Lessons on Killing the Golden Goose

Wake up, this is important I say!

If you were listening closely on Thursday you might have heard the collective yawn of 300 million Americans as the US Census Bureau released its 2009 report on poverty in America. Meh, so what if 1 in 7 people and 1 in 5 children in the world's richest country are destitute with ever diminishing chances of climbing out of the cesspool of want. 4 million more people than the year before failed to surpass the threshold of despair, there are now more poor people in the US than people in Argentina (look out Tanzania, your next). It kinda reminded me of standing in front of around fifteen 22-year-old Polish university students lecturing about inequality in those same United States. There I was going over chart after chart showing how the distribution of income in the US hasn't been so unequal since the beginning of the last century and trying to get them to come up with ideas about why it was happening and what repercussions it might have. I mean, what was I thinking? Better yet, what we're they thinking? A few possibilities:

"I can't wait to get home and stream last night's Desperate Housewives!"
"Did he just say 'annual stimulus'?"
"I wonder how my tomatoes are growing in Farmville?"

You see, I'd forgotten the golden rule of giving a lecture. Know your audience. These kids are the first generation born and raised from birth completely free of communism. Equality is the last thing they want, all they want is to be living in a country just like America. If they only knew that if we had been in America, most of them wouldn't have the opportunity of sitting in a classroom such as that one. Well, unfortunately what is happening in America isn't happening in isolation and it has repercussions for us all.

Just to be fair, I suppose I should do to my readers as I did to my poor students and put you all through a little inequality 101 primer:

The first decades of the 20th century were a time of crisis for capitalism in America. No one had tried to measure income inequality as measuring income was impossible before the introduction of federal income tax in 1913 but it was clearly a problem. It was the time of the robber barons and Standard Oil. Vanderbilt, Astor, Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P Morgan showed the world how unrestrained markets led to accumulated wealth, monopolistic behaviour and distorted markets that retarded growth. The ideas of Marx were mixing in a potent cocktail of labour unrest. Something was wrong with capitalism. When in 1915 a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States he was astounded to find that the top 1% of the population accounted for about 15% of the income. That figure was to climb to a peak of 23.9% in 1928. Coincidentally, the next year saw Black Tuesday as the stock market crashed on October 29th kicking off the Great Depression.

The effects of the depression combined with progressive taxation, the New Deal and World War II to usher in an era of dwindling income disparity, referred to by some economists as the Great Compression. Provided you were a white, Christian male of non-drafting age, this period of time could be viewed by many as the golden age of American life. There was no better time to be a middle-class American and the numbers grew and grew in a virtuous cycle. America had won the war and they were tasked with powering the global economy. Foreign competition was minimal, resources were abundant, each decade added a year to average educational attainment and unions ensured workers earned a salary that allowed them to purchase their employers products. The gap between rich and poor reached it's historic low in the 1970s as the top 1% was taking in about 9% of total income, a little over a third of what it had been 45 years earlier.

Oh, this is the top 0.01%. Not bad!

Then, something happened causing what Paul Krugman has termed the Great Divergence. The trend completely reversed itself and we've seen a growing disparity between rich and poor, rich and richer along with poor and poorer ever since, to the point where the top percentile's income share reached 23.5% in 2008. Notice any similarity between that number and the one eighty years ago, you know, right before the Great Depression? Correlation isn't causation and all that, but do you think the fact that a smaller piece of the pie being available to the majority of the population could have something to do with a slowdown in economic activity? I'm no economist, but...

Ok, so what's my point? Well, that's my point. It's not just my classroom that was bored to tears with these numbers. Imagine Faux 'news' trying to go through these facts with its viewers. Ha! Just mention the word inequality and the next thing you know you'd probably be shouted down for being a socialist-communist-terrorist pedophile with an evil plot to turn the country into a government controlled death camp in preparation for an alien invasion. Or something like that. Americans truly believe that what has made their country great is the independent/innovative/entrepreneurial spirit of its population facilitated by having a small, unobtrusive government. They've been brainwashed into believing that the only economic prescription for tough times is to cut taxes and liberalize the market. Funny they don't seem to remember that it was government policies that created the conditions for growth (and a couple of little World Wars that knocked out the manufacturing capacity of much of the world) seen in the 20th century. Anti-trust legislation, the minimum wage, social security, the 16th and 17th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Glass-Steagall. Oops, see, we've gotta be vigilant or the next thing you know these things could be gone.

