Oceans 4 Peace Pacific Pivot Panel

SUBHEAD: Here on Kauai we are at the epicenter of US military ecocide and and control of the Pacific Ocean.

By Juan Wilson on 18 June 2016 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/06/oceans4peace-pacific-pivot-talk.html)


Video above: Oceans4Peace Pacific Pivot Panel Discussion approximately 1.5hours. Filmed by Robert Zelkovsky.]. Source (https://youtu.be/Gl1kBS7-_dQ).

[IB Author's note: Below is the written text of the talk I gave (see video above) at the Oceans4Peace presentations and discussion. The evening program as hosted by Gorden Labedz and included;
Technology Effects on Whales - Kalasara Setaysha - Oceans4Peace, The Threats to Coral - Dr. Katherine Muzik - Marine Biologist NTBG, Expansion of US Militarism in the Pacific - Juan Wilson - Kauai Sierra Club]

OCEANS4PEACE PACIFIC PIVOT PRESENTATION
By Juan Wilson

Aloha All,
I am a retired architect/planner and a member of the executive committee of the Kauai Group of the Sierra Club. My wife Linda and I publish IslandBreath.org - an online website focussing on peace, sustainability, and living local.

I'm speaking in place of Koohan Paik who planned to make a presentation on the US military buildup in the Pacific Ocean and the so called "Pacific Pivot". However, she could not be here, as she is in South Korea.

I must say that Koohan works tirelessly on the issues we will speak about tonight. She was the first one that brought to me the importance of the Strategic Islands of of the United States - specifically in the Pacific Ocean. She is knowledgable of the policies and actions the US implements in achieving its imperial goals as well as the impacts they have on local cultures and ecosystems.

Koohan's presentation for our panel discussion before RIMPAC two years ago is pertinent today. In fact it was prescient:

I think it's worth revisiting. She said in part:

The U.S. is attempting to stake its claim on the Asia-Pacific region. Hillary Clinton, a huge cheerleader for the militarization, has called the 21st century “America’s Pacific Century.

RIMPAC is only a small piece of a huge, systemized, federal project of destruction called “the Pacific Pivot.” The Pacific Pivot is a plan to reorient the U.S. military away from Europe and the middle-east, and toward the Asia-Pacific region.

We are now in its beginning stages. New bases are being built, new military agreements are being forged with Pacific-rim nations, PMRF is ramping up for more rocket launches, the obnoxious Osprey helicopters are coming to Hawaii; and huge swaths of ocean have been targeted by the Pentagon for continual year-round bombing and detonations.

Our region is now witnessing an acceleration of militarization that resembles all-out war. And from an environmental point of view, it is no different from all-out war, because the training exercises, rife with every kind of explosion imaginable, never stop. Even PMRF Commander Hay bragged how, “Our ability to train like we would actually fight exists here”.

For the natural world, the Pacific Pivot is nothing short of an environmental holocaust. Bio-diverse ecosystems… totaling over three million square miles of supposedly “wild” ocean have been officially set aside to be systematically poisoned, dredged, detonated, torpedoed and bombed into nonexistence -- all in service of “military preparedness.” Over three million square miles of open seas – that’s roughly three-quarters the size of the entire United States of America.

We in Hawaii are at the center of this ecocide. We are not only at the center geographically – we are also at the center of control.

In 2014 at during the same panel discussion I said:

In recent decades several weapon systems have been developed and tested from the PMRF here on Kauai.  Those systems include submarine based ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

The PMRF is the wheelhouse for many activities of RIMPAC.

Ocean, reefs, beaches, dunes, valleys, plains are strewn with lead and depleted-uranium munitions as well as pollutants such as bilge oil, hydraulic fluid, defoliants, and countless other contaminants used in war - and in war games.

RIMPAC is a demonstration to our "partners" and "enemies" that we will do anything to maintain military control over the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Image above: Image above: Map of Hawaiian Range Complex and inset showing it's position within a temporary operating area that is now part of the two-million square mile HIRC (Haweaiian Island Range Compex. From Source: (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/permits/hrc_bo.pdf) Page 7. Click for larger map with legend.

THAT WAS THEN - THIS IS NOW
A point I would like to make this evening is that what maintains American domination of the Pacific are not the alliances and trade agreements with partner nations. That is not where the real power lies.

The power lies in the strategic military bases we maintain throughout the Pacific that are the muscle that allows those alliances, trade deals and policies to be enforced. And the force that runs through those muscles is delivered by nuclear reactor power and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power propels about 100 nuclear submarines and leads 10 nuclear carrier strike groups with access to thousands of state of the art nuclear weapons. During RIMPAC 2016 one of those US Carrier Strike Groups will lead 45 ships and four submarines throughout the Hawaiian Islands.

My case to you tonight is that the United State's domination throughout the Pacific during the last 70 years rests on two foundations of nuclear engineering -  Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Weapons.

According to GlobalSecurity.org the mission of the PMRF is to facilitate Training, Tactics Development, and Test & Evaluations for air, surface, and sub-surface weapons systems and Advanced Technology Systems. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pmrf.htm)

The PMRF will be a crucial asset in coordination, communication, telemetry, intelligence, evaluation, and recording the events during RIMPAC 2016 and any future Pacific War.

The map I brought with me is an update of a map I put together with Koohan to demonstrate aspects of the Pacific Pivot. It shows the the vast area of the Pacific Ocean used for testing, developing and deploying weapons systems. It stretches east-west from the Philippines to California and north-south from Japan to Australia.


Image above: A overall map of the Pacific Ocean showing the areas under US control and used to develop, test and train military systems and weapons. It also shows the Marine National Monuments and US restricted fishing areas that not only greatly overlap with the military test range, but with the islands used for nuclear weapons testing from the end of World War II to the Cubal Missile Crisis.  Click to see full size.

With a red outline the map identifies the boundaries of millions of square miles of range complexes for shooting rockets, testing sonar, exploding ordinance, and other destructive behavior.

There are 2,000,000 square miles of it around the Hawaiian Islands alone for use by RIMPAC 2016 participants.

The map also shows two "Transit Corridors" in dotted red crossing the Pacific from San Diego to Hawaii and from Hawaii over the Marshall Islands all the way to the Mariana Islands.

These corridors are used to test experimental planes, intercontinental missiles and space vehicles. The PMRF is at the center of where these corridors meet. 

There are also restricted fishing areas (in red) and Marine National Monument areas (in gray) that surround American controlled Pacific Islands in order to keep people out.

Lynn McNutt is on the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. Regarding the expansion of the Marine National Monument area around the Northwest Hawaiian Islands she said recently:

"The military is not subject to ANY of the conservation rules, and by allowing them to operate sonar in the Monument area and continue missile launches and at sea training, the conservation rules are meaningless. Recently, the PMRF has been expanding its territorial restrictions on fisherman due to rocket firing and missile testing. 

If the proposal that the Marine Monument boundary of the Northwest Hawaiian Island area was expanded to 200 miles out from Nihoa Island, then Niihau and part of Kauai would be off limits to fisherrman, and the boundary line would conveniently come right up to the restricted area around PMRF. 

Since there is talk of making PMRF and active military base and since recent test activity took place in an expanded range restriction, fisherman are very concerned that expanded military use will result in further restrictions."

MISTREATING THE PACIFIC SINCE WWII
Starting in 1946 America, and its allies Britain and France, conducted what in effect was a nuclear war in the Pacific Ocean. This involved detonating over 160 nuclear devises over, near or on islands in the Pacific Ocean This included Bikini Island, Baker Island, Enewetak Atoll, Christmas Island, and Johnston Island (merely 700 miles from Kauai).

The British conducted over 20 nuclear tests in the Central Pacific and Australian territories. (https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/the-united-kingdomsnuclear-testing-programme/)

The French conducted over 40 nuclear tests in the South Pacific (https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/frances-nuclear-testing-programme/)

The United States conducted 106 atmospheric  and underwater nuclear tests in the Pacific, many of which were of extremely high yield. While the Marshall Islands testing composed an estimated total yield of around 210 million tons of TNT, with the largest being the 15 mega-tons Castle Bravo shot of 1954 which spread considerable nuclear fallout on many of the islands, including several which were inhabited, and some that had not been evacuated. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Proving_Grounds)

The Navy's introduction to Kauai's Barking Sands was in 1956, near the height of the nuclear tests when the Air Force's Bonham Air Force Base granted it a five year revocable license to use 37 acres.

Two years later the Pacific Missile Range Facility was formally established.

The nuclear tests continued.

In 1962 the Navy's PMRF was becoming the principal user of Bonham Air Force Base, and formal negotiations began to transfer the base to the Navy.  (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pmrf.htm)

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin cows started delivering milk containing Strontium-90 that they ingested from eating grass. The atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs soon stopped.

In 1964, negotiations were completed, and  Bonham Air Force Base officially transferred all its 1,885 acres to the Navy.

By this time, the PMRF had established a chain of stations throughout the Pacific.

Besides Barking Sands and Kokee, several down range stations under the PMRF included: South Point, Hawaii; Midway Island; Wake Island, Eniwetok Atoll; Tern Island; Christmas Island; Canton Island; and the recovery ships, USS Longview and USS Sunnyvale.

In 1967 the Barking Sands Tactical Underwater Range (BARSTUR), and the Makaha Ridge Instrumentation Site, were completed.
(http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pmrf.htm)

TRIDENTS AND TOMAHAWKS
These facilities were crucial in the development and testing of submarine launched nuclear weapons like the Trident, Tomahawk missiles systems.

