Louis Bergeron : A Practical Vision for Global Sustainable Energy

L.A. Cicero Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering At Stanford University. Photo from L.A. Cicero.
It will take concerted effort:
A practical vision for alternative energy

By Louis Bergeron / Stanford Report / April 7, 2011

A new study -- co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi -- analyzing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy.

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources -- nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today -- why wouldn't you do it?

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology, and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters -- no more natural gas or coal -- and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water, and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water, and solar, and by 2050, all preexisting energy production would be converted as well.

"There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.

"We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure -- for all purposes -- with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years," said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

"When you actually account for all the costs to society -- including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today," Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide "base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

"The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle," he said. "If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

"One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites," said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

"With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management," he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

"For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch," Jacobson said. "Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal. and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water, and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

"Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming," Jacobson said. "The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he said. "It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

"But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies," Jacobson said. "We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

[Mark Z. Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. This article was originally published by the Stanford University News on January 26, 2011.]

Professor Mark Z. Jacobson:
Global clean energy is within reach:



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BOOKS / Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Marge Piercy: Science Fiction as Prophetic Vision

Marge Piercy's 'He, She and It':
Science fiction as prophetic vision

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2010

[He, She and It by Marge Piercy (Knopf, 1991); Hardcover; 446 pp.]

Marge Piercy's novel He, She and It appeared almost 20 years ago. My review appeared in Tikkun magazine in 1992. During these years, many aspects of her novel have loomed more prescient -- even prophetic in the sense not of prediction but of accurate warnings spoken by the Spirit.

Anyone concerned with corporate domination, with global scorching, with feminism, with Middle East peace, with the renewal of Jewish peoplehood and Judaism, with the deeper meaning of computer technology and "artificial intelligence," with Kabbalah, with the nature of humankind -- will be drawn to think and feel more deeply by reading her novel. And as I wrote then, it is a novel -- joy and sorrow in tales of love and failure, moral conflicts embodied in four-dimensional human brings.

Why do I want to share the review now? We are standing today on the brink of a great choice -- for America, for the planet. This book helps us to look across the brink of disaster into a world scorched and flooded, a world nakedly controlled by corporations in outright feudalism, a world in which nevertheless, technological creativity is matched with spiritual creativity.

After a passage from the review itself (the full original review is on-line), I have added a note on my own personal relationship to the book that I did not discover till years later.


Androgyny and Beyond:
'He, She and It' by Marge Piercy

I began to read science fiction when I was 12 years old, just a few months after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and I've never stopped. It wasn't gee-whiz gadgets that attracted me; it was the dark visions and the rainbow cloudbursts of imagined social transformation, dystopian and utopian. My commitment to healing the world has been shaped as much by science fiction as by those other Prophetic writers whom I discovered much later -- Isaiah, Marx, Buber, Heschel.

All that time I have been waiting for Marge Piercy's new book. Not quite consciously waiting, you understand. Not even in my dreams could I have created this book, but in my heart and kishkes, I've been waiting.

So what is so delicious? First of all, it's Jewish science fiction. Feminist Jewish science fiction. Feminist Kabbalistic Jewish science fiction. Feminist Kabbalistic kibbutznik Jewish science fiction.

Not just casually Jewish, but rooted in a sardonic version of Jewish mysticism and in the profoundly Jewish spiritual wrestle about what social justice means in a world where the Messiah is ever-coming, ever-vanishing.

Feminist, yes, like all of Piercy's work. The story of the Golem of Prague – that famous artificial "human" being clumsily created by a great rabbi five centuries ago -- is at the heart of Piercy's tale. But the Golem takes a different form when his tale is for the first time told by a woman, Malkah, one of Piercy's heroines.

The communitarian ethos of the kibbutz is the air that Piercy's story breathes, but the kibbutz is a different place when it is transformed by a feminist politics and culture. And the science of "artificial intelligence" is transformed by a feminist outlook.

Piercy's kibbutz arises not in Israel but on the surviving hills of what we know as Boston. Surviving because much of the American coastline has been inundated by a new Flood, a surge of ocean from the melted ice caps, the result of global warming. It's the mid-twenty-first century, and a lot we take for granted is gone.

The United States, for instance. It collapsed, like the -- what was it? –oh yeah, the Soviet Union. The world is ruled by several gigantic corporations that have divided it into feudal fiefdoms. There are a few free cities, and the free Jewish town of Tikva (Hope) is one of them.

The Middle East has also vanished. Not just a government or two, a sovereignty or two, but the entire region, oil fields and fig trees and mountain goats and peoples. It's the Black Zone now, an empty blotch on the map. Jerusalem is a wilderness of fused green glass, the thermonuclear casualty that set off a totally ruinous bio-chemical-nuclear war.

