MAGA cum Lousy: Making America Gangrenous Again.

Crapitalism: The Immoral Equivalent to War

As the US continues to make itself isolated from the rest of the global economy, gangrene has begun to seep in. Gangrene is a type of tissue death caused by a lack of blood supply.  Blood supply to an energy-intensive economy bent on constant military expansion is oil, yet, in the face of constrained energy reserves, multi-billion-dollar destructive impacts from high-atmospheric-energy-amped storms, and environmental degradation resulting in enormous yield losses for huge swaths of the plains, the US continues to increase its reliance on fossil-fuel-based energy consumption, with no resultant uptick in oil production, contrarily, it spurs the use of energy where said increase should be spurned.

Which is all to say, in a, I hope, not too annoyingly roundabout way, that, even if this were the only example of it, as the IPCC comes out with its most dire warning yet about everything we already know about the end result of our squandering of the earth's treasures to funnel their beneficence to a fraction of its inhabitants, all of whom can only agree on one thing: to keep the earth from undergoing the disastrous effects our energy-intensive lifestyle has condemned it to is to spread that lifestyle to every corner of the globe while simultaneously increasing our own rampant energy consumption by whatever means necessary.

Need more gasoline than you can import? Turn the vast plairies into an ethanol plant by growing acres upon acres of corn to process, via coal-burning power plants, into fuel, not for the carbon-based energy units called people, but for their CO2-spewing machines. But don't make those machines more energy-efficient or smaller: no, with all that free green-energy we are now growing by pouring vast amounts of Blue-State tax dollars into Red-anti-government States that demand a cessation of deficit spending even as they scream bloody murder if a nickle of their deficit-fueled boondoggle is threatened, we do the opposite. Double the transit fleet tonnage and decrease its fuel efficiency. As an added bonus, that ethanol delivers a less energy-intensive fuel, so all that extra tonnage streaming across the nations highways requires a good ten% more gas to travel the exact same distance.

Following the IPCC report, Victoria University professor of climate science Tim Naish said the CO2 reduction target they proposed was not possible without technology - that doesn't yet exist- to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Ah, but the technology does exist, it's called forestation. But the world is instead engaging in the most protracted bout of DE-forestation in mankind's history, burning vital forests down, and consequently pouring vast reserves of CO2 into the atmosphere that we now whine we need to devise a new technology to extract what shouldn't - as in we already knew we would thus seal our fate -  have been put there in the first place. Instead, entire swath's of not only the Amazon rain-forests, but those in Indonesia as well, in order to "grow" fuel: sugar to be used for ethanol in South America; bio-diesel from Indonesia to be used to poison the volk via wagons in Germany. It is not technology that we need: if mankind as a whole were a patient it would be in the insane asylum being treated with Electric shock therapy to see if we couldn't jolt it back into its senses.

Which brings to mind a more apt analogy: Frankenstein. The economy, receiving the jolt mankind needed in 2008, created the monster that has been stumbling around blindly with an outraged crowd at its heels ever since.

The stitched together remnants of the market forces that blew itself to pieces have been haphazardly sewn onto the tattered remains of Centrally planned economics with an autocratic head precariously perched atop, to ease its periodic replacement, sending ersatz signals to the benumbed periphery as its gangrenous tissue increasingly succumbs to its torpor and responds more and more sluggishly to the ever-increasing stimuli of massive doses of military expenditures, deficit spending, and suffocating debt, to increase demands in the economy, none of which are in any way related to the actual needs of the underlying tissue which therefore becomes all the more necrotic.

Even as the sclerotic carcass of the USSR lay rotting away in its infamous dustbin of history,  the USA was rummaging through that stinking dumpster to cannibalize the corpse so as to resurrect its worse features and splice them onto the far more dangerous body politic of liberal democracy, at the center of which sits the Federal Reserve, a private bank staff paid with taxpayers' funds, costing it billions to perform one function: normalize interest rates so that they are what the market wants. There is no larger indicator of the failure of market forces than when an entity purposely manipulates that market economy via interest rates yet claims its main function is to set those rates at neutral, where they naturally should be, to effect the greatest market efficiency. HUH? If that sounds confusing, it's because it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But that an agency, developed at a secret gathering of madmen intent on Hyde'ing their true motives of self-aggrandizement, meet on an island called Jeckyl, should emerge as a monster really shouldn't come as any great surprise.

