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220823 – Letter to an American Friend

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

It all sounds like really down the rabbit hole stuff to me.  The world, undoubtedly, is in a terrible mess.  But explanations, such as your paper offered, are not going to help.  They just increase the social tensions.

I had my fourth Covid jab yesterday.  Free, painless, no teeth have fallen out, IQ has not (apparently) dropped.  

If I was still in the USA, I’d be very worried at the rising tide of Republican conservatism.  A tide that threatens to overthrow American democracy as you and I have always known it.  We even have bits of it here in New Zealand.  People who want to swarm into under attended local boards and get onto them with the explicitly stated goal of making the system ungovernable.   

All these motions to resist the governance of the democratic states will, IHMO, simply result in a conversion that ushers in authoritarian states much as when Mussolini rose to power with Fascism.  Then choice did truly disappear.  Santis and/or Trump at the top of an U.S. authoritarian pyramid of consolidated power?   I don’t think I want to be there.

Democracy is a terrible system.  But, as Winston Churchill said, it is the best one we’ve got.  

Consider your options to continue being the edgy, art-centered, always wants to see the alternate POV person that you are.  And consider your chances of being able to do that under any authoritarian government.

American democracy is a fucking mess with unbridled Capitalism simply and insidiously running away, year by year, with more and more of the wealth.  

But balance and Capitalism can work together – if the system is structured to be intentional about it.  And if the public culture supports a balance between egalitarian and Capitalistic  notions.

Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have such systems.  Rather than going off to Palm Springs, I think you should take six months and go and immerse yourself in Nordic culture.  

Trying to appreciate what’s possible from within the silo of Americana is like looking through a telescope backwards.

America is insular and inward looking.  I know – I lived there most of my life.  

I’ve read that only 13% of Americans have passports.  

As a typical American looking out, it is easy to imagine that America is the center jewel of all existence.  And that all the other poor struggling countries are just ‘pretending’ to be real places.   

Read some books, Buddy.  Get out of the silo in an effort to break your American hypnosis.  Go sit in European cafes and coffee shops and philosophize with folks there.   You have the money, you have the intelligence.  Break out of your increasingly personal ‘fortress mentality’ in which you constantly imagine ‘they’ are closing in on your freedoms.

Simply shed your patterns and ego defenses and go and intentionally re-invent yourself.  Trust yourself to survive.  Trust yourself to drop your assumptions and trust that you will be able to see the truth when it is standing in front of you.

I’ve jumped ship several times in this life and re-invented myself.  And each time I ended up better off than I was.  You can either hunker down like a hedgehog or you can fly like a bird.  Either way, the experiences you’ll have will largely be the product of the courage you bring to the table.  And for fuck’s sake – you’ve got nothing to lose.  None of us, NONE, are getting out of here alive.  So there’s nothing really to survive and protect against.

Travel.  And wherever you are, look up the expats there.  They are all new and from other places.  They want to talk and socialize, they want to discuss politics, they want to feel a sense of flexible, moveable community.  Go Salsa across Europe –  you have the skills.

Stop sending me fucking paranoid missives from down at the bottom of some American silo.   I’ve been there and I’ve been many places and I don’t believe they are anything other than local cultural illusions.

When you’ve sat in Olso, Lisbon, Copenhagen or Amsterdam for six months, send me a note and I’ll come and join you for a few beers and we can talk about how the world looks then.   And I guarantee you that America will look FAR DIFFERENT looking in from the outside than it does looking out from the inside.

Many years ago, you came to my apartment in Long Beach when I was on the brink of turning my life upside down.  You told me a story about the “Sword of no sword” and in those days you were a pirate – the way you lived.  I loved your courage and your example.   You said then that one of the reasons you liked me was that “I owned myself”.

Well, let me  return the favor (and I mean this sincerely).  Break the molds you are in, my friend.  They are not serving you.  They are just driving you further into America-centric silos of distrust.  Meditate on the fact that you have nothing to lose.  You have money, you have time, you have health and all you need to do is rip off the bandages and defenses and go out on a mind-freeing walkabout outside of America.

I absolutely stone-cold promise you that you will scare the fuck out of yourself and feel alive like you have probably not felt in a long time.

Fondly,

Dennis

Posted in Culture - How not to do it, Fundamentalism, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

The state of the U.S

Thursday, July 23rd, 2020
A letter to my son who lives in the U.S.  Basically, it is a statement of how I think things got to where they are now in the States.

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I feel your pain, my son. There is a lot of terrible stuff going on in the world and in the U.S. just now.
 
I don’t think Hillary is or was the answer. I don’t think Democrats, as they are now in the U.S., are the answer. From my POV, Democrats and Republicans are basically the same.
 
The fights between these two parties are to see who is going to run the U.S. They are not fights between good and evil. They are fights between two corrupt groups; each of whom wants to control and benefit from the wealth of the richest country in the world.
 
People think of the U.S. as a democracy. But, it hasn’t been a democracy for some time. Laws like those that give corporations the same rights as citizens and laws that remove any limits of how much rich people and corporations can donate to political parties are plain evidence that the votes of the rich and of the corporations clearly weigh far more than the votes of the average man. One has to be in serious denial to not see this.
 
All I can say for Hillary is that if she had been elected, I expect that the looting of American would have gone on quietly; as it has been for the last four or five administrations. Most of the presidents who have been elected in recent decades in the U.S. have been quiet figureheads put into place to give the semblance of presidential leadership while the gathering and looting of the national wealth continued by the party in power at that moment.
 
The middle and lower classes in the U.S. have been getting poorer for decades now. It began in the mid-70’s. And since then, the wealthy have been getting more and more of the pie.
 
And as the rich get richer, they spend more on donations to political parties and candidates. And, not amazingly, those parties and candidate vote in laws that benefit their donors. Wealth is essentially ‘buying’ the American democracy.
 
This is not a function of the Democrats or the Republicans. They are both pushed up against the same trough to get what they can.
To see why America is getting poorer and more unstable, we only have to look to see why it was getting wealthier up until the 70’s and why it began to get poorer after that time.
 
And the answer is that then corporations realized that rather than manufacturing things in America, with its well paid workers and strong unions, they could make the same things in the far east in China and cut way down on manufacturing costs. And that, in turn, made their profit margins go way up.
 
So, from the POV of the big corporations and the wealthy, this was a no-brainer, a win-win. They shifted manufacturing to the far east and began making way more money.
 
But no one, seemingly, thought about what effect this would have on America in general. America had been a manufacturing powerhouse all through the 50’s and 60’s. America made things. America manufactured wealth. We made excellent things, we sold excellent things – and life was good.
 
But when manufacturing went overseas, the American dollars, that would have been spent on America workers, and which would have then circulated around inside of the America economy, went overseas to pay for the manufacturing and a lot of cheaply made shit came back.
 
The net effect was that America began to bleed money towards China at the same time that American corporations began to make higher profits from having lower manufacturing costs. But overall the net was that America was losing money and getting poorer. And the money being lost was coming from the middle and lower classes and the profits from lower manufacturing costs was accruing to the wealthy.
 
For awhile the middle and lower classes were happier. They now had places like Walmart where they could buy stuff cheaper and that gave them the impression that life was getting better. But it was an illusion.
 
Union busting began in earnest after that because with manufacturing gone overseas, the unions had little power to negotiate for American workers. And the corporations were happy to bust the unions because that meant they could pay their U.S. workers even less which lead to more profits for them.
 
One particularly nasty side effect of this gutting of American industry by sending manufacturing overseas was that all this money that was going to China, allowed China to build up and ENORMOUS balance of trade with the U.S. They were putting money into their banks hand-over-fist. And that, my son, is how they went from being a third-world military power to a first-world military power in a few decades. And America paid for it. American corporate greed for lower manufacturing costs has trashed the middle and lower American classes and made China a world power. And all of that happened right under our noses.
 