The Trident is a high altitude ballistic missile with multiple independently targetable reentry nuclear warheads or MIRVs. The Trident has a 6,000 mile range.

The Tomahawk is a low altitude radar avoiding cruise missile that can follow a flight plan independently.

Beginning in 1968 the Navy built ten Nimitz Class nuclear powered aircraft carriers to lead Strike Groups with the capability of launching nuclear missiles or planes with nuclear bombs to anywhere on Earth.

Beginning in the 1970's a new fleet of nuclear powered submarines designed to replace the older Polaris subs. Eighteen of the Ohio Class and 39 Los Angeles Class are now operational and fitted with either Trident or Tomahawk nuclear missiles.


Image above: Partial map from a "industry" handout of the Barking Sands underwater test area. This came from a briefing to military contractors on the features of the PMRF (a key player in RIMPAC 1016 activities) when its BSURE hydrophone array was first added. Note the yellow "Fake Island" in the BARSTUR area. Is this some kind of target simulation? From (http://www.ceros.org/documents/FY10%20Industry%20Day%20Briefings/PMRF_CEROS%20Industry%20Day%2020100930.pdf). Click to see full page larger. Below is back side of this handout.

Image above: Partial map of the Barking Sands underwater test area. This came from a briefing to military contractors on the features of the PMRF (a key player in RIMPAC 1016 activities) when its BSURE hydrophone array was first added.

PMRF MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The PMRF is now the world's largest instrumented, multi-dimensional testing  and training range. PMRF is the only range in the world where subsurface, surface, air and space vehicles can operate and be tracked simultaneously.

This capability allows range users extraordinary flexibility in planning and conducting realistic multi-participant, multi-threat freeplay operations to train crews, evaluate tactics, and test weapon systems.

But since nuclear war was found impractical most nuclear activity in recent decades has turned to building nuclear power plants.  Asian nuclear power plant building has been aggressive.  China, India, Japan, and South Korea have become enthusiastic advocates. (http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/others/asias-nuclear-energy-growth.aspx).

Needless to say many US weapons contractors also got involved with the nuclear power industry. American government and corporations pushed nuclear power technology on allies as well as defeated enemies.

In the 1970s, the first light water reactors were built in Japan in cooperation with American companies. These plants were bought from vendors such as General Electric and Westinghouse with contractual work done by Japanese companies. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan)

A FEW NUCLEAR TECH COMPANIES
General Electric, Westinghouse, Bechtel, Babcock & Wilcox, American Atomics, Nuclear Fuel Services, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, GenCorp Aerojet, Huntington Ingalls, and Lockheed Martin, Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel, and Honeywell.

Many of these organizations (and others like Sandia  Labs) are still represented here on Kauai at the PMRF. The place is not so much a naval base as it is an industrial park for developing lethal weapon systems managed by guys in navy whites guarded by the private security firm ITT.

The results of their work are nuclear armed fleets which have dominated the Pacific Ocean (and the world) for over half a century with the fear of annihilation of life on Earth. The biannual celebration of this armada of destruction has been RIMPAC.

But that's only half the story
QUESTION: Which came first - the reactor or the bomb? ANSWER: Reactors.

Ex-WWII general and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed that nuclear technology be used for peace instead of war. He proposed the "Atoms for Peace" program that would transform the power of the atom to make electricity. It would also give many large military industrial corporations something to do after 1953 other than wage war. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace#Legacy)

In the early 1950's it was recognized that the weapons program would require more plutonium than could be furnished by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). One suggestion, made by Dr. Charles A. Thomas, then executive vice-president of Monsanto Chemical Company, was to create a dual purpose plutonium reactor, on which could produce plutonium for weapons, and electricity for commercial use (http://www.neis.org/literature/Brochures/weapcon.htm)

Atoms for Peace created the ideological background for the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but also gave political cover for the U.S. nuclear weapons build-up, and the backdrop to the Cold War arms race. Under Atoms for Peace related programs the U.S. exported over 25 tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to 30 countries, mostly to fuel research reactors, which is now regarded as a proliferation and terrorism risk. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace#Legacy)

Nuclear reactors are needed to make the material for nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons keep the US in a dominating position throughout the world. In addition, nuclear reactors power the aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines that deliver the nuclear weapons to their targets.

These two engineering disciplines are joined at the hip. One needs the other for survival.

Our former enemy and current ally Japan has suffered from both disciplines.
They, unfortunately, have the distinction of being victims of the two worst nuclear catastrophes in history.

As an enemy, in 1945, Japan suffered having two cities being destroyed by atomic bombs within days of one another.

As an ally Japan is suffering now from worst nuclear meltdown in history -  following the March 11th 2011 earthquake and tsunami, there was complete meltdown of three of the six reactors supplied by the General Electric for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Put in perspective the destruction and radiation sickness caused by the single atomic bomb that landed on Hiroshima was generated with just a few pounds of Uranium 235.

But each of the nuclear reactors that melted down at Fukushima Daiichi had more than 600 pounds of reactor fuel for a total of about 1,800 pounds.

Moreover, in the case of Fukushima Reactor #3 it is reported that, despite regulations, the fuel used was mixed oxide - which is about 7% plutonium. Plutonium is more toxic than uranium for a considerably longer time.

In the 1960s US President Nixon had proposed we build "Breeder Reactors" using the MOX fuel. They were named "Breeders" because they make more refined uranium than they consume from the plutonium.

The Fukushima Daiichi Reactors #1, #2 and #3 had complete meltdowns that included the breaching of their reactor vessels.

More horrifying,  the fuel has likely completely burned through the four foot thick concrete slabs of their containment buildings and into the ground.

Ground water passing over the unreachable melted cores are picking up radioactive elements. This is producing about 300 tons of highly radioactive water that enters into the Pacific Ocean everyday.

It is unlikely that this process will not be stopped in the lifetime of anyone in this room.

In the case of reactor #2 there is evidence of a steam explosion tearing apart the reactor vessel. More ominously, in the case of reactor #3 the evidence points to a run away nuclear chain reaction (or criticality) of the MOX fuel.

In effect, the detonation of a plutonium bomb.

Tiny black grains of plutonium were blown into the atmosphere over Japan (including Tokyo) as well as out over the Pacific Ocean on the wind. Plutonium can be carried on the surface of the ocean supported by carbon soot buckyballs.

At the time of the March 11th tsunami the US Carrier Strike Group led by the USS Ronald Reagan was nearby. It was decided the Reagan and elements of the carrier group would provide logistical support.

The ships steamed to the eastern shore of Japan off Fukushima. When the two reactors exploded the Reagan and other ships were swallowed by a radioactive plume of soot, steam and ash that stretched across the ocean from the plant.

Lindsay Cooper, Navy sailor was aboard USS Ronald Reagan during 3/11 rescue operation:
(http://nypost.com/2013/12/22/70-navy-sailors-left-sickened-by-radiation-after-japan-rescue/)

“I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air, and, suddenly, it was snowing [...] We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow! I took pictures and video [...] Japan didn’t want us in port, Korea didn’t want us, Guam turned us away. We floated in the water for two and a half months [until Thailand took them in] “People were suffering from excruciating diarrhea and shitting themselves in the hallways].”

On top of that the Reagan had replenished its water tanks that it desalinated for washing cooking and drinking. It did not realize the water contained radioactive elements.

Since 2011 about 400 young healthy service persons from the carrier group have become unexplainably ill. Several have died.

The USS Ronald Reagan was severely contaminated. The Reagan was taken out of service and drydocked for 18 months in Bremerton, Washington in order to be decontaminated.

The ship was back on duty in time to be a flagship for RIMPAC in 2014. After the war games the Reagan was reassigned from San Diego to the strategic forward naval base at Yokosuka, Japan, near Tokyo.

The participants for RIMPAC 2016 include Canada, Chile, China,  India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, Tonga, and the United States. It also includes three NATO allies France, Germany, and the Netherlands,  (http://www.cpf.navy.mil/rimpac/participants/)

It seems ominous to me that NATO allies are participating in RIMPAC. France, Germany and the Netherlands are NATO members obligated to supporting other NATO nations if attacked. With tensions rising in the South China Seas it seems ill advised to make the Pacific Ocean part of NATO's responsibility.

Does anyone hear remember SEATO? The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization?  SEATO was in effect after the Korean War and was used through the Vietnam War era to keep "friendly" nations in the area on the same page. But after America lost the Vietnam War SEATO withered away and was disbanded by 1977.

SEATO, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) committed participants to join in a war if any party were attacked. NATO commits America and its partners to joining in war in Europe against what was the USSR and is now Russia.  SEATO was aimed primarily at Red China.

There has been a heating up of Chinese sovereignty claims to the South China Sea with its oil and gas reserves. RIMPAC 2016 may now be morphing into alliance not unlike the now defunct SEATO.

So it is no surprise that RIMPAC 2016 includes so many exSEATO nations and and a Chinese navy observation boat. Maybe it's time to rename it RIMCO.

What are our real strategic priorities?
If it is not obvious yet, but it should be soon. There is only so much more easily obtained conventional energy in the form of gas, oil and coal fossil fuels. These three sources are critical to modern industrial civilization.

• They are crucial for refining steel, aluminum and other metals.

• They are the source material for creating asphalts, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and lubricants.

• They are the source of about 75% of the energy we use.

We now know that burning all the available fossil fuels are causing uncontrollable runaway global warming - with climate change and rising oceans. We are already experiencing the bow waves of those effects.

