lot.

But it fed a lot more people with a lot fewer of them needed to produce the bounty of fossil-fueled growth of grains that fed not only the humans, but stuffed their many animals. Pasteurland that once were fed and nourished by animals' urine and manure were plowed under and planted with grain to more efficiently feed and herd them, again, without the messy necessity of humans to pay. Agriculture was thus transformed to suit the needs of the machines, the living beings, for whom the entire enterprise was originally engineered to feed, completely left out of the equation except as  consumers.

The second time the misnomer of a Green Revolution was invoked was more recent. It came to the fore during GW Bush's first term, when the concept of corn-based Ethanol was being sold to a gullible public as a means of making America "Energy Independent" (A lie right from the start: Energy Independence was not only not its intention, it  never had a glimmer of possibility of being achievable). But to the science-addled Left, none of that mattered, what was important was that the young could easily be persuaded of the "rightness" (the left is besotted by the need to be in the right) of the drive toward energy independence from foreign sources of oil, itself a goal of dubious value, and one completely at odds with the same population's enthusiastic embrace of globalization.

This resulted in even more prairie being plowed under to grow unneeded grain to power SUV's. Because, at the same time as the "green" solution was being touted, the real reason behind it, the doubling in the tonnage that the average drivers were dimwittedly dragging around with them occurred, such that its weight burgeoned to more than three tons. Whose zooming who when you have to haul three tons of glass and metal around with you to pick up an 85 pound child from school, never mind a quart of milk from the grocery store?

To accomplish this Green revolution, a coal-fired power plant, needed to process all that grain into ethanol, was constructed and put on line for every single week of the Bush Presidency - from 2000 to 2008. A growth rate that saw the number of coal-fired plants increase by fully a third, from barely a thousand to more than 1450. Blowing mountaintops off Appalachian peaks, sloughing off slag and mounding it in heaps on the sides of rivers that eventually collapsed into them, digging mines so fast and furious they didn't bother much about safety, resulting in collapsing mines with miners trapped inside, as King Coal was crowned anew; its demand driven by the very Green revolution that pretended it was, well, green. Guess that's why it's called a revolution: what goes 'round comes 'round.

Soon enough Brazil adopted the green solution and started burning up their rainforests to plant sugarcane to propel their own growing thirst for hydrocarbon-fueled transport, followed by Indonesia, where even more rainforests, the lungs of the planet, went up in smoke, pumping CO2 into an atmosphere already besotted with it from industrial activities, to grow palm trees to fuel Germany's and the EU 's "Green" fuel of Biodiesel that poisons urban atmospheres so much with micro-particulates, that VW, and many of the other darlings of the European hi-priced automobile robofactories, devised means by which they could fool governments into sanctioning these Multinational Corporations' deployment of weapons of mass destruction in all their cities, enabling them to reap in profits while choking their citizens on diesel fumes (thank god it was "Green"!) and carcinogens. Yet you will  hear nothing about how ironic it is that the company Adolf Hitler championed, and named after the Volk, is busily gassing innocent civilians, only this time selling them their own little portable gas chambers, with the added insult of charging them for both the gas chamber and the poison gas. Hey, who cares? It creates jobs. Heil Hitler!

And now yet again we're being raked over the coals we ourselves set on fire by the belief that "Going Green" means we stop wasting energy, when exactly the opposite has been proven to be true time and time again; a fact you can prove to yourself by examining your own attitude toward so-called green energy: it's free, right? Carbon neutral. Who has to worry about energy consumption when it's green energy generated with the use of "Clean" fuels? An appellation the cognoscenti know is ridiculous when applied to coal, but unquestioningly swallow whole when it refers to solar or wind.

But, battery and other forms of energy storage aside, for every wind-powered plant built there is a fossil-fueled plant necessary to power it when the wind isn't blowing or the sun don't shine, and the amount of energy consumed therefore becomes of tantamount importance. And this, actual energy consumption, despite all the hurrahs in regards to the increased output of green energy, has risen at a faster clip than the growth in renewable energy. So that, as it is thus far turning out, the more renewable energy produced, the faster fossil fuels are consumed. This is counter-intuitive at first, until one considers that there has been no push to conserve, no drive to use less energy, and even as every last dollar is leveraged to the hilt, the leveraging of energy use, such that the more energy an economy consumes, the greater its economic output, is plummeting.