You won’t see this discussed much in the U.S. when folks are analyzing what’s going wrong. Why? Because both parties, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in the entire business.
 
Once big money realized that they could buy votes to get the laws they wanted, they began doing so and they ended up owning the souls of most politicians. And as they got more and more of the laws they wanted, they ended up controlling the American political system better and better. And the rich don’t care of America is being gutted during all of this. They are walking away richer and that is all they care about. It is simple human nature.
 
You are probably wondering what this long essay has to do with rioters, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 and Trump?
 
Well, it is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now
American is a failing empire. And has been for decades now.
Wealth is bleeding out because the country is not longer a net wealth creator. And, of the residual wealth (which is still a hell of a lot) that remains, much is being looted year by year in unreasonable corporate profits, massive bonuses for corporate bigwigs, off-shore tax avoidance schemes, and tax-relief schemes for the wealthy that are enacted by the political parties that those same wealthy folks helped put into power with their donations.
 
There’s no other way to say it. The country is owned by the rich and it being looted by the rich. The much cherished ideas of one-man-one-vote and equality for all are increasingly just mirages.
 
But these things don’t happen overnight. They take decades to slowly unfold.
 
But, before we get into the heart of things, do you know how the U.S. government finances itself from year to year?
 
Each year, the U.S. sells bonds. These bonds don’t payback a huge amount when they mature but they do have one attractive property. They ALWAYS pay back what they promised and they have NEVER failed to do so.
 
The U.S. is still regarded as the wealthiest nation in the world and the U.S. dollar is the de-facto reference currency of the world.
 
These factors mean that buying U.S. bonds is one of the safest things a rich individual or a foreign government can do with their excess wealth. Every year, the U.S. sells U.S. bonds and folks ALWAYS buy them.
 
The U.S. sells bonds each year to the generate the money it uses to run the country next year. Each year, as the size of the national budget goes up, the U.S. sells more bonds to cover it.
 
Does this sound familiar? In banking terms it is called “kiting checks”. The U.S. is essentially paying for the increasing costs of running the country by selling bonds to stay ahead.
 
But, here’s the rub. They can’t do this forever.
 
And given that the U.S. has been bleeding money for decades and getting poorer, the country is getting to be like a big cardboard store-front. There’s not as much real wealth standing behind the cardboard as they’re used to be. And there’s less every year.
 
There is going to come a big, final show-stopper event when the U.S. finally can’t pay back on the bonds it sells. It is going to be a major world-shaking default.
 
The entire world of finance knows about this. They have known for years. And all it will take to bring the U.S. to a full stop is for entities to stop buying U.S. bonds. If they stop, then the U.S. won’t have enough money to run and it won’t have enough money to pay back on the bonds it sold previously and BOOM – big toast.
 
It hasn’t happened yet because if the U.S. defaulted then a lot of countries like China, which holds large amounts of U.S. bonds, would also get badly hurt – because they would not get payed back on their bonds.
 
But everyone knows that things cannot go on like this. The U.S. is standing on financial sand that is seeping away from under its feet. China and the others are buying less and less U.S. bonds each year to minimize their exposure to the problem. China and Russia are trying to rework in the international financial system to make their currencies the de-facto reference currencies so they can get away from the U.S. dollar and make themselves more powerful.
 
So, year by year the U.S. is in a worse and worse financial position. As I said, the U.S. is a failing empire and the irony is that it took out its own ‘greed-gun’ and shot itself in the foot when it chose to sent its manufacturing overseas.
 
Meanwhile, the rich-listers and the multi-national corporations in the U.S. are locking up the political system by buying the politicians left and right to pass the laws to benefit themselves. Why? So they can loot what they can of the remaining U.S. wealth.
 
Son, don’t forget that these folks are wealthy enough that borders don’t mean squat to them. They can buy their way into most countries if they are wealthy enough. So, if the U.S. crumbles into anarchy, they will just move away.
 
So how does all of this backstory relate to what’s going on now? Well, several unusual things have happened all at once in recent years.
First, the normal pattern of voting in one party or the other to continue to the looting has been broken.
 
The American public can sense that the American empire is failing. They may not be able to articulate, it as I have, but they clearly know that they are getting poorer and things are not right. Hence, they were not happy to just put in another figurehead president, like Hillary, to continue with business as usual (make that looting as usual). And in a major surprise, they elected Donald Trump.
 
A billionaire, a businessman, a reality TV host and a serious narcissist. People were tired of more of the same and they wanted big change and he promised it – in big bold letters.
 
But, as a billionaire, was he really the one we should trust to reverse things back to the America that we remember when the country was getting richer and things were good? No matter if electing him was logical or not. The American public wanted a change and he was it.
 
The second factor was the Covid-19 virus. Who could have predicted that? It has come out of left field to body-slam the world.
 
And then the third factor was triggered when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.
 
The first and third factors reveal a deep and growing instability in the way things are being run in the U.S.
 
If things had been handled better and the U.S. had not beggared itself by sending its manufacturing offshore and if the rich hadn’t essentially ‘bought’ the house and senate votes, then I strongly doubt that conditions would have been right to elect someone like Donald Trump. He would have just remaining a self-impressed wealthy showman with a trophy wife.
 
And if the U.S. had really tried to embrace its minorities and had not just kept sweeping the racism problem back under the rug each time it arose, then things like Minneapolis probably would not have happened. And, if they did, they would not have been part of a large pattern that has been ignored over and over again.
 
But factor two, the Covid-19 virus has been the real show-stopper. It has pushed our fragile systems, globally, right to the edge relentlessly and it has pointed up a very deep truth that everyone, especially our politicians, needs to learn.
 
And that is that the virus is part of a reality that doesn’t care what we think, what we believe or what we hope. Like gravity, it just happens and we have no choice about it – none. We either work with it ‘as it is’ or we deny how it is – at our own expense.
 
Donald Trump and many other leaders believe that the world and reality are shaped by their charisma, their leadership and the force of their personalities. When those sorts of beliefs come up against the virus, they are not going to win – it isn’t going to happen. Anyone who doesn’t realize that we have to work around the virus ‘as it is’ – is simply is simply in denial of reality.
 
Reality doesn’t care what we think. Gravity doesn’t ask our permission to do what it does and neither does something like this virus. It is programmed by evolution to do one thing and no matter how many speeches are given that ‘it will go away’ and no matter how many meetings are held trying to balance of the health costs vs. the costs to our economies, it will still just do just what it does because it doesn’t care. It doesn’t even know we are here. It doesn’t know anything. It just does what it does.
 
People like Trump and all those who resist face-masks and social distancing are just walking into the whirling blades of this thing with nothing but denial and bravado in hand.
 
So, what’s a person to make of all of this?
 
Damned if I have a good answer, Son. But I do think it settles the mind and gives some sense of clarity about what’s going on if you have the larger backstory and can see a bit of how things got to where they are.
 
Trump thinks he’s destined to be a great world-changing leader. I think he’s got a bit of Mussolini in him. But he is clearly a product of his times.
 
The U.S. is coming unraveled. And at such times strong leaders emerge and their natural response is to clamp down and to try to hold things together. But Trump’s also got an election coming up and he wants badly to win it. So, he’s playing the cards he’s got. And Law and Order is a big card just now and it clearly appeals to his base.
 
Regarding Portland: Portland belongs to the folks that live there. If they have a democratic governor and mayor, it is because they elected them. And if those leaders choose to deal with the demonstrators as they have been, then that’s their right. And if the locals don’t like it, then they can vote it more law and order oriented governors and mayors. Isn’t that the American way?
 
There’s no place in that equation for outside Federal interference – except that it represents a way for Trump to play the Law and Order card loudly to rally his base and create the impression that he’s saving the world from liberal anarchy.
 
