The Way of All Empires

SUBHEAD: Review of Michael C. Ruppert "Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World".

 
Image above: Detail of painting of the sacking of Rome by the Visogoths on 24 August 410AD by J. N. Sylvester in 1890. From (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sack_of_Rome_by_the_Visigoths_on_24_August_410_by_JN_Sylvestre_1890.jpg).  

By Rob Williams 4 May 2010 in Vermont Commons -
(http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2010/04/ian-baldwin-free-vermont-media-way-all-empires-us-eve-peak-oil)
 
For me, Michael Ruppert is the Paul Revere of our present moment in history. Revere risked his life to carry news and vital communiqués to the leaders of the burgeoning secessionist movement in Boston all the way southward to New York and Philadelphia. On his historic night of “alarming” the countryside en route to the Lexington homes of the secessionist leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, a sentry confronted him and asked Revere not to make so much noise. “Noise!” exclaimed Revere, “you’ll have noise enough before long.”

Like Revere before him, Ruppert is a dedicated, hard-riding messenger, who has risked his life to bear news vital to the survival of a society grown suddenly global. Of course, Ruppert’s message is not about the dreaded approach of the redcoats, but a far larger, far more formidable, and yet strangely less visible “enemy” known to some by the name of Peak Oil. Or, perhaps more accurately, Peak Oil and Peak Money. Ruppert describes his purpose as an activist-writer thus:

“To impart to as many individual human beings as possible the gut-level awareness of the magnitude of the crisis we face, and to enable those who do understand to prepare to face it, free of denial and with open eyes.”

It is fortuitous a filmmaker of Chris Smith’s consummate skill has given us a riveting hour-and-twenty-minute window into Ruppert’s mind and soul in "CoLLapse", which began as a project about Peak Oil and ended up as a film featuring the man who made the subject his cause célèbre.

Although he may not yet be a household name, Michael C. Ruppert’s first book, "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil" (2004), a complex and labyrinthine tour of the multi-chambered basement of imperial power, sold more than 100,000 copies and was for many months among amazon.com’s top 50 sellers. Rubicon became the Rosetta Stone for those who sought to deconstruct the most impenetrable, disguised machinations of power on the global stage, and provided its readers with a veritable Map of the Post-9-11 World.

The phenomenon of Peak Oil has only recently gained consensus among a broad range of experts, despite being discussed and argued about for at least two decades. It is not about running out of oil, a common misconception. It is about running out of cheap oil. That is the peg on which the Peak Oil story hangs.
And it is quite a story. Ruppert writes early on in Confronting Collapse:

“The edifice of human civilization…is built upon cheap oil... There is no combination of alternative energies anywhere…that will sustain the structure built by [cheap] oil and fossil fuels.”

It turns out the American Dream is negotiable after all. (Or soon will be.)
Unlike money, or credit, which may be and is being loaned into limitless existence by the central bankers 24-7, energy sources are bounded. And yet, as Ruppert insists, “Money has no value without energy to back it up.” This essential and exquisite insight into the relationship between energy and money is either ignored or glossed over by nearly every economist who advises hapless governments, national and local. “Energy, not money,” claims Ruppert, “is the root of all economic activity…the equivalent of free slave labor for industrial civilization.”

And what a source of “free” labor it has been for those of us who have lived and live in the last and present centuries! One $2.69 gallon of gasoline yields us 500 slave hours of work, or the equivalent of owning three weeks’ of slave labor. Anyone who commandeers the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil, for the moment priced at about $80, gets the energy-equivalent work of a human slave for two to three years — 23,200 hours worth. Talk about cheap!

However messy or proximate these slave-work analogies may be, they signify one thing for sure: cheap oil has meant boom times, and no nation has sucked up more of the black gold and enjoyed its oomph more than the United States.

EROEI: the ratio of collapse
Ruppert and other Peak Oil students believe that in 2005 the world economy climbed to the top of the bell-shaped curve that describes the useful life of oil (and practically any other non-renewable resource located on Earth). We humans now live atop The Bumpy Plateau, where global supply cannot be much expanded regardless of demand expressed by oil’s price. The bumps on the world economy’s road consist of price-driven dips down (aka recessions caused by “demand destruction”) and rises (a.k.a. faux “recoveries,” caused by massive inputs of central bank fiat money) that overall are making for a rocky ride for anyone who’s not an investment banker.