That's the reason, btw that the social planning of the OECD countries is falling into a black hole: the growth in the use of energy has become completely unmoored from economic productivity as it is burned more and more to power  Game consoles, wall-sized TV's, refrigerators the size of closets, and everything Internet, which means tons of AC, the  most energy-intensive user of electricity.  Enormous amounts of fuel are set aflame to cool down electronic switches and transistorized server farms. And one of the reasons for that escalating consumption is the very real misunderstanding, and consciously propagated fallacy, that Going Green means you stop wasting energy. But you don't. The belief that you have Gone Green has the exact opposite effect: it convinces people who should know better that they have the license to waste energy, because they've been led to believe, and want to believe, that it is no longer harmful to do so.

That sentence from earlier in this essay, when I asked if they are confusing us with those backward children they play dirty tricks on? That's from All About Eve. At the beginning of the movie, Eve asks Gary Merrill's character, as he's leaving to shoot a movie in Hollywood, if he isn't going to miss the theater. "The Theater", he exclaims sarcastically, and goes on to deliver a diatribe against the reverence with which New Yorkers hold "The Theater", at the end of which Eve meekly remonstrates, "I only asked a simple question".

I feel something of the same could be said about this reaction to a simple crossword clue, or, more to the point, the answer to that clue. Big deal, right? But that's how propaganda works. By subtly suggesting that something is simply accepted knowledge, and if you think otherwise, you're just politically incorrect, or simply too dense. But this wasn't in a mere puzzle book. It was in the pages of the NYT, and  edited, with top billing, by Will Shortz, the most famous name in crosswords ever. Both the publication and its editors, whether of the op-ed pages or its crosswords, should be held to a higher standard than a random fifty cent puzzle book. We are currently, though few seem to realize it, in the midst of a Corporate crime wave the likes of which have never been seen. VW is just the one that got caught. The Madoff in the coal mine. The most famous example, although the public largely remains ignorant of the enormity of their crime, of the Enronification of entire economies that globalization represents.

But we are fighting for our lives here, and we neither need nor appreciate the NYT spilling what our illustrious president would bellow as Fake News across its pages, even if that lie happens to be buried in a grid and needs to be teased out by solving the puzzle in which it's encased. The Corporate malfeasance that VW gave us a rare glimpse into also had to be teased out and solved by subterfuge before the Bosses found out and had the investigators stopped ... by whatever means necessary.  Things are buried for a purpose, and that purpose is rarely either aesthetic or accidental. And it seemed to me that allowing this purposely-construed misrepresentation to go unchallenged contributes to the poisonous atmosphere spreading through the body politic in much the same sinister way that gangrene seeps into the bloodstream from a festering wound that's simply ignored, and the result f that poisoning are already manifesting themselves while we continue to pretend that Capitalism, the engine that is pumping the poison into our bloodstream, will somehow (nobody even pretends to know quite how) provide the antidote.

But Capitalism is often described, even by its most ardent avatars, as economic Warfare.

And War, like the fires ravaging California, lives only for itself.

Climate and its Derangements: Head-fake Noose.

The American Way of Life is NOT Negotiable.

Like the military, the economy is now a bigger threat to us than the exigencies it was set up to protect us from in the first place. Because the "us" here in the good ole US is not us at all, but "them". And all they care about, as the number of homeless filling the streets and living in their cars steadily increases, are the employment numbers that belie the growing desperation; the rising housing values, that leave employed people nowhere to live but on the streets; the excessive Stock Market valuations, buoyed by tax bonanzas and an "independent" FED without which the traded companies' balance sheets could never justify those valuations; and all in the name of a Free Market that's been rigged (they may be called Equity Markets, but there's nothing equitable about them) and a Democracy that's been cynically usurped, buoyed up on the hydrogen fumes of a Financial system so riddled with corruption it needs but a spark to ignite a firestorm of economic destruction from the tinderbox of derivatives that has been construed for the sole purpose to hide their very real flammability. The ensuing conflagration will engulf the global economy yet again as it sets ablaze a bonfire of asset destruction that will incinerate without distinction the valuable assets along with the junk. 