We must be very judicial in determining what we will do with these resources.

One thing to consider is that without abundant available gas, oil and coal we cannot safely maintain operating the world's almost 500 nuclear power plants. It is likely that without a massive effort - starting now - we will not even be able to safely shut them down. (http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/World-Statistics)

There is also the more than 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world that need safe decommissioning. The US has more than 7,000 to deal with. (http://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report?gclid=CNzq1_mmrc0CFYiVfgod1XkK7Q).

WPP IT GOOD
Many may not realize that the only facility for storing nuclear waste in the US is no more. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (or WPP) in New Mexico, closed in 2014. That was due an accident that created an uncontrolled plutonium fire.

It seems that before shipping technicians at Los Alamos National Labs packed a 55 gallon steel drum of waste plutonium with the wrong kitty litter (used as a filler) that ignited the fire and incapacitated the plant. Who knew? Atomic scientists?

There is now no place for the US to process and store waste nuclear fuel or weapon.

The most most important thing our blue water Navy could do is find another agenda than turning the Pacific Rim into an ashtray. Perhaps they could find a way to safely put away their nuclear devices while there is still the industrial capability to do it.

And rather than implementing a current plan to turn the PMRF from a research facility into a regular military base further suggestions.

Perhaps the Navy could make a new list of priorities in the Pacific Ocean that could be incorporated into future RIMPAC activities.

For example:

1. Tackle the problem of hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water entering     the Pacific daily from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.
   
2. Commit whatever is required to saving ocean reefs from acidification and bleaching.
   
3.  Strictly enforce international regulations to keep fisheries sustainable and healthy.
   
4. Take care of the gigantic Pacific gyres of plastic, flotsam and jetsam.
   
5.  Rescue Pacific islanders threatened by rising seas due to global warming

Mahalo for you time and patience this evening.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Ocean 4 Peace Events 6/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Prepare for RIMPAC 2016 War in Hawaii 5/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to "take" millions of mammals 5/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: US court RIMPAC Impact decision 4/3/15
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 Impact Postmortem 10/22/1
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 in Full March 7/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: 21st Century Energy Wars 7/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War on the Ocean 7/3/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Voila - World War Three 7/1/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/28/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC IMPACT 6/8/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC Then and Now 5/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Asian Pivot - An ugly dance 12/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/13/13
Ea O Ka Aina: End RimPac destruction of Pacific 11/1/13 
Ea O Ka Aina: Moana Nui Confereence 11/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy license to kill 10/27/12 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sleepwalking through destruction 7/16/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Okinawa breathes easier 4/27/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy Next-War-Itis 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: America bullies Koreans 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Despoiling Jeju island coast begins 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Jeju Islanders protests Navy Base 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii - Start of American Empire 2/26/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Korean Island of Peace 2/26/12   
Ea O Ka Aina: Military schmoozes Guam & Hawaii 3/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: In Search of Real Security - One 8/31/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Peace for the Blue Continent 8/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Shift in Pacific Power Balance 8/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RimPac to expand activities 6/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War Games here in July 6/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Pacific Resistance to U.S. Military 5/24/10
Ea O Ka Aina: De-colonizing the Pacific 5/21/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC to Return in 2010 5/2/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/15/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam Land Grab 11/30/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam as a modern Bikini Atoll 12/25/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GUAM - Another Strategic Island 11/8/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Diego Garcia - Another stolen island 11/6/09
Ea O Ka Aina: DARPA & Super-Cavitation on Kauai 3/24/09
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 - Navy fired up in Hawaii 7/2/08
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 uses destructive sonar 4/22/08
Island Breath: Navy Plans for the Pacific 9/3/07
Island Breath: Judge restricts sonar off California 08/07/07
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 sonar compromise 7/9/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 - Impact on Ocean 5/23/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2004 - Whale strandings on Kauai 9/2/04
Island Breath: PMRF Land Grab 3/15/04  

Oceans 4 Peace Events

SUBHEAD: A mission to educate the public about the adverse effects of the 2016 RIMPAC.

By Juan Wilson on 11 June 2016 for Oceans4Peace -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/06/oceans-4-peace-events.html)


Image above: Still frame of ship bow plowing the ocean. From video "Sonic Sea" trailer below.

WHAT:
RIMPAC 2016 - The US Navy is sponsoring the armed navies of 24 countries to come to Hawaiian waters and practice naval war. They call these war exercises, RIMPAC, short for rim of the Pacific. These foreign navies will blast whale-killing active sonar, shoot missiles, shoot torpedoes, drop bombs, plant mines, sink ships, test new experimental weapons and otherwise harass, pollute and upset our ocean environment and the creatures who live in it. Oceans4Peace will sponsor teach-ins, a film series, contacts with decision makers and other public education events.

WHERE:
Around the Hawaiian Islands and the Pacific Missile Research Facility on Kauai.

WHEN:
June and July 2016

ACTION:
 Sign our petition to stop RIMPAC 2016
 "Oceans4Peace : Stop the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises"

To sign click here:
(https://www.change.org/p/oceans4peace-stop-the-rim-of-the-pacific-rimpac-exercises?recruiter=1616584&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive)

Oceans4Peace is sponsoring discussions, teach-ins, a film series and other public education events. See calendar below or go to(http://www.oceans4peace.org/page/page/8901763/2016-6.htm) or

RIMPAC IMPACT
Panel Discussion
Friday, June 17th 2016  6:00pm
Kapaa Library
Technology Effects on Whales - Kalasara Setaysha - Oceans4Peace
The Threats to Coral - Dr. Katherine Muzik - Marine Biologist NTBG
Expansion of US Militarism in the Pacific - Juan Wilson - Kauai Sierra Club

MOVIE SERIES
"Sonic Sea" A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Thursday, June 23rd 6:00pm  2016
Koloa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

"Sonic Sea" A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Friday, June 24th 7:00pm 2016
Kapaa Library
Discussion with  Kalasara Setaysha

“Sonic Sea” A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Sunday, June 26th 6 :00pm 2016
Princeville Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

“Why We Fight”  A film about the US military.
Friday, July 1st 1016  6:30pn
Koloa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

"Oceans" Disney documentary film about the ocean.
Saturday, July 9th 1:00pm
Hanapepe Library
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

“Why We Fight”A film about the US military.
Sunday, July 10th 1:00pm
Kapaa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

“Why We Fight”  A film about the US military.
Friday, July 15th, 6:30pnm
Hanapepe Library
Discussion Rick Cooper

“Oceans”  Disney documentary film about the ocean.
Sunday, July17th 206 1:00pm
Kapaa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

Oceans4Peace is a Coalition of Kauai Conservation and Social Justice groups whose Mission was to educate the general public about the adverse effects of the 2016 RIMPAC, Rim of the Pacific, Naval war exercises.

The Coalition continues to monitor the US Navy for abuses to the ocean, its inhabitants and ecosystem. With Hawaii the center of the US Naval Fleet and Kauai the center of Naval war research, our Coalition continues to update its educational Process.

Presently, the on-going threat to our Ocean is the increase of the US Naval presence in the Pacific, "the Pacific Pivot," especially in the new Marine Sanctuary of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

The Navy has excluded all human activity there, except their own. They admit to using mid frequency and low frequency active Sonar in this so-called 'Protected Area'. This extreme sound blasting Sonar has been shown to cause harm to all ocean life, especially to marine mammals that rely on hearing for their existence.

The Navy, in partnership with the South Korean and Japanese governments, continues to build military bases only a few hundreds of miles from China, at Jeju Island in South Korea and Oura Bay, Okinawa, Japan. Both projects necessitate environmental destruction on a massive scale. We can ill afford this military buildup or the arms race with China it will provoke.

Our 'Oceans 4 Peace Coalition' is seeking the real answers, which enable us to report the truth. This page will keep you updated on US Navy impacts on our Ocean.


Video above: Still frame of ship bow plowing the ocean. From video "Sonic Sea" trailer below. From (https://youtu.be/T-jabL64UZE).

Oceans4Peace supporting organizations
Kohola Leo (Whale Voice)
Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice
Surfrider Foundation
Kauai Sierra Club


Video above: "RIMPACT IMPACT" film shown by Juan Wilson at Oceans4Peace Panel Discussion 6/7/14. From (http://youtu.be/NLZx9fg7Gvg).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Oceans for Peace Pacific Pivot Panel 6/18/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Prepare for RIMPAC 2016 War in Hawaii 5/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to "take" millions of mammals 5/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: US court RIMPAC Impact decision 4/3/15
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 Impact Postmortem 10/22/1
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 in Full March 7/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: 21st Century Energy Wars 7/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War on the Ocean 7/3/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Voila - World War Three 7/1/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/28/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC IMPACT 6/8/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC Then and Now 5/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Asian Pivot - An ugly dance 12/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/13/13
Ea O Ka Aina: End RimPac destruction of Pacific 11/1/13 
Ea O Ka Aina: Moana Nui Confereence 11/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy license to kill 10/27/12 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sleepwalking through destruction 7/16/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Okinawa breathes easier 4/27/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy Next-War-Itis 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: America bullies Koreans 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Despoiling Jeju island coast begins 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Jeju Islanders protests Navy Base 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii - Start of American Empire 2/26/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Korean Island of Peace 2/26/12   
Ea O Ka Aina: Military schmoozes Guam & Hawaii 3/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: In Search of Real Security - One 8/31/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Peace for the Blue Continent 8/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Shift in Pacific Power Balance 8/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RimPac to expand activities 6/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War Games here in July 6/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Pacific Resistance to U.S. Military 5/24/10
Ea O Ka Aina: De-colonizing the Pacific 5/21/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC to Return in 2010 5/2/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/15/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam Land Grab 11/30/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam as a modern Bikini Atoll 12/25/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GUAM - Another Strategic Island 11/8/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Diego Garcia - Another stolen island 11/6/09
Ea O Ka Aina: DARPA & Super-Cavitation on Kauai 3/24/09
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 - Navy fired up in Hawaii 7/2/08
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 uses destructive sonar 4/22/08
Island Breath: Navy Plans for the Pacific 9/3/07
Island Breath: Judge restricts sonar off California 08/07/07
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 sonar compromise 7/9/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 - Impact on Ocean 5/23/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2004 - Whale strandings on Kauai 9/2/04
Island Breath: PMRF Land Grab 3/15/04  

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Trillions Spent on Violence

SUBHEAD: The world continues its downwards spiral away from peace.

