Conspiracy and the Morality of Politicians.

I've been a regular reader of Jean Michael Greer's Blog - 'The Archdruid Report' - since its inception. The guy has a handle on the implications of 'peak-oil/energy' for our globalised industrialised economic/political systems that produces regular keen insights into the way things are likely to unfold. His analyses of human societies' handling of unwelcome change is deeply thoughtful and clearly springs from extensive pondering of the issues it raises. Put all that together with with a certain gift of expression and you have a highly informative and readable blog.

So it happened that I was enjoying his latest piece when I was struck by a couple of jarring notes. They are the subject of this post.

Jean Michael is clearly a gentle man who seeks the best in people. I have no issue with that and admire him for it. But it was his repeated use of the term 'Conspiricist' and his assertion (to paraphrase) that politicians are broadly representative of the populations that they spring from - good and bad - that jarred.

Firstly the term 'Conspiracist'. Like other pejoratives, (Holocaust denier, Anti-semite, Communist, Fascist Flat-Earther etc) its use is generally intended as a debate changer by making those it is applied to appear 'beyond the pale' or 'ridiculous' and thus unworthy of a hearing. So, what is it supposed to mean? and why is it ranked right up there with those other powerful debate changers?

Jean Michael uses it to dismiss those who he sees as proposing wide-ranging or all-encompassing conspiracies as having a significant role in human affairs. Put that way it seems to me that the 'anti-conspiracists' are the ones with some explaining to do. At the most basic level of meaning, it really ought to be beyond dispute that conspiracy by constituent cliques and cabals prior to ANY type of  minuted, publicly accountable meeting or action - from the lowly local club right up to the highest reaches of government decision-making - is actually the driving force behind pretty much any and all collective human endeavour. IOW the Public Agenda is largely driven and determined by hidden, private agendas that are furthered by conspiracy. It is simply the way the world works.

So why is it that the terms 'conspiracist' and 'conspiracy theorist' have become such powerful debate-clinching pejoratives? 

Since it is invariably applied to those suggesting conspiracy and complicity by elements of the State in violence against its own people, I suggest that it has to do with peoples' overwhelming need to believe in the basic good intent of the State, its Government and Agencies. Granted they can be stupid, bungling, incompetent - even corrupt at times, but the idea that they would or could EVER act deliberately and with calculation against the interests of the general population, let alone be involved in persistent gross deception and/or deliberate acts of domestic terrorism, is simply too abhorrent and downright scary to countenance - And that in spite of overwhelming evidence that latter day Western Governments are literally up to their necks in all of those things.

Which brings me to the morality of politicians.

At the outset of a political career and discounting the allegiances that political dynasties impose, I guess the aggregate of wannabe politicians are indeed representative of the aggregate of the populations they spring from. Self-evident really and in that sense Jean Michael is quite right in his assertion. However, it is the attributes required to produces a 'successful' political career that are the nub of the matter. 'Successful' here meaning one that achieves ministerial/cabinet/Privy Council Rank in the UK or their equivalents elsewhere.

I suggest that, whatever genuinely altruistic public-service ideals may originally have motivated a politician or 'public servant', it is the progressive compromise and ultimate abandonment of any such principles that is the sine-qua-non of elevation to the high offices of State. The career progression of such an individual can be likened to the degrees of initiation bestowed by a Masonic Order. Following initial elevation by the masses, any further advancement is by invitation and appointment by superior initiates. Ability and merit may have a bearing on the matter but if so, it is ability and merit in the promotion of the official narrative of events and the State's part in them that is the crux of the matter. Such narratives effortlessly accommodate the divisions between the major political parties which boil down to little more than froth. But on their substance, no departure from orthodoxy is tolerated.

Thus, an alliance of superior, freedom-loving democracies is valiantly striving to fight the evil of terrorism and generally to do good in the world; with its heroic armed forces sacrificing their lives selflessly in multiple distant desert countries that we might avoid having to fight their malign evil in our own lands.

Take a step back and try to look at that as might a visitor from another world - or better yet as a young innocent staring at his naked Emperor. It is so self-evidently absurd as to be risible, yet it IS the basic official narrative of the early 21st century, lapped up by a fearful, insecure and gullible population. It is trotted out endlessly by mainstream political parties and media of ALL persuasions in the manner almost of a religious creed and woe-betide anyone - especially an ambitious politician - who dares question it.