Sending federal soldiers to ‘democrat’ cities? Really?
 
He’s attempting to manufacture a bogus war between liberal and conservatives for his own purposes. And I suspect it has to do with getting re-elected though that is looking less and less likely. And if he cannot win the election, how about he just blows by it by creating a small civil war so he can claim that the nation is in such turmoil that an election is not possible?
 
All this also serves as a way to distract from the fact that for all of his bluster, Trump’s handled the Covid-19 situation abysmally.
 
Yesterday’s headline said that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have no
w exceed 140,000 but Trump claims things are getting better.
 
The U.S. is a failing empire and these sorts of things happen in failing empires.
 
If you are on the inside of the empire and your entire life, family and livelihood depend on stability and predictability and things are falling apart all around you, then I can see how easy it is to get caught up in the good-guy, bad-guy, liberal, conservative rhetoric.
 
It is a game that is currently driven by one man’s desire to dominate the situation and retain the presidency and he will do whatever it takes to it it – even if he pulls the country down around everyone’s ears.

Your asked if I have better suggestions?
  • If he would just back off and govern for the good of the people.
  • If he would stop with all the conservative against liberal agitation.
  • If he would start doing whatever it takes for the U.S. to beat the virus as New Zealand has.
  • If he would start rolling back all the laws that benefit the rich against the poor and middle classes.
  • If he would block the loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid taxes and hide their money offshore.
  • If he would work to bring manufacturing back into the country.
  • If he would stop unlimited campaign financing so that the elected representatives represent the voters who elected them rather than those who donated massive amounts of money too their campaigns.
  • If he would revoke the law that says corporations have the same rights as people.
  • If he would establish universal health care like every other major nation the the world.
  • If he would see to it that the primary ethic of the U.S.’s national government is to maximize the quality of life for all of its citizens.
All of this is possible and it has been done in other countries.
 
How’s that for a list of suggestions about what might be done?
 
But, of course, none of what we say here will matter. You can believe what you want and I can say what I believe and in the end, forces much larger than you or I will control how it all plays out.
 
So, what to do?

Well, anger doesn’t help. It just clouds our judgment. Getting a clear idea of how things got to where they are improves our ability to predict where they might go next and that has good survival value. But becoming part of one hostile faction or the other doesn’t lead to clarity. It just leads to anger and blaming again.
 
In truth, I wish I could transport all of you down here to New Zealand.  Both of your skill sets would work very well for you here.  It is a small place but it is run reasonably and there is good opportunity here.
 
Love you, son
 

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Conflict, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Pandemics, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | Comments Closed

U.S. Medical costs and Corporate death-grips

Saturday, January 12th, 2019

U.S. Friends.

You have undoubtedly heard folks from other countries complaining that medical costs in the U.S. are higher than they need to be?

Then you hear, from U.S. sources, that this isn’t so and that U.S. medical services, coverage and prices are excellent – unlike those poor countries that ‘suffer’ under socialistic medical systems.

Mmmm. Well I’m a U.S. citizen and a New Zealand citizen and I’ve tasted what life is like on both sides of this question.

Today, here in New Zealand, I’m buying insurance for two upcoming overseas trips.

On my first trip, I’m going to the U.S. for three weeks.

On the 2nd trip, I’m going to Europe (Portugal, France, the U.K., Sweden, Denmark and Norway) for four months.

Cost for New Zealand medical insurance to cover me in the U.S. for three weeks (23 days) is $295 USD.

That’s $12.83 per day.

Cost for New Zealand medical insurance to cover me in Europe for four months (122 days) is $468 USD.

That’s $3.84 per day.

That’s over three times more.

*WHY*, you say?

Well, in countries where they ‘suffer’ under Socialized Medical Systems, the cost of medical care is directly related to what it costs to deliver that medical care.

But in countries where the private for-profit folks get to ‘help’ deliver medical care, they, of course, need a cut to help pay for their help.

But is the medical care in the U.S. is superior to that delivered by socialized medical systems?

Don’t just drink the kool-aid being offered up by those in the U.S. who make big profits ‘helping’ to deliver medical care. Go and read the international statistics that describe how much each country spends per citizen to provide medical care. And then look at the the results delivered in terms of longevity and infant mortality; among other things.

You will see that the costs of medical services delivered in the U.S. are significantly higher than in most other countries. And yet the measurable results of those medical services are of lesser quality.

As I said at the beginning, “…in countries where they ‘suffer’ under Socialized Medical Systems, the cost of medical care is directly related to what it costs to deliver that medical care.”

The reason why the delivery of medical services in the U.S. is more costly is because there are additional players in the circle.

So, a consumer of U.S. medical services is *not* just paying what it costs to deliver that medical service. They are also paying towards the profits of at least three additional players – all of whom want a cut of the pie. And, as all corporations do, they are keen to maximize their profits and minimize their costs to get the biggest slice of the pie they can.

The three extra players?

Well, the first are the medical services delivery corporations that have taken over the medical world in the U.S. in the last few decades

When is the last time you heard of a doctor in the U.S. having a ‘private-practice’?

Nope. Most of them have been swept up into medical services delivery companies. Most doctors now are the employees of these companies. And, in exchange for having their equipment supplied to them and having their medical malpractice insurance paid for them, they now have to see a new patient every 15 minutes and, if they want to write prescriptions for additional, specialized tests, they have to fill out forms to justify the costs. And corporate bean-counters, in the medical services delivery companies they work for, end up making judgements as to whether the tests are justified or not. Remember, a corporation wants to maximize its profits and minimize its costs.

The second player in the mix is the medical insurance companies.

There is very little socialized medicine for the U.S. citizen. So most people are driven to insure themselves against medical mishaps. I recall that for the last 10 years I lived in the U.S., before I left in 2009, I paid over $800 a month to have medical insurance coverage. And then there still was a big deductible and a co-pay percentage after that. And these medical insurance companies? They want to maximize their profits and minimize their costs too.

And then the third player is Big-Pharma.

Every wonder why prescriptions cost so much more in the U.S. than in other countries? Well, Big-Pharma is so big, that it is hard for the U.S. government to touch them. But then very few in the U.S. legislative branch would want to touch them anyway because they make so many large and fine political contributions to very people who would be the ones to control them. But after all, these lovely little corporations just want to maximize their profits and minimize their costs too.

Google around and compare the cost of various prescriptions for exactly the same drugs between the U.S. for profit corporate controlled system and those terrible socialized medical systems that so many people in other countries ‘suffer’ under.

Who you vote for makes a difference, my friends.

And all the propaganda you hear about socialized medicine being bad – is just that – propaganda.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, New Zealand, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | 2 Comments »

South by South-South

Saturday, August 25th, 2018

I write, occasionally, for the Sky Valley Chronicle in Washington State in the United States; where I used to live up until 10 years ago.  Here’s an article I just wrote for them.

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Amid the clatter of many dozen keyboards, the constant smell of coffee and a steady influx of reports arriving from the Chronicle’s bevy of international correspondents, I have, I believe, the honor of being the Chronicle’s southern-most correspondent. That is unless they’ve hired someone to cover Antarctica and they’ve failed to tell me.

I’m a former resident of Monroe, Washington, and the Sky Valley area; where I lived for 20 years. But in 2009, I moved to New Zealand and settled there in the city of Christchurch on the country’s South Island.

New Zealand is out in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean 1000 miles east and south of Australia. It could easily be considered the world’s most remote advanced western democracy. The country’s two major islands, called the North Island and the South Island, are together about the size of Colorado.

You’ve heard of the place and you say Baaaaaaa? Yes, you are right. There are about seven sheep here for every person.

The country makes its way, financially, with tourism, agriculture and forestry. But, remote or not, it has all the same high technology attributes that the other advanced nations have.