It turns out that there may be secret survivors -- is anybody as stubborn and tenacious as Israelis and Palestinians? As women? But that's a thread for you to follow when you read the book.

Piercy does give us some gee-whiz gadgets: computer networks deft enough to create planetary virtual realities, through which the corporations can struggle to invade Tikva, through which Tikva can struggle to defend itself, and through which people who explore them can transform themselves -- and die. And cyborgs -- cybernetic organisms, fusions of computer programming and biology, real live quasi-humans, with intelligence for sure, and maybe, just maybe, with free will. Or maybe not.

Can a cyborg be a citizen and vote in the town meeting of Tikva? Can a cyborg be a Jew and count in a minyan? And here is the neat and powerful question posed by Piercy's fusion of feminism with science fiction: Who or what is a creature that is programmed with both a woman's and a man's mentality? Can a spiritual androgyne be a human? Or is the real question whether anyone who is not androgynous can be fully human?

Piercy's androgynous cyborg may be the only fully human creature in the world. His name -- in outward anatomy this cyborg is fully male, though inwardly also the He/She/It of the title -- is Yod, the name of the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (This model was the tenth in a series of attempts to build a useful cyborg.) But "Yod" is also the first letter of God's name, which is sometimes written as Yod-Yod. And it is close to the Yid that in Yiddish is the generic word for Jew.

Note the wonderful linguistic problems that Piercy introduces. Yod is the newest model of a cyborg, like the latest car, clearly an invention, a machine. Yet Yod has overtones of the ultra-human, much more fully in the Divine Image than anyone since the original Adam, who was made in Our Image, said God, in the Image of God, male and female, androgynous as God is androgynous. He, She and It.

This is a novel of ideas, but not only of ideas. By introducing a being who is both male and female, both human and machine, Piercy has jiggled and joggled the relationships of all the characters. Not only the ideas, but the people, are delicious. They make love, they get jealous, they fight for custody of their children and for control of their creations, they rebel against their bosses and comply with the rules, they take risks and die and go half-mad with grief.

The book is told from the alternating standpoints of Malkah, a tough and gentle grandmother who is sexually alive and technologically ingenious, and Shira, her bright and frightened granddaughter who is relearning her way toward love and a sense of her own power in the world. It is Malkah who has made sure that Yod has a full womanly as well as manly programming, and who searches for some way to tell him of his own ancestors. (Notice how Jewish is this desire: "Tell it to your child on that day," says the Passover Haggada.)

But who, or what, is the ancestor of a cyborg? Malkah decides it is the Golem of medieval Prague, that doomed subhero to whom, in Jewish legend, the great Rabbi Judah Loew gave life and a mission to protect the Jewish people from pogroms. The story enters Yod's consciousness at a level quite different from computer programming, a level that involves what seems to be free will; and after hearing the story, Yod assumes the triumph and tragedy of carrying the Golem's being to a higher level.

This transmutation of the Golem story becomes a metaphor for Piercy's own work. If the Golem is Yod's ancestor, then the Golem story is ancestor to Piercy's novel. Piercy in effect both locates the Golem story as a kind of early Jewish science fiction, and places her own work in the stream of mythic Judaism.

How can Piercy dare to see a tiny Jewish town in such a bold light? I think it is because her Jewishness and her feminism fuse into a new vision. The Jews are too few to shake the world; women are many. Women are too diffuse and too diverse to make a counter-community; Jews know how. Counting noses on the face of the earth, the Jews are just about the tiniest imaginable community with a transformative vision; women could be the largest. But they cannot transform the earth alone, and they cannot transform it if they work alone, as individuals.

Piercy is saying that women must create communities of women and men in conscious connection with the earth, communities that are intimate and participatory, that so thoroughly share an approach to work, sexuality, money, and spirituality that they can stand together against the powers that be.

The struggle to heal the world may well take generations, Piercy warns, during which time even more of the world may be deeply wounded. An ancient Jewish wisdom for a wider human future: Only painful birth pangs can give birth to the days of Messiah.

Years after the publication of this review, years after Piercy had taught several summers at the Elat Chayyim retreat center where Phyllis Berman (not yet a rabbi) was the director of the summer program, Phyllis and I had Marge as a visitor for dinner. The conversation turned to He, She and It, and I said again how much I loved it.

Marge said, "Did you ever notice that at the end of the book, among the acknowledgements, I thanked you?" "Yes," I said, "But I never understood it. It said something about my having clued you into some aspects of Kabbalah, but I can't remember doing that -- or even in those days, being able to."