By Andrea Germanos on 8 June 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/08/trillions-spent-violence-world-continues-downwards-spiral-away-peace)


Image above: Korean, Japanese and U.S. naval ships are moored at Naval Station Pearl Harbor preparing for exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2008 military exercises. From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RIMPAC_2008.jpg).

The global spiral downwards towards less peace continues, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) finds.

The findings are laid out in the think tank's latest Global Peace Index (GPI), now in its 10th edition, released Wednesday. It ranks 163 states and territories based on 23 indicators covering domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and a country's militarization.

Book-ending the 2016 index (pdf) are Iceland, ranking as the most peaceful country, and Syria, which ranks dead last. The United States comes in at 103, just behind Uganda and Guinea, while the UK comes in much further ahead at 47.

Putting a precise figure on the downward trend, the authors of the new index say the world has become 2.44 percent less peaceful since 2008. While 77 countries improved over the past decade, 85 countries fell.

Driving the decline is the impact of terrorism and political instability. Deaths from terrorism shot up 80 percent, while the number of countries suffering more than 500 deaths as a result of terrorist acts jumped from 5 to 11. And only 23 percent of all the countries on the index have been spared terrorist activity.

While the latest index shows that more countries improved than deteriorated (81 to 79) compared to the prior index, the level of deterioration outweighed the gains.

Europe is the most peaceful of the nine geographical regions on the new index, with North America coming in as the second.

Not only did the Middle East and Africa (MENA) again rank last, it was also the region with the biggest drop since the previous index. Three of the five that fell compared to the prior year are also in that region: Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain.

"As internal conflicts in MENA become more entrenched," stated Steve Killelea, Founder and Executive Chairman of the IEP, "external parties are increasingly becoming more involved and the potential for indirect or 'war by proxy' between nation states is rising.

This was already evident in Syria with the conflict between the Assad regime and multiple non-state actors, and is now spilling into countries such as Yemen. There is a broader proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and more recently both U.S. and Russia have increased their level of involvement."

On top of that region's conflicts, the report notes that the UN Refugee Agency described over 57 million people in 2015 as refugees, internally-displaced people, or others of concern.
Among the highlights, as noted in the report:

• Two indicators improved by more than ten percent, external conflicts fought and UN peacekeeping funding.
• The total number of deaths from terrorism rose from less than 10,000 in 2008 to over 30,000 in 2014.
• Terrorism is at historical levels, battle deaths are at a 25-year high, and the number of refugees is at a level not seen in sixty years.
• Internal peace and the societal safety and security domain declined every year for the past eight years.
• Nine countries have more than ten percent of their population displaced in some form, with Somalia and South Sudan both having more than 20 percent and Syria over 60 percent.

Another finding, as noted by the Independent, is that "only Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica, Japan, Mauritius, Panama, Qatar, Switzerland, Uruguay and Vietnam are free from conflict."

There's another sobering point in the report: while the ten-year trend downward has continued, there's been more spending on violence than peace. The price tag on the violence added up to $13.6 trillion in 2015, or 13.3 percent of gross world product. Investments in peacekeeping and peacebuilding, in contrast, totaled $15 billion.

Even a meager improvement could bring about big dollar value. Killelea notes that "peacebuilding and peacekeeping spending remains proportionately small compared to the economic impact of violence, representing just 2% of global losses from armed conflict.

Addressing the global disparity in peace and achieving an overall 10% decrease in the economic impact of violence would produce a peace dividend of $1.36 trillion. This is approximately equivalent to the size of world food exports."

Achieving sustainable peace is paramount, the report notes, as "international cooperation on an unprecedented scale" is needed to address the "unparalleled challenges" facing the world including "climate change, decreasing biodiversity, increasing migration, and over-population."

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They Died of Progress

SUBHEAD: Imperial America has been reduced to a massive but fragile shell, invincible only in appearance.

By John Michael Greer on 8 June 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/06/they-died-of-progress.html)


Image above: Sailors scrub the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan to remove potential radiation contamination following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Afterwards the shipwas in drydock for 18 months for decontamination. Several of the crew have subsequently suffered from radiation related illnesses. From (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/20/us-navy-sailors-legal-challenge-fukushima-radiation-tepco).

I'd intended this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report to continue the discussion of education that got started two weeks ago, but that’s going to have to wait a bit. As my readers have doubtless learned over the last ten years, whichever muse guides these essays is a lady of very irregular habits, and it happens tolerably often that what she has to say isn’t what I had in mind.

This is one of those times.

In last month’s installment of my ongoing Retrotopia narrative, one of the characters summed up her position in a bit of intellectual heresy that left the viewpoint character flummoxed. Her argument was that progress has become the enemy of prosperity.

That’s something you can’t even suggest in today’s society; the response of the viewpoint character— “With all due respect, that’s crazy”—is mild compared to the sort of reactions I’ve routinely fielded whenever I’ve suggested that progress, like everything else in the real world, is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Nonetheless, the unspeakable has become the inescapable in today’s world. It’s become a running joke on the internet that the word “upgrade” inevitably means poorer service, fewer benefits, and more annoyances for those who have to deal with the new and allegedly improved product. The same logic can be applied equally well across the entire landscape of modern technology.

What’s new, innovative, revolutionary, game-changing, and so on through the usual litany of overheated adjectives, isn’t necessarily an improvement. It can be, and very often is, a disaster. Examples could be drawn from an astonishingly broad range of contemporary sources, but I have a particular set of examples in mind.

To make sense of those examples, it’s going to be necessary to talk about military affairs. As with most things in today’s America, the collective conversation of our time provides two and only two acceptable ways to discuss those, and neither of them have anything actually useful to say.

The first of them, common among the current crop of American pseudoconservatives, consists of mindless cheerleading; the second, common among the current crop of pseudoliberals all over the industrial world, consists of moralizing platitudes.

I don’t particularly want to address the moralizing platitudes just now, other than to say that yes, war is ghastly; no, it’s not going away; and it’s not particularly edifying to watch members of the privileged classes in the countries currently on top of the international order insist piously that war ought to be abandoned forever, just in time to keep their own nations from being displaced from positions they won and kept at gunpoint not that many decades ago.

The cheerleading is another matter, and requires a more detailed analysis. It’s common among the pseudoconservative right these days to insist that the United States is by definition the world’s most powerful nation, with so overwhelming a preponderance of military might that every other nation will inevitably have to bow to our will or get steamrollered.

That sort of thinking backstops the mania for foreign intervention that guides neoconservatives such as Hillary Clinton on their merry way, overthrowing governments and destabilizing nations under the fond delusion that the blowback from these little adventures can never actually touch the United States.

In America these days, a great deal of this sort of cheerleading focuses on high-tech weapons systems—inevitably, since so much of contemporary American pop culture has become gizmocentric to the point of self-parody.

Visit a website that deals with public affairs from a right-of-center viewpoint, and odds are you’ll find a flurry of articles praising the glories of this or that military technology with the sort of moist-palmed rapture that teenage boys used to direct to girlie-mag centerfolds.

The identical attitude can be found in a dizzying array of venues these days, very much including Pentagon press releases and the bombastic speeches of politicians who are safely insulated from the realities of war.

There’s only one small difficulty here, which is that much of the hardware in question doesn’t work.

The poster child here is the F-35 Lightning II fighter. It so happens that I’ve faced a certain amount of recent embarrassment with regard to this plane, for a curious reason. Back in 2013 and 2014, when I was writing my novelTwilight’s Last Gleaming, I worked out what I thought was a reasonable estimate of the F-35’s performance in combat against Chinese J-20 and J-31 fighters.

That estimate wasn’t exactly in accord with the dewy-eyed accounts just mentioned; the F-35—called the Lardbucket by Air Force pilots in my novel, due to its short range and sluggish performance in the air—came out decidedly second-best, suffering three losses for every two Chinese planes shot down.

As it turns out, though, my guess at the F-35’s performance was far too optimistic. The more data slips past the Scylla of Lockheed’s publicity flacks and the Charybdis of their equal and opposite numbers in the Air Force, the clearer it becomes that the Lardbucket is an utter dog of a plane, so grossly underpowered and so overloaded with poorly functioning gimmickry that nearly every other fighter in current service can outperform it with ease.

For example, if the F-35’s stealth features are to work, the plane can only carry two air-to-air missiles and two bombs—a quarter the firepower of similar planes in other air forces.

