Lamentation

SUBHEAD: The sudden end of a whole regional economy that was a tragic blunder from the get-go?

By James Kunstler on 14 September 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/lamentation/)


Image above: Bedroom sheetrock drywalls in the home of Rashida Ferdinand in the New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward blooming with health threatening mold following heavy rain and flooding in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005. From (https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/keep-mold-taking-hold).

An awful lot of sheetrock is going to be permanently ruined over the next few days down along the coast of Dixieland. Following the spectacle of hurricane reportage on TV reveals very little while the event is in progress.

The cheapo building materials of the stereotypical strip malls flap around in the gale and the valiant cable news storm-chasers lean into the horizontal deluge in the empty parking lots, but their reportage doesn’t tell much of the real story, which only emerges when the roaring blob of weather moves on and the sun finally comes out.

More than a decade of punishing storms along the US coastline must be wrecking the insurance industry as much as the stuff on the landscape.

They’ve been pummeled from another direction for ten years by the supernaturally low interest rates that make it so hard to refurbish their coffers after whole regions like the Houston metro area and the entire island of Puerto Rico get blasted and they have to pay out billions in claims.

This time around, all those vinyl and chip-board McHouses along the Atlantic beaches will not be replaced. But farther inland, far from the roaring surf, along all the overflowing estuaries that drain the coastal plain, the damage will be widespread and epic.

It may create a whole new social class of de-housed, displaced Sunbelters who will never again have a decent place of their own to live in. Since many are retirees, the event may even lead to a stealth die-off of people who are just too far along to start over.

The lamentation for the northern part of “flyover” America is an old story now. Nobody is surprised anymore by the desolation of de-industrialized places like Youngstown, Ohio, or Gary, Indiana, where American wealth was once minted the hard way by men toiling around blast furnaces.

But the southeast states enjoyed a strange interlude of artificial dynamism since the 1950s, which is about three generations, and there is little cultural memory for what the region was like before: an agricultural backwater with few cities of consequence and widespread Third Worldish poverty, barefoot children with hookworm, and scrawny field laborers in ragged straw hats leaning on their hoes in the stifling heat.

The demographic shifts of recent decades turned a lot of it into an endless theme park of All-You-Can-Eat buffets, drive-in beer emporia, hamburger palaces, gated retirement subdivisions, evangelical churches built like giant muffler shops, vast wastelands of free parking, and all the other trappings of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Like many of history’s prankish proceedings, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

As survivors slosh around in the plastic debris in the weeks ahead, and the news media spins out its heartwarming vignettes of rescue and heroism, will there be any awareness of what has actually happened: the very sudden end of a whole regional economy that was a tragic blunder from the get-go?

It is probably hard to imagine Dixieland struggling into whatever its next economy might be. In some places, it’s not even possible to return to a prior economy based on agriculture. A lot of the landscape was farmed so ruinously for two hundred years that the soil has turned into a kind of natural cement, called hardpan or caliche.

The climate prospects for the region are not favorable either, not to mention the certain cessation of universal air-conditioning and “happy motoring” that made the unwise mega-developments of recent decades possible.

The one salutary effect of Hurricane Florence may be that news of the after-effects will supersede the incoherent manufactured political blather welling up around the coming midterm elections — especially if the financial damage is powerful enough to disturb the debt-fueled occult economic “boom” attributed to the magic powers of our deal-wielding POTUS.

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Dimming Bulb: Collapse has arrived!

SUBHEAD: Third of the series examining the implications ten years after Peak Oil. 

By RE on 4 June 2017 for Doomstead Diner -
(http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2017/06/04/dimming-bulb-3-collapse-has-arrived/)


Image above: See the lights, while you can, with a deluxe Las Vegas helicopter night flight with VIP Transportation. From (http://www.5starhelicoptertours.com/agent/las-vegas-night-strip-helicopter-flight/).

Due to my High & Mighty position as a Global Collapse Pundit, I am often asked the question of when precisely will Collapse arrive?  The people who ask me this question all come from 1^st World countries.  They are also all reasonably well off with a computer, an internet connection, running water and enough food to eat.

While a few of us are relatively poor retirees, even none of us wants for the basics as of yet.  The Diner doesn't get many readers from the underclass even here in Amerika, much less from the Global Underclass in places like Nigeria, Somalia,Sudan and Yemen.

The fact is, that for more than half the world population, Collapse is in full swing and well underway.  Two key bellweathers of where collapse is now are the areas of Electricity and Food.

In his seminal 1996 paper The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age, Richard Duncan mapped out the trajectory of where we would be as the years passed and fossil fuels became more difficult and expensive to mine up.

Besides powering all our cars and trucks for Happy Motoring and Just-in-Time delivery, the main thing our 1^st World lifestyle requires is Electricity, and lots of it on demand, 24/7.

Although electricity can be produced in some "renewable" ways that don't depend on a lot of fossil fuel energy at least directly, most of the global supply of electric power comes from Coal and Natural Gas.

Of the two, Natural Gas is slightly cleaner, but either way when you burn them, CO₂ goes up in the atmosphere.  This of course is a problem climatically, but you have an even bigger problem socially and politically if you aren't burning them.

Everything in the society as it has been constructed since Edison invented the Light Bulb in 1879 has depended on electricity to function.

Now, if all the toys like lights, refrigerators big screen TVs etc had been kept to just a few small countries and the rest of the world lived a simple subsistence farming lifestyle, the lucky few with the toys probably could have kept the juice flowing a lot longer.

Unfortunately however, once exposed to all the great toys, EVERYBODY wanted them.  The industrialists also salivated over all the profit to be made selling the toys to everyone.

So, everybody everywhere needed a grid, which the industrialists and their associated banksters extended Credit for "backward" Nation-States all over the globe to build their own power plants and string their own wires.

Now everybody in the country could have a lightbulb to see by and a fridge to keep the food cold.

More than that, the electricity also went to power water pumping stations and sewage treatment plants, so you could pack the Big Shities with even more people who use still more electricity.

This went on all over the globe, until today there isn't a major city or even a medium size town anywhere on the globe that isn't wired for electricity, although many places that are now no longer have enough money to keep the juice flowing.

Where is the electricity going off first? Obviously, in the poorest and most war torn countries across the Middle East and Africa. These days, from Egypt to Tunisia, if they get two hours of electricity a day they are doing good.