The ride, and its eventual destination, matter not much to those Lords of the Universe who inhabit the warrens of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Treasury (as well as TBTF banks elsewhere on the planet), for whom the laws of economic growth are more certain and reliable than the Laws of Thermodynamics (or any other science whose laws govern life), and who in the end are principally concerned to “Make money on the way up and make money on the way down.” In "Confronting Collapse", Ruppert reminds us more than once during the course of his terse deconstruction of Peak Oil, that “Until we change the way money works, we change nothing”. In the interim, we bear witness to the ravishment of our own wealth as ordinary Americans.

“Simply put, more money can be made – more quickly – by accelerating decline, bankrupting the country, starving people, and selling off assets than by investing it in rebuilding under a new economic paradigm or by trying to soften the crash… Financial markets have no long-term vision in the infinite growth paradigm… The current economic paradigm will find that it uses less energy to make more money by driving things [assets, such as housing] down than by building them up.”

At this juncture the hard facts of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) raise their stony heads. According to Ruppert, “EROEI is at the heart of what sustainability means,” the litmus test all new energy sources must pass (and few do). The search for the hard-to-find-and-hard-to-produce oil and other fossil sources of energy has already begun in earnest, albeit amidst confusing price signals. Demand decreases in the OECD countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), but rises in massive nations like China, India, and Brazil, as well as in oil-dense nations such as the Arab Gulf states, yielding a relentless net upward pressure on price.

EROEI now guides the calculus of energy enterprises and governments. If you have to invest $100 to get an $80 barrel of oil, are you going to do it? Not likely, even on spec. As for the oil fields already drilled, “Once it takes more than one barrel of oil …to extract one barrel of oil, an oil field is considered dead” (Confronting Collapse).

More than 96 percent of all the oil used in the world to date has been used since the United States entered World War II. Earlier in the last century, when the oil boom started in earnest, one barrel of energy-equivalent oil yielded an astonishing 100 barrels returned. Kaboom! That same barrel of oil invested today yields a meager three barrels here in the U.S. In Saudi Arabia, where one quarter of all the world’s oil is estimated to lie, and whose reserves are a closely guarded state secret, drilling offshore has begun (despite Saudi assurances its on-shore storehouse is practically limitless). As for oil produced from shale, tar sands, and coal, from deep beneath the Arctic and other oceans, off Brazil’s coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, such wished-for bonanzas are likely to yield EROEIs of 2:1 or less.
A world built on such expensive energy will be profoundly, comprehensively different from the one built on 100:1 energy.

Transition time
Entry onto The Bumpy Plateau has given us precious “transition time” to “power down” while not-yet-too-expensive energy reserves are available to repair and maintain the infrastructure that “lies at the heart of complex civilizations . . . without which civilization starts to break down.” Plugging the leaks in the dikes that are our infrastructure gives us time to start the work of re-localizing our economies, plural. Make no mistake, Ruppert is “alarming” us, as did Revere in a similarly life-threatening situation 235 years ago, to re-localize our food and energy systems now, without delay. We must come to understand that “globalization,” a term for the American Dream gone viral, “will die with ever-increasing [fossil] fuel costs.”

Some Peak Oil analysts believe The Bumpy Plateau — our final breathing space or “transition-time” — may last for one or two decades, to 2015 or 2025 (or possibly longer). Ruppert is not among this sanguinary lot. In a personal communication he has told me 2010 could be the year when the global economy “goes over the cliff.” I myself am agnostic on the timing, if not about the event itself. “The United States,” he told me, “will be impossible to govern as a single nation… There are only 13 combat brigades in the U.S. and these will not be enough to prevent chaos.”

Like Rome was, the U.S. will be caught with its troops scattered over the face of the Earth fighting perpetual imperial wars on multiple frontiers where the last sweet crude still flows in a world grown ravenous for every last drop. In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, “Complexity and Collapse: Empires at the Edge of Chaos,” the historian Niall Ferguson suggests that empires are complex systems that “operate somewhere between order and disorder – on the edge of ‘chaos.’”

Following the theory of complex systems, Ferguson reminds readers just how fast actual civilizations do in fact collapse, contrary to the ex post facto narratives of professional historians. Rome – that is, the Western Roman Empire – fell “within the span of a single generation.” That was long time ago, when transportation and communication systems were almost infinitely slower than they are today.
 
The incomparable 300-year old Ming Dynasty’s fall “from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.” The relatively modern Hapsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, and British empires all ceased to be empires swiftly. Closer in time to our own era was the former Soviet Union. “If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining — it was the one founded by Lenin,” Ferguson notes. He concludes his essay by observing that, like it or not, the collapse of empires (and the civilizations they embody) “is sudden.”

Ruppert thus hardly stands alone in his assessment of the precarious condition of the United States, and indeed of the whole of industrial civilization. Written in 2008, his new book contains many very specific and useful recommendations whose chances for adoption are now less than what they were when “change we can believe in” was a slogan that energized a plurality of voting Americans. However, in light of his ruthlessly sober observation that “recovery is what will kill us,” do we have a choice – and a chance? We do.