Persistent reports, hotly denied by Lockheed and the Pentagon but still not yet disproved by the simple demonstration that would be necessary, claim that the vertical takeoff version of the plane has so little thrust that it can’t even get off the ground with a full fuel tank. Mind you, this embarrassing object is the most expensive military procurement program in history, scheduled to cost the Pentagon some $1.5 trillion by the time purchases are completed.

Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese are fielding fast, heavily armed, maneuverable long-range fighters for a fraction of the F-35’s hefty price tag, and those fighters are going into service while the F-35 lumbers through one production delay after another.

Some of my readers may be wondering if this is simply one bad apple out of an otherwise sound barrel. Not so. The Navy has an equal embarrassment on its hands right now, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), another high-tech, high-priced failure.

The LCS costs $37 billion a pop, and has been marketed as the be-all and end-all of coastal warfare craft. If this sounds reminiscent of the praise lavished on the F-35, it should—and the results are comparable.

Like the F-35, the LCS is packed to the gunwales with high-tech gimmickry that doesn’t work as advertised, and it’s so finicky to run that after a minor maintenance error, one of the few LCSs in service has been laid up for five months at a dock in Singapore while technicians try to figure out whether there’s any way to repair it short of towing it back across the Pacific to the shipyard.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are fielding a new fleet of fast, heavily armed littoral combat ships for a small fraction of the cost.

Two bad apples? Consider the SBX missile defense system, which was supposed to track incoming ICBMs and knock them out of the sky. It’s a $10 billion dollar flop; none of its array of high-tech gizmos—the flying lasers, the antimissile rockets, the gargantuan seaborne radar—does what it’s supposed to do.

Consider the Air Force’s Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECCS), a computer system designed to handle logistics for overseas deployments, which ate a billion dollars and seven years before being cancelled as a complete failure.

Consider, for that matter, the Army’s new pixellated camouflage uniform, $5 billion in the making, which had to be scrapped when it turned out that it sticks out like a sore thumb against every environment on Earth.

I could go on. These programs, and many others, were sold to politicians and public with lavish claims about their ability to perform every imaginable military mission.

As it turned out, they were well designed to carry out devastating raids on the US Treasury, and that’s about it. The US military is certainly the most expensive military in the world, and it’s equipped with a gaudier assortment of high-tech trinkets than any other, but it’s not actually that well prepared to carry out its ostensible purpose—that is to say, warfare.

The results can be seen with painful clarity in the last three-quarters of a century of US military history. Ask yourself this, dear reader: since the end of the Second World War, how many wars has the United States actually won?

There are two factors at work here, and both of them unfold from broader patterns in American society. The first is the descent of the United States into overt kleptocracy on a scale that makes Third World dictators drool with envy. In today’s America, a very large number of government and corporate officials alike overtly treat their positions as opportunities for plunder.

Consider the stock-buyback programs that are standard among Fortune 500 corporations these days. The corporation spends its money buying shares of stock to inflate stock prices, boosting the net worth of corporate insiders, who get hige blocks of shares as part of their compensation packages.

The expenditure of business funds for the personal benefit of influential insiders used to be prosecuted as embezzlement; now it’s business as usual—and don’t even get me started about the absurd salaries and bonuses currently shoveled into the laps of CEOs and other overpriced office fauna.

On the other side of the coin we have government officials who serve in various positions where they can benefit corporate interests, and then leave their jobs and are hired by the corporations they used to deal with as, ahem, consultants, pulling in very high salaries for very little apparent labor.

Corruption? I see no reason to give it any more polite name, and it’s played a major role in providing the US armed forces with fighters that can’t fight, camouflage that doesn’t camouflage, and so on, through the long catalogue of military-procurement failures that have equipped America’s soldiers, sailors, and pilots with embarrassingly substandard gear.

Still, there’s something else going on here. All the most egregious examples of military-procurement failure in recent years have had something in common: they were supposed to be revolutionary new breakthroughs using exciting new technology, and so on drearily through the most overused rhetoric of our age.

The cascading failures of the F-35 can be traced straight to that sort of thinking; its designers apparently believed with all their hearts that every innovation must be an improvement, and so came up with a plane that fails in the most innovative ways you care to imagine.

The LCS, the SBX, the ECCS, the pixellated camo uniforms, all fell victim to the same trap—their designers were so busy making them revolutionary that they forgot to make them work.

Compare this with the very different approach of another major power—Russia—and it’s not hard to see the flaws in that dubious logic. The Russian approach to military technology has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Where the US set out to create an antiballistic missile defense system from scratch, Russia took the incremental approach.

They started with the S-300 air defense system, a sturdy piece of Soviet-era equipment designed to shoot down airplanes, cruise missiles, and the like, and built on that foundation in a cautious, step-by-step fashion.

The S-300 thus gave way in due time to the S-400, which had a variety of solidly tested incremental improvements, and then to the S-500, scheduled for deployment this year, which adds in the ability to target incoming ballistic missiles in near space.

The Russian logic was as straightforward as it was irrefutable: if you want something to destroy lots of very fast objects at high altitude, start with something that can destroy a more modest number of slower objects at lower altitudes, and then tinker carefully from there. That approach works; ours doesn’t.

What makes the American obsession with revolutionary breakthroughs so dysfunctional isn’t just that it so often yields substandard results; it's that it’s being paid for at the expense of essential military needs. Here’s an example. The US Marine Corps has, on paper, a substantial fleet of F/A-18 fighter-bombers—276 of them. In fact, though, less than a third of them can fly. The Marines are so short of spare parts that their mechanics are having to decide which planes to keep airworthy and which ones to strip for parts.

The helicopters the Marines use to ferry forces from ship to shore are in the same condition, with 105 of 147 Super Stallion copters more or less permanently grounded. There are plenty of other examples; right now, between high-tech flops that don’t work and working technologies that have been starved of maintenance and spare parts, the US military is in appalling condition

The exception that proves the rule is the nuclear arm, which has been steadfastly ignoring high-end gimmickry for decades. It turns out, for example, that the launch systems for America’s nuclear-armed ICBMs still use8 inch floppy disks to store the launch codes.

Those ICBMs, by the way, are Minuteman IIIs, which were introduced in 1970—the missile that was supposed to replace the Minuteman, the MX Peacekeeper, was deployed in the 1980s but turned out to be yet another of the Pentagon’s overpriced white elephants, and was quietly decommissioned between 2003 and 2005.

The other two legs of the so-called nuclear tripod are just as elderly. The Trident nuclear submarine is another 1980s technology, still chugging away sedately at its mission, while the airborne leg still relies on the geriatric B-52, a 1950s design with modest incremental improvements tacked on.

There were two attempts to replace the B-52; the B-1, which turned out to be a lousy plane and mostly does ground attack duties these days, and the B-2 stealth bomber, which was so expensive that only 12 of them are in service, and is no longer invisible to state-of-the-art air defense systems.

Since nuclear weapons are the one US military asset that must always be ready to function, no matter what, it’s telling that the Pentagon’s planners have quietly allowed old but sturdy technologies to remain in service there—though it’s anyone’s guess how well maintained those technologies are at this point.

That strategy probably won’t be viable in the long term. Military procurement fraud is as old as war, and overinvestment in the latest fashionable gimmick is tolerably common as far back as historical records reach. Every nation’s political and military establishment has to contend with both, and most manage to keep them within the bounds necessary to ensure national survival.

Those nations that don’t restrict them in this manner normally go under, and this mode of failure is particularly common in the declining years of great powers.

Those of my readers who’ve read up on the last years of vanished empires—the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires, Romanov Russia or Habsburg Spain, and so on down the list of history’s obituaries—know the results already.

The imperial state has been reduced to a massive but fragile shell, invincible in appearance but shockingly vulnerable in reality, resting ever more unsteadily on a crumbling foundation of ineffective or broken weapons, decaying or abandoned facilities; a political leadership blithely unaware of the gap between its fantasies of invincibility and the reality of accelerating systemic failure.

We have a high command too busy feathering its own nest and playing political games to notice the widening cracks; and a dwindling corps of servicepeople, overworked, underpaid, and demoralized, who nonetheless keep on struggling to prop up the whole brittle mess until the inevitable disaster sweeps their efforts aside once and for all.

All this is standard. What’s different in the present situation, though, is the all but universal conviction in American society, from top to bottom, that the lessons being taught so insistently by the F-35 and its fellow embarrassments cannot and must not be learned.

Yet another round of innovative, revolutionary, breakthrough technologies is not going to solve America’s military problems, since those problems were caused or worsened by previous rounds of innovative, revolutionary, breakthrough technologies.

Nonetheless, that’s the conventional wisdom in today’s United States, and in an embarrassingly large number of its allies—and history offers no encouragement at all to those who want to believe that this can end well.

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On Surplus - Part One?

SUBHEAD: My wife and are still adjusting our lives so that we might live within the means we can expect.

By Erik Linberg on 5 June 2016 for Transition Milwaukee -
(http://transitionmilwaukee.org/profiles/blogs/on-surplus-part-i)


Image above: Detail of cover art for the Rhythm Pimps "End of Suburbia" album. From (https://therhythmpimps.bandcamp.com/album/end-of-suburbia).

This is Part 1 of a 2 or 3 part series on the concept of surplus. Surplus is one of the most central features of modern industrial and democratic societies. In fact it is so central and its permanence so taken for granted that it is scarcely noticed and even less understood. The following installations are my attempt to discuss several of its facets, for the slow disappearance of surpluses is, I think, the cause of great bewilderment.