Occasionally, in the years since I left western Washington, I’ve written pieces for the Chronicle discussing my New Zealand travels and also some of the other places I’ve visited to in the 10 years since I left.

In this story, I want to share a trip with you that I took recently right here on New Zealand’s South Island. You might say this was a trip to the “South of the South” because I went right down the southern end of the South Island. This trip was partly for fun and tourism and partly because I’m thinking abut the future and where I might want to own land for my family. I’ll share a few of those thoughts as we go along.

But first, let’s get you oriented.

New Zealand is a long country that stretches basically north and south. If you laid the entire country alongside the U.S.’s west coast, at the same latitudes, the southernmost, or coldest, part of New Zealand would fall about where Astoria, Washington is. And the northernmost, or warmest, part would be about where Los Angeles is.

Where I live in Christchurch on the South Island falls at about where Eugene, Oregon, is.

This country is a place of incredible beauty and low population. About 4.5 million people live here.

When you think about the weather, try not to let the fact that the southernmost end of the South Island falls about where Astoria is fool you. The weather here is quite different from Astoria – or anyplace along the U.S.’s west coast.

You see, New Zealand sits in what is called the Great Southern Ocean. If you look at a globe or a world map, you’ll see that once you get south of the world’s major land masses, there’s a huge sweep of ocean that goes right around the southern part of the world. This is the Great Southern Ocean. Other than the southern tip of South America, there’s nothing else down here at these southern latitudes; except little New Zealand. And without significant land masses to block the southern weather systems, they sweep powerfully around the world from west to east unimpeded. These southern waters are some of the wildest oceans on the planet.

So the weather in New Zealand, especially in its more southerly parts, can change three times a day quite easily as the systems come roaring in from the west. It can be hard country with huge rains; similar to what happens along the Pacific Northwest’s coast. And snow is not at all uncommon, which might seem like an odd idea when you think of an island in the South Pacific. But you have to remember just how far south we are and how unrestrained the Great Southern Ocean’s weather systems are.

There are some tremendous mountains here as well. These are the Southern Alps. They are relatively new ranges so they are still freshly risen, sharp-edged and jagged. Great ranges of them rise along the South Island’s entire west coast from north to south. Among them, Mount Cook and twenty other peaks rise to above 10,000 feet.

But, farther south along this island’s western coast, there’s a very special country to be found. It is a country with mountains, thousands of square miles of virgin forests and deep fiords like those in Norway. And all of this sits pristinly within an enormous national park that occupies the entire southwestern corner of the island. This park, the Fiordland National Park, comprises over 8% of the South Island’s total area. And, except for one road in the northeastern corner of the park from Te Anau (tay-ah-no) to Milford Sound, there simply are no roads at all. If you want to get into the inner spaces of this vast park, it is going to require hiking, a helicopter or a float plane. Or you’ll have to come around by sea and into one of the deep fiords. This area is truly one of the world’s better kept secrets.

The occasion for this trip was my birthday. That, and the fact that I hadn’t yet seen this part of my adopted country. I’d been wanting to go down and see the area for some time – and this year was the year we went.

We? Yes, that would be myself and my Kiwi partner, Colette, with whom I’ve been living here in Christchurch for these last eight years.

We flew from Christchurch to Queenstown and then got a rental car at the Airport. From there, we drove to Te Anau, a town of about 2,000 folks.  Follow this link for information about Te Anau.

This was in August which, in the northern hemisphere. would be high tourist season. But we are in the southern hemisphere and August here is like February in the U.S.

So, the town was quiet. About half the restaurants and hotels were closed for the season. But that all suited us fine. We are not into big crowds of people. But all the extreme beauty of Te Anau and its lake remained; and it was spectacular. Our holiday apartment was just beside the lake and the downtown area was only a 10 minute walk away. Mountains topped with snow stood around us in all directions.

Something that’s different about hotel rooms here in New Zealand is that they nearly all come equipped with kitchens and everything you might need if you want to stay in and cook.

Te Anau is truly at the end of the world down in the “South of the South”. Beyond it there is only the one road out to Milford Sound. And that road is a one-way-in and one-way-out affair with an interesting and rough-hewn tunnel that bores under the Southern Alps at one point.

We were enjoying all this beauty and reveling in having so much of it to ourselves. But I was also looking at the land around me and thinking about the future; as I mentioned earlier.

But, let’s backup a bit.

I came to New Zealand ten years ago for several reasons. Some of them had to do with the politics and the finances in the U.S. which I felt were really going downhill. And as much as I loved, and still love, the United States and its people, these things were really annoying me. And I also came because I’d seen New Zealand a few years before and I’d liked the smallness of it and the slower pace. No place is perfect and New Zealand is no exception; but it seemed better here. And last, but not least, I was already thinking then that the world was getting more and more unstable every year. And the idea of being far away from the crowds and tensions in the northern hemisphere was attractive.

So, if a person was looking for how to get out of harm’s way, I think by moving down to New Zealand, I’ve probably made a good start at it. But now that I’ve been here awhile, I find myself thinking about what’s next. About how things might change here in the future, how I can protect my decendants and about how we could all benefit from the coming changes.

So, I’ve been thinking about land down here. Land down in the South of the South. And our trip to Te Anau and Milford was my way of putting another piece into that puzzle.

The southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island is, as I said, a largely unpopulated area. It’s remote from the cities and it is cold. But, I’m attracted to it because don’t think it is always going to stay that way.

On an trip a few years ago, I visited another area here in the deep south. It’s over on the southeastern corner of the South Island and it’s an area called “The Catlins”.  Follow this link for information about the Catlins.

It’s another beautiful and remote area. Perhaps, it’s not as extreme as Te Anau and the Fiordland area for beauty and high mountains, but it’s intriguing just the same. Only 1200 people live there and it has hills, mountains, forests, rivers, harbors and land that is fertile and seas that teeming with life in this remote corner of the world.

A lot of people are saying that the world is heading towards some hard times. But really, not a lot has happened so far and things seem relatively intact. But I beleive things are beginning to change now slowly. And greater changes are gathering all around us. I recently read an article with a map that showed what the world might look like if the temperature rises another few degrees. And it was not a pretty sight.

But is all this actually going to happen? Yes, personally, I think so.

Consider that the world has a lot of problems. Problems that are building their way steadily towards critical. Just give a thought to religious fundamentalism, over population, resource depletion, pollution, growing wealth inequality, increasing political polarization, nuclear proliferation, food and fresh water shortages, pandemics, refugee migrations, the breakdown of the weaker nations like Somalia, species extinctions, and this little list is no where near exhausted – it goes on and on.

A few of these problems may sort themselves out. But I find it really hard to believe that all of them will come right. And for the ones that don’t come right, the clock is ticking until one or more of them go critical and the wheels start to come off.

If such a thing happens, do you think anyone really going to want to find themselves living in downtown Los Angeles or Seattle? I don’t think so.

But the truth is that people can pretend impending disaster isn’t real – if they don’t feel that they have any real options.

Here’s a quote by Tolstoy from War and Peace that gives some insight into this:

“With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.“

Of course, many of us hope that things will hold together for the rest of our lives. And maybe they will.

But, I find myself thinking, what about our kids and their kids? What are they going to do in this future world? A world that is looking more and more dangerous.

Thoughts like these were, in part, on my mind when I moved down to New Zealand ten years ago. But, New Zealand wasn’t my only option back then for getting out of harm’s way. And in fact, if I’d have stayed in the U.S., I would have still had some good possibilities available to me. If you are following my line of thought about all of this, some of these thoughts might be of interest to you.