"Yes," she said. "Do you also remember that way back in the mid-'60s, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, where you were a Resident Fellow?

"Yes," I said, scrunching up my face to recall. "So?"

"You asked people at IPS to look at about 50 pages of a novel you were trying to write. It began with a nuclear attack that destroyed Jerusalem and led to the collapse of both the USSR and the USA, and it included the creation of an independent Jewish commonwealth in New England."

"Oh My God! Yes, it was around 1965. I was trying to write a novel in the form of letters from and to a future me. I called it "Notes from 1999." I remember I imagined my grown-up daughter killed when a U.S. Navy sub unintentionally destroyed Jerusalem. Maybe that image was already a dead end. I never got anywhere with the book."

"I know. But I kept the idea as a seed in my head, and it sprouted into He, She, and It."

"Ohhh. Oh. My. God.

"Thank God you wrote it. I couldn't write a novel. You could. You did. Thank God!"

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center. He is co-author of The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; author of Godwrestling, Round 2 and Down-to-Earth Judaism; and editor of Torah of the Earth (two volumes, eco-Jewish thought from earliest Torah to our own generation). These pioneering books on eco-Judiasm are available at discount from “Shouk Shalom,” The Shalom center's online bookstore.]

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Chris Hedges : The Attack of the Future Eaters

Image from AppleBazaar.
Calling all future-eaters:
Time is not on our side

By Chris Hedges / July 21, 2010

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians.

And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."

In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement, and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half.

We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.

Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.

There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, "occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone."

Bye-bye, Paris. Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival.

We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers, and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?

The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt.

Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

But reality is rarely an impediment to human folly. The world's greenhouse gases have continued to grow since Zwally's statement. Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO22) from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have increased by 3 per cent a year. At that rate annual emissions will double every 25 years.

James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world's foremost climate experts, has warned that if we keep warming the planet it will be "a recipe for global disaster." The safe level of CO22 in the atmosphere, Hansen estimates, is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). The current level of CO22 is 385 ppm and climbing. This already guarantees terrible consequences even if we act immediately to cut carbon emissions.

The natural carbon cycle for 3 million years has ensured that the atmosphere contained less than 300 ppm of CO22, which sustained the wide variety of life on the planet. The idea now championed by our corporate elite, at least those in contact with the reality of global warming, is that we will intentionally overshoot 350 ppm and then return to a safer climate through rapid and dramatic emission cuts.

This, of course, is a theory designed to absolve the elite from doing anything now. But as Clive Hamilton in his book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change writes, even "if carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm, after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperatures would continue to rise for at least another century."

Copenhagen was perhaps the last chance to save ourselves. Barack Obama and the other leaders of the industrialized nations blew it. Radical climate change is certain. It is only a question now of how bad it will become. The engines of climate change will, climate scientists have warned, soon create a domino effect that could thrust the Earth into a chaotic state for thousands of years before it regains equilibrium.

"Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point," Hamilton writes. "One thing is certain: there will be far fewer of us."

We have fallen prey to the illusion that we can modify and control our environment, that human ingenuity ensures the inevitability of human progress, and that our secular god of science will save us. The "intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself," Hamilton writes. "The prospect of runaway climate change challenges our technological hubris, our Enlightenment faith in reason and the whole modernist project. The Earth may soon demonstrate that, ultimately, it cannot be tamed and that the human urge to master nature has only roused a slumbering beast."

We face a terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls such as BP's Tony Hayward.

These political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life. They do this in the Gulf of Mexico. They do this in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where the export-oriented industry is booming.

China's transformation into totalitarian capitalism, done so world markets can be flooded with cheap consumer goods, is contributing to a dramatic rise in carbon dioxide emissions, which in China are expected to more than double by 2030, from a little over 5 billion metric tons to just under 12 billion.

This degradation of the planet by corporations is accompanied by a degradation of human beings. In the factories in Guangdong we see the face of our adversaries. The sociologist Ching Kwan Lee found "satanic mills" in China's industrial southeast that run "at such a nerve-racking pace that worker's physical limits and bodily strength are put to the test on a daily basis." Some employees put in workdays of 14 to 16 hours with no rest day during the month until payday.

In these factories it is normal for an employee to work 400 hours or more a month, especially those in garment industry. Most workers, Lee found, endure unpaid wages, illegal deductions and substandard wage rates. They are often physically abused at work and do not receive compensation if they are injured on the job. Every year a dozen or more workers die from overwork in the city of Shenzhen alone. In Lee's words the working conditions "go beyond the Marxist notions of exploitation and alienation."