Because that distinction, between real value and trumped-up trash, has been malignantly configured to make the difference between the two indecipherable. Using the totally bonkers concept of hiding risk from investors in order to use the hard-earned sweat of the indebted multitude to pay for the bad bets of the well-placed, bad debts that are still dragging on the economy from the last crackup,  a similar concept was in full view, though  unreported, as the claims of the rich after the climate-related storms of the Atlantic, were paid, their property secured, all while the bulk of the insurance Companies' premiums are paid for by the families living in bungalows and trailers, whose premiums will rise to pay for the nose-bleed valuation on the property of the rich: Communism redux. 

Collectivism: they collect, but rarely pay, those not well-placed. The Corzine Mentality of running a fine-tuned machine of asset allocation whose underlying mechanism is designed to enrich the House at the expense of its clients (MF Global collapsed into bankruptcy in 2011 and lost more than $1 billion of its customers' money).  Run out of money? No problemo. Just ransack your clients' accounts: "whatdya think they're there for, 'cause they're theirs? There there. There's no their there, just Ours."

Much like in Our Boarding House, there's a lot of Hoople goin' on:

Hoople: Lazy character preferring to work as little as possible,
 "earning" money on the side running every scam going.

And now that's all the economy is anymore, with the head scammer, whose morphology bears not a little resemblance to the overstuffed corpulence of the Major, is feeding his family reams of insider information to enable them to run every scam going while he does what he does best: distracts the hoi polloi and our embedded media with his outlandish buffoonery.

Meanwhile back in reality, the repercussions from heating up the atmosphere are indeed non-negotiable:

Dr. Jeff Masters' Wunderground Weather site reports on a fierce storm that brought over 50 foot seas and wind gusts in excess of 90 mph to Alaska's Aleutian Island ...

Bombogenesis: An atmospheric pressure drop of 24 millibars in 24 hours .
This storm dropped 55 millibars in 24 hours.

Meanwhile Robert Fanney, aka Scribbler, reports that hurricane force wind gusts are blowing off the West Coast of Greenland and predicts that  temperatures there will likely hit record ranges of up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit above average in the next few days.

And then there's Sam Carana of Arctic News fame informing us that on the other side of the Arctic Ocean a freshwater lid, formed from all the melting icewater floating atop the heavier, saltier, ocean water, has resulted in warmer water since Heat can't escape through the freshwater dome, (but solar radiation can penetrate deep into the salt water beneath), as is evident from the huge anomalies at the locations near Svalbard, where temperatures were 13.19°C or 23.77°F higher than normal. While:

Venezuela Poised to Become the First Country to Lose All of Its Glaciers to Climate Change

Climate scientists believe Antarctica may have hit a tipping point (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).

But the intelligence of even our brightest is no match for the rampant stupidity of militant capitalism:

Mahindra will open the area's first new vehicle assembly factory in 25 years (Not 25 years from now, but the 1'st one in 25 years ... ain't English grand? It's the Gracie Allen of languages), building off-road vehicles. Oh, but they'll be electric (Not!).

EVs will simply send CO2 emissions upstream. (Simply? That's actually was the original point of making them, to extend the life of the most environmentally destructive form of transportation imaginable, Automobiles, by pseudo-convincing the almost half of the globe's population that lives in Mega cities that it's OK, 'cause it doesn't affect them anymore). But like ethanol, it merely makes them feel better while actually accelerating Climate Derangement.

Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, describes the present moment as the “first time really in history with any major conflict that we have borrowed rather than ask people to contribute to the national defense directly, and the result is we’ve got this huge fiscal drag … that we’re not really accounting for or factoring into deliberations about fiscal policy as well as military policy.”