Image above: Young men walk a darkened street in the Middle East. From article below.

Robin Wright wrote a piece for the New Yorker titled "The Lights Are Going Out in the Middle East". She pointed out:

Public fury over rampant outages has sparked protests. In January, in one of the largest demonstrations since Hamas took control in Gaza a decade ago, ten thousand Palestinians, angered by the lack of power during a frigid winter, hurled stones and set tires ablaze outside the electricity company.

Iraq has the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves, but, during the past two years, repeated anti-government demonstrations have erupted over blackouts that are rarely announced in advance and are of indefinite duration.

It’s one issue that unites fractious Sunnis in the west, Shiites in the arid south, and Kurds in the mountainous north. In the midst of Yemen’s complex war, hundreds dared to take to the streets of Aden in February to protest prolonged outages.

In Syria, supporters of President Bashar al-Assad in Latakia, the dynasty’s main stronghold, who had remained loyal for six years of civil war, drew the line over electricity. They staged a protest in January over a cutback to only one hour of power a day.

Over the past eight months, I’ve been struck by people talking less about the prospects of peace, the dangers of ISIS, or President Trump’s intentions in the Middle East than their own exhaustion from the trials of daily life.

Families recounted groggily getting up in the middle of the night when power abruptly comes on in order to do laundry, carry out business transactions on computers, charge phones, or just bathe and flush toilets, until electricity, just as unpredictably, goes off again.

Some families have stopped taking elevators; their terrified children have been stuck too often between floors. Students complained of freezing classrooms in winter, trying to study or write papers without computers, and reading at night by candlelight. The challenges will soon increase with the demands for power—and air-conditioning—surge, as summer temperatures reach a hundred and twenty-five degrees.

The reasons for these outages vary. With the exception of the Gulf states, infrastructure is old or inadequate in many of the twenty-three Arab countries. The region’s disparate wars, past and present, have damaged or destroyed electrical grids.

Some governments, even in Iraq, can’t afford the cost of fueling plants around the clock. Epic corruption has compounded physical challenges. Politicians have delayed or prevented solutions if their cronies don’t get contracts to fuel, maintain, or build power plants.

Now you'll note that at the end of the last paragraph there, the journalist implies that a big part of the problem is "political corruption", but it's really not.  It's simply a lack of money.  These countries at one time were all Oil Exporters, although not on the scale of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

As their own supplies of oil have depleted they have become oil importers, except they neither have a sufficient mercantilist model running to bring in enough FOREX to buy oil, and they can't get credit from the international banking cartel to keep buying.

Third World countries are being cut off from the Credit Lifeline, unlike the core countries at the center of credit creation like Britain, Germany and the FSoA.  All these 1^st World countries are in just as bad fiscal deficit as the MENA countries, the only difference is they still can get credit and run the deficits even higher.  This works until it doesn't anymore.

Beyond the credit issue is the War problem.  As the countries run out of money, more people become unemployed, biznesses go bankrupt, tax collection drops off the map and goobermint employees are laid off too.  It's the classic deflationary spiral which printing more money doesn't solve, since the notes become increasingly worthless.

For them to be worth anything in FOREX, somebody has to buy their Goobermint Bonds, and that is precisely what is not happening.  So as the society becomes increasingly impoverished, it descends into internecine warfare between factions trying to hold on to or increase their share of the ever shrinking pie.

The warfare ongoing in these nations has knock on effects for the First World Nations still trying to extract energy from some of these places.  To keep the oil flowing outward, they have to run very expensive military operations to at least maintain enough order that oil pipelines aren't sabotaged on a daily basis.

The cost of the operations keeps going up, but the amount of money they can charge the customers for the oil inside their own countries does not keep going up.

Right now they have hit a ceiling around $50/bbl for what they can charge for the oil, and for the most part this is not a profit making price.

So all the corporations involved in Exploration & Production these days are surviving on further extensions of credit from the TBTF banks while at the same time cutting back on their capital expenditures.  This also is a paradigm that can't last.

The other major problem now surfacing is the Food Distribution problem, and again this is hitting the African countries first and hardest.  It's a combination problem of climate change, population overshoot and the warfare which results from those issues.

Currently, the UN lists four countries in extreme danger of famine in the coming year, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.  They estimate currently there are twenty million people at extreme risk, and I would bet the numbers are a good deal higher than that.


Image above: A child is fed a special formula by her mother at a hospital in Baidoa, Somalia, where drought is causing severe malnourishment. From article below.

Bethan McKernan wrote a piece for the New Independent titled "World faces four famines as Trump plans to slash foreign aid". She pointed out:

This is the iggest humanitarian crisis since World War II' about to engulf 20 million people, UN says, as governments only donate 10 per cent of funds needed for essential aid.

The world is facing a humanitarian crisis bigger than any in living memory, the UN has said, as four countries teeter on the brink of famine.

Twenty million people are at risk of starvation and facing water shortages in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, while parts of South Sudan are already officially suffering from famine.  

While the UN said in February that at least $4.4 billion was needed by the end of March to avert a hunger catastrophe across the four nations, the end of the month is fast approaching, and only 10 per cent of the necessary funds have been received from donor governments so far.

It doesn't look too promising that the UN will be able to raise the $4 billion they say is necessary to feed all those hungry mouths, and none of the 1^st World countries is too predisposed to handing out food aid when they all currently have problems with their own social welfare programs for food distribution.  Here in the FSoA, there are currently around 45 million people on SNAP Cards at a current cost around $71billion.

The Republicans in charge of Congress will no doubt try to cut this number in order to better fund the Pentagon, but they are not likely to send more money to Somalia.

Far as compassion for all the starving people globally goes in the general population, this also appears to be decreasing, although I don't have statistics to back that up. It is just a general sense I get as I read the collapse blogosphere, in the commentariats generally.

The general attitude is, "It's their own fault for being so stupid and not using Birth Control.  If they were never born, they wouldn't have to die of starvation."  Since they are mostly Black Africans currently starving, this is another reason a large swath of the white population here doesn't care much about the problem.

There are all sorts of social and economic reasons why this problem spiralled out of control, having mainly to do with the production of cheap food through Industrial Agriculture and Endless Greed centered on the idea of Endless Growth, which is not possible on a Finite Planet.