A survey published in 2003 by the official China News Agency, cited in Lee's book Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, found that three in four migrant workers had trouble collecting their pay. Each year scores of workers threaten to commit suicide, Lee writes, by jumping off high-rises or setting themselves on fire over unpaid wages. "If getting paid for one's labor is a fundamental feature of capitalist employment relations, strictly speaking many Chinese workers are not yet laborers," Lee writes.

The leaders of these corporations now determine our fate. They are not endowed with human decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.

As climate change advances we will face a choice between obeying the rules put in place by corporations or rebellion. Those who work human beings to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone are the enemy. They serve systems of death. They cannot be reformed or trusted.

The climate crisis is a political crisis. We will either defy the corporate elite, which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see ourselves consumed.

Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the more assured our destruction becomes. The future, if we remain passive, will be wrested from us by events. Our moral obligation is not to structures of power, but life.

© 2010 TruthDig.com

[Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.]

Source / TruthDig / Common Dreams

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Apocalypse 2010 : Meltdown Under the American Bubble

Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams.
Remembering 2010 (if we must):
Mass amnesia, the Rapture,
and the Palin-Bachmann nuptials

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Book-ended by mass amnesia under the American bubble, 2010 was yet another year to erase from living memory. Although Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams with the usual volcanoes blowing their stacks, earthquakes rearranging the landscape, flood and drought rampaging from one continent to the next, nuclear war raging in the Middle East, and serial economic calamities inducting a billion more sentient human beings into the starvation army, First World elites navigated through daily disaster delusionally convinced that everything was honky dory.

Children played happily with their Chinese mechanical hamsters until the batteries went dead and families gathered around home entertainment centers, even the millions of families who had been evicted from their homes. Neighbors exchanged pleasantries as they cruised empty super market aisles (most brand-name products were recalled because of suspect Chinese-induced E Coli contamination), oblivious of the unseen poor parboiled in their own sweat and tears far beyond American shores. Scientists attributed this massive indifference to the plight of the planet to the presence of toxic amounts of Ambien in the water systems of major U.S. cities.

The majority of U.S. citizens were not even aware of their failing memories and did not know what was missing. Still mass forgetfulness had grave political downsides. One example: no one could remember the name of the U.S. president when just a year ago, it was on the tips of everyone's tongue. Indeed, no one could recall much of anything anymore. Even after the physical environment collapsed and the faithful were taken up in the Rapture, no one seemed to miss them.

The faithful were taken up in the rapture, but weren't missed. Artist reconstruction.
The following month-by-month capsule of how the Apocalypse impaled Planet Earth on the Cross of Catastrophe was scraped together from the author's pitiful scraps of memory before he slipped into total dementia.

JANUARY - The failure of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (they will reconvene in December 2010 in Mexico City, the most monstrous megalopolis in the Americas) and the formation of a cartel of the world's pollution leaders had immediate repercussions when Somali pirates captured an iceberg floating in the Red Sea.

In accordance with the U.S. Zero Tolerance For Pirates protocol, President What's His Name stealth-bombed the dusky buccaneers who were towing the huge block of ice into port and so-called depleted uranium radiation liquefied it, triggering monumental flooding -- all of Yemen and parts of east Africa remain underwater and the quat crop has been decimated for years to come, causing wide-spread depression on the Dark Continent.

Further north, global warming had a more fortuitous fallout when the melt-down of a thermo-nuclear power plant in the capital city of Nuuk converted the Greenland Ice Cap to boiling water and the Inuit Riviera caught fire as a hot tourist attraction

Back under the American Bubble, on the first year anniversary of his hope-saturated inauguration on the Capital Mall, 78% of those polled by the Pew Institute On Domestic Dementia could no longer remember the President's name -- 72% referred to him simply as "you know, that black guy." Another 16% still had the President confused with Osama Bin Laden but 9% could correctly remember his first and last name although not at the same time.

On the other side of the political ledger, the words "Republican Party" had no name recognition for 81% of those who responded to the Pew poll. Alarmed pollsters hypothesized that the results were symptomatic of mass brainwashing, probably due to "something in the water."

FEBRUARY - Whatever his name was, The President of the United States was confronted with his umpteenth international terrorist crisis when Taliban technicians, employing Sky Grabber technology on sale at Radio Shack for $26 Americano, seized control of an unmanned and unwomanned drone over North Waziristan and redirected it to Kabul where the rebels launched missile attacks against the seat of the puppet government, flattening President Karsai and his entire cabinet, which included three of the world's most influential heroin dealers.