Overshoot
A few weeks ago I came home from work one day feeling utterly defeated, oppressed by a life-weight that was buckling my knees.  Money was short, jobs seemed ready to go off the rails, and there was no way I could stay on top of all the moving parts.

The driver’s side door of my truck would no longer open due to some sort of malfunction and a day of scooting over a passenger seat full of job folders, miscellaneous tools, and the other refuse of a contractor/carpenter life was making a previously broken wrist ache.

I looked around at our house and yard and saw the wreckage of a half-completed life.  I’m a third done with a home restoration project that starts when some money comes in and stops when it doesn’t, but going on year three I leave things set up and un-tidied as if to tell myself (and my restive neighbors) that the work is in permanent progress.  The sink was full of dishes, the garbage overflowing, and the living room an explosion of Legos, Lincoln Logs, sticker-books and crumpled artwork.

Dust-bunnies, dirty socks and cheerios huddled along the walls.  Only a fire or a flood. . . (I thought to myself) could solve this problem.  All of this was the results of two overworked parents who, already running large deficits on our own time, also can’t afford the hired help that would be necessary to keep everything put together in the wake of our twin four year olds and their boundless entropy.  This is not what I expected.  This is now how I grew up.

This scene is of course also our own doing and is indicative of quirks and weaknesses that my wife and I share.  But there are aspects in it that also represents a unique moment in American (and probably European) culture today.

For it is not just about a messy house and overwhelmed parents, but a greater sense of a botched life, of having not lived up to our potential, of grinding ourselves into nubs of our former selves without the prospect of relief; we fight our way through the tangled underbrush without hope of finding a clearing or a vista.

This moment is marked by a place where shrinking paychecks cross paths with our expanding hopes and aspirations, leaving so many of us frustrated, angry, looking for answers.  Though  usually misnamed, this moment and its trajectory seems to be all that we talk about, at least during a political season, though without any real understanding.

Because I have been a student of this moment for almost a decade (let’s keep things general for now and call it the changing wealth of nations) I know not to compare my life with the life of my parents, for the wealth of their nation was far different than is ours.   This difference will be my eventual topic, but I think the lived experience of it is a crucial groundwork.

I know not to make this comparison, then but there are moments of defeat or frustration, when everything seems such a hopeless and uncleanable mess, and I look around and feel like a failure as old images from my childhood--of clean and sparkling success--sneak out from their hiding place.

These images represent not only what I lived as a child, they were additionally pounded into the crevices of my being by years simply of living in America, the land of high expectations, where we walk to the uniform drumbeat of forced want and desire.

You can turn away from all this unfortunate cultural training.  You can know that success is not the same thing as having, and that simplicity can be beautiful, and imagine a beautiful and simple life for yourself.

You can read and write and march and protest in order to dislodge these images, bury them in community gardens dug until your fingers bleed;  but some are so deeply embossed on our emotional backdrops, ready always to remake their mark—ready, in my case, for the moment when the façade of my life appears to crumbling.

For when I came home that afternoon I suddenly recalled in the most vivid crystalline light an image of my childhood home, always tidy and well-kept, my parents relaxing in the shade, tending  the flower garden and reading quietly after supper.  It was an ordered life, lived well and well within its means.

But virtue of this order, it seemed a modest life; and compared to many portrayed on TV and movies as the most idealized kind of American wealth, it was a modest life--comfortable, yes, but without a hint of ostentation.  Their life, in any case, was the opposite of our frantic overshoot.

“Everything I wanted”
My parents did live extraordinary lives of the kind that could only happen in America and during a short and extraordinary time.  From relatively humble, evangelical origins they marched together away from that past to the top of academic ultra-success--my father writing the books, giving the papers, and directing the institutes, my mother hosting the parties and providing a welcoming place for graduate students and new faculty.  They did this without Ivy League credentials or any insider-edge.

In fact they struggled in the early years of academic life to discard their old inherited evangelical bumpkinisms, like confusing sherry for white wine, a crime against humanity in 1960s Ann Arbor.  They were sensitive, honest, and forthright--and faultlessly dependable.  They worked hard and with spectacular diligence.

And, as my father always emphasized, they were lucky.  Especially when two years into his Michigan appointment, a position opened up in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin, where he was to spend the rest of his days.

By the time he was my age, he had published a shelf full of books, many translated into dozens of languages; he lectured widely around the world, and was positioning himself for his end-of-career glory, in which he was bestowed with all the honors available in his field.  He was soon to publish the standard textbook on “the origins of Western science.”

He was awarded a Vilas Professorship from the University of Wisconsin and had countless life-time achievement awards from various scholarly societies in the decade before his death.  He was smart, of course, and very hard working.  He was disciplined, organized, a revered teacher and trusted colleague.

He never missed a deadline and his constant productivity was rewarded with a lifetime of summer grants and other funding that allowed us to spend a year in Princeton when I was four, and a year in Oxford when I was a pre-teen, along with countless other stays in various global academic hot spots.[i]

Because of the accompanying material comfort and stability, theirs was not just the picture-perfect academic life.  It was an upper-middle class life as well, even though we, like most people in America, felt ourselves to be closer to the middle than we actually were.  It was, to be honest about it, a comfortable life of bourgeois consumption, despite the high-culture and socially critical hue to it—entirely ecologically unsustainable despite its ordinary and modest lack of anything considered excessive.

True, we were more frugal than most of our family friends and neighbors, adopting new middle class conveniences like central air-conditioning, color TV, snow blowers, and automatic garage door openers after everyone else we knew had.  And true, as I noted, our consumption often had an edifying angle to it—Europe rather than Disney World, camping rather than amusement parks.

But the sort of “headwinds” that many experienced during the 1970s energy crisis and economic slow-down had no apparent effect on our lives.  The two week summer vacations never ceased, we bought new (if very modest) cars whenever they were needed.  We upgraded from a modest ranch to a larger cape cod style house in 1973, and we took a 5 week European vacation in 1974.

Despite the years of “stagflation,” the research grants (in the humanities no less!) and summer funding never missed a beat during the seventies, nor, for that matter over the course of at least five presidential administrations.  We were nothing if not economically secure.

If life in America might be called super-abundant, it was also ultra-secure.  That we might have a routine crisis (a car breakdown, the need for a new furnace or washing machine, even a kitchen no longer suited to our position in life) and not have the savings to address it immediately was unthinkable.

Life could be well-ordered and tidy in so many inner and external ways because, like a balanced ecosystem (though that it was not) the flows and supplies, the inputs and outputs all seemed to work according to a well-proportioned logic.

I would write a history of the structural tectonics of the 1980s in a much different way than I would describe lived-experience during the Reagan years.  Although my parents believed Reagan was a scourge on the Republic, they also enjoyed rising possibilities at the same time, though without ever understanding the connection.  The vacations became more frequent and more luxurious, the artwork real, the personal indulgences less reserved.

But still they saved staggering amounts of money—at least from my perspective--had long-term care insurance, a place reserved at a very nice retirement village, and were still able to put two children through private college and then graduate school, help with our home purchases, and still maintain large reserves.  My children, sadly (or not), will have none of these privileges.

Like every life, theirs had its turmoil and tragedies and our family had the normal mix of pathologies and dysfunction, resentments and disappointments.   But, at least in my mind, these never characterized the sum of their life.  As my father once commented to my mother, he had managed to get everything he had wanted in life.  This is an extraordinary feat.

The wants were not extravagant, but they were in many ways highly ambitious.  It was a beautiful life that combined hard work and discipline with leisure and enjoyment, intensive days of research and writing, and relaxing strolls by the Madison lakes.

Their access to money is alien to my experience, but even more befuddling is how much spare time they had—time to pursue hobbies, art, culture, and an active social life.  How did my dad write the books, paint the house himself, never miss one of my soccer games, read every night, exercise, entertain, work for hours in his woodshop?  Where did all that time come from?  And where has it gone?

What I Have
I learned a lot from my parents and consider my childhood to have been good training for my current life.  They modeled good parenting, and I always felt loved.  I was granted remarkable intellectual privileges, for we talked and debated and thought for hours on end as a family.  But beyond this, none of what I have been describing is available to me and my family.

To be clear, compared to most of the world, I still enjoy unwarranted privileges, but not with as much ease and regularity as many of my parent’s generations.

Although I have worked hard, especially over the past decade, to curtail my wants and redefine success, there are days in which I feel like a complete failure.  I have not, to put it bluntly, gotten very much of what I wanted, or at least I sometimes feel like that, and I probably should have more trepidation than I do about my family’s material insecurity.

When I set out in 1990 in pursuit of my own Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, I believed that I had every reason to expect that my future might bear some resemblance to my past.  We could of course quibble with the details but it is safe to say that my father and I have roughly the same general range of natural talent and I benefited from a life-long academic acculturation that he did not have.

He was more disciplined than I am, but I am probably a bit more creative.  He was more focused on the end-product, while I am probably more attracted to the ideas themselves. He was moderate where I tend to be radical.  But the same sort of life in the academy was not ruled out by some major break in in aptitude, intensity, or motivation.

As some of my readers are aware, I am a carpenter rather than a professor.  I had some successes in the academic world, including a number or articles in refereed journals and a page full of conference presentations.

But no job.

The life of a carpenter and small business owner, into which I fell backwards, has some marvelous features and it initially provided an interesting sort of relief from the very different competition and status-based world of an academic aspirant.  It allowed me to pursue urban farming, and perhaps a more radical and free-ranging sort of social activism and intellectual work.