It is the sordid realities behind that and other absurd 'official narratives' that the ambitious politician is gradually initiated into such that, by the time the higher degrees are reached, there is little of principle left in the initiate beyond defence  of the existing power structures at any price. My latest (somewhat seasonal) analogy for the relationship between the State and its general population is that, as a matter of rigid orthodoxy, communication is conducted around an intellectual and emotional framework not unlike that of a parent and 5 year old child but absent any altruistic/parental bond - such that the official narratives of most events of importance are massaged to a level of factual accuracy resembling those of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. In other words - in the interests of an over-riding imperative to maintain 'The System' and protect its corrupt, self-serving interests, we are lied to systematically as a matter of time-honoured and sanctified practice - PERIOD. In the immortal words of that venerable Irish muckraker Caud Cockburn therefore: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied".

On the narrow subject of 'conspiracy theories' and terrorism, I personally doubt more than about 10% of all so-called terrorist outrages in the West occur without deep complicity on the part of our SIS's and their 'assets' - its called 'calibrating the level of violence and tension the better to further the policy agenda and secure compliance from a fearful population',  and anyone who thinks that an exaggeration - or more likely absurd - should first of all read up on 'Operation Gladio' as a primer before moving onto the more outrageous stuff. The information is readily available; it is just studiously ignored, other than as the occasional butt of ritualised ridicule, by the MSM.

So personally and in spite of JMG's admonitions, I'll stick with 'conspiracy theory' rather than 'coincidence theory' as a consistently superior explanation of events, with States, their Governments and especially their SI Agencies - per Spymaster extraordinaire Robert Cecil and his foolhardy dissident victim Guy Fawkes - as the model conspirators.

Whistling past the graveyard

The following is an Anglicised paraphrasing of parts of a recent post on Jim Kuntzler's US blog. With the US and UK practically joined at the hip on pretty well all areas of policy that really matter, it only required minor tweeking to make it an equally accurate description of our present condition and the stark realities we are faced with.

What's going on in the UK economy right now is a slow-motion convulsion from which we will emerge as a very different nation with a very different economy.  The wild irresponsibility of the media in pretending otherwise is only going to make the convulsion worse, more painful, more socially and politically destructive. The convulsion can be described with precision as one of compressive contraction. Historic circumstances are requiring us to change our behaviour, to make new arrangements for everyday life in all the major particulars: capital accumulation and deployment; food production; commerce; habitation; transport; education; and health care. These new arrangements must be organized at a smaller and finer scale, and on a much more local basis.

The main "historic circumstance" mandating these changes goes under the heading of "Peak Oil."  We've come to the end of our ability to increase energy inputs to the global economy.  The routine "growth" in industrial activity and production that has been the basis of our financial arrangements for 200-odd years is no longer possible.  Offsetting this decline in oil energy "input" with "alt.energy" is a dangerous fantasy because it distracts us from the urgent task of making new arrangements for trade, food production, etc - the very things that would provide jobs and social roles for our citizens in the future.

We are witnessing a comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector and every level of British life - in politics, business, banking, education, news media, medicine, and the clergy. All are determined to pretend that we can somehow continue the habits and behaviours of the pre peak oil era. All appear unwilling to face reality, and all are engaged in mutually supporting each other's dangerous fantasies.

If we don't start attending to the transformation of life in these islands soon, by downscaling our activities, changing the way they are carried out and re-localizing them, we will see society disintegrate - and I use the word "dis-integrate" with purposeful precision. Everything will come apart - our political arrangements, our households, our health and our well-being.

At the moment, banking is disintegrating.  It's happening because the end of regular, predictable, cyclical, industrial growth means the end of our ability to generate credit without limits, and in fact we passed this point by stealth some time ago leaving the banks in "Wile E. Coyote" suspension above an abyss, where they have lately been joined by government at all levels and the indebted citizens of the land. The profound nausea spreading through the offices of Britain is the somatic recognition of exactly where we are in all this: off the cliff.

We're now seeing worldwide a kind of race between the assertion of peak oil and the failures of capital management as to which will provoke a widespread convulsion first.  They are obviously related and whichever gets us in the most trouble fastest, the destination is the same: the absolute necessity to reorganize how we live.  Among the many elements of this is the fact that "globalisation," in the Thomas Friedman sense of the word, is over. The urgent need to re-localize economies makes this self-evident. As a practical matter for us, this means committing to import replacement - making the things we need here in the UK and Europe in other words.  "Globalisation" now joins the many other fantasies that we can no longer indulge.

But - as we approach the 2009 festive season, our entire political class, regardless of party, remains resolutely committed to GROWTH which, translated means 'sustaining the unsustainable'.  That is their 'for public consumption' refrain at least; whilst, under cover of the phoney manufactured GWOT, those who pull the strings forge ahead with building the Security State they know will be required to deal with the shit-storm we are faced with.