The obliteration of central authority quickly splintered the Afghan Crusade into a series of local mini-wars. Caught in the crossfire between feuding warlords, the U.S. death toll climbed to 502 for the month, topping even Iraq at the nadir of the illegal American invasion and occupation. Both the Nobel Peace Prize winning president and his Commander-in-Chief Stanley McChrystal extolled the high death toll as proof that the U.S. was winning the war and vowed to dispatch 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

When Taliban Sky Grabber gear hijacked two more drones and targeted Blackwater/Xe training facilities in the Great North Carolina swamp, Obama or Osama or whatever his name was closed down all Radio Shacks in the continental U.S.

Also under the bubble, cheap Chinese pork chops were deemed responsible for an outbreak of an inscrutable strain of Swine flu ("Swinear flu") that convulsed the breadbasket of the country.

The majority of citizens weren't aware of their failing memories. Image from TheTugboatComplex.
MARCH - A post-midnight coup March 11 in Quito, Ecuador, in which a junta of generals and admirals trained at the former School of the Americas overthrew and subsequently dismembered that tiny Andean country's elected president, the economist Rafael Correa, was the latest violent "regime change" in Latin America.

Since the White House greenlighted the overthrow of right-wing leftist Mel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009, 11 Latin countries have suffered "golpes de estado," 10 of them this year (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The wave of coup d'etats is almost certainly being orchestrated by the U.S. South Command operating out of seven state-of-the art bases recently installed in Colombia.

In Paraguay, the U.S. 4th Fleet parked itself off the coast while military gorillas dethroned former liberationist bishop and father of 14, Fernando Lugo. Up until January 2010 Paraguay had no coastline but global warming has brought the Atlantic Ocean to that impoverished majority Indian nation's doorstep.

Meanwhile in Mexico, scattered rebellion has broken out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. In early January, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation occupied sacred sites throughout the country including Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, Palenque in Chiapas, and Teotihuacan near Mexico City, calling upon ancient Mayan and Mexica deities to join their uprising.

Panicked by the prospect of declining tourist dollars, fraudulently elected president Felipe Calderon pulled 50,000 troops out of his failed war with the drug cartels that has now taken 25,000 Mexican lives, to dislodge the Zapatistas. The strategy backfired when the cartels seized statehouses in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

On March 18th, the 72nd anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico's petroleum from the transnational Seven Sisters, President Calderon was found dangling from the rafters at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, an apparent suicide -- however, an autopsy turned up a note apparently pinned to the inside of his tie with a single Mexican expletive inscribed: "RATERO!"

Further scandal erupted when photographs emerged of Calderon's corpse, clad only in jockey shorts and plastered with bloody Mexican and U.S. bills, amulets, crucifixes, and rosaries in classic narco fashion, raising questions about the dead president's cartel affiliations.

APRIL - Global warming was deemed responsible for the near-biblical migration of small, undocumented mammals abandoning a disintegrating Mexico for El Norte -- badgers, gophers, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and bats had little trouble burrowing under the 1,000 kilometer-long Separation Wall between the two distant neighbor countries or flying over it. Hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwest were destroyed by the marauding illegals.

Rabid bat of the type that devoured a Minuteman in Lubbock.
When an anti-immigration Minuteman was devoured by rabid bats in Lubbock, Texas, crusading Mexican killer Lou Dobbs flew to the scene of the crime where he was confronted by several hundred indignant skunks that rendered his campaign for the White House permanently unviable. The stench caused frontrunner Sarah Palin to replace Dobbs on the ticket with hysterical TV paranoid Alex Jones of Austin, Texas.

Passions in the Middle East boiled over in April when Iranian patrol boats sunk a Liberian-flagged tanker carrying 176,000 gallons of Chinese-made flan to Spain. The sinking cargo soon gummed up the Straits of Hormuz through which the bulk of oil destined for Europe, the Americas, and China passes each day. Oil prices immediately shot up from a seasonal low of $50 USD to $250, deflating the dementia-driven euphoria on Wall Street. Acting on the self-interest of his Goldman Sachs advisors, the President floated multi-billion dollar bailouts.

MAY - After five months of testy reconciliation conferences between the House and the Senate during which Dennis Kucinich challenged Michelle Bachman to a duel and was shot dead on the House floor, the U.S. Congress announced that it had reached agreement on a compromise version of all but forgotten health care reform. Indeed all the health care reform provisions in the John Doe Omnibus Health Care Reform bill (named for a bus driver who had to sell both his kidneys in order to feed a starving puppy) had been stripped from the measure before it arrived at the White House for the first Afro-American president's John Hancock.

Among the provisions of "John Doe": renewed funding for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kerghizstan, and Uzbekistan (two Stans will be added every year though 2018); the criminalization of abortion; and the restitution of the universal mandatory death penalty.

A new Pew poll prepared by the Institute for Domestic Dementia indicated that many Americans (a whopping 77%) had forgotten all about health care reform by May.