I like working with my hands and my body, and have an interesting niche in the local restoration market.  The life of a carpenter has allowed me to feel strong, resilient, and capable.

If I can’t fix it, I know someone who can.  This is a gift in a world where most of us grow increasingly dependent on high-priced experts.  There is much to be grateful here, especially as the University of Wisconsin inches towards systemic collapse.

But this career path was only partially chosen.  There was a time in which I very much wanted an academic job and worked furiously to secure one.  I am at heart more interested in ideas, language, and concepts than anything else, and for the first time in fifteen years yearn for a life that would allow complete dedication to ideas.

In graduate school I wrote a very long and intense dissertation on the history of the idea of the unconscious.  Into it was packed all sorts of social and political philosophy, literature, and a focused study on cultural narratives.  I lived and breathed this stuff, and after a few years of practical respite in carpentry, still do.   I had some job interviews after finishing the dissertation—good jobs that I would have been thrilled to accept.

But, for a number of reasons, none of the jobs panned out and I was soon swept away, for a time, by the excitement of building things that pushed the limits of my knowledge and experience almost every day.

The usual path for a graduate student in the humanities looking for a tenure-track job is to become a “lecturer,” which, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is a step below the coveted “adjunct professor” position.  The mis-named “lecturer” is a transitional position that, for many, becomes permanent.  It even has a version of tenure, aptly named “indefinite status.”

That means they will probably keep you around as long as enrollments remain high, while those who are not given indefinite status by default have “definite status,” which means they are definitely not going to be kept around for very long.

Marx referred to the industrial equivalent of this as “mobile army of surplus labor,” and the lecturer (or whatever else it is called in other universities) is indeed the university proletariat, the caste my wife belongs to.

A lecturer in the English department teaches up to four classes (often, because of the low pay, supplemented by another class or two at a community college).

Lecturers do some of the most labor-intensive teaching in the university and often that which requires a level of teaching talent not required to deliver the weekly lecture that many high-ranking professors are permitted; in the English department they work with entry-level students in basic writing classes that involve thousands of pages of writing to be graded and commented-upon each semester.

Although it can be fulfilling (as it is for my wife who loves her students and is revered by them), this is work in the trenches in an institution that is supposed to only have high and broad vistas, and where only merit trumps equality but never at the expense of fairness and respect.

For reasons I will be discussing, the university in America today cannot afford its high principles, nor its lavish grants and light teaching loads.  The low cost of temporary and disposable labor is becoming the financial backbone of the university, just as outsourced labor is used to keep corporate profits aloft.

The wave of retirements (that made job prospects appear promising for my generation of graduate students) resulted less in new tenure-track hires, and more lower-paid and easily eliminated lecturers and adjuncts.  Professors bemoan this situation, but, I should add, are equally unprepared to share their privilege.  They too feel under fire from above.

I opted out of the lecturer track, falling back on my experience as a roofer (where speed, endurance, and focus are proportionally rewarded and at a much higher pay rate than the itinerant intellectual worker) while also finding promise in the growing remodeling industry of the late 90s.

About 8 years later, by which time I had built a small but solid company called Community Building and Restoration, we in the construction industry were beginning to realize that we had been banking on a system of borrowed home-equity money. and had been floating untethered within an exploding bubble economy.

Like most people in my position, I was almost wiped out when the housing bubble popped, found myself laden with unpayable debt, and came out the other side barely limping.  Things have never been the same since.

This isn’t to say that some business models aren’t performing well, as least for now.  But I have given up all former dreams of an upwardly mobile life of a small business man, where I might settle into leisure and comfort as I get older and hand off the harder physical labor work to underlings.  I don’t aspire to this anymore, because I don’t think it is an ethically responsible life, but I couldn’t have it if I wanted it.

There is neither a path from where I am to a parallel version of the life my parents made for themselves, nor for a university-based one secured by my wife, despite her rare talent as a teacher. In fact, there is scarcely much chance for basic economic security in our future.  I hope the university survives and that my body doesn’t break down too soon.  I worry about the next popping bubble, but probably not as much as I should.
 
My main purpose in sharing these personal reflections is, perhaps contrary to appearances, to explain the structural tectonics that have fractured the roads to success upon which many in my generation once set out.  My experience, I think, is not entirely unique.  The comparison between me and my parents is largely a generational one. 

On a whole, my generation does not live as securely as our parents did and our opportunities are shrinking.  This is born out in the statistics and in the life experiences of many of my peers.  There are of course exceptions.  Those who went into “financial services” live with excessive comfort, as do many physicians and lawyers and people in the “tech industry.”

But for most of the rest of us, whether we work in retail, the trades, manufacturing, as teachers, in most government jobs (the list could go on), the fact that wages have “stagnated” tell only part of the story of slow decline.

The life of a young university professor, one who did manage to find a foothold into the world in which my father thrived, also provides a good insight into a world I know well, while reinforcing my sense of generational differences.  The university is not funded the way it used to be, and, in addition to the truly beleaguered lecturers and adjuncts, tenured professors are also feeling a pinch.

They can live very comfortable lives, it is true, but the expansive opportunities enjoyed by my father’s cohort have largely dried up.  In the humanities, summer funding is rare, teaching loads are increasing, departments are shrinking, and even tenure is being questioned as the university is being “run more like a business.”

If I am honest with myself, these personal reflections are flavored with own bitter aftertaste.  I admit it—I do have a chip on my shoulder about the university and about the amount of unpaid research and writing I perform in my scarce free-time and for no compensation.  Living in a different generation, my father had more free time to do what he wished after he was done writing, lecturing, and leading seminars than I have to do any reading and writing in the first place.

There is some self-pity (since I’m already opening myself up for dissection, I might as well admit it all) in my moments of defeat, when I just don’t have the time I need to pursue what I value and what might get give me pleasure.  I do, as I have said, sometimes feel like a failure when life has run me down, and when I feel like a failure, I also feel a bit sorry for myself.  So there you have it.  This might all be read as an attempt to come to grips with my own pathetic little feelings.

But this may make it all the more significant, if for no reason other than the way  I have spent the last eight years on what I now think of as a spiritual journey—one bent on understanding not in  terms of personal entitlement and disappointment, but in structural and historical ones, the changing course of the wealth of nations and especially the American nation.  I don’t believe the world owes me a growing economy and increased consumption.

Just the opposite, in fact—for an economy the size of our current one has already overshot the planet’s biological capacity for production and regeneration.  I know this--and still the lived experience of decline and contraction is more than I can gracefully accept or emotionally process when my back is up against the wall.

My wife and are still only beginning to adjust the reality of our material lives so that we might live within the means we can expect.  We, too, are still in a position of overshoot.

So I’m getting personal, here, because I think the struggles I am able to articulate are ones that others will, though each in their own way, also be required to confront as well—if not now, then in the future.  Feelings, hopes, expectations, disappointments—this is where politics and the economy are lived.  And the changing wealth of our nation will give us a difficult journey.

Or maybe it is not so difficult, per se; perhaps we as a people are unprepared for minor challenges of a certain sort.  In either case,  my own unfinished journey to a new acceptance has taken lots of painful and persistent work and I still have a long way to go.

 And when I see the supporters of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump acting as if their candidate could possibly remake the America that my parents and their generation enjoyed, I see denial and postponement of the inevitable real revolution—one of expectations.

When I see faculty at the University of Wisconsin view their current struggles almost exclusively in personal terms of a bad governor and an indifferent state legislature, I see people who have neither begun to understand nor integrate at the level of lived-experience the great structural and systemic changes in the wealth of nations that are afoot.

I know I risk coming off as smug, here, but that is not my intention, even though (to be honest again) I do feel smug at times.  But I am also afraid.  For if the most educated and most adept at structural and historical thinking among us are not able to translate their own lived-crises into a broader systemic one, then what hope is there for the angry, frustrated and increasingly violent supporters of someone like Trump and all that they represent and portend in a world of decreasing surplus?

For those readers who have made it this far, I would only ask this: listen to my coming systemic explanation for the sorts of frustrations, worries, and disappointments that so many Americans are experiencing today.

See if it makes more sense than the usual explanation, in which America is suffering a temporary setback at the hands of bad governance or a false ideology or those on the other side of the political divide.

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[i] There is of course a valid feminist critique of the support role that my mother played without question.  But on the other hand she was also revered among their circle for her warmth, humor, and friendship, along with epic garden parties and superb gourmet cooking whipped out with no apparent effort.  This division of labor in what from the outside, as least, was a beautiful life was of course made possible by the simple fact that a simple university salary was more than enough to exceed any material ambitions they had dreamed of as they set out on their life-journey. 

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The Money Cult

SUBHEAD: ZIRP and NIRP have coincided in first zero growth and now negative growth.

By Dmitry Orlov on  7 June 2016 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-money-cult.html)


Image above: Illustratio by Dennis Cristo of Zero Interest Rate Policy landing in catastrophic Negative Interest Rate Policy. From (http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.15/recession.html).

Previously, I have written about the progression from positive interest rates to zero interest rates (since 2008) and finally to negative interest rates.

And I asked my readers a simple question: How will negative interest rates blow up the financial system? And apparently none of you knew the answer.

Now, I must confess that to start with I didn’t know the answer either, which is why I asked the question, and my first attempts at finding it were somewhat tentative. But now, having thought about it, I do seem to have found the answer, and it is that…

But first let us back up a bit and answer several preliminary questions:

1. Why did zero interest rates become necessary?
2. Why are negative interest rates now necessary? and,
3. Why are negative interest rates a really excellent idea?*

* if you ignore certain unintended consequences (which is what everyone does all the time, so let’s not worry about them just yet).