Total military costs racked up since that day in 2001 (can you guess which one?) are now $5.6 trillion. That includes not only Pentagon expenses, but also the State Department, Homeland Security, veterans’ health care… and $534 billion in interest costs arising from those expenses. What it doesn't include are the DOE, a large part of whose budget goes to nuclear matters, or the EPA, whose responsible fro the cleanup of so-called Super sites, many of which were involved in the Federal Government's uranium enrichment programs.

Both the United States and Britain have been making more money with arms sales to Saudi Arabia in recent years than ever before. Human rights critics fear that Saudi Arabia has not only bought their weapons but their acceptance for its policies

American car buyers are borrowing like never before—and missing plenty of payments, too.

Stock markets have grown to a total value of nearly one-and-a-half times GDP in the US

Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt manifestations of neoliberalism in today’s world.

Because of the above, the IEA Sees U.S. Shale Surge as Biggest Oil and Gas Boom in History, meaning that the aftermath will be the biggest BUST in history.

Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” was just one more empty promise as he adds to the muck with military contractors in key Pentagon jobs and other industry lobbyists at regulatory posts, says Jonathan Marshall. Big surprise, that.

 Exxon has "global expertise in extra-long laterals—including a 39,000 footer in Russia," WoodMac says.That's via a partnership with Rosneft, inked while our Secretary of State was its CEO. As can be gleaned from his performance while in the job, it is the only reason he was appointed Secretary of State. But Luckily, it had nothing whatsoever to do with his Rolodex of Russian contacts.

Rahmstorf said there are currently about 600 billion remaining tons of carbon dioxide that can be emitted (The idiotically-monikored "carbon budget") if the world is to have a good chance of keeping warming considerably below 2 degrees Celsius (If it's already more than .8 degrees, the most conservative estimate of how much increase we've already measured, how can it ever be "considerably below" 2 degrees?) and with some 40 billion tons of emissions each year (an amount that's growing not shrinking), that leaves just 15 years.

“If we start to ramp down emissions from now on (Lol) we can stretch this budget to last us about 30 years,” he said. “With every year that we wait we will have to stop using fossil energy even earlier.”

The amount of global warming as a product of CO2's increased concentration in the atmosphere is the model that global climate scientists use in their calculations. Nowhere in those formulas is the excess heat from burning billions of bbl's of oil a year, combined with that released from Natgas, only the solar radiation from above, not the solar radiation from below, which also can't radiate out into space because  of the increased density of the gaseous blanket with which we are suffocating ourselves.

The so-called "Carbon budget" assumes somehow that all the heat generated by using renewables (all energy generation anywhere in the known universe produces waste heat in the process) can escape into space. This seems to indicate that the so-called "Carbon budget" is a misnomer, because, what the article, what NO article written about the increase in CO2 cares to mention, is that during the same year that the failure to reach "Peak Carbon" occurred, the amount of energy generated by the so-called renewables is far larger than it's ever been and represents a far greater percentage mix of the ever-growing use of fossil fuels which, by the way, far from making the human experience on the planet easier and life more enjoyable, is starting to have precisely the opposite effect, wreaking havoc all over the globe, and dooming the children that the human race, which is hell-bent on reproducing at an astronomical rate, to early death.

Any other human endeavor, that doesn't advocate the constant multiplication of offspring, from Art to Science, is disdained, ridiculed, and in many States, punished by ostracism or death: Reproduce or be killed. Whereas the world itself is telling us, Reproduce and be killed. We are no more intelligent than bacteria in a petri dish. At least the bacteria are having their exogenous energy piped into them by an entity over which they have no control; we, however, are both the agents and subjects of our own experiment of stoked population growth, everybody watching with bated breath to see how the resultant inability of our own economic system to support such rabid multiplication of such an energy-intensive species will crash and burn.

Emissions are forecast to reach around 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning and industrial activity in 2017, said the group, which published the results in the journal Environmental Research Letters and more detailed findings in Earth System Science Data Discussions.

