We Are the Change

Maintaining And Creating Egalitarian Social, Economic and Political Structures After the Collapse

By Steve Thomas

Introduction

That we are approaching the collapse is largely beyond debate. It is unnecessary to give a detailed examination here of the factors by which the collapse may come about. My purpose, instead, is twofold:

1. To explore the form the collapse may take; that is, to speculate on what we will actually experience as global industrial civilization crumbles, and more importantly

2. To explore how we may hope to create and perpetuate egalitarianism in a state of civilizational collapse.

What to Expect

How will we know the collapse is upon us? The warning signs may be here already. We have already written of hurricanes Katrina and Rita as possibly the “opening shots” in the collapse of the oil infrastructure. We will probably learn this winter whether we are correct.

However, it is very unlikely that there is going to be a point at which we can say “Yes, civilization is collapsing.” That is, it is very unlikely that there will be a sudden, thief-in-the-night disintegration of all of this society’s political and economic infrastructure. What we are likely to see, in the near term, is escalation of the current spate of war and oppression, until the point at which they become untenable.

That is: we will continue to fight everywhere in the globe for oil, until we have less oil to fuel our armies than we are bringing in from the Middle East, the Caspian, South America, etc. We will continue to undergo increased political repression in the form of surveillance, law enforcement, and curtailing of dissent, until there is no more oil left to power the police cars, the check points, the GPS systems, the computers, etc. And the American economy will continue to crumble, forcing more and more people into poverty, debt, and unemployment. It will look like a recession, then like a depression, before it looks like collapse.

The pace of the collapse will probably be gradual overall, with a few puntucating events. We have already seen one such punctuation (Hurricane Katrina). However quickly or slowly events progress, there will come a point at which the knowledge that the current system for the provision of basic resources—food, water, shelter, heat—is defunct. There will be a point at which most grocery stores are empty. At which most of the lights and heaters do not turn on and most of the water faucets stop running. At this point the collapse will begin in earnest, as the majority of America’s 300 million people realize that they are going to have to find a different way to live.

There may be a sudden event which triggers this--an event after which the whole of the United States finds itself in the position of New Orleans. But even with a sudden event, things may linger for quite a while, a decade or more.

The Land Grab

What we may see is a massive Land Grab, as millions of urbanites, suburbanites and townsmen struggle for every remaining bit of land they can force a crop out of. In fact, such an event is almost guaranteed to occur. It is very unlikely that this event will be nonviolent. The vast majority of the rural land in America is owned either by the state or by corporations—that is, by the powerful—who are unlikely to give it up, and will probably fight tooth and nail for the last of what they see is “theirs.”

We may see an incipient feudalism appearing as police, soldiers, and vast numbers of the newly impoverished find themselves willing to fight for some wealthy landholder for the right to a meager plot of land.

Even if/where such a feudalism does not emerge, violence is likely. The North American landmass (north of the Rio Grande) is home to some 320 million people at present. It cannot support that population without modern petroleum-based agriculture. Rwanda—a genocide driven by overpopulation, as Jared Diamond convincingly demonstrated in Collapse—may provide a terrifying example of what America will look like as petroleum agriculture collapses.

Eventually the Land Grab will end, and the North America will settle into a sustainable equilibrium. The question before us is whether that equilibrium will consist of Option A: a reasonably high population of interlinked, egalitarian societies of diverse configurations (as was the case on the continent before the arrival of Europeans); or Option B: perpetual famine, endemic warfare and warlordism (as is the case in other modern examples of state collapse).
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There is no Iraqi Army

We often hear the administration say that we need to stay in Iraq until the Iraqi army is ready to take over.

There will never be an "Iraqi" army to take over.

There is no “Iraqi army”. Troops are loyal to their group or clan not to “Iraq”. Of the 115 Iraq army battalions: 60 are made up of Shia, 45 are Sunni, 9 are Kurdish and there is one mixed battalion in Baghdad (which is full of assassinations and betrayals).
Iraqi commanders receive a lump sum of cash for the troops they report under their command; this acts as an incentive for them to inflate the number of troops they claim.
U.S. weapons given to the Iraqi army and police for troops that don’t exist often wind up being sold in the markets – usually to the insurgents.