Bank bailouts? - What's needed is a MORAL bailout

Chris Hedges is always worth reading. This 'Truthdig' essay from him struck some particularly resonant chords for me. He castigates the USA for its nihilism and the co-opting of its universities to the requirements of the 'Corporate State' and the 'American Imperial Project', but the general thrust is no less applicable to the UK and I have 'Anglicised' a few paragraphs below as a taster.

"In decaying societies, politics become theatre. The Elites, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the Corporate State, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at RBS bonuses/pensions and empathy with a working/middle class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising. They make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. When the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once they go off, they make sure RBS, Northern Rock, HBOS and other Banksters and large corporations, have the hundreds of billions of pounds in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid, with taxpayer money....

We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success - always defined in terms of money and power - is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse......

Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the Elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression....."

Read the whole thing - it's worth it.

The mind-numbing vastness of our economic woes - Some numbers and context

The total size of Tax-Payer funded Banking, financial services and other industry 'bailouts' world-wide to date are so mind-numbingly vast as to defy comprehension when expressed in terms of monetary units . The words 'Billion' and 'Trillion' roll off the tongue easily enough but realistic comparisons with anything encountered in the daily lives of most individuals? - forget it.

So, a few months back, I found some work by Barry Ritholtz useful in getting a handle on this vastness. US-centric but no less applicable to the UK and the wider world - as of December 2008 total committed tax-payer funded 'bailout' monies to US companies was nudging $4.7 TRILLION. Today it is substantially more and rising. Barry Ritholtz takes up the story:

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find 'the bailout' has cost more than all of the following big budget government expenditures – COMBINED!:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• Savings & Loans Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: Just $3.92 trillion

But wait! - as if all that were not 'mind-numbing' enough, - there's more: The unfunded liabilities of the US Government now exceed - wait for it - $65 TRILLION. That's the 'Net Present Value' of those liabilities which is the standard accounting method of valuing future cash-flows. The biggest items are pension, medical and social security promises to an ageing population. Proportionally the situation is very similar here in the UK. All of which means that, if these promises are to be kept then the poor bloody taxpayer is on the hook for them too.

But, The Coup de Grace, the number which pretty much guarantees that these obligations will NOT be met and that the sovereign debt of the USA, the UK and a good few more 'developed' countries will be either defaulted or devalued to 'manageable proportions' by resort to the monetary printing presses, is this:

$700 TRILLION.

That is the notional value of financial derivative contracts currently outstanding (ie financial bets on financial bets to maybe the 3rd or 4th power made with margin loans of anywhere from 5-100:1) and which governments are desperate to protect with all these bailouts. (For context again, the total value of ALL the worlds stock markets is currently around $50 trillion).

Apologists for the system and the talking head financial entertainers of Bloomberg, CNBC et al will tell you that the $700 trillion figure is indeed 'notional' and that in fact it nets down close to zero when open interest positions are offset against each other. The BIG problem with this whistling past the graveyard is that, if it really did net down to zero (or even 10-15% of notional value) in terms of the risk it is alleged to 'spread', then there would be no need for continuing bailouts which are little more than desperate attempts to hide what the markets suspect is their true net value in the event of cascading defaults, together with the identity of the household name companies that would be on the hook for the resulting tsunami of bankrupting losses. Those with the best handle on their true net value are governments and their Central Banks. They are scared witless by that insight and therefore not telling.

The whole OTC derivatives market is really nothing more than an enormous, unregulated casino run on vastly leveraged credit. Amazingly it is STILL operating, but The House (in the persona of its major contract providers) is now broke. It knows it, governments know it, the markets suspect it - but the poor bloody taxpayer is still just frightened, confused, angry and largely ignorant of the true extent of the epoch-defining shit storm that really has only just started.

What kind of Recession?

Prescient cartoons from Tom Toles (The Washington Post)


My view on the parlous state of the globalised economy and the UK component of it are clear and have nothing whatever to do with 'money' per se - or the trendy, euphemistic cliches - credit crunch, liquidity problem, economic downturn et al - associated with it.

In a nutshell, the past decade or so has see production rates of the raw materials that fuel industrial growth bump hard up against constraints imposed by physical (as opposed to economic) reality. The clear recognition of those constraints and the dawning realisation of their implications by the elites who control the major concentrations of wealth and power throughout the world, is at the root of it. A cascade of continuing covert actions aimed at protecting that wealth and power has finally, 'Wizard-of-Oz'-like, revealed that a system whose fundamental operating principle - the necessity for perpetual growth on a very finite planet - is absurd.

The system is not merely 'BROKEN' - it is FUNDAMENTALLY UNSUSTAINABLE and has finally pushed close enough to its limits to scare the daylights out of those who had assumed it would go on forever.

Welcome to the real world.