More places on Earth were wired up with each passing year, and more people were bred up with each passing year.  The dependency on fossil fuels to keep this supposedly endless cycle of growth going became ever greater each year, all while this resource was being depleted more each year.

Eventually, an inflexion point had to be hit, and we have hit it.

The thing is, for the relatively comfortable readers of the Doomstead Diner in the First World "Business as Usual" seems to be continuing onward, even if you are a bit poorer than you were last year.

Electricity is still available 24/7 from the grid with only occasional interruptions.  Gas is still available at the pump, and if you are employed you probably can afford to buy it, although you need to be more careful about how much you drive around unless you are a 1%er.

The Rich are still lining up to buy EVs from Elon Musk, even though having a grid to support all electric transportation is out of the question.  The current grid can't be maintained, and upgrading to handle that much throughput would take much thicker cables all across the network.

People carry on though as though this will all go on forever and Scientists & Engineers will solve all the problems with some magical new device.  In other words they believe in Skittle Shitting Unicorns.

That's not going to happen though, so you're back to the question of how long will it take your neighborhood in the England or Germany or America to look like say Egypt does today?  Well, if you go back in time a decade to Egypt in 2007, things were still looking pretty peachy over there, especially in Tourist Traps like Cairo.

Terrorism wasn't too huge a problem and the government of Hosni Mubarak appeared stable.  A decade later today, Egypt is basically a failed state only doing marginally better than places like Somalia and Sudan.  The only reason they're doing as well as they are is because they are in an important strategic location on the Suez Canal and as such get support from the American military.

So a good wild ass guess for how long it will take for the Collapse Level in First World countries to reach the level Egypt is at today is about a decade.

It could be a little shorter, it could be longer.  By then of course, Egypt will be in even WORSE shape, and who might still be left alive in Somalia is an open question.  Highly unlikely to be very many people though.

Over the next decade, the famines will spread and people will die, in numbers far exceeding the twenty million to occur over the next year.  After a while, it's unlikely we will get much reporting about this, and people here won't care much about what they do hear.  They will have their own problems.

See also:
Doomstead Diner: The Dimming Bulb 12/7/14
Doomstead Diner: The Dimming Bulb: Peak Electricity 10/18/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Living through economic collapse 8/28/16


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Obama's Third World USA

SUBHEAD: The Obama Administration's economic vision for America is coming into focus and it's not pretty -- the United States as a third-world nation.

By Curtis Ellis on 14 May 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/curtis-ellis/obamas-economic-vision_b_3276203.html)


Image above: The Damm family in their car photographed by Amanda Rosende. From (http://amandarosende.blogg.se/2011/october/mary-ellen-mark.html).

Third world economies export raw materials, such as oil, timber and ore, while advanced economies process raw materials into value-added manufactured goods.

The U.S. has a newfound abundance of natural gas from the fracking boom. While the debate over fracking continues, the question remains: Should we use the gas for value-added manufacturing here in the U.S. (both as an inexpensive energy source and as a feedstock for chemicals and pharmaceuticals), or do we export it in raw form as liquefied natural gas?

The development strategy the president seems to favor resembles that of an extractive third world economy. The Financial Times reports:

"The Obama administration has signalled support for more plants to export liquefied natural gas, as the US embraces its surging energy production as a key new element of its national security policy.

Barack Obama said at the weekend the US was likely to be a net gas exporter by 2020, the strongest sign yet that the president is swinging his support behind higher energy sales overseas."

European and Asian customers currently pay three to four times the going rate for natural gas in the U.S. Under the White House plan, we would frack as much gas as we possibly can and send it to Japan to fuel their manufacturing industries. The gas would return to our shores in the form of value-added manufactured goods.

American manufacturers, including Dow and Alcoa, disagree. They advocate limiting gas exports, instead using the gas as a source of cheap energy to give U.S. industry a competitive edge over Asian competitors. They argue rightly that manufacturing creates more jobs outside its sector than any other industry.

But the oil & gas industry supports maximum exports, and it has an ally in the debt merchants of Wall Street. (Gas liquefaction plants typically have a 4-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio.)

It's no surprise an administration as tied to Wall Street as this one is taking the side of the financial sector.

But it's even worse: If the administration has its way, neither Congress nor any government official, elected or appointed, would have any say in the matter.

The Obama Administration (along with corporatist allies in the GOP) is pursuing the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), a so-called free trade agreement with eleven nations including Japan. TPP has been described as NAFTA on steroids, and the president says he wants to conclude it this year.

If TPP is approved we would be all but required to export natural gas to Japan.

Under the banner of global free trade, Congress would forfeit its power to craft a national energy policy that serves the best interests of all our citizens, rather than the narrow interests of international bankers and the Seven Sisters.

I would argue that a maximum export policy relegates the U.S. to the status of a captive colonial market for manufactured goods from Asia.

Reasonable people can disagree. But one thing is certain: The decision whether to export and how much to export should be made in America, by Americans, not by unaccountable transnational authorities beyond the reach of our elected representatives.

The first order of business is stopping the TransPacific Partnership so we will continue to have control over our nation's energy resources and the power to determine what we do with them.

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Gravity Light

SUBHEAD: Gravity powered lights where there is no elextric grid that are cheaper than solar powered ones.

By Dane Carlson on December 11 2012 for Business Opportunities -
(http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2012/12/11/generating-light-with-gravity/)


Image above: Gravity light in the Third World. From original article.

Did you know that there are currently over 1.5 billion people in the World who have no reliable access to mains electricity? These people rely, instead, on biomass fuels (mostly kerosene) for lighting once the sun goes down.

A commonly held view is that solar powered lighting is the answer to these problems in the developing world. However a number of conflicting factors combine to complicate matters. Solar panels produce electricity only when the sun shines, so the energy needs to be stored in a battery to produce the light when it becomes dark. The amount of energy stored is dependant on the size of the panel, the size of the battery, and how much (if any) sun has shone.

However batteries, panels and lights are expensive, and beyond the reach of people with no savings. Solar lighting projects continue to provide lighting for thousands of people in the developing world, but the spread is slow because the cost is too high for individuals, so they need to be bought and installed by communities instead.

Lower cost self-contained lamps are becoming more widely available, but batteries are the weak link, because they are expensive and deteriorate through use and over time. Very often, when buying a low cost solar lamp with an inbuilt rechargeable battery, a full third of what you’re paying for is the battery, and you will need to replace it every few years. Assuming you can get a new battery… The capacity is often reduced to save money which limits the use time, after which there is no light.