There simply can not be an effective Iraqi army because the people don’t owe their allegiance to “Iraq” but to their clan.

Brazilians and Brazilians

This from Seeing the Forest:

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims.  "That's terrible!"

His staff sits in stunned silence--shocked at this uncharacteristic display of emotion--nervously watching as the President sits slumped in his chair with his head in his hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

Shunning

What follows is an excellent article by Paul Harris. This needs to be read by every American and for that matter by every citizen of the world. The rest of the world needs to turn its back on America until we learn to be a partner in the community of nations. If the rest of the world would shun America, it would help those of us in America fighting to make our country live up to the high ideas it so often expresses but rarely achieves.

Shunning
by Paul Harris

In modern times, occasions arise when one or several countries choose to ‘shun’ another nation as a way of trying to influence a change in that nation’s behaviour. Think of the United States’ embargo on Cuba, sanctions levied against bad actors by the United Nations (like Libya, Iraq), Canadian sanctions against South Africa, eventually adopted by most of the British Commonwealth. That last example is a model of what can be accomplished with international condemnation; although the world’s sanctions against Apartheid cannot claim full credit for the turnaround in South Africa, it was a powerful incentive to those who sought to bring about changes there.

This is an article about the United States of America. From the outset, let me state clearly that there is tremendous credit due to the US for a wide variety of social, humanitarian, artistic, scientific, intellectual accomplishments. But this small group of people, ruled by an even smaller group of thugs (a kleptocracy), is truly the epitome of the ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ syndrome. The US comprises a small fraction of the world but it sees all the rest of the world – and, for emphasis, ALL the rest of the world – as its servant, its supplier of cheap goods and labour, its warehouse, its flea market, the place to play with its guns.

Both Canada and Mexico can reasonably think of the United States as our best friend. But it is also our worst enemy. Indeed, I will argue here that the United States is the enemy of ALL nations. It may be a little tougher for Canada and Mexico because the Beast lives next door, but also a little easier because at least they haven’t sent in the troops. Yet.

Now, we’ve all heard the rebuttal that ‘not all Americans are like that’, and that is certainly true. The US has at least as many decent humans as any other nation, more than many. But a country premised on ‘we the people …’ cannot shirk the responsibility for what they do as a group. The actions of the US are the actions of the whole population, by definition … the US constitution does not open with ‘we, some of the people’.

Many outside the US have waited patiently for them to outgrow their juvenile delinquency, but they show no sign of maturing. We have waited patiently for the good citizens of the US to corral the bad, but they persist in failing to do so. And now that they are acting out again and threatening the peace and security of the entire planet, it is high time that the rest of us took matters into our own hands.

The rest of the world should join hands and shun the United States.

America, the country, really does believe it is better than anyone else. That America is entitled to as much of the resources and riches of the planet as it wants and it doesn’t matter whomever else might have to suffer or go short. That all other nations are enemies if they don’t march to the American drum in virtually any arena you might mention. That it has the right, indeed the obligation, to enforce its will wherever it sees fit, and by whatever means it wants. That it has the right to invade sovereign nations as a way of deflecting attention from domestic political scandals or if there is some new weapon that needs a good field testing. That killing of foreign civilians doesn’t really count because they’re always in season and there’s no quota. That a bullet-ridden and trigger-happy American society is in every way superior to any other place on earth.

Astonishingly, Americans as a group have a hard time grasping that other folks might be a little annoyed about all that.

Bombs and Bullets
Consider their military adventures. The United States claims to be a nation of peace lovers and officially it has been at peace since the end of the Second World War. Except, that is, for their attacks on:

 

China (1945-46)

Korea (1950-53)

Guatemala (1954, 1967-69)

Cuba (1959-60)

Belgian Congo (1964)

Vietnam (1961-73)

Cambodia (1969-70)

Grenada (1983)

Libya (1986)

El Salvador (1980-92)

Nicaragua (1981-90)

Panama (1989)

Iraq (1991)

Somalia (1993)

Bosnia (1995)

Sudan (1998)

Yugoslavia (1999)

Afghanistan (2001-02)

plus a grudge match currently underway in Iraq (since 2003)

Plus "police action" in Colombia re: drugs (ongoing), an insurrection in Chile (1973) and numerous other covert bombings conducted by, or under the direction of, the CIA.