Sabotaged by the flan crisis, the economy was again in freefall despite White House lies that the 2009 depression was officially over and the country was growing again. As jobless benefits dried up, many families in the lower socio-economic brackets were forced to reduce their daily caloric intake and unemployed carnivores threatened to eat the rich.

Fortunately, rolling black- and brown-outs as river flows slowed to a trickle due to global warming and shut down hydro-electric power plants, caused widespread refrigeration meltdowns and millions of tons of spoiled meat, fruit, and dairy products poured into dumps and landfills where hungry garbage pickers were eager to harvest the putrefying bonanza.

Also in May, the last U.S. daily print newspaper, Rudolf Murdoch's New York Wall Street Times Journal Sporting News, closed up shop.

JUNE - Food riots became generalized in such depression-wracked formerly industrial cities as Detroit and Houston and Fox News Chief Albino Glenn Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots to arm themselves for self-defense -- the average white North American family now owns 12 to 15 automatic weapons to hold off their equally heavily armed neighbors, according to the Pew Institute On Domestic Violence.

Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots coagulated around a doddering George H.W. Bush in Texas and Dick Cheney in the Wyoming-Colorado Theater to seize state armories and hold nominating conventions. With armed insurrection being urged on cable news channels, the first Afro-American President of the United States retreated to a hollowed-out mountain in Virginia to watch the NBA Finals.

The Finals themselves generated alarming news when it was reported that Kobe Bryant had been genetically engineered on a farm in Kansas once owned by assassinated late term abortionist George Tiller -- it was not known if embryonic cells were employed in Kobe's modifications. A federal raid on the "farm" led by General Jeff Novitsky (he won his stripes in the Barry Bonds genocide campaign) uncovered thousands of Kobe clones in various stages of assemblage.

In other sporting news, the World Cup Matches in South Africa had to be called off when starving rioters set stadiums aflame, roasting tens of thousands of first world hooligans.

Flood and drought raged from one continent to the next. Image from Worth1000.com.
JULY - Prodded by global broiling, temperatures all across the northern regions of the planet jumped three degrees Celsius in July, one degree higher than the acceptable limits imposed by the polluting nations at the Copenhagen conference. The summer heat was so intense that roadways buckled and bridge struts melted and infrastructure in the U.S. midwest collapsed. The overload on the electricity grid shut down air conditioning units in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and sweltering senior citizens dropped like flies. So many old people expired during the month (123,000 according to the Pew Institute On One-Time Senior Citizens) that morgues overflowed and bodies were put out on the street each morning for the dead wagons to collect and carry off to common graves.

By mid-summer with the doomed president's jobless recovery in full flower, 36% of all American families were living in their cars, according to the Pew Institute On Vehicular Gridlock, transforming the nation's highway system into a coast-to-coast parking lot. Then cars began to commit suicide, blowing sky-high with no warning. Homeland Security blamed explosives sewn into drivers' underwear for the plague of car bombings although some experts speculated that the automobile industry was just depressed.

AUGUST - The dog days extended into August with no relief in sight. Despite the intense heat, the Tea Bag Patriots were on the move, traveling mostly at night towards Washington D.C. for the much ballyhooed Palin-Bachman same sex nuptials set for later in the month despite Michelle's pending indictment for gunning down a liberal congressperson on the House floor.

Sarah Palin announced her engagement to Michelle Bachman who had killed Dennis Kucinich in a duel on the floor of the House. Photo from jezebel.
As U.S. troops abandoned Iraq to its own explosive devices, the summer doldrums were punctured when a terrorist commando, the Universal Unitarian Salvation Squadron (UU'SS) thought to be affiliated with the Al Qaeda-Taliban Axis of Evil overran Pakistan's nuclear arsenal near Islamabad demanding, among other items, that the United States get out of the Islamic world, Africa, and South and North America. Holed up in his Virginia mountain bunker, President Osama/Obama called for a diplomatic solution. The Palin-Bachman nuptials were called off, reportedly due to domestic dispute.

Diplomats shuttled in and out of Islamabad seeking solutions to this latest geo-political crisis. One no-show: Osama Bin Laden who had passed away many years before trundling his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass. A proposal offered by Tuvalo's ambassador that Washington change places with his low-laying Pacific island nation was rejected by the United Nations Security Council on the grounds that moving the U.S. Capital would be an extravagance a bankrupt world could ill afford.