With GravityLight, however, it only takes a few seconds to lift the weight, which creates enough energy for half an an hour of light, whenever it is needed. It has no batteries to run out, replace or dispose of. It is completely clean and green. 


By Jason Weisberger on 12 December 2012 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2012/12/12/gravity-powered-lights-cheape.html)



Video above:Gravity light promotional video. From original article.

Simple things that we take for granted, like flipping a switch and having light suddenly appear, aren't so simple in developing countries. This fantastic gravity powered light may change that, if their Indiegogo project is successful.

The designers developed the project in their spare time over four years, while working at London-based design firm Therefore. They're expecting the light to cost less than $5 to manufacture at scale. Once a family purchases the light, they'll be able to keep it running at no additional expense.

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World Bank Land Grab

SOURCE: Elaine Dunbar (inunyabus@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: World Bank involved with massive predatory land deals in developing world, particularly Africa.

By Carey L. Biron on 7 October 2012 for Nation of Change -  
(http://www.nationofchange.org/world-bank-refuses-call-halt-land-deals-1349620014)


Image above: African women on a small farm serving local markets. From original article.

[Source's note: Note the push worldwide land speculation by First World on local indigenous Third World peoples. I think this is the big picture. PLDC is one of the small specks. And Agenda 21 is another one of the specks] 

Over the past year, aid agencies, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and development watchdogs have warned that international investors are increasingly engaging in massive and sometimes predatory land deals in the developing world, particularly in Africa.

The World Bank has rejected a call to suspend its involvement in large scale agricultural land acquisition following the release of a major report by the international aid agency Oxfam on the negative impact of international land speculation in developing countries.

“We share the concerns Oxfam raised in their report,” the bank stated in an unusually lengthy public rebuttal to the Oxfam Report. “However, we disagree with Oxfam’s call for a moratorium on World Bank Group…investments in land intensive large-scale agricultural enterprises, especially during a time of rapidly rising global food prices.”

“A moratorium focused on the Bank Group targets precisely those stakeholders doing the most to improve practices – progressive governments, investors, and us. Taking such a step would do nothing to help reduce the instances of abusive practices and would likely deter responsible investors willing to apply our high standards,” the rebuttal said.

Over the past year, aid agencies, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and development watchdogs have warned that international investors are increasingly engaging in massive and sometimes predatory land deals in the developing world, particularly in Africa. These acquisitions are partly to blame for rising food insecurity.

Food prices are once again nearing record highs. In late August, the World Bank warned that due to adverse weather in parts of Europe and the United States, the global cost of certain staple crops was approaching levels last seen in 2008.

Ironically, multinational companies interested in growing food crops to address this need have been doing much of the recent investing. According to Oxfam, however, two-thirds of the investments made between 2000 and 2010 were exclusively for export-oriented crops, while other lands are being used to meet the increasing international demand for biofuels.

“Already an area of land the size of London is being sold to foreign investors every six days in poor countries,” Oxfam stated, noting that in Liberia, land deals have “swallowed up” 30 percent of the country over the past five years.

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The report did not reject what good can potentially result from private investment but warned that food-price spikes from 2008 to 2009 led to the tripling of land deals, as “land was increasingly viewed as a profitable investment” even though it largely failed to benefit local communities.

Slow the speculation

“The world is facing an unbridled land rush that is exposing poor people to hunger, violence and the threat of a lifetime in poverty. The World Bank is in a unique position to stop this,” Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam’s executive director, said Thursday, noting that the bank both invests in land and advises developing countries.

Oxfam is calling on the World Bank to temporarily halt its investments in agricultural land to give it time to review the advice it offers developing countries, and to put in place stronger policies to slow or stop the speculation and “land-grabbing” projects in which it is said to be involved.

World Bank investment in agriculture has reportedly tripled in the past decade. Since 2008, however, local communities have also brought 21 formal complaints against bank-funded projects that they say have violated their rights.

In a way, the bank’s response to the call for a moratorium demonstrated outright denial: “The Bank Group does not support speculative land investments or acquisitions which take advantage of weak institutions in developing countries or which disregard principles of responsible agricultural investment.”

The bank also noted that 90 percent of its agricultural investment is focused on smallholders, and that the agricultural work of its private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has provided 37,000 jobs. By 2050, it warned, the global population is set to grow by two billion people, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production.

Still, the bank recognized that its massive systems are imperfect and highlighted an upcoming overhaul of related guidelines that would “review and update its environmental and social safeguards policies”.

“We agree that instances of abuse do exist, particularly in countries where governance is weak, and we share Oxfam’s belief that in many cases, practices need to ensure more transparent and inclusive participation in cases of land transfers,” the rebuttal stated.

Impetus from below

The degree to which these safeguards are followed nevertheless remains voluntary, said Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based think tank that has been at the forefront of recent civil society warnings about the effects of land speculation in the developing world.

“Back in 2009 and 2010, we were clearly identifying the role that the World Bank Group has been playing in promoting and facilitating these large-scale investments, completely ignoring the social and economic impact,” she told IPS, referring to two reports (available here and here) that the new Oxfam work builds upon.

“Oxfam is reiterating that this kind of investment is misinvestment in communities, in agriculture, and unfortunately the bank is choosing to ignore the clear evidence that has been brought forward.” Bank officials did not respond to requests for additional comment.

Mittal said that the development discussion needs to focus less on prescriptions handed down from multilaterals and more on the national implementation of internationally agreed rights including the rights to food and to free and prior informed consent.

“We’re not interested in voluntary guidelines coming from Washington or Geneva, but rather in strengthening local and national capacities that help communities work best themselves,” she said. “Each country in Africa, for instance, is in a unique situation. So what we need are real consultations at the local level to see what kind of development actually works for the local populations.”

While Oxfam had called on the World Bank to move to halt its involvement in land deals before the annual meetings between the bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in Tokyo next week, the bank’s new president is now suggesting that he will use the meetings to begin pushing substantial reforms aimed at holding the bank’s anti-poverty approaches more to account.

“If we are going to be really serious about ending poverty earlier than currently projected…there are going to have to be some changes in the way we run the institution,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, preparing to attend his first annual meetings, told journalists on Thursday.