From 1945 to the early years of the 21st century, the US attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist movements fighting against insufferable regimes. In the process, they bombed about 25 countries, killed several million people, and condemned many millions more to lives of agony, poverty and despair. Oh yes, and they’re presently sabre-rattling against Iran and, maybe, North Korea. [Forgive me if I’ve forgotten any military excursion here; it’s hard to keep track. And I do concede that Korea and Iraq (1991) were different because they occurred under the aegis of the United Nations; but my that does not deflect from my point that this a bellicose group.]

Most of this activity took place during a time when the United States was allegedly in a defensive posture. In reality, the United States has never been in a defensive posture. It’s short history has been one of expansionism; first through movement to the west coast, then economically in the rest of the Americas where profits can be derived without the overhead of actually running the countries.

At this point, thanks to George W. Bush’s September 2002 document entitled ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ (NSS), we know with certainty that the United States intends to rule the world. They will act unilaterally to attack wherever and whenever they wish and they have already demonstrated that they mean it. Given their propensity for field-testing their high-tech weaponry, should they really be surprised that most other nations fear them? And is it rational for them to think that those who fear them are going to like them?

But it isn’t quite as simple as worrying about American bombs because they don’t drop them everywhere. There are actually some places that the US considers to be alright. Canada for one, although they often think we are cheeky buggers who they’re one day going to have to squash. Britain for another, although one wonders if the US only thinks well of them because of the recent lapses of British common sense in supporting Bush’s military adventures.

 

Let’s Make a Deal
Ask any country that’s ever entered into a trade agreement with the United States how well it worked out for them. The US bargains with a fisted glove, despite George Bush’s remarks in the second paragraph of the NSS: “In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage.” He couldn’t even get past the second paragraph without lying.

The fact is, the financial instruments that operate the world – the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund – are all tools of American diplomacy (I use that term loosely since diplomacy is not a strong suit for America and never has been). Oil, that most precious commodity, the thing that seems to attract American military excursions like flies to a corpse, is priced in US dollars giving the United States an unprecedented trading advantage over every other nation. The Yankee buck is used as the currency standard in most parts of the world despite its shaky foundations and the tremulous state of the American economy. By default, then, the currencies of the rest of the world are subservient and unstable because of their measurement against the flaky dollar.

The list of agreements entered into by the US that they have ignored, abrogated, or violated is long; and it has grown exponentially in recent years. Without even looking beyond the borders of North America, the US record of honouring its commitments is appalling. The Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have been sad examples of the way the US bullies its ‘partners’. It routinely ignores rulings of the dispute resolution panels that it doesn’t like, it slaps unjustified tariffs against its partners and dares them to do something about it. It fully expects the other partners to live with and adhere to the agreed upon rules, but it has no intention of doing so itself.

Naturally, these examples should serve as warnings to anyone else foolish enough to think they can enter into equal agreements with the US. It should be clear to all that no trade agreement with the United States is ever predicated on a ‘win-win’ principle, but on the premise that all the chips end up on the American side of the ledger. It is almost pathological that the US cannot abide the idea of both sides winning something, because that means something was left on the table that they could have grabbed.

On the horizon is the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Despite the obvious failings of FTA and NAFTA, other North and South American countries have given serious consideration to entering into trade agreements with the United States. Some have already foolishly signed on the dotted line. They need only look at the record of the way America adheres to its bargains with its closest neighbours to realize that the United States considers the rest of the world to be nothing more than its supplier of cheap raw materials and labour, and the place that it wishes to dump its surplus and its junk.

Playing well with others
One of the most sensible things ever created by the countries of the world is the United Nations. Its problems and weaknesses are huge, but most stem from four things: the foolish concept of the Security Council; the American belief that the sole function of the UN is to service the domestic and foreign interests of the United States; the failure of the US to live up to its commitments to the UN; and the US determination that nothing the rest of the member nations want or think is relevant if it doesn’t suit the United States.