 Now when that same entity purchases MBS and Treasuries to the tune  of $4.5 Trillions of dollars, for the express purpose of keeping the long-term borrowing costs of an out-of-control federal government and pour billions upon billions into a fracking industry that would otherwise be flat on its back, in order to pump enormous volumes of energy into transportation and electricity-generating capacity, then withholding that vital forcing will cause dislocations that are as predictable and inevitable as the changes atmospheric forcing, caused by the vast clouds of pollutants thus generated, is causing.

 The entire system upon which the economy now rests have all been either rescued, bailed out, or came into being only because of government investment in R&D, yet the People, from whom the investment dollars for Nuclear Research, Computer Development, and design and construction of the  Internet were wrested, and from whom the monies for TARP and the bailout of the entire financial "industry" were extorted, those people to whom the government went when it needed funds to bailout the auto industry over which executives had lorded, thus fattening their wallets while they driving the industry they commandeered into a brick wall, have nothing to show for their investments.

Claiming that they"paid back" the "loan", all theses industries are plowing full steam ahead into the next crash, fully armed with the knowledge that the fortunes lost in the next debacle will likewise not be theirs, but the suckers they lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery to be picked off with all the glee of a marksman, chest puffed up with the pride of conquest that comes even when the prey is robbed of its powers of fight or flight.

 But that's not  how investment's supposed to work. The US citizens who invested in GM, via the US Treasury, should be receiving dividends, like any other shareholder, as long as the companies it bailed out are making money. Every cent the Fed created to supply the fracking giants, such as Halliburton, already flush with cash from Cheney's gift of non-competitive bidding on military contracts, should have dollars flowing, akin to that fracked condensate, in to the pockets of the citizens of the US who risked future tax liability in order to pay for their bailouts. Instead, the taxpayer is still burdened with $4.5TRILLION of liabilities from those companies going out of business (ie declare bankruptcy so they don't have to pay their bills, then get sucked up by EXXON for pennies on the dollar (pennies on YOUR dollars), keep the receipts from selling that fuel abroad, pour what they save into building LNG infrastructure to ship the resultant Natural Gas overseas, with loans guaranteed by the Federal government from whom it hides the profits in tax-havens, and we wonder why the country keeps getting  poorer.

 So the Fed raises interest rates.

This is the new Frankenstein economy. Where the taxpayer and the citizens' monies incur all the risk, extend the loans, guarantee the profitability of one enterprise after the other, and the clowns they employ, who more often than not run the enterprises to whom they been given the sacred trust of operating, right into the ground, but not before stitching together a carefully crafted golden parachute to strap on themselves to jump out of the wreckage right before they plunge it into the sea.

And like the other centrally planned economies it so scathingly trashed in the past, the current global economy is stymied by the lack of actual demand, the unaccountability of entire industries for the enormous benefit from public expenditure they reap, even as they refuse to pay a nickel to the government that provides the equivalent of the very air they breathe: oil, or more exactly, as we're about to find out, cheap oil. Without it there'd be no Amazon, no Google, no Facebook, as there'd be no internet, the single-most energy-intensive entity, outside of the transportation sector, in existence.

 The FED, Ginny Mae, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac, the SEC, NSA, Sally Mae and bailed-out banks, the nuclear industry, airports, the interstate highway system, all are the products not only of Central planning in Washington, but Central funding from US taxpayers in whose numbers less and less are ranked the actual People (Corporations, the only ones that have a vote) who can afford to pay for such largess, even as they profit from it more than those who are having their feet held to the fire to do so.

If you don't wish to have a phone with you 24 hours a day, don't care to drive for a good quarter of your waking hours, or maybe if you don't appreciate the joys of air travel supervised by the Stasi, nor desire to buy a McMansion (most of whose rooms you'll never see), if you don't have any inclination to live in a floodplain, or in the middle of the dessert, it matters not a whit: you're paying for all of them anyway.