Kim said he would be pushing for a model “where our board and our governors focus much more on holding us accountable for results on the ground in countries, rather than focusing so much on approval of large loans”.

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America - Third World Energy Source

SUBHEAD: How the big energy companies plan to turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State.  

By Michael Klare on 1 April 2012 for Tom Dispatch -  
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175523/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_welcome_to_the_new_third_world_of_energy%2C_the_u.s./)


Image above: Oil industry boom in Nigeria leaves local shantytown behind. From (http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/480/1/).
 
The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled. Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.

Welcome to the Third World of Energy
Up until 1950, the United States was the world’s leading oil producer, the Saudi Arabia of its day. In that year, the U.S. produced approximately 270 million metric tons of oil, or about 55% of the world’s entire output. But with a postwar recovery then in full swing, the world needed a lot more energy while America’s most accessible oil fields -- though still capable of growth -- were approaching their maximum sustainable production levels. Net U.S. crude oil output reached a peak of about 9.2 million barrels per day in 1970 and then went into decline (until very recently).

This prompted the giant oil firms, which had already developed significant footholds in Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, to scour the global South in search of new reserves to exploit -- a saga told with great gusto in Daniel Yergin’s epic history of the oil industry, The Prize. Particular attention was devoted to the Persian Gulf region, where in 1948 a consortium of American companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- discovered the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia. By 1975, Third World countries were producing 58% of the world’s oil supply, while the U.S. share had dropped to 18%.

Environmental concerns also drove this search for new reserves in the global South. On January 28, 1969, a blowout at Platform A of a Union Oil Company offshore field in California’s Santa Barbara Channel produced a massive oil leak that covered much of the area and laid waste to local wildlife. Coming at a time of growing environmental consciousness, the spill provoked an outpouring of public outrage, helping to inspire the establishment of Earth Day, first observed one year later. Equally important, it helped spur passage of various legislative restraints on drilling activities, including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. In addition, Congress banned new drilling in waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida.

During these years, Washington also expanded areas designated as wilderness or wildlife preserves, protecting them from resource extraction. In 1960, for example, President Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Range and, in 1980, this remote area of northeastern Alaska was redesignated by Congress as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ever since the discovery of oil in the adjacent Prudhoe Bay area, energy firms have been clamoring for the right to drill in ANWR, only to be blocked by one or another president or house of Congress.

For the most part, production in Third World countries posed no such complications. The Nigerian government, for example, has long welcomed foreign investment in its onshore and offshore oil fields, while showing little concern over the despoliation of its southern coastline, where oil company operations have produced a massive environmental disaster. As Adam Nossiter of the New York Times described the resulting situation, “The Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.”

As vividly laid out by Peter Maass in Crude World, a similar pattern is evident in many other Third World petro-states where anything goes as compliant government officials -- often the recipients of hefty bribes or other oil-company favors -- regularly look the other way. The companies, in turn, don’t trouble themselves over the human rights abuses perpetrated by their foreign government “partners” -- many of them dictators, warlords, or feudal potentates.

But times change. The Third World increasingly isn’t what it used to be. Many countries in the global South are becoming more protective of their environments, ever more inclined to take ever larger cuts of the oil wealth of their own countries, and ever more inclined to punish foreign companies that abuse their laws. In February 2011, for example, a judge in the Ecuadorean Amazon town of Lago Agrio ordered Chevron to pay $9 billion in damages for environmental harm caused to the region in the 1970s by Texaco (which the company later acquired).

Although the Ecuadorians are unlikely to collect a single dollar from Chevron, the case is indicative of the tougher regulatory climate now facing these companies in the developing world. More recently, in a case resulting from an oil spill at an offshore field, a judge in Brazil has seized the passports of 17 employees of Chevron and U.S. drilling-rig operator Transocean, preventing them from leaving the country.

In addition, production is on the decline in some developing countries like Indonesia and Gabon, while others have nationalized their oil fields or narrowed the space in which private international firms can operate. During Hugo Chávez’s presidency, for example, Venezuela has forced all foreign firms to award a majority stake in their operations to the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Similarly, the Brazilian government, under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instituted a rule that all drilling operations in the new “pre-salt” fields in the Atlantic Ocean -- widely believed to be the biggest oil discovery of the twenty-first century -- be managed by the state-controlled firm, Petróleo de Brasil (Petrobras).

Fracking Our Way to a Toxic Planet
Such pressures in the Third World have forced the major U.S. and European firms -- BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total of France -- to look elsewhere for new sources of oil and natural gas. Unfortunately for them, there aren’t many places left in the world that possess promising hydrocarbon reserves and also welcome investment by private energy giants. That’s why some of the most attractive new energy markets now lie in Canada and the United States, or in the waters off their shores. As a result, both are experiencing a remarkable uptick in fresh investment from the major international firms.

Both countries still possess substantial oil and gas deposits, but not of the “easy” variety (deposits close to the surface, close to shore, or easily accessible for extraction). All that remains are “tough” energy reserves (deep underground, far offshore, hard to extract and process). To exploit these, the energy companies must deploy aggressive technologies likely to cause extensive damage to the environment and in many cases human health as well. They must also find ways to gain government approval to enter environmentally protected areas now off limits.

The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified.

Consider the extraction of shale oil and gas, widely considered the most crucial aspect of Big Oil’s current push back into the North American market. Shale formations in Canada and the U.S. are believed to house massive quantities of oil and natural gas, and their accelerated extraction is already helping reduce the region’s reliance on imported petroleum.

Both energy sources, however, can only be extracted through a process known as hydraulic fracturing (“hydro-fracking,” or just plain “fracking”) that uses powerful jets of water in massive quantities to shatter underground shale formations, creating fissures through which the hydrocarbons can escape. In addition, to widen these fissures and ease the escape of the oil and gas they hold, the fracking water has to be mixed with a variety of often poisonous solvents and acids. This technique produces massive quantities of toxic wastewater, which can neither be returned to the environment without endangering drinking water supplies nor easily stored and decontaminated.

The rapid expansion of hydro-fracking would be problematic under the best of circumstances, which these aren’t. Many of the richest sources of shale oil and gas, for instance, are located in populated areas of Texas, Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In fact, one of the most promising sites, the Marcellus formation, abuts New York City’s upstate watershed area. Under such circumstances, concern over the safety of drinking water should be paramount, and federal legislation, especially the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, should theoretically give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to oversee (and potentially ban) any procedures that endanger water supplies.