If I was still living in the Pacific Northwest now, I’d be seriously looking towards the Alaska Panhandle area. It has all of the following advantages:

The panhandle is remote with low population. It’s in the U.S. so you’ve got every right to move there. It’s cold; but that’s OK because things are going to get warmer. It’s got mountains and wildlife so you’ve got water, hunting possibilities and building supplies close by. It’s by the ocean which is a food source and it keeps the temperature swings a bit mellower than further inland. It is well worth a look.

But now that I’m here, it’s the South of the South that I’m considering.

You see, if the climate predictions of increasing warmth hold true and the world does get warmer, a lot of things are going to change. The primary bread-basket growing areas in the U.S., places like California’s Central Valley and the U.S.’s midwest, are going to start migrating north. That will probably spell the end for California’s growing capabilities and what’s working well now in the U.S.’s midwest will begin to shift towards the Canadian plains.

The same things will occur here in the southern hemisphere but just reversed. And that has made me realize that the southern South Island, that now seems so cold, remote and sparsely populated, is going to come into its own as the shift gets moving. And I’m thinking this is worth considering before the land rush begins.

We’ve got another problem here in New Zealand that most people, even in this country, haven’t thought a lot about. You see, New Zealand and Australia have a long-standing agreement that allows folks from either country to freely move to the other one.

This hasn’t been much of a problem so far but temperatures in Australia are already ramping up and they are facing ever more severe droughts. Even at the best of times, Australian agriculture has been a marginal business and things are getting worse.

If you look at Australia on the map, with its 20 million people, the vast majority of them are gathered along the coasts because nearly all of the country’s interior is simply a desert wasteland. As temperatures rise, our little clean and green New Zealand is going to start to look pretty good to a lot of Australians. And this makes me wonder how many of the 20 million can come over to a small country of 4.5 million before New Zealand is overrun. Again, it is another reason to think ahead and to get moving ahead of events.

For the moment, I am strongly favoring the Catlins. I’d like to buy a large piece of land there and just sit on it as a future-proofing investment. At the moment, the place is too remote and cold for many people to be interested. But, as I said, I’ve got a lot of reasons for thinking that will change.

So, did you know that some of the wealthier people in the U.S. are already seeing the future I’m taking about and they are coming down here now to New Zealand to establish “Bolt Holes”? Yep, they are buying land in New Zealand as an insurance policy so they’ll have a place to run to if the wheels start coming off up north.

Peter Thiel, the American Billionaire and one of the founders of PayPal, essentially bought his way into a New Zealand citizenship recently.

And here’s another story about Americans coming down.

A lot of wealthy folks are beginning to smell the coffee and they are planning where they want to be, if things get bad.

I feel quite lucky in that I am already here and I’m a New Zealand citizen now. So I’ve done a large part of what I can do to get out of harm’s way. But buying land down in the Catlins for my kin would hopefully give them a shot at a good future because they would own land in an area that can only get better as the climate warms..

But, my American readers, what are your options? Moving to the other side of the planet to a place like New Zealand is only going to work for you if you are young (you cannot get in after 55), educated (they have a points systems that favors those with college degrees) and you are wealthy enough to be able to absorb to cost and turmoil of shifting half way around the world.

You might console yourself by thinking that having two weeks of food and water stashed out in your garage as a hedge is going to sort things out for you. But, I don’t think so.

Think about what you are going to do. Think about water and food, if everything should go to hell. Buy some remote land and build a strong cabin that can be securely locked up. Stash some stuff there or nearby. This might be the best insurance policy you could ever buy for you and those who come after you. Some day your descendants may give thanks for your forethought.

If I was still living in Western Washington, I’d be looking towards the Alaska Panhandle.

Posted in CrashBlogging, New Zealand, Politics | 2 Comments »

The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism

Monday, March 28th, 2016
  • Not sure I have a lot to say about this other than it makes me feel that where it says “Futurist” on my business card is not unjustified.
  • dennis

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By Chris Hedges

College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.

There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.

These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the liberal state.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness, while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.

The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting Tuesday, 5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans.

Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998, presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”

In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.

As Arendt noted, the fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s “… recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.”

Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.

Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism too will reach back to traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and beliefs.

Robert Paxton wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism”:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as [George] Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral renewal, new glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said, is war.

Paxton singles out the amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist movements.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination.

There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country. This movement will never come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton prevails in the general election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand. Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life. Tremendous damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated elites to our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in charge, the worse it is going to get.

  • to the original: ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Small town mayor relinquishes electronics and passwords to agents at SFO

Monday, October 5th, 2015
  • An interesting story. Prescient of our future?  
  • Just last month, I read in an American publication about a news conference held by the senior leaders of the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and several other security-related agencies.  The reason they held the conference was to say to the press and the American public that this ‘tension’ between them and the public needs to be toned down.  That they are only trying to protect our security interests and that they need to be free to get on with it.
  • Interesting that they failed to note that a lot of this started when Edward Snowdon pulled the covers back from their secret programs and the public found much of what was revealed deeply unpalatable.  No comment on that and little has been done about it save for imposing a few small limitations here and there.
  • But, if those limitations are reimplemented, we’ll never know about it because it will all be done behind those same secret curtains again (and for our own good, I’m sure).
  • So, here they are in this story forcing their way into a private citizen’s private affairs/data with no warrant, no probable cause and no comment when asked about it by the press.  Basically, “Nothing to see here.  Just move along now, move along.”
  • Is this how they are going to win the public’s trust again?
  • And, isn’t the deepest irony here that if the fellow searched had wanted to hide something, he simply could have dropped an encrypted copy of it onto any of a hundred places out in the Internet cloud and erased it from his phone before entering the country.  Once home, he grabs it again from the web, decrypts it and he’s done.
  • The only criminals and terrorists the Feds are going to capture these Bully-Boy methods are the dumbest of the dumb.  
  • So what is the point then?  Simple harassment of the public? A flexing of their muscles so we can all see how very powerful they really are?  Or just a profound example of bureaucratic ineptitude wherein the left hand has no idea what the right hand’s doing?
  • dennis

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As feds battle over privacy, mayor compares the situation to North Korea.

Stockton, California Mayor Anthony R. Silva attended a recent mayor’s conference in China, but his return trip took a bit longer than usual. At the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) this week, agents with the Department of Homeland Security detained Silva and confiscated his personal cell phone among other electronics. According to comments from the mayor, that may not even be the most alarming part.

“Unfortunately, they were not willing or able to produce a search warrant or any court documents suggesting they had a legal right to take my property,” Silva told SFGate. “In addition, they were persistent about requiring my passwords for all devices.”

The mayor’s attorney, Mark Reichel, told SFGate that Silva was not allowed to leave the airport without forfeiting his passwords. Reichel was not present for Silva’s interaction with the DHS agents, either. The mayor was told he had “no right for a lawyer to be present” and that being a US citizen did not “entitle me to rights that I probably thought,” according to the paper.

As of Friday, Silva had not yet received his property from the SFO detention. SFGate reports Reichel contacted the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, but they would not comment on whether they still had the mayor’s possessions. The paper also reached out to a spokesperson at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but that office also refused comment. (Ars has reached out to the mayor’s office for any new information, and we’ll update this story accordingly if we hear back.)

Authorities demanding access to password-protected devices has become a hot-button issue across the country, highlighted in particular by the federal government’s ongoing battle with Silicon Valley over the lack of crypto backdoors in modern smartphones. At the end of last month, one US District Judge in Pennsylvania ruled that forcing suspects to surrender their passwords was unconstitutional on Fifth Amendment grounds.

Evidently, Silva was well aware of the situation and only had his concerns heightened by first-hand experience. Talking to SFGate, he briefly compared the government battle on privacy to notorious dictatorships worldwide.

“I think the American people should be extremely concerned about their personal rights and privacy,” Silva told the paper. “As I was being searched at the airport, there was a Latino couple to my left, and an Asian couple to my right also being aggressively searched. I briefly had to remind myself that this was not North Korea or Nazi Germany. This is the land of the Free.”