If the US was being given a grade school report card for its United Nations activities it would be given the lowest grade possible and the teacher would surely note that the US does not play well with its peers. Indeed, the United States does not seriously consider that it has peers. There is a good chance the teacher might think the US needs professional intervention to deal with its obvious psychopathic tendencies.

Recently on the table was a draft agreement for United Nations reform and renewal. It is well-recognized internationally that the UN has shortcomings and members from many nations worked long and hard to prepare a draft proposal for addressing those weaknesses. At the eleventh hour, the United States made hundreds of changes to the document that they insisted would be necessary before they would agree to the rest. The parts they were willing to leave in place are the vague ‘lets play nice’ homilies that are unenforceable and make no commitments; the parts they want changed or removed provide a solid roadmap to showcase the disagreements the US has with the rest of the world on almost every imaginable global issue. In the end, a document barely worth the price of the paper on which it was printed was the result. No reform or improvement of the UN will come out of this massive effort to address its shortcomings. It is no wonder Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez Frias called for the UN to be moved out of the United States.

Think back again to President Bush’s statement: “In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage.” It is difficult to credit that there is anyone, anywhere, including within the United States, who could make that statement with a straight face. Where the US is unable to win agreement from other countries, it threatens. It starts with gentle remonstrance but the stakes very quickly rise to trade and even military threats: it takes guts to stand up to the US and only a few countries have the clout or temerity to do so (China and Cuba, respectively, come easily to mind).

But the reason these difficulties arise in the first place is there is no room in the eyes of the United States for compromise. President Bush again: “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” This narrow black-versus-white approach (an appropriate metaphor for the US) allows for no compromise, it permits no neutrality. It is the classic schoolyard bully approach to problem solving.

As a further example, consider the American attitude to such concepts as the International Court of Justice. The US refuses to be a part of it because they will not put themselves in the position where someone else has the power to judge them or the activities of their citizens. They believe that international law governs everyone but them: they were quite prepared to judge the Third Reich at Nuremburg and Manuel Noriega (after he finished being useful to them) and Saddam Hussein, and so on, but they refuse to accept that anyone, anywhere, has the right to judge them or one of their citizens.

Freedom
The United States prides itself on being free. Its citizens have come to believe that this includes them although any outsider can easily see that the only freedom in the US is the freedom of the elite to get richer and richer. The US operates on the principle of ‘free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich’ in an astounding display of law-of-the-jungle mentality. The rich and the elite of the US enjoy the biggest and best of everything while the lower castes fend for themselves.

This is a nation with wealth and privilege beyond measure, yet it houses vast numbers of poor and downtrodden who are left to wallow on their own. A timely example is in front of the world as we all watch with horror and consternation the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It is clear that the US was unprepared for this disaster despite having all the resources imaginable, despite having plenty of notice that this event was about to occur, despite having years of warning that it would occur some day. It is not lost on anyone that the slow and feeble response of the Bush administration to this catastrophe is coloured by who the victims happen to be.

The US was founded on the principle of democracy, the republican form of democracy, but it has been many years since it practiced democracy or even believed that it should. We all know its elections are unfair contests of rich against rich, often with unscrupulous polling practices to ensure the right person wins. And we all know that once elected, the winners are ensconced for the sole purpose of lining their own pockets and those of their backers.

Yet the United States strides around the world with the alleged aim of installing ‘democracy’, by force if necessary, even if the people affected would rather not have it. There is a proselytizing fervour and a missionary zeal with which the US pledges to ‘free’ the rest of the world. It cannot be stated more clearly that the US interest in other nations is solely as providers of cheap raw materials and labour, and as market places. They are quite content to accept the rule of dictators in those nations who are willingly serving US interests (Saudi Arabia, for instance).

The US notion of ‘democracy’, at least within the current administration, is surely Orwellian, avoiding anything that would allow for a genuine rule of the people. In nominal democracies today there is a huge gap between the ruling elites and the general populace. In this neo-con world, leaders regularly betray campaign promises and the public interest in order to serve the needs of the corporations who ensured their election victories. Nowhere has this reached such a high art form as in the United States.