We must confront the truth of Peak Oil and begin the long march toward radical re-localization of fundamental life-supporting economic enterprises such as agriculture, energy, credit and currency, education, security, and health, and toward the creation of a new economic paradigm that permits us to live in equilibrium with our natural Earth-given endowments, both renewable and non-renewable, wherever we ourselves are located. And become sovereign in our own local domains.

Just as “union” was once necessary for nations, including our own, to survive and flourish in the wide-open, expansive energy era of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, today’s conditions, which are being determined by Peak Oil-driven collapse, make secession the new survival zeitgeist, as inevitable as “union” was 150 years ago. Survival won’t be in empires or regional hegemons but in the locales where we live as flesh-and-blood beings, growing our own food (no thank you, Monsanto), making our own energy (no thank you, ExxonMobil), assuring our own security (no thank you, Pentagon), making our own currency (no thank you, Federal Reserve), and issuing our own credit (no thank you, Goldman Sachs).

And thereby secede. Secede from the old paradigm and all that it enables, preeminently the thievery, murder, and wanton destruction of empire itself.


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The New Secessionists

SUBHEAD: The corporate state is rapidly cannibalizing the nation and pushing the planet toward irrevocable crisis.

By Chris Hedges on 26 April 2010 in Truthdig -
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_new_secessionists_20100426)


 
Image above: Detail of 1776 English map of revolutionary New England showing the boundaries of British provinces and colonies. From (http://www.sonofthesouth.net/revolutionary-war/maps/new-england-map.htm).  

Acts of rebellion which promote moral and political change must be nonviolent. And one of the most potent nonviolent alternatives in the country, which defies the corporate state and calls for an end to imperial wars, is the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states including Vermont, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii. These movements do not always embrace liberal values. Most of the groups in the South champion a “neo-Confederacy” and are often exclusively male and white.

Secessionists, who call for statewide referendums to secede, do not advocate the use of force. It is unclear, however, if some will turn to force if the federal structure ever denies them independence. These groups at least grasp that the old divisions between liberals and conservatives are obsolete and meaningless. They understand that corporations have carried out a coup d’état. They recognize that our permanent war economy and costly and futile imperial wars are unsustainable and they demand that we take popular action to prevent citizens from being further impoverished and robbed by Wall Street speculators and corporations.

“The defining characteristic of the Second Vermont Republic is that there are two enemies, the United States government and Corporate America.”

Thomas Naylor, who founded Vermont’s secessionist movement, told me when I reached him by phone at his home 10 miles south of Burlington.

“One owns the other one. We are not like the tea party. The underlying premise of the Tea Party movement is that the system is fixable.”

As reported by Christopher Ketcham in a recent issue of GOOD magazine, Naylor points to the nation’s decline, noting that the United States stands near the bottom among industrialized countries “in voter turnout, last in health care, last in education, highest in homicide rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth pregnancy, abortion, and divorce...”

The nation, he says grimly, has trillions in deficits it can never repay, is beset by staggering income disparities, has destroyed its manufacturing base and is the planet’s most egregious polluter and greediest consumer of fossil fuels. With some 40 million Americans living in poverty, tens of millions more in a category called “near poverty” and a permanent underclass trapped by a real unemployment rate of 17 percent, there is ample tinder for internal combustion.

If we do not undertake a dramatic reversal soon, he asserts, the country and the global environment will implode with catastrophic consequences. The secessionist movement is gaining ground in several states, especially Texas, where elected officials increasingly have to contend with secessionist sentiments. “Our membership has grown tremendously since the bailouts, since the tail end of the Bush administration,” said Daniel Miller, the leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement, when I spoke with him by telephone from his home in the small town of Nederland, Texas. “There is a feeling in Texas that we are being spent into oblivion. We are operating as the cash cow for the states that cannot manage their budgets. With this Congress,

Texas has been squarely in their cross hairs, from cap and trade to the alien transfer and exit program. So many legislative pieces coming down the pike are offensive to people here in Texas. The sentiment for independence here is very high.

The sentiment inside the Legislature and state capital is one of guarded optimism. There are scores of folks within state government who are supportive of what we are doing, although there is a need to see the public support in a more tangible way. This is why we launched our Let Texas Decide petition drive. We intend to deliver over a million signatures on the opening day of the [state legislative] session on Jan. 11, 2011.”

Miller, like Naylor, expects many in the Tea Party to migrate to secessionist movements once they realize that they cannot alter the structure or power of the corporate state through electoral politics. Polls in Texas show the secessionists have support from about 35 percent of the state’s population, and Vermont is not far behind.