The 2008 depression changed the landscape in ways we've refused to acknowledge, and one of those way was that it tipped the idea of assuming a shared burden in order to provide a shared affluence on its  head. Austerity means there is no shared affluence, just an unshared burden. But since those who are "asked" to bear that burden now get no say, so the old USSR dynamic was simply slid into place with the Corporate heads of the private sector, who bear none of the onus of governance, instead of the Politburo: WE, as in Corporate heads, decide, not the market, and certainly not the government, its role has been truncated: simply deliver their lobbyist-written pronouncements to the citizens, and protect and serve them with lethat firepower and military-style weapons. 

As a stark example of this new reality, politically and economically, we should take heed from the reaction to the IPCC warning mentioned above, it couldn't be more stark:

"If that happens (ie, if oceans' temperatures increase beyond the 2C target ... "if" indeed, Lol), temperatures over many land regions would increase by double that amount (and that estimate, given it comes from the IPCC, errs on the low side).

"The Australian government has rejected the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report’s call to phase out coal power by 2050, claiming renewable energy cannot replace baseload coal power.

"Prof Naish: that doing something about climate change (the usual fiction) is not a viable option because it will (sic) destroy the economy.

 So there you have it, nothing else, even human existence matters: only "the economy".

If you think protesting and boycotting any specific Corporate plan will accomplish anything beyond a specific goal (such as stopping a pipeline - a laudable achievement, but ...), this should set you straight: even the inevitable short term (as in by the end of this century) destruction of everything we know is not enough to steer us from our path of extermination. So even as we love to continue to compare everyone we don't like in government to Hitler, the reason we most abhor what he did is forgotten: the industrialization of human annihilation. Yet we continue to idolize the machine that brings about the exact same thing: the Corporate Cowboy Capitalist Keptocracy. So now the decades-old question of how could the Germans have done it is at long-last answered. How could they be so cruel? (watch a Trump rally in the Bible belt-in-the-mouth states and witness the ascension of cruelty to the status of a virtue throughout the heartlessland of America). 

What we are doing is this: Perhaps you know,  perhaps you don't, but it is a well-known bromide in investment circles that as debt increases, it takes more and more debt to eke out each dollar of profit. Likewise we have woven the same dynamic into our energy usage such that even as our usage soars, the benefits it provides decrease. Using CO2-generating methods to industrialize the production of clothing, food, and housing may or may not have been wise, but it can be hard to argue that they didn't/don't have salubrious results.

To do so in order to enable watching reruns of Gilligan, funding college for students who'll be hired, if at all, to do jobs that have no such educational input requirements, fuel multi-ton vehicles to carry hundred-pound loads, and basically to subsidize the entire tourism/travel/airline industries, which is to name but a few of the energy-squandering, heat-trapping mechanisms we indulge in simply for our fleeting entertainment, is completely bonkers. It's mad bad and sad. To say we can do nothing is not very believable when in point of fact we've yet to even try anything (Seriously, a few wind farms, and solar arrays, added in order to keep the fossil-fuel-regime going, don't count as trying. Look at the figures: global energy consumption is growing faster than renewable sources of power-generating capacity. What that means, sans even lip-service to conservation, is that, regardless of the best of intentions, is that the faster we add renewable energy into the mix, the faster we're burning through our fossil reserves, and so the quicker that CO2 is burdening the troposphere). In other words, Green Power, renewable energy, however you wish to refer to it, is not being used to replace fossil fuel, but contrarily is being used to enhance their extraction, deployment and combustion.

To paraphrase Jimmy Carter, it is the Immoral Equivalent of War. Nor is there any chance, given that we truly are held, stifling and incapable of effecting change, under a heavy-handed, unrelenting Corporatocracy (heavy emphasis on the rat), that change will be effected. But not because it will destroy the economy, we've already done that, but because we have ceded our will to those who care about only their own ascendancy. Even unto the destruction of the planet's ability to sustain life, including, naturally, their own.