However, oil companies seeking to increase profits by maximizing the utilization of hydro-fracking banded together, put pressure on Congress, and managed to get itself exempted from the 1974 law’s provisions. In 2005, under heavy lobbying from then Vice President Dick Cheney -- formerly the CEO of oil services contractor Halliburton -- Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which prohibited the EPA from regulating hydro-fracking via the Safe Drinking Water Act, thereby eliminating a significant impediment to wider use of the technique.

Third Worldification
Since then, there has been a virtual stampede to the shale regions by the major oil companies, which have in many cases devoured smaller firms that pioneered the development of hydro-fracking. (In 2009, for example, ExxonMobil paid $31 billion to acquire XTO Energy, one of the leading producers of shale gas.) As the extraction of shale oil and gas has accelerated, the industry has faced other problems. To successfully exploit promising shale formations, for instance, energy firms must insert many wells, since each fracking operation can only extend several hundred feet in any direction, requiring the establishment of noisy, polluting, and potentially hazardous drilling operations in well-populated rural and suburban areas.

While drilling has been welcomed by some of these communities as a source of added income, many have vigorously opposed the invasion, seeing it as an assault on neighborhood peace, health, and safety. In an effort to protect their quality of life, some Pennsylvania communities, for example, have adopted zoning laws that ban fracking in their midst. Viewing this as yet another intolerable obstacle, the industry has put intense pressure on friendly members of the state legislature to adopt a law depriving most local jurisdictions of the right to exclude fracking operations. “We have been sold out to the gas industry, plain and simple,” said Todd Miller, a town commissioner in South Fayette Township who opposed the legislation.

If the energy industry has its way in North America, there will be many more Todd Millers complaining about the way their lives and worlds have been “sold out” to the energy barons. Similar battles are already being fought elsewhere in North America, as energy firms seek to overcome resistance to expanded drilling in areas once protected from such activity.

In Alaska, for example, the industry is fighting in the courts and in Congress to allow drilling in coastal areas, despite opposition from Native American communities which worry that vulnerable marine animals and their traditional way of life will be put at risk. This summer, Royal Dutch Shell is expected to begin test drilling in the Chukchi Sea, an area important to several such communities.

And this is just the beginning. To gain access to additional stores of oil and gas, the industry is seeking to eliminate virtually all environmental restraints imposed since the 1960s and open vast tracts of coastal and wilderness areas, including ANWR, to intensive drilling. It also seeks the construction of the much disputed Keystone XL pipeline, which is to transport synthetic crude oil made from Canadian tar sands -- a particularly “dirty” and environmentally devastating form of energy which has attracted substantial U.S. investment -- to Texas and Louisiana for further processing. According to Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the preferred U.S. energy strategy “would include greater access to areas that are currently off limits, a regulatory and permitting process that supported reasonable timelines for development, and immediate approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.”

To achieve these objectives, the API, which claims to represent more than 490 oil and natural gas companies, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to sway the 2012 elections, dubbed “Vote 4 Energy.” While describing itself as nonpartisan, the API-financed campaign seeks to discredit and marginalize any candidate, including President Obama, who opposes even the mildest version of its drill-anywhere agenda.

“There [are] two paths that we can take” on energy policy, the Vote 4 Energy Web site proclaims. “One path leads to more jobs, higher government revenues and greater U.S. energy security -- which can be achieved by increasing oil and natural gas development right here at home. The other path would put jobs, revenues and our energy security at risk.” This message will be broadcast with increasing frequency as Election Day nears.

According to the energy industry, we are at a fork in the road and can either chose a path leading to greater energy independence or to ever more perilous energy insecurity. But there is another way to characterize that “choice”: on one path, the United States will increasingly come to resemble a Third World petro-state, with compliant government leaders, an increasingly money-ridden and corrupt political system, and negligible environmental and health safeguards; on the other, which would also involve far greater investment in the development of renewable alternative energies, it would remain a First World nation with strong health and environmental regulations and robust democratic institutions.

How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation..

Solar cheaper than Kerosene

SUBHEAD: Not only is kerosene more expensive, but solar is affordable and getting more popular in 3rd World.  

By Sami Grover on 26 August 2011 for TreeHugger - 
  (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/solar-cheaper-kerosene.php)

 
Image above: Villagers in Wada, India, light kerosene lamp. From (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/24539).
 
We know that solar can be a lifesaver in rural Africa, replacing dirty, polluting and potentially dangerous kerosene lamps. We've also seen how solar lanterns can create economic opportunities for micro-entrepreneurship. Still, it's good to read a blog post by Yotam Ariel over at Renewale Energy World on how solar is becoming cheaper than kerosene lamps for many off-grid poor communities. It's particularly encouraging to see that the boom in solar products is being driven not just by charitable purchases anymore, but by communities themselves as they recognize the superior performance and economic benefits of clean energy:

Unlike the past decade, which saw solar solutions purchased mainly by international donors, it is now the locals who are increasingly opening their wallets to make the switch from their traditional energy means. That is because solar products prices in recent years have declined to become cheaper than kerosene and batteries.

In Cambodia, for example, villagers can buy a solar lantern at US$25 and use it for two years without any extra costs, where their previous spending on kerosene for lighting was about $2.5 per month, or $30 per year. In Kenya a solar kit that provides bright light or powers a radio or cell phone costs under $30 at retail stores. By switching to this kit Kenyans can save $120 per year on kerosene lighting, radio batteries and cell phone recharging fees.

Barriers remain, including distribution, access to up-front capital, and gender inequality issues. But the future is looking decidedly sunny for solar in the Global South.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: China says PV to beat Coal 8/19/11

  
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Economic Blackhole

SUBHEAD: Why some countries fall into the financial black hole faster than others.  

By Ashvin Panderangi on 6 July 2011 for the Automatic Earth -
(http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/07/july-6-2011-why-some-countries-fall.html)

 
Image above: Blackhole of US dollars. From (http://wjmc.blogspot.com/2011/06/pentagon-loses-66-billion-in-cash.html).

 It's nothing new to say that we are living in a "black hole" economy, in which productive capital is continuously vacuumed up by speculative financial structures, as we continue spiraling down a non-stop path of fiscal "stimulus", bailouts and central bank monetization of debt-assets, without any chance of those capital "influxes" reaching enough velocity to escape into the real economy any time soon. As long as we continue operating under the same structures of economic organization, nothing we do will overcome that gravitational force and we will fall towards the singularity until we are wholly digested.