“If we want to ensure that emissions remain flat we have to put policies in place . . . and the second step is to start to drive emissions down.” (While relying on auto sales, arms deals and tourism as drivers of the Globalized economy: all of which depend on technologies that produce emissions as a result of energy-intensive activities). It's like saying we have to keep dead zones from spreading while slathering more and more nitrogen-based fertilizer on industrial-sized croplands that drain into the Mississippi and hence the Gulf of Mexico. In both cases, it ain't gonna (because it can't) happen.

The number one contributor, by far, to this difference in projected temperature change to observed? The atmosphere. This "blanket-like” effect of the gases in our atmosphere was first discovered nearly two centuries ago by Joseph Fourier and worked out in detail by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. Each of the gases present has some amount of absorptive effects in the infrared portion of the spectrum, which is the portion where Earth re-radiates most of its energy. Nitrogen and oxygen, which comprise the bulk of the atmosphere, are terrible absorbers, but good ones include water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and carbon dioxide. Capitalists are able to simply exhaust all of those gasses into the atmosphere at no cost ... to them. And, under the Law, that's all that matters ... to them. When we add (or take away: the oxygen atoms bound up in CO2 molecules represent that many fewer oxygen molecules available to support life) more of those gases to our planet’s atmosphere, it’s like thickening the blanket that the planet wears. This, too, was worked out by Arrhenius over 100 years ago.

But because fossil fuels, if the theory that names them that is correct, are essentially solar energy conserved in the form of hydrocarbons, somewhat akin to a battery, are always used to provide energy for another process besides heat, the conversion creates, on earth as everywhere else in the universe, waste heat. So as we stuff our metaphorical down comforter with more and more feathers in the form of CO2 we are turning the heat up on the electric blanket we have placed underneath it: whether it's fossil fuels, solar panels, windfarms, hydro or nuclear, we are converting one form of energy into another in order to do what we laughingly refer to as "useful work", a term that used to actually mean something. But is supplying tons of AC to a server farm in order to "mine" bitcoins to be playthings of the rich, doing useful work? Because one thing we know they ARE doing is using valuable resources, burning irreplaceable fuel, spewing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere, as their"mining" is undermining all the attempts to slow down the accelerating exhaustion of CO2 into the air. All at no cost to them, and invisible to you and me, and that isn't even taking into consideration the heat. No one in any calculations I've seen (and they may be out there, or I may have missed it in the equations), takes into account the enormous production of waste heat produced by burning (which is itself an indicator of our blindness ... NatGas, Oil, Coal, all must be burned to get them to do the work we want them to, yet no one thought to consider the waste heat they produce? Just the CO2?) But if solar heat can't be reflected back into space because of the CO2 blanket we're suffocating ourselves under, how can the waste heat from energy conversion get through it? Hint: it Can't).

This question is crucial, because, there's been so many hoorays and so much enthusiasm over the enormous increase in Renewables that are now being used to generate electricity, that no one has bothered to look at the use of fossil fuels, which one would hope would show a concomitant decline: they aren't. Their use is steadily increasing. And not only are they increasing they are, as of last year, increasing at a faster rate than the 1.5% at which they had been increasing before the use of alternatives to fossil fuels were even considered.

This shouldn't surprise anyone, as there has been neither discussion nor expression of any necessity to conserve our use of energy. Contrarily, via fracking in the US the oversupply of a fuel detrimental to the entire planet is not only accelerating, it is doing so with the use of government funding, tax breaks and depletion allowances that flail taxpayers so as to  force upon them the burden of costs that ratepayers and shareholders should be, but aren't, shouldering. Once again Capitalism does what it does best: funnels profits to criminals thereby creating more criminals in the process, as others see the easy gains to be "won"' by climbing aboard the gravy train of Government guarantee. Despite the self-serving volumes written to the contrary, at its heart, Cowboy Capitalism is Criminality gone Wild.