  • To the original in Ars Technica:  ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, CyberChaos, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Why are houses so expensive? (UK article)

Friday, September 18th, 2015
  • As time passes, my ideas about what and where our problems are shifting too.  
  • Currently, I’m focused on the idea that our representative democracies, which are primarily a balancing of self interests; one against each other, are, by their very nature, incapable of dealing with problems affecting our ‘commons’.
  • The housing cost problems described in this Guardian article make this point particularly well.  
  • It is in the majority’s common interests that most of us should be able to find and afford reasonably priced housing.  But a minority of us, well positioned to take advantage of the situation, have elevated their minority self interests over the majority and, in their greed, they are making a bad situation worse.
  • This has happened because ‘we’ the people have never decided to implement governments which look out for our common interests as their top priority.  
  • And you can be sure that those who are looking after their self interests and wealth are never going to support this.  They will, in fact, actively suppress the idea.
  • dennis

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There’s a sizeable chance that many people born before me in the late 1980s – and far more who were born after me – will never own their home in the UK. The goal for most people is now to get on “the housing ladder”: buy a small house or flat, and gradually move to a nicer area and bigger home as your profits increase. This wasn’t always the case. Back in the early 1980s, around half the population of the country owned their own home, and half rented – 30% in social housing, from their local council, and 20% from private landlords.

Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of right to buy meant that those who bought their council home saw the value of their subsidised purchase rise rapidly, meaning housing was seen less as a permanent home, more as an investment. At the same time, councils stopped building homes partly due to economic constraints, and partly due to the ideological shift away from renting and towards home ownership.

But now we’re in a crisis. Homes cost an awful lot in many places in the UK, and wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, or risen as much as house prices, post-recession. The young, in particular, find their earning potential and borrowing allowances have been harder hit than most. Meanwhile, the vast majority of new private-sector jobs are in the capital, where house prices are exorbitant.

The average house price for the UK was £282,000 in July according to the Office for National Statistics, which, if you live in London, sounds like nothing – the average house price there nudged £525,000 this month. But the average UK earner, who takes home £24,648 gross, including bonuses, can only afford a house worth around £110,000, if you imagine them taking out a mortgage worth 4.5 times their salary. To find a job paying that much and a house that costs that little isn’t easy – saving for a deposit while paying market rents is even harder.

Part of the problem is scarcity. Britain simply isn’t building enough housing to meet the demand for homes. Part of that is due to a brick shortage that began before the recession, and a skills shortage: British workers predominantly don’t want to be builders, and the rhetoric against hiring in skilled workers from the EU and beyond also stymies attempts to build more.

But many people profit from rising house prices: landbanking is a huge problemthat exacerbates the housing crisis. In areas where homes are needed, it works in private companies’ interests to sit on land that could be developed, inflating its prices, and in turn inflating house prices.

Where housing expansion has happened is in private renting, the sector least likely to increase the home ownership rate in Britain. If you ask most people what is the biggest barrier to raising the capital necessary for a deposit, most will say that it’s high rents. It’s in landlords’ interests to keep people renting, rather than buying. An interest-only mortgage lets you cream off a considerable profit while buying more properties.

And once profits rise in houses, and people see property not as a home but as an investment opportunity, outside investors pour in. Concerns have been raised at the proportion of new-build properties in London being bought and treated as asset lockers in the capital – left empty, while appreciating in value at very little risk for the predominantly foreign buyers. Meanwhile, families flounder on the housing waiting lists, or are forced out to far-flung towns, away from their children’s schools or support networks.

Houses aren’t expensive simply because of supply and demand. As long as houses are expensive, people will work to keep them expensive – buy-to-let landlords with far more capital can buy up houses and rent them out at high costs, wealthy British and foreign investors can buy up land and new-build luxury property knowing that the likelihood of profit is a far better bet than with any other investment. Keeping families and individuals locked out of home ownership for a lifetime works as a financial racket, which is precisely what we’re dealing with.

There’s also the massive regional disparity – growing up, I remember working out exactly how much I’d need to earn to afford a mortgage on my own home. It seemed achievable, because I foolishly hadn’t assumed a global recession would cause stagnant wages while house prices continued rising unhindered. And to get a mortgage on a property where I grew up in Newport, at an average of £115,828I’d need to earn around £29,000 per year. I’ll admit to earning far more. But to buy the average home where I currently live near Clapham, I’d need to earn £182,809. I earn far less. Why do I stay, rather than returning home and snapping up a four-bed house? The same reason anyone does – friends, work opportunities, and an emotional investment in the local surroundings.

But across England and Wales, the average home costs 8.8 times the average salary. In Westminster, it’s 24 times the local salary, compared to 12 times a decade earlier. Everywhere in England and Wales, the house price/local salary ratio has risen since 2002. Part of the reason so many people want to buy is because renting conditions can be so poor, while rent is so high. Those hoarding properties can hike up house prices as people become increasingly desperate to get on “the ladder”.

Scarcity causes a number of responses: firstly panic – watch any queue outside a house in Walthamstow, or try to rent a room in London or Oxford, and realise how many people are scrabbling for any opportunity to solve their personal housing crisis. But it also encourages hoarding: the financially solvent notice an asset’s sharp increase in value and hoard that asset, inflating the price and their profits at the same time. One in five homes in the UK is now owned by a private landlord, yet landlords only account for 2% cent of the adult population.

But crises reach a head: at the moment, house prices are so expensive, many people will be unable to afford to buy at all, which impacts on birth rates, encourages people to move abroad, and affects the economy, both because people are spending more on rent and less on goods that boost the economy, and because housing is a precarious market to rely on to prop up GDP. It’s because the market has been allowed to grow unchecked, and landlords and investors allowed to distort and inflate the market, that houses are expensive. But to bring prices down, some homeowners have to lose out and end up in negative equity. It depends on who politicians value most – homeowners, or Generation Rent. Or, we can all sit tight and wait for the bubble to burst.

  • To the original in the Guardian:  ➡

 

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

HOW COVERT AGENTS INFILTRATE THE INTERNET TO MANIPULATE, DECEIVE, AND DESTROY REPUTATIONS

Tuesday, August 11th, 2015

– This piece was written by Glenn Greewald on 24 Feb 2014 but it is still relevent.

– dennis

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One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:

– This article continues and you will do best to read it in its original form as it has many graphic elements.

– to see the original, click here: ➡

 

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corruption, CrashBlogging, CyberChaos, Politics - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Climate change threat must be taken as seriously as nuclear war – UK minister

Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

In foreword to Foreign Office report, Baroness Joyce Anelay highlights holistic risks of global warming, including food security, terrorism and lethal heat levels

The threat of climate change needs to be assessed in the same comprehensive way as nuclear weapons proliferation, according to a UK foreign minister.

Baroness Joyce Anelay, minister of state at the Commonwealth and Foreign Office, said the indirect impacts of global warming, such as deteriorating international security, could be far greater than the direct effects, such as flooding. She issued the warning in a foreword to a new report on the risks of climate change led by the UK’s climate change envoy, Prof Sir David King.

The report, commissioned by the Foreign Office, and written by experts from the UK, US, China and India, is stark in its assessment of the wide-ranging dangers posed by unchecked global warming, including:

  • very large risks to global food security, including a tripling of food prices
  • unprecedented migration overwhelming international assistance
  • increased risk of terrorism as states fail
  • lethal heat even for people resting in shade

The world’s nations are preparing for a crunch UN summit in Paris in December, at which they must agree a deal to combat climate change.

Monday’s report states that existing plans to curb carbon emissions would heighten the chances of the climate passing tipping points “beyond which the inconvenient may become intolerable”. In 2004, King, then the government’s chief scientific adviser, warned that climate change is a more serious threat to the world than terrorism.