Perhaps shreds of our former system will eventually radiate back into space, detectable to future generations, but its structures will be radically different for quite awhile. On the other hand, you rarely ever hear the analogy extended much further than that. The productive economy is essentially being dismantled and vacuumed into another dimension, but how quickly will it happen? That question brings us to two related concepts that are frequently found in nature, and also a bit too often in modern human society - predicaments and paradoxes.

As we are rapidly descending into the black hole of ponzi capitalism, a critical paradox involving time reveals itself. The closer you are situated to the event horizon of a black hole, the more gravitational force is applied (less gravitational potential) and the more time is dilated.

The equivalence principle in Einstein's theory of general relativity allows even stationary bodies with relative distances from a gravitational mass to be treated as having accelerated frames of reference with respect to each other. So we are not talking about an absolute measure of time, but its measure relative to other observers situated at different distances from the black hole. If observer A is closer to it than observer B, then a clock in A's possession will tick slower than one in B's possession, and both A and B will agree that A's clock is moving slower than B's.

 From an absolute perspective, the gravitational force tearing at A's tendons is an extremely violent one, but, from a relative perspective, the time over which that force is applied is smoothed out towards infinity (as A's relative frame of reference approaches the speed of light).

The clock in A's possession will continue to slow in relative terms, until an entire year in the life of B is just a few short ticks on the second hand, and eventually it will appear to B that A is barely aging at all (and to A that B barely exists for any time at all). To see how this time paradox applies to the global economy's black hole of speculative capital, we only have to look around us.

Observer A could be represented by the largest economies in the world, hosting the largest financial/equity markets (U.S., China, Japan, Western/Central Europe, Canada, Russia), while observer B is represented by every other economy that is linked into the global financial system (this ranges from the economies of Iceland, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria all the way to those of Ireland, Greece, Italy and Spain).

The biggest economies are closest to the event horizon of financial capitalism, since they have the highest levels of unproductive debt sitting on their private and public balance sheets. Their citizenry is being systematically poisoned by excessive debt, collapsing revenues, unprecedented bailouts, subsidies, taxes, regulatory oppression, unemployment, speculative inflation, etc., but it is also a very slow death.

Relative to an Observer B, such as the Egyptians, Irish or Greek, the populations of these countries do not feel that their lives have significantly changed in the last few years or even decades, despite the changes most certainly taking place. The time dilation effect has smoothed over these changes to make them appear much less drastic.

 Almost all asset markets in the U.S., Europe and China are now wholly subsidized by their respective governments/central banks, but the taxpayers fail to recognize that the bill was drafted in their names and will come due well within their lifetimes.

Millions of people have lost their jobs, retirement savings and employment benefits in the West, but millions of them are also collecting welfare benefits such as food stamps, Section 8 housing, medicaid, medicare and/or unemployment insurance (or the equivalents in Western Europe). Meanwhile, the clocks in North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the EU periphery are ticking much faster, as a new financial or sociopolitical "crisis" in those regions seems to erupt every other day of the week.

While the size of their individual economies are relatively small and are capable of being partially backstopped with imaginary capital generated by the alchemy of Observer A, the rate at which their respective populations experience economic deterioration still renders it a very painful process.

That is especially true when the pace is relative, and the people are forced to watch local economic and political institutions "age" much faster than their counterparts in larger economies. The amount of suffering experienced by the average Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan or Greek in one day generally equals the amount the average American, Canadian, Brit or German will experience in a year or more.

The fundamental reasons we suffer do not differ, since we are all a part of the same economic system and are being consumed by the same black hole of debt, but the temporal schism makes that shared reality difficult to see. The dilation of time for the central economies of our world may not be fair or just, but it's a fact of our existence, and it behooves us to now use it to our advantage and the advantage of those we can reach.

For some, that might mean undergoing extensive financial and physical preparations and working towards 100% self-sufficiency, by learning how to grow/preserve food, access/purify water, generate renewable energy, use weapons for self-defense, develop community ties, etc. For others, it may not mean much more than getting out of debt, gathering knowledge and speaking their minds whenever others will listen. Regardless of one's specific strategy, it should be remembered that a dilated time frame does not mean the economy is recovering or the status quo will persist.

Our frame of reference may be relatively slower and more drawn out, but we are still being digested by the financial black hole of global civilization.

In fact, we are positioned closest to its event horizon, and there will come a time when we can no longer afford to linger in the relative safety of its boundaries, but rather must cross over to the other side. When that happens, our relatively slow clocks will synchronize with all of the others and quickly make up for the time that was lost before. This time may be dilated, but, in the end, it's really no different. .

What's Happening in Tunisia?

SUBHEAD: Inspiring story of Tunisian protests ignored by Washington and western media.

By Rob Prince on 4 January 2011 for Alternet.org - 
(http://blogs.alternet.org/russwellen/2011/01/04/inspiring-story-of-tunisian-protests-ignored-by-washington)


Image above: Recent street protests in Tunisia. From (http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Turborama/398).  

They Just Don’t Stop Protesting

Not even torture, which is rampant, or live bullets, which the Tunisian authorities are using with greater frequency, stop them. It is more than two weeks since a distraught and unemployed young university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, sat down in front of the town hall in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, poured gasoline on himself and lit a match. 

Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation and protest against Tunisia’s high unemployment, rampant corruption and decades of repression by the government of Zine Ben Ali triggered a protest movement, first in the country’s center and south, but now virtually everywhere, including the capital, Tunis. Unwilling to admit how his own regime has contributed to the crisis, Ben Ali, predictably blames the protests on ‘radical elements,’ ‘chaos mongers’ ( an interesting and empty phrase) and ‘a minority of mercenaries’ rather than on the policies Tunisia has implemented during his 23 years in power. 

Neither the intervention of the Tunisian security forces and army using live ammunition nor Zine Ben Ali’s sacking of 4 members of his cabinet combined with promises of a $5 billion state jobs program has stopped the wave of anger and protest, which at the time of this writing (January 2, 2011) continues and is more and more taking the form of a national uprising. 

While some property has been destroyed, the overwhelming amount of violence has come from the state and the security forces. Virtually all of the demonstrations have been peaceful to date.