Naylor, who taught economics at Duke University for 30 years, is, along with Kirkpatrick Sale and Donald Livingston, one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement. His writing can be found on The Second Vermont Republic website, on the website Secession News and in postings on the Middlebury Institute website. Naylor first proposed secession in his 1997 book “Downsizing the USA.”

He comes out of the “small is beautiful” movement, as does Sale. Naylor lives with his wife in the Vermont village of Charlotte. The Second Vermont Republic arose from the statewide anti-war protests in 2003. It embraces a left-wing populism that makes it unique among the national movements, which usually veer more toward Ron Paul libertarianism.

The Vermont movement, like the Texas and Alaska movements, is well organized. It has a bimonthly newspaper called The Vermont Commons, which champions sustainable agriculture and energy supplies based on wind and water, and calls for locally owned banks which will open lines of credit to their communities. Dennis Steele, who is campaigning for governor as a secessionist, runs Radio Free Vermont, which gives a venue to Vermont musicians and groups as well as being a voice of the movement.

Vermont, like Texas, was an independent republic, but on March 4, 1791, voted to enter the union. Supporters of the Second Vermont Republic commemorate the anniversary by holding a mock funeral procession through the state capital, Montpelier, with a casket marked “Vermont.”

Secessionist candidates in Vermont are currently running for governor, lieutenant governor, eight Senate seats and two House seats. “The movement, at its core, is anti-authoritarian,” said Sale, who works closely with Naylor and spoke with me from his home in Charleston, S.C. “It includes those who are libertarians and those who are on the anarchic community side. In traditional terms these people are left and right, but they have come very close together in their anti-authoritarianism.

Left and right no longer have meaning.” The movement correctly views the corporate state as a force that has so corrupted the economy, as well as the electoral and judicial process, that it cannot be defeated through traditional routes. It also knows that the corporate state, which looks at the natural world and human beings as commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs, is rapidly cannibalizing the nation and pushing the planet toward irrevocable crisis.

And it argues that the corporate state can be dismantled only through radical forms of nonviolent revolt and the dissolution of the United States. As an act of revolt it has many attributes. “The only way we will ever stop these wars is when we stop paying for them,” Naylor told me. “Vermont contributes about $1.5 billion to the Pentagon’s budget. Do we want to keep supporting these wars? If not, let’s pull out. We have two objectives. The first is returning Vermont to its status as an independent republic.

The second is the peaceful dissolution of the empire. I see these as being mutually complementary.” “The U.S. government has lost its moral authority,” he went on. “It is corrupt to the core. It is owned, operated and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America. Its foreign policy is controlled by the Israeli lobby. It is unsustainable economically, socially, morally, militarily and environmentally. It is ungovernable and therefore unfixable.

The question is, do you go down with the Titanic or do you seek other options?” The leaders of the movement concede that sentiment still outstrips organization. There has not been a large proliferation of new groups, and a few old groups have folded because of a lack of leadership and support. But they insist that an increasing number of Americans are receptive to their ideas. “The number of groups has not grown as I hoped it would when I started having congresses,” said Sale, who addresses groups around the country.

“But the number of people, of individuals, of websites and the number of libertarians who have come around has grown leaps and bounds. Many of those who were disappointed by the treatment of Ron Paul have come to the conclusion that they cannot have a Libertarian Party or a libertarian Republican.

They are beginning to talk about secession.” “Secessionists have to be very careful not to be militaristic,” Sale warned. “This cannot be won by the gun. You can be emphatic in your secessionism, but it won’t happen by carrying guns.

I don’t know what the Tea party People think they are going to accomplish with guns. I guess it is a statement against the federal government and the fear that Obama is about to have gun control. It appears to be an assertion of individual rights. But the Tea Party people have not yet understood how they are going to get their view across.

They still believe they can elect people, either Republicans or declared conservatives, to office in Washington and have an effect, as if you can escape the culture of Washington and the characteristics of government that has only gotten bigger and will only continue to get bigger. Electing people to the House and Senate is not going to change the characteristics of the system.”

The most pressing problem is that the movement harbors within its ranks Southern secessionists who wrap themselves in the Confederate flag, begin their meetings singing Dixie and celebrate the slave culture of the antebellum South. Secessionist groups such as the Southern National Congress and the more radical League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a “racist hate group,” openly embrace a return to uncontested white, male power. And this aspect of the movement deeply disturbs leaders such as Naylor, Sale and Miller.