“Assessing the risk around [nuclear weapon proliferation] depends on understanding inter-dependent elements, including: what the science tells us is possible; what our political analysis tells us a country may intend; and what the systemic factors are, such as regional power dynamics,” said Anelay. “The risk of climate change demands a similarly holistic assessment.”

The report sets out the direct risks of climate change. “Humans have limited tolerance for heat stress,” it states. “In the current climate, safe climatic conditions for work are already exceeded frequently for short periods in hot countries, and heatwaves already cause fatalities. In future, climatic conditions could exceed potentially lethal limits of heat stress even for individuals resting in the shade.”

It notes that “the number of people exposed to extreme water shortage is projected to double, globally, by mid century due to population growth alone. Climate change could increase the risk in some regions.”

In the worst case, what is today a once-in-30-year flood could happen every three years in the highly populated river basins of the Yellow, Ganges and Indus rivers, the report said. Without dramatic cuts to carbon emissions, extreme drought affecting farmland could double around the world, with impacts in southern Africa, the US and south Asia.

Areas affected by the knock-on or systemic risks of global warming include global security with extreme droughts and competition for farmland causing conflicts. “Migration from some regions may become more a necessity than a choice, and could take place on a historically unprecedented scale,” the report says. “It seems likely that the capacity of the international community for humanitarian assistance would be overwhelmed.”

“The risks of state failure could rise significantly, affecting many countries simultaneously, and even threatening those that are currently considered developed and stable,” says the report. “The expansion of ungoverned territories would in turn increase the risks of terrorism.”

The report also assesses the systemic risk to global food supply, saying that rising extreme weather events could mean shocks to global food prices previously expected once a century could come every 30 years. “A plausible worst-case scenario could produce unprecedented price spikes on the global market, with a trebling of the prices of the worst-affected grains,” the report concludes.

The greatest risks are tipping points, the report finds, where the climate shifts rapidly into a new, dangerous phase state. But the report also states that political leadership, technology and investment patterns can also change abruptly too.

The report concludes: “The risks of climate change may be greater than is commonly realised, but so is our capacity to confront them. An honest assessment of risk is no reason for fatalism.”

– to the original article: ➡

 

Posted in Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Politics - The Right Way, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Questions about ISIS

Friday, May 8th, 2015
Sun in Montreal
 
Its a beautiful Spring day here in Montreal, Canada, where I am now.  My partner, Colette, and I just spent an hour eating our sandwiches, sitting in the sun beside a huge square near the center of the city and watching the thousands of people nearby.  People were walking, talking, sitting and eating their lunches, sharing petitions to be signed, visiting, taking in the sun, clowning around, flirting and all of the many things free people do to enjoy such a gorgeous day.
 
In the past few years, Colette and I have spent extended time in several of our advanced democracies. I’m thinking here of New Zealand, France, Australia, The United States and now Canada.
 
Everywhere we’ve gone, I’ve seen people enjoying their rights and their freedoms.  In truth, most of us unconsciously assume the presence of our rights and freedoms; much as the birds assume the air and the fish assume the water.

 
It is so easy for us to forget that it was a long and hard struggle to bring our societies to where they are now.  These rights and freedoms have been with us for so long now that it is easy to forget the desperate places from where we began.
 
In the advanced democracies, that we now live in, we can freely practice our religions. We have certain inalienable human rights. Our women have the same rights as our men. The Rule of Law is firmly established and protects us from the arbitrary taking of our lives, our freedoms, and our goods  by those who think they can simply take what they want from us because they have more brains, money, weapons or power than we do.  We have democratic elections so we can freely choose who will perform the public service functions of our governments. We can go to a government office and get a license for driving, hunting or fishing without having to pay a bribe. We know that if we’re arrested and accused of committing a crime, that we have a right to a trial before a jury of our peers. 
 
You and I could both go on adding to this list.  We have so many fundamental freedoms and rights that we take for granted that it’s hard to even remember what they all are now.
 
But keen students of history and eclectic readers know that it wasn’t always this way. And intrepid world travelers know from direct experience that it is not this way in much of the world around us.
 
A Dark Cloud Rising
 
There is a dark cloud rising in the world.  And I find it is hard to say just why it is arising.  
 
Oh, there’s no shortage of theories and ideas around; including my own.  But they are all just like leaves whirling in a summer zephyr.
 
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.  I still remember getting up to find the story on my TV screen one morning.  Little did I know all that would follow from that one morning’s news.
 
But somehow, now, 25 years on, the middle-east has become a maelstrom.  
 
I read the news from Iraq, from Afghanistan and from Yemen and I have no idea anymore who the main players are.  Or even if the players I am reading about are good guys or bad guys.  
 
The Shia, the Sunnis, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, the Houtis, ISIS, the Syrian Rebels, and on and on.  Refugees are everywhere and they are risking their lives by the tens of thousands in leaky boats and desperate treks to get into Europe where they believe stability exists.  Or perhaps they are striving just to get away from where ever the terror is reigning the hardest behind them.
 
I watch BBC America most nights here in Montreal and often they will have important talking-heads who are former ambassadors or generals coming on to discuss the Middle-East.  I listen but I don’t hear clarity coming from what they have to say.  It all puts me in mind of the three blind men and the elephant parable elevated to the glitter of world news.
 
But, amid all of this, there is a particularly dark cloud to be seen in the midst of all the chaos and confusion and its name is ISIS.  
 
And ISIS puzzles me deeply.  How have they become so powerful so quickly in a world in which the flow of money is so highly regulated and where there are already so many people and weapons staked out on highly contested ground?  
 
Where does ISIS get its money, who is selling them their arms and who is secretly supporting them with both?
 
Everyone publicly disavows them, including the vast majority of moderate Muslims across the world.  And yet their political power, their wealth, their Internet presence, their numbers and their military power continue to grow.  How can this be so?
 
As I said, there are a lot of theories.  
 
One thing I’ve noticed is that in this latest upsurge in Middle-Eastern violence, the U.S. has remaining largely absent.  The U.S. went in after Saddam invaded Kuwait, and then it went in later to oust him, and then it went in after 9/11 to sort out Afghanistan.  
 
And each ‘going in’ was accompanied by great publicly expressed hopes that we’d ‘sort the mess out’ and spread American ideals like democracy, freedom and education far and wide.  And each time that was not the result obtained.  
 
Many American lives were lost, many more of our young lives were blighted by wounding, permanent crippling, and by mental damage from what they’d seen, done and experienced.  Billions of dollars of U.S. tax payer money was blown and the only obvious beneficiaries from these interventions were those U.S. industries that benefit from war.
 
In each case, what the U.S. left behind from their interventions was a bigger mess than when they arrived.  
 
In my mind, the only possible exception to this was when the U.S. ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991 and drove him back home with his tail behind his legs and left him there to lick his wounds.
 
So, maybe why we don’t see much U.S. presence in the current middle-eastern mess is because America’s lost heart with the idea that America can ‘sort things out’ with American boots-on-the-ground and American money because most times, it just hasn’t turned out well.  
 
Or, more cynically, maybe the American war industries just don’t see the opportunities for vast profits that they saw before.
 
Regardless of all that blather and the current confusion about what all is going on in the Middle-East, the simple and stark fact is that ISIS is there and they are rising and they are a dark cloud indeed.
 
Sunlight and shadows
 
I began this with a description of an idyllic afternoon in a square in Montreal and I was reflecting on all the hard-won freedoms and rights we enjoy in the advanced democracies.   And, so musing, I commented that after folks have had those rights and freedoms for a long time, it is easy to forget how precious they are and how hard the struggle was to secure them.
 
ISIS is forcing people to convert to their brand of fundamentalist Islam or to face death or slavery.
 
ISIS executes the opposition soldiers they capture in public and horrific manners to instill fear and submission into all that have not yet encountered them.
 