Feeling excluded from the international spotlight, Israel, with a go-ahead from the White House-in-exile, launched a nuclear attack on the Iranian holy city of Qum where the Ayatollahs were putting the finishing touches on their own minaret-tipped nuclear missiles. Mamoud Ahmadinejad, hanging on to power by the skin of his wolf-like teeth, ordered retaliation against the Zionists but his delivery system fell short of Tel Aviv and obliterated Syria and Jordan instead.

SEPTEMBER - By Labor Day weekend, the Tea Party Patriots were encamped on the White House lawn and demanding that the first Afro American President turn over the keys to the executive mansion for the on-again off-again Palin-Bachman nuptials.

The serial catastrophes that now included the incineration of vast swaths of the Middle East had an upside -- Americans no longer worried much about global warming. Although world temperature readings had jumped another point, the calamity was no longer an issue on the 24-Hour news cycle or the Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the fact that humpback whales were beaching themselves in record numbers on whatever dry land they could find and birds had begun to fly backwards, a sign that the Apocalypse was in the pipeline, the general public seemed more preoccupied by Palin's and Bachman's never-ending domestic disputes.

Finally, fed up with the first Afro-American President's stonewalling, the Tea Party Patriots broke into the White House and a troika -- Sarah Palin, her sometimes lover Michelle Bachman, Dennis Kucinich's assassin, and George H.W. Bush, now suffering terminal Alzheimer's Disease -- was sworn in. Glenn Beck was appointed Secretary of Defense and Alex Jones got State. Mel Gibson bought the movie rights.

OCTOBER - While the right-wing fanatics squabbled over power in Washington, most of the planet was either underwater or so radioactive that the land could no longer sustain life. Slowly falling ash blotted out the sun and in the feeble light no one could tell if it was dawn or dusk anymore. Water, although there was plenty of it, was undrinkable and the food chain tainted. Cannibals roamed the roads in packs. Indeed, outside of the Washington bubble, the earth had become a road show of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Inside his Virginia mountain, the former president tried to watch the World Series but he was too depressed.

NOVEMBER - All was not lost yet. Vulture Capitalists saw profit in the new holocaust and took steps to bolster their failing fortunes. Murdoch bought up what news was left and changed the channel. A new television season kicked in and sponsors returned. The slate was wiped clean: no more nuclear war, world hunger, mindless terrorism, and global warming. Ambian dosage was increased for all citizens.

The new shows looked a lot like the old shows but since no one could remember the old shows, reruns became the real thing. New generations were enchanted by Lucy and Desi and Ed Sullivan's "Toast Of The Town" ("Gilligan's Island" was submerged deep beneath the graying sea.)

Outside of the bubble, of course, the rainforest was on fire and 39% of all children were born with multiple deformities (the Pew Institute On Monstrous Deformations.) The cities of the world had been abandoned.

Here in Mexico City where 23 million people had once lived cheek by jowl you could spend a whole day without speaking to anyone. On the Day of the Dead, I walked out to where Chapultepec Park lay in ruins behind a curtain of toxic smoke. It was then that I saw my neighbors tramping north towards Mictlan, the direction of the dead, and I tried to stop them. "Wait!" I urged, "Stay! The U.N. Climate Conference will convene here in December and surely, the leaders will fix things up..." But my neighbors just kept marching towards Mictlan.

DECEMBER - Inside the bubble, the Holiday Season was in full swing. Americans went shopping for mechanical hamsters again, not remembering that it was last year's toy to die for. They went to Church forgetting that God was dead and wagered on the Stock Market as if the bottom had not fallen out of the Big Board long ago. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny led parades and made patriotic, optimistic speeches and Santa promised to visit every home.

So the families went home, those who still had one, and set fire to their furniture and hung their stockings by a roaring hearth. They wrote letters to Santa and left out cookies and cocoa for the jolly old fruitcake but although he had promised, Santa Claus never showed up.

Indeed, he would never show up again. Late-breaking film from the Arctic Circle showed the old gentleman and his eight reindeer keeled over in their North Pole sweat lodge.

[John Ross will launch a three-month, coast-to-coast book tour with his latest and much-buzzed cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City in Fresno, California, this February 4. For further info and suggested venues (Chicago area and east coast dates are solicited) consult johnross@igc.org.]

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Larry Piltz : These Future Days

"A" is for Android / James "Jimbot" Demski / Idiot Box Artwork.