1. Interest rates went to zero because economic growth went to zero. If you are just now wondering why that happened, just google “Limits to Growth” by clicking this link. (A public notice about the scheduled end of growth has been on display at your global planning office for four decades now. It is not anyone else’s fault if people of this planet don’t take an interest in their global affairs. I mean, seriously…)

Interest rates and rates of growth are related: a positive interest rate is little more than a bet that the future is going to be bigger and more prosperous, enabling people to pay off the debts with interest. This is an obvious point: if your income increases, it becomes easier to repay your debts; if it stagnates, it becomes harder; if it shrinks, it eventually becomes impossible.

Yes, you can nitpick and split hairs, and claim that there was still some growth, but in the developed economies most of this growth has been in financial shenanigans, fueled by an explosion in debt, and most of the benefits of this last bit of growth accrued to the wealthiest 1%, and did next to nothing for anyone else. Did this growth help support a large, stable and prosperous middle class? No, it didn’t.

In fact, wages in the US, which was once the world’s largest economy, have been stagnant for generations. In response, the Federal Reserve has been continuously reducing interest rates, until they hit zero in 2008. And there they have stayed ever since. But now, it turns out, that’s not good enough. If the Federal Reserve wants to keep the party going, they have to do more, because…

2. Once you are faced with a continuously shrinking economy, just holding interest rates at zero is not sufficient to forestall financial collapse. The interest rates must go negative.

Here are just a couple of particularly striking examples.

Australia has amassed a huge pile of debt—over 120% of GDP—and most of it is mortgage debt on overvalued real estate. Now that Australia’s economy, which was driven by commodity exports to China, has tanked, a lot of this debt is being turned into interest-only loans, because Australians no longer have the money to repay any of the principal.

But what if they can’t make the interest payments either? The obvious solution is to refinance their mortgages as interest-only at zero percent; problem solved!

Of course, as conditions deteriorate further, the Australians will become unable to afford taxes and utilities. Negative interest rates to the rescue! Refinance them again at a negative rate of interest, and now the banks will pay them to live in their overpriced houses.

Another example: energy (oil and gas) companies in the US have accumulated a fantastic pile of debt. All of this money was sunk into developing marginal and very expensive resources such as shale oil and deep offshore. Since then, energy prices have fallen, making all of these investments unprofitable and dramatically reducing revenue.

As a result, energy companies in the US are a few months away from having to spend their entire revenue on interest payments. The solution, of course, is to allow them to roll over their debt at zero percent, and if you want them to ever start drilling again (their production has been falling by around 10% annualized) then please make that interest rate negative.

3. Are you starting to see how this works? Whereas before you had to be careful about taking on debt, and had to have a plan for how you will repay it, with negative interest rates that is simply not a consideration. If your debt pays you, then more debt is always better than less debt. It no longer matters that the economy continuously shrinks because now you can get paid just for twiddling your thumbs!

Image above: Chart of effective Federal Interest Rate From original article.

But are there any unintended consequences of negative interest rates? Unintended consequences are hard to think about, and most people get a headache even trying. How can it be that clean, plentiful nuclear energy will eventually pollute the whole planet with long-lived radionuclides, resulting sky-high cancer rates? How can it be that wonderful genetically modified seeds will render us sickly and infertile in just a few generations?

And how can it be that ingenious mobile computing technology has turned our children into zombies who are constantly twiddling their smartphones as they sleepwalk through life? It’s hard to think about any of this without taking some happy pills; and how can it be that taking those happy pills has… you get the idea.

The unintended consequence of negative interest rates is that they destroy money. This is true in an entirely trivial sense: if you deposit x dollars at -ρ% annual, then a year later you will only have x(1-ρ) dollars because xρ dollars has been destroyed.

(In case you prefer to count on your fingers and toes, if you deposit $10 at -10% annual, then a year later you will only have $9 because $1 has been destroyed.) But what I mean is something slightly more profound: negative interest rates erode the very concept of money.

To get at the reason for this, we have to ask a slightly more profound question: What is money? I think that money is the cult of the god Mammon. Look at the following symbols:

€ $ ¥ £
Don’t they resemble religious symbols? In fact, that’s what they are: they are symbols of faith in money. They are also units—dimensionless units, of a peculiar kind. There are quite a few dimensionless units in math and science, such as π, e, %, ppm, but they are all ratios that relate physical quantities to other, identical, physical quantities. They are dimensionless because the units cancel out.

For instance, π is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and diameter; length over length gives nothing.

But monetary quantities do not directly relate to any physical quantity at all. It can be said that some number of monetary units (let's call them "yarbles") is equivalent to some number of turnips, but that, you see, is a matter of faith.

Should the turnip farmer turn out to be an unbeliever, he would be within his rights to say, “I am not taking any of your damn yarbles!” or, if he were a polite turnip farmer, “Your money is no good here, Sir!”

Of course, if our turnip farmer were to do that, he’d land in quite a bit of trouble because, you see, the cult of Mammon is a state cult. You have no choice but to be a believer, because only by worshiping Mammon can you earn the money to pay your taxes, and if you don’t pay your taxes you get jailed.

Nor can you produce money on your own, because that right is reserved for Mammon’s high priests, the bankers.

Making your own money makes you a heretic, and gets you the modern equivalent of being burned at the stake, which is a $250,000 fine and a 20-year prison sentence.

But it goes beyond that, because the state insists that just about everything there is must be valued in units of its money. And the way everything must be valued is through a mystical legitimizing process that is central to the cult of money: Mammon’s “invisible hand” makes itself apparent within the “free market,” which is Mammon's virtual temple.

The “invisible hand” sets the price of everything as a mystical revelation and, as with any revelation, it is beyond criticism. It is a redemptive ritual, in which people acting out of their basest, most antisocial instincts—greed and fear—manage, through Mammon's divine intervention, to serve the common good.

The “free market” is also believed to have all sorts of miraculous properties, and as with all miracles it is all a matter of smoke and mirrors and suspension of disbelief.

For example, the “free market” is said to be “efficient.” But it sets the price of turnips, and the result is that fully 40% of the food in the US ends up being wasted. That’s definitely not efficient.

This sort of inefficiency can be tolerated while resources are plentiful. Should throwing away 40% of the turnips cause a shortage of turnips develop, turnip producers can grow more turnips and sell them at prices that turnip consumers can still afford. But when resources are no longer plentiful, this trick stops working, and what you end up with is something called market failure.

The current state of the global oil industry is a good example: either the price is so high that marginal consumers cannot afford it (as was the case until quite recently), or the price is so low that the marginal producers can’t break even (as is the case now).

And so a bout of supply destruction follows a bout of demand destruction, and then the pattern repeats. Everybody loses, plus this is terribly inefficient. It would be far more efficient to appoint some central planner to calculate the optimum price of oil once a month.

Then all the marginal producers would jump out the window, all the marginal consumers would slit their wrists, and equilibrium conditions would prevail.

As the oil supply dwindled (it is depleting at around 5% per year), some additional number of producers and consumers would need to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and so on until the last barrel is produced and burned, leaving whatever producers and consumers still remained lying in pools of their own blood.

As natural resources dwindle, our faith in the cult of Mammon is being sorely tested. But what alternatives are there? Well, there is an even older, ancient cult that’s based on idolatry: the worship of precious metals. Gold has some industrial and aesthetic uses, but it is primarily useful for making a golden calf for you to worship (or, if you are former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, a golden toilet).

 Economists tell us that gold is a “pet rock” or a “barbarous relic,” and they are right, but what is one to do when there is a Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods) going on? Nature abhors a vacuum, and in a Götterdämmerung older pagan deities sometimes emerge and demand virgin sacrifices—such as poisoning entire river ecosystems by mining gold using mercury, or squandering prodigious amounts of fossil fuels in mining, crushing and sifting through millions of tons of hard rock to get at just 3 parts per million of gold.

Negative interest rates are Mammon’s Götterdämmerung. The money cult is bolstered by the idea that its huge and all-powerful deity will be even more huge and all-powerful tomorrow; if the opposite is demonstrably the case, then people’s faith in it begins to falter and fade.

Negative interest rates are like an icy-cold bath for Mammon, causing its godhead to shrink a little more with every dip.

People see that, and think, “I don’t want to worship his shrinking yarbles.” Then they go and spend their own yarbles on anything they can find—fallow land, vacant houses, golden calves, boxes of brass knobs... They don’t bother investing their yarbles in growing turnips, because what’s the use of turnips if all you can do with them is sell them for even more shrinking yarbles?

Negative interest rates are an excellent idea—and perhaps the only way to keep the financial game going a bit longer—but, given these unintended consequences, they are also a terrible idea. The bankers know that. They want to preserve their cult’s status, and constantly talk about raising interest rates.

But they haven’t yet, because they also know that just a small increase will result in trillions of dollars of losses, triggering widespread business failures and ushering in the Greatest Great Depression Ever. This is not a problem for them to solve; this is a predicament.

They will delay and pray, and make pronouncements loaded with keywords designed to please the high-frequency trading algorithms that are in charge of artificially levitating the “free market” with judiciously timed injections of “free money.” But in the end all they can do is act brave, wait for a distraction and then… run for the exits!

And your job is to make it to the exits before they do.
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