What all these movements grasp, however, is that the American Empire is over. It cannot be sustained. They understand that we must disengage peacefully, learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, or see an economic collapse that could trigger a perverted Christian fascism, a ruthless police state and internecine violence. “There are three or four possible scenarios that will bring down the empire,” Naylor said. “One possibility is a war with Iran.

Another will see the Chinese pull the plug on Treasury bills. Even if these do not happen, the infrastructure of the country is decaying. This is a slower process. And they do not have the economy fixed. It is smoke and mirrors. This is why the price of gold is so high. The economy and the inability to stop the wars will alone be enough to bring us down. There is no escape now from our imperial overstretch.”

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Will Vermont Secede?

SUBHEAD: Nine statewide candidates in Vermont support seceding from United States.

By John Curran on 13 January 2010 in Huffington Post -  
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/vermont-secession-movement_n_421323.html)

 
Image above: Symbol on the state flag with the motto "Vermont - Freedom & Unity".  

Peter Garritano thinks it's time for Vermont to call it quits with America. The way the 54-year-old automobile salesman sees it, the "empire" is about to implode and tiny Vermont can lead the way by becoming its own independent republic. So he's running for lieutenant governor, topping a slate of secession-minded candidates seeking statewide offices this year. Their name: Vermont Independence Day. "The only hope is to just say, 'Look, this isn't working for us. We want to start fresh again, with a real democracy,'" Garritano said. "I think that's the answer. Hopefully, it won't take another horrible economic breakdown to realize that the people running things don't look out for the little guy, or us, or the soldiers. It's all about profit and getting the last drops of oil on Earth and trampling people's rights." Garritano, gubernatorial candidate Dennis P. Steele and seven candidates for state Senate seats plan to declare their candidacies Friday. Their cause isn't new: It's the latest incarnation of a movement that's bubbled in Vermont and elsewhere for years. Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire and Texas all have made noise about seceding, to no avail. Their method is: Organizers say it's the first time since the Civil War that a secession movement has fielded a slate of candidates for statewide office, although individual pro-secession candidates have run before.

Few political observers give them much hope of winning, even in a left-leaning state where the popular Republican governor's decision not to seek re-election has touched off a scramble among would-be successors, with five Democrats and a Republican in a wide-open race for the seat headed to the Nov. 2 election. Story continues below Unlikelier still is the idea that, if elected, the candidates could accomplish their goal, critics say. "This is the triumph of hope over reality," said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont and a longtime observer of the state's political scene. "The whole movement was spawned by having George W. Bush as president.

My guess is that with (Barack) Obama as president and this being Obama's second-best state, the wind has been taken out of their sails." In fact, Obama's failure to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has fueled some of the candidates' positions. Long on outrage about the status quo but short on details about the new order they envision, they say Vermont could establish its own Social Security system, tend to health care and maintain roads using the billions of dollars in taxes it could save by not paying federal taxes.

Steele, a U.S. Army veteran, says if elected he'll call a statewide convention to consider articles of political independence and try to get Vermont National Guard troops returned home from the wars. But as Dartmouth College professor of government Linda Fowler says, "The problem (with secession) always is the one the framers pointed out: Governmental units that are so small end up being vulnerable to their neighbors, in all kinds of ways."

For now, the focus is on the campaign in Vermont, where the secession candidates – on a shoestring budget – plan a largely Internet-based campaign. As of Wednesday, they hadn't launched a dedicated Web site, though one is planned. Garritano, a Shelburne independent who's never run for office before, promised his wife the campaign wouldn't cost them much money. He's sticking to that: So far, he's spent $20 on business cards. Come November, he won't be identified as a "secession" candidate on the ballot; it will just say "independent."

"If somehow, miraculously, I got elected lieutenant governor, I'd make an effort to get back some of our rights – right to freedom of speech, freedom of association and other Constitution-Bill of Rights things that have been taken away from us," Garritano said. Steele, a 44-year-old political neophyte from Kirby who owns Internet radio station Free Vermont Radio, says he'll take a grassroots approach to campaigning – traversing the state in a recreational vehicle with his wife, 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. "The plan is to travel around the state with my family, try to make it a fun thing," he said. "Go out, do some live broadcasts, pound some doors and then come back to the campground with my family in the RV." Former Gov. Thomas Salmon is among those who doubt Vermont will ever break its ties with Washington, D.C.

 "Do I think Vermont has a realistic chance of seceding in the near-term, midterm or long-term future? No, I don't," said Salmon, who served in the 1970s. "We did our time as an independent Republic, from 1777 to 1791. I think one time as an independent republic is enough."

 See also:
Island Breath: Vermont Wants Out 11/11/05
 Island Breath: Vermont Impeaches GWB 3/8/06