The only thing, despite the Kyoto protocols and other misguided attempts to reduce our fuel burning, that changed that 1.5% yearly climb in the combustion of everything we can dig up into smoke, was the GW recession. And that's the only thing that'll stop it now. That is the obvious plan. Just as watching the trading in the Stock Market of certain securities prior to the 9/11 attack alerted observant speculators that something was afoot, the current build up in stock prices is just as foreboding, as the reasons for it are exactly the same: Knowing what's about to happen, you get it while the gettin's good. And then step out out of the way right before the debacle becomes manifest to the rest of us, leaving all those ships that rose with the rising tides to flounder in the stormy seas of rigged markets and FED-induced business cycles, the cyclical nature of which is denied the better to keep a trusting public without even a lifeboat to climb into or a life-vest to don. Because that 's what being "fully invested" amounts to.

You see, if you really believe the fact that the planet we're on is getting warmer, and that the reason for said warming is the amount of CO2 being generated, then there is no escaping the fact that the population that you would logically target to redress that situation would be the middle classes of the OECD countries, and, more specifically, the middle class of the USA, which, even compared to its lifestyle-equivalent fellow members of this select club of Nations, burns up an outsize proportion of energy, and yet whose exports, to pay for that usage, have always, for decades, been in the negative ... by billions of dollars.

Yet the whole thrust of Capitalism, the supposed strength upon which it rests and provides the resiliency its ardent supporters claim it has, is based on the proper allocation of resources. An allocation based on a practice called accounting, which practice has been purposely debased. This much was spent on this or that and produced this, that and the other thing, production of which would halt should it be proved unprofitable. Yet decade after decade the US economy has, by the only metric that the most UBER-capitalist nation in the world allows: profitability, has been shown to be not only wanting, but sorely so, disastrously so, as the US has been building up, simultaneously, a National debt so onerous that, as these underlying dynamics of the economy illustrate, surpasses the ability of the debtor to ever repay. Debt is now the largest export that the US economy has, and it is the one that the reign of the Trump of Doom will make toxic. And toxic debt leads to crippling interest rates: that's why it's called junk, no one would want it except for its nosebleed interest rate is so alluring that those who know how collect it during the boon then slough off the securities once it's too dangerous (by, (as in the case of the toxic MBS and CDO's), getting the FED to buy it by the truckload, as one example of how the well-heeled take but never give) get to skim the cream and leave the bad debt for the rest of us to bear. And then call it Reform. (Seen Trading Places? Debt is just another commodity, like OJ in the film, to be manipulated so the suckers buy it just as its price has peaked).

But, having no resources, the dispossessed can't pay, and the bankrupt country must distract the world from that fact. Which is why the Distractor-in-Chief is doing such a bang-up job. Our orangutan Zero fiddles about, while our 'ome burns. No one notices that the drop in real value of real estate turned into a pile of ash loses, no matter how much insurance you've paid,  not only its appraised value, but its value for generating the very coin need to justify the outre debt assumed via leverage in the first place, but what the debt was using for leverage has been burned (or flooded) right out from under it. At some point this continuing destruction of the very infrastructure needed to produce the wealth to pay for, not only what is being completely destroyed, but the debts written off that can no longer be serviced, will, as it always does, reach a Lehman's moment, and the country's pr machine will no longer be able to hide that the Climate is a far stronger PR machine, as unmitigated disasters equivalent to what's happened to Puerto Rico soon enough demonstrate Nature's far greater ability to destroy wealth at a rate much faster than we can create, not just wealth, but the very facilities necessary to create it.

That is the point of The Donald's Disaster Capitalism. Creation of the only thing he's capable of producing: Chaos. For it is in that environment that he flourishes, and from which he plans to extract his billionaire-sized bounty, which even at that size doesn't come close to what his billionaire ego knows he, all while his putting on heirs (onto the federal payroll), deserves. What in heaven's name would lead anyone to believe that he intends to do otherwise?

Leading by (bad) Example.

Barren to Baron: I'm the President, See son?
Well, not anymore.

  E-clips: An Unfortunate Memento of the Total Eclipse: Eye Damage

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unfortunate-memento-of-the-total-eclipse-eye-damage-1512666000