These Future Days

I've got a clock that runs on water
my dog takes Chinese herbs
I live next door to my dear wife's house
and I'm not a bit perturbed
my car is half electric
and could run on mayonnaise
it's said there's nothing new under the sun
try telling that to my solar shotgun
then tell me you're not amazed
to be alive in these future days

my computer's built in Iceland
my printer in Monaco
my software's written in some nice land
I print out on trees from Idaho
my money's purple paisley
it has chips that make it smart
It tells me that I should spend it
on a wheelbarrow from Wal-Mart
oh tell me you're not amazed
what life's like in these future days

my doctor is an android
her clinic's on the moon
she mostly treats the paranoid
and swears she'll see me soon
my lawyer lives in the ocean
his lawyer lives up a tree
they swear they’ll file a motion
to do something about me
cause they think I'm too unphased
to appreciate these future days

my job's become elastic
and I'm stretched way too thin
though I'm 14% plastic
I know now when to say when
my eyeballs are half vinyl
and I see you’re looking good
are you sure your answer’s final
cause I’m 30 percent wood
I’m so glad this issue’s raised
In these heady future days

my hard drive reads the paper
tells me what I should know
a Nobel Prize went to a man
who could kiss his own elbow
the Oscar went to China
along with Meryl Streep
though no one could be finer
I’m not losing any sleep
we won’t always be in this haze
that’s just life in these future days
I’ll take life in these future days

Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

Indian Cove
Austin, Texas
May 12, 2009

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Mike Davis : Note to Obama: 'Futurama' Has to Wait Its Turn

'We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car.'
By Mike Davis / November 21, 2008

America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: "For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America." Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His "Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" vows to "create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we'll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges." Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials -- from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the "win-win" approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM's shareholders), but that infrastructure spending -- if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama's first 100 days -- can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush's "socialist" efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn't progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren't high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I'm not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis -- a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales -- has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis -- from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly -- is its potential universality. Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie's choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made -- with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I'll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids' school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama's left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect's original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities and poverty.]

Source / Progressives for Obama

Also see Mike Davis : Can Obama See the Grand Canyon? by Mike Davis / The Rag Blog / October 23, 2008

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National Intelligence Council : Sun Setting on The American Century

The report said that global warming will aggravate the scarcity of water, food and energy resources. Graphic: 20th Century Fox.
'The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons.'
By Tim Reid / November 21, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The next two decades will see a world living with the daily threat of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe and the decline of America as the dominant global power, according to a frighteningly bleak assessment by the US intelligence community.

“The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons,” said the report by the National Intelligence Council, a body of analysts from across the US intelligence community.

The analysts said that the report had been prepared in time for Barack Obama’s entry into the Oval office on January 20, where he will be faced with some of the greatest challenges of any newly elected US president.

“The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes,” the 121-page assessment said.

The analysts draw attention to an already escalating nuclear arms race in the Middle East and anticipate that a growing number of rogue states will be prepared to share their destructive technology with terror groups. “Over the next 15-20 years reactions to the decisions Iran makes about its nuclear programme could cause a number of regional states to intensify these efforts and consider actively pursuing nuclear weapons,” the report Global Trends 2025 said. “This will add a new and more dangerous dimension to what is likely to be increasing competition for influence within the region,” it said.

The spread of nuclear capabilities will raise questions about the ability of weak states to safeguard them, it added. “If the number of nuclear-capable states increases, so will the number of countries potentially willing to provide nuclear assistance to other countries or to terrorists.”

The report said that global warming will aggravate the scarcity of water, food and energy resources. Citing a British study, it said that climate change could force up to 200 million people to migrate to more temperate zones. “Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions,” it said.

“The international system will be almost unrecognisable by 2025, owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalising economy, a transfer of wealth from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors. Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States’ relative strength – even in the military realm – will decline and US leverage will become more strained.”

Global power will be multipolar with the rise of India and China, and the Korean peninsula will be unified in some form. Turning to the current financial situation, the analysts say that the financial crisis on Wall Street is the beginning of a global economic rebalancing.

The US dollar’s role as the major world currency will weaken to the point where it becomes a “first among equals”.

“Strategic rivalries are most likely to revolve around trade, investments and technological innovation, but we cannot rule out a 19th-century-like scenario of arms races, territorial expansion and military rivalries.” The report, based on a global survey of experts and trends, was more pessimistic about America’s global status than previous outlooks prepared every four years. It said that outcomes will depend in part on the actions of political leaders. “The next 20 years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks,” it said.

The analysts also give warning that the kind of organised crime plaguing Russia could eventually take over the government of an Eastern or Central European country, and that countries in Africa and South Asia may find themselves ungoverned, as states wither away under pressure from security threats and diminishing resources..

The US intelligence community expects that terrorism would survive until 2025, but in slightly different form, suggesting that alQaeda’s “terrorist wave” might be breaking up. “AlQaeda’s inability to attract broad-based support might cause it to decay sooner than people think,” it said.

On a positive note it added that an alternative to oil might be in place by 2025.

Source / The Times, U.K.

Read the report in full.

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