That said, the economic grievances which fueled the initial outbursts now have a more political aspect to them as more and more voices within Tunisia outside of the ruling party, the Rassemblement Constitutionelle Democratique (RCD), are calling for Ben Ali and his increasingly influential wife, Leila Trabelsi, to step down and relinquish power. 

Ben Ali is giving no indication of stepping down. He has combined increased repression on the one hand with a media campaign and promises of economic and social reform on the other. Ben Ali is gambling that the protests, which seem to be led mostly by unemployed youth as well as some elements of Tunisian’s student and labor movement, are a spontaneous expression of frustration that will fizzle sooner rather than later. 

While this might be the case, it appears that broad sectors of Tunisian society are more supportive of the protestors than the government and that Ben Ali’s promised reforms are too little too late. 

Even if he is able to maintain his grip on power for the moment, his social base support has narrowed to the military, police and security apparatus, along with the support of a few key European governments, France key among them.

The United States Remains Silent

The United States State Department remains silent in face of the Tunisian protests. Since the protests began on December 17, 2010, there has been little media coverage in the mainstream US media, virtually nothing on mainstream television, nothing in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, or for that matter even Democracy Now!

This is in sharp contrast with the European, North African and Middle Eastern media where theTunisian protests have become big news. In two articles in the British Guardian, columnist Brian Whitaker calls the Tunisian protests the ‘most important and most inspiring story from the Middle East this year’.

In another story a few days earlier, he wrote a scathing critique of the Tunisian government commenting at the end that Ben Ali’s days in power are probably numbered.

The Obama Administration’s failure to comment on the Tunisian events is another indication of its more general hypocrisy when it comes to supporting human rights in Middle East countries. It is not that the administration is unaware of the situation in the country.

The WikiLeaks cables concerning Tunisia, from a former US ambassador to the State Department, contained very explicit and damning information, detailing the repressive environment in the country and the rampant corruption, most especially of the families of President Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi, at one point labeling the regime as a ‘kleptocracy’. So why the measured silence by the Nobel Peace Prize winner?

 A number of factors come into place, central among them, the Obama Administration is wary about opening up another front of social unrest with Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia on its hands.

If Washington has no particular love for Ben Ali, still they worry about a replacement, wanting one that would, like Ben Ali and Bourguiba before him, support US strategic policy in the Middle East and Africa, who will cooperate with NATO and AFRICOM as Ben Ali has.

It would not be the first time that the Obama Administration has thrown a U.S. commitment to human rights concerns to the winds to maintain strategic support for this or that tyrant. There are also economic considerations.

Tunisia has been played up as an IMF-World Bank poster child, an example of how following ‘the Washington Consensus’, — i.e., the IMF structural adjustment program — leads to success.

 Except it didn’t.

Take for example Tunisia’s rush to privatization, one of the IMF’s sacred cows — you know, that line of reasoning made popular by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that somehow the private sector sector can conduct business better than the state. According to the dogma, privatization is supposed to lead to increased competitiveness and greater efficiencies. Perhaps under certain (increasingly rare) circumstances the logic works.

But in Tunisia – as in many other places, privatization became a means of the two ruling families, the Ben Alis and Trabelsis, to buy up state property at bargain basement prices and make a financial killing.

It did not lead to a growth of Tunisian entrepreneurship, but simply to a greater concentration of economic power in the hands of the two families, and the corruption involved was so bad that even the U.S. ambassador (in a WikiLeaks cable) was embarrassed.

Yet despite the current economic crisis, which these structural adjustment programs only exacerbated, the IMF continues to pressure Tunisia to ’stay the course’…cut remaining subsidies on basic food stuffs and fuel, privatize its social security system and open up its financial sector even further.

And once again, the IMF is oblivious to how those policies have only deepened the socio-economic crisis in the country and that an entirely different economic strategy is in order.  

‘Most Inspiring Story Coming Out Of The Middle East This Year’

There is another reason for Washington’s hesitancy, call it ‘revolutionary contagion’ …what starts in one place, as in the strategically not particularly important Tunisia, could spread to…Egypt, Saudi Arabia and who knows where else.

Signs abound. Just to the west, Algerians are protesting inadequate housing that they have been promised for years. Although current turmoil in Egypt appears to center around the bombing of a Coptic Church, with accusations of the hand of al Qaeda in the attack, under the surface, for all its differences with Tunisia, Egypt too is facing serious socio-economic problems.

And throughout the Middle East, governments are nervous. The Iranian and Syrian press have commented on Tunisia’s unemployment and corruption problems, as if they too don’t have to deal with similar drawbacks.

 Saudi commentators (of all people) are lecturing Ben Ali on the need for democracy, etc. Throughout the region among the ruling elites there is the growing concern that the Tunisian protests could spread to their countries. And they have reason for concern, for despite many differences, unemployment, corruption and dictatorship are by no means limited to Tunisia. So already, ‘the Tunisian example’ in two short weeks has spread beyond the country’s borders and governments are taking the events seriously.

If Ben Ali will not relinquish power (yet), still, he reshuffled his cabinet firing four ministers and promised a $5 billion jobs program. He also was careful to visit Mohammed Bouazizi (the young man who set himself aflame) as well as meet with the families of those killed by the security forces.

As the protests grew in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarek, speaking to the ruling political party in Egypt, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, announced that Egypt too would launch a $3.5 billion jobs program to deal with Egyptian unemployment. Coincidence?

In a gesture to help Ben Ali, Muhammar Khadaffi in nearby Libya announced that Libya would not limit entry to Tunisians seeking jobs. Khadaffi also announced a major government financed housing project not long ago.

Nesrine Malik, like Brian Whitaker, writing in the Guardian on New Year’s Eve, calls the Tunisian protests ‘one of the most inspiring episodes of indigenous revolt against a repressive regime.’ Referring to the Tunisian protests she comments: ‘Change is sometimes more likely to happen when people know what it looks like, when the first person dares to point to the emperor and say that he is naked.’

And if events continue in Tunisia, what does it mean for the other ‘geriatric regimes’ of the Middle East, many of which themselves are on the verge of transitions of power? For if the Tunisian people can stand up to power and oppression, why not the others? Meanwhile the protests in Tunisia continue…La Lutta Continua.

 • Rob Prince is the publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News. .