ISIS forces the women they capture to ‘marry’ their soldiers as sexual slaves.
 
ISIS has no tolerance for those who believe differently than they believe. 
 
ISIS takes over areas and imposes a new strict Muslim fundamentalist lifestyle on all whom they conquer.  Even when those whom they conquer are Muslims like themselves, they impose their will without exception.  They rule on how things should be done under penalty of death.  Girls shall not go to school and men shall not shave their beards and so on and so on.
 
I’ve read two chilling accounts of ISIS recently and I’d like to give you the links to these stories here.  I suggest that if you find what I am writing here of interest, that you go sideways for a few minutes and read these two articles.  They are chilling.
 
Article 1: http://tinyurl.com/o3tn7p7  “What ISIS Really Wants” from the Atlantic Magazine.
 
Article 2: http://tinyurl.com/mnajk2e “Searching for mercy in ISIS territory” from CBC Radio
 
Some tough questions you won’t find asked in the press
 
How, in an age wherein virtually everything we do on-line is analyzed under a microscope by governments, internet companies and those who want to sell us things … how can ISIS have such a huge presence on the Internet spewing hate and enticing new recruits and no one seems to be able to do anything about it?  If all these wanna-be jehadi kids are capable of find ISIS’s on-line propaganda, how can the western security services not find it?  And which Internet Service providers in which countries are putting up the web pages?
 
How, in an age when countries are swapping vast amounts of banking and tax information in an effort to clamp down on tax evasion, an age when every bank is mandated to “Know your customer”, how can ISIS own, move and spend millions of dollars on weapons and Internet propaganda?  These folks don’t even have a country!
 
How, in an age when oil supplies and prices are tracked with global precision, can ISIS profitably sell huge amounts of oil from the territories they take over?  Who is buying millions and millions of dollars of this oil and how can the international community not know that it is going on?
 
They have money, they have Internet presence and they are selling oil hand over fist … and it all seems to be a mystery to our governments how they can do such things?
 
And all this in a time when France has just passed new draconian security laws (http://tinyurl.com/mjatkbv) and Canada is about to vote on its new security law, C-51 (http://tinyurl.com/obf9svo).   And when the U.S.’s NSA has got their nose so deep in my underwear drawer that I’m sure they know all the brand names in there.  
 
How is ISIS even able to walk down the global street without getting mugged from six directions by our security services?
 
Where to from here, Dorothy?
 
Generally, I’m considered to be a liberal.  Cut me and you’ll find a tree hugger inside.  But I’m not cut from only one cloth.  
 
For instance, I believe in Capital Punishment.  Show me an incorrigible criminal who shows no signs of ever changing and who has blown several chances already and I’m quite willing to ‘off’ that person so the rest of us can get on with the business of making this a better world.
 
Perhaps, when you reflect on the hard-won freedoms we all enjoy, you may see why I am so deeply opposed to, and intolerant of, ISIS and Muslim Fundamentalism – or any fundamentalism, for that matter, that would impose its view of the world on me by force or stealth.  
 
These people want to throw away the hard-won advances it has taken us literally centuries to put into place like women’s rights, the rule of law and freedom from religious oppression.  
 
They want to take us back to Mohammed’s day in the 6th century.  
 
And I am bitterly opposed to this.  No one who has understood how long a road it has been to move from warlords to democracies, from woman as chattels to women as equals, and from power and corruption to the Rule of Law would ever want to go back.  
 
I am not afraid to tell you, my friends, that I would see the earth under their feet melted into nuclear glass before I would personally let them have a ghost of a chance at succeeding.
 
This world of our is, in fact, a damn mess; regardless of how nice it might be out in the sunlight in a square in Montreal on any given day.  We have got a ton of problems and a huge need to get them sorted out.  
 
But what we don’t need is a bunch of fanatics full of fundamentalist religious fervor who want to take us to the 6th century as a way to solve the world’s problems.
 
But back to the tough questions
 
I asked some questions earlier that I’ve wondered about a lot.  Questions that I have not seen in the press – and yet they are questions that demand answers.   
 
Here are some more.
 
Remember when U.S. forces simply blasted most of Saddam’s army to rubble in a matter of days once the U.S. decided to eject him and his Republican Guard from Kuwait in 1991?  I remember seeing videos of literally miles and miles of burned and destroyed military assets along the roads leading from Kuwait to Iraq.  He was barely left with two sticks to rub together.
 
Contrast this with the fact that more recently we hear that in Iraq ISIS’s forces are ‘threatening’ some town or other in Iraq.  They are coming towards the town and they are gathering outside the town and it is going to be a desperate battle; in spite of U.S. air strikes, we’re told.  What’s wrong with this picture?  ISIS must look like fleas on a linen napkin sitting out there in the desert ‘gathering’.  
 
But no, no one can do anything and after a short while, they take the town.  The U.S. made good efforts with its airstrikes – but what could be done?
 
Even more recently, we hear that the Iraqi’s have finally gotten their sh*t together and were going to eject ISIS from the Iraqi town of Tikrit.   There’s massive buildup of Iraqi forces on one side of Tikrit and then the Iraqi’s attack.  
 
What does ISIS do?  They fight a bit and then pull out of town on the other side and vanish to fight another day.  
 
Oh, nascent military strategists, what’s wrong with this picture?  Could someone not have been bright enough to have thought to have bottled them up from all sides – and ended their fighting days altogether?
 
A lot of this type of lame ‘news’ makes me really suspicious.
 
Here’s one that goes way back:  Remember a long time ago, in 2001, when U.S. forces had gone into Afghanistan and were closing in on Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora Caves of the White Mountains of Eastern Afghanistan?  Reports at the time said they had him ‘Bottled up’ with no escape.  Later, it was revealed that he had escaped into the tribal zones of western Pakistan.
 
How had this happened to the best and brightest of our military?   
 
Well, it came out later that the U.S. forces had let some of the local Afgani forces, who were fighting as allies of the U.S. military, into the plan.
 
Amazing!  Just damned amazing!   Think of all the fighting and dying that followed his escape – and we’d actually had him.
 
If the U.S. military had anyone on staff who understood Afghani culture, they would have known that tribal loyalties in Afghanistan cut far, far deeper than any loyalty that might be engendered by giving someone a rifle, a uniform and some pay for a few days.  
 
So, the locals who learned of the plan, communicated it to bin Laden’s folks and there you go … he was gone after all that cost, blood and effort to capture him.  And a lot of bad stuff followed on from that oversight.
 
So, where am I leading with all this cynicism?
 
Well, this is my suspicion, nasty as it may sound:
 
I think the folks in the U.S. who make such massive profits from war don’t mind if things run on for a bit.  After all, the money is made from conducting a war, not from ending it.
 
I think the folks in the U.S. who make such massive profits from war have been stung though in recent years by criticisms over how much they’ve spent and how little it has accomplished in the Middle-East.  
 
Every adventure they’ve lead into the Middle-East has left the area in even more turmoil.  And people are getting tired of it.  
 
The world is in worse and worse shape, the U.S. debt is climbing like crazy, the U.S. economy is struggling and we’ve poured billions of dollars into all of this – with very little to show for it.
 
I think the war industry folks have decided to hang back for awhile.   They have no doubt that they can crush ISIS when they need to – but they are in no hurry to proceed.
 
Let the killing and the atrocities continue.  Let the American people get really clear on just how bad ISIS really is.  
 
Let the perception grow that ISIS might get loose and begin attacking people anywhere out in the world.  Wait for the public to rethink its reservations about interventions in the Middle-East and then, when they are squeaking and scared, roll out the forces of truth, goodness and light and obliterate the bad guys.  
 
And, with such a build up and delay, the profits will be even better.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Conflict, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | 3 Comments »

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