Democracy has steadily eroded in the United States, accelerated by the present administration. The Patriot Act and its successor have castrated the constitutional protections of the rights of individuals; the courts have been filled with pliable right-wing judges, threatening judicial independence and constitutional rights; corrupt election practices are rampant and the checks and balances system has been seriously disrupted.

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The Slow Crash by Ran Prieur

Imagine the end of the world in moderation. It's hard. We tend to imagine that either the "economy" will recover and we'll go on like 1999 forever, plus flying cars, or else one day "the apocalypse happens" and every component of the industrial system is utterly gone.

I'm not ruling out a global supercatastrophe. A runaway greenhouse effect might turn Earth into another Venus and cook us all. Acidification of the oceans might kill the plankton, and with them everything that needs a lot of oxygen. An instant ice age could happen several ways, and this scenario needs more attention because some humans would survive. But what I'm focusing on here is the scenario that includes only events we're reasonably sure about: the end of cheap energy, the decline of industrial agriculture, currency collapse, economic "depression," wars, famines, disease epidemics, infrastructure failures, and extreme unpredictable weather.

If that's all we get, the crash will be slower and more complex than the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. It won't be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won't be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn't even know it. We're told to draw a line at the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, but to Romans at the time it was just one event -- the Visigoths came, they milled around, they left, and life went on. After the 1929 stock market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment, that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929.

I suggest we're already in the fall of civilization. In 2004 the price of oil doubled, bankruptcies and foreclosures accelerated, global food stockpiles fell to record lows despite high harvests, an apocalyptic religious cult hacked an election to tighten their control of the world's most powerful country, and we had record numbers of hurricanes and tornadoes -- and a big tsunami to top it off. If every year from here to 2020 is half as eventful, we'll be living in railroad cars, eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we've been led to expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and be over in two hours.

You know how it goes: Electricity and water and heat are off and not coming back on. Food and fuel will never again be coming into the cities. People "revert to savagery" or "anarchy," running wild in the streets killing and looting. If you live in the city, you will have to kill people to steal their food, or even eat them, and they'll be trying to do the same to you. If you live in the country, you'd better have a big gun to fend off the hordes of starving urbanites scouring the countryside. This condition will last until a strong leader rebuilds "civilization."

This is a web of lies. The first lie is the assumption that breakdowns will be sudden and permanent. More likely it will go like this: As energy gets more expensive and the electrical infrastructure decays, blackouts will be more frequent and last longer, but power will come back on. By the time the big grids go down permanently, the little grids, patched together from local sources, will be ready to take their place. They will be weaker, less reliable, and more expensive, and they won't cover the slums, but by then we'll all be experts at living without refrigerators and running laptop computers from car batteries scavenged from junked SUV's and recharged with solar panels. Electricity is a luxury, not a necessity. When the lights go out, we won't go berzerk -- we'll go to bed earlier.

Likewise with gasoline. The oil's not running out -- it's just getting more scarce and expensive. People who want it will not form motorcycle gangs that chase tankers and fight to the last man. They'll do what my dad did in 1973 and what they're doing now in Iraq -- wait six hours for a fill-up. If you already know how to get by with a bicycle, you just won't have as many cars to deal with.

Water supplies are mostly gravity-fed. If something stops the flow, someone will be fixing it. Even the worst places, like Phoenix or Las Vegas, will not suddenly and permanently run out of water. As with electricity and fuel, water will get lower quality, more expensive, and unpredictably available. People will learn to store it and to stop wasting it by watering lawns and washing cars and shitting in drinking water. Adaptable people will learn to catch rainwater. With only 12 inches a year, a 10 foot square metal roof feeding a storage tank will gather 100 cubic feet, or about 800 gallons, enough for one person to have more than two gallons a day.

Food is more difficult. It rarely falls from the sky, and industrial agriculture can't possibly continue to feed everyone. It would be easy to feed even our present bloated population if we all learned how to grow little gardens and trays of sprouts and bathtub algae, but that's not going to happen. Populations have died in famines before and will do so again. The lie here is that the food supply will end suddenly and permanently, when really, like everything else, it will end in a series of small collapses and partial recoveries. Continue reading....