So, before figuring a way out, or even if we need to, the first question is, what happened? Economists have variously pointed fingers at race, gender, the breakdown of the nuclear family, immigration, technology, Republicans, the demise of organized labour, globalization, federal policy, and the decline of K-12 education. Well, I blame it on the 1970s. No, not disco (well, a little bit), nor the designated hitter rule, the Big Mac or the Bicentennial. Why were the seventies such a turning point? The oil crisis, Vietnam and Nixon closing the gold window to allow for an unchecked expansion of the money supply led to stagflation. At the same time American corporations were just figuring out that the rebellion against conformity of the previous decade wasn't a threat but in fact their greatest opportunity. Value and lifestyle marketing. It was in the corporations interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. America's (and the developed economies) were rescued by the self-actualizing individuals who became the motor of what became known as the new economy. Consumerism became the path to self-actualization. This was not only observed and practiced in the market for goods and services but politics too. New individualism was leading an attack on fifty years of government interference in people's lives. Well, we know where that led to now. Reagan/Thatcher ushered in an era of deregulation at the same time as the right-wingnut mantra chant became the only correct way to think: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Products and false idols allowed people to express what they felt was their individuality. "The generation that once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism now embraced it because it helped them to be themselves." (Do watch the whole series, this is the 3rd of 4 parts)



Middle America's recent embrace of the Tea Party and their populist slogans really isn't that surprising. Anything that allows the mind to shift the burden of blame away from itself is much easier than looking within, finding the errors of one's ways and correcting them. No matter how much they yell and scream about the 'Obamanation' that they see as the cause of their ills, there's no escaping the fact that it is in fact us who are too blame. We allowed the mass marketing gurus to convince us that the road to happiness could be found in the modern day houses of prayer, the strip malls, that sprung up all around them and powered the new economy for 30 years. As the economy grew however, our wages didn't keep pace, the median male worker earns less today than he did in 1980, so we adapted in order to be able to continue to sate our unlimited desire to buy new things. How? Women continued to stream into the workforce making the two-income family the norm. In 1966 only 24% of mothers with young children worked outside the home; by the late nineties that figure had reached 60%. When this wasn't enough, we all worked longer hours, and not just in America - by the middle of the oh-ohs (2000s) the average male worker was working 100 more hours a year than two decades previously (almost 2 more hours a week! - the typical female was working 200 more hours!). Is it any wonder that no one was able to notice what was happening around us? With less and less time people came to rely more and more on opinion instead of news. Why bother to read and learn about a subject when it's much easier and quicker to simply digest what your told to believe as quickly as possible while scanning your iPad/Phone/Blackberry for news and updates on Facebook. Oh internet, you had so much promise! The worse was yet to come for Jack and Jill Average though as they found they still couldn't keep up with the Jones' next door (or at least what all those Lifestyle's of the Rich and Famous types the boob tube kept telling them were so much better than they were). When Jack and Jill found they had charged up their Visa cards over the limit, they discovered they could use their homes as credit cards. Oh, the joy they had in going up the hill, as housing prices always went up, right? So nothing could ever go wrong, could it? From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes leading to a tumble that has broken more than our crown.

Meanwhile their corporate masters took a growing slice of a stagnant pie (untasty!). They allowed the post-Reagan acolytes to dismantle their only defense against this onslaught, the unions, first smashing the air-traffic controllers union in a display of might and power, then slowly removing market stability legislation that had been in place since the New Deal. Today, organized labour is down to about 7% of the private workforce. While the workers were losing their voice, the plutocrats were just finding theirs. With all the hoopla surrounding bankers' pay last year it was somehow missed that this isn't an anomaly but a trend. In 1970 US CEOs were paid 28 times more than the average worker; by the oh-ohs this figure was hovering around 500 to 1, peaking at 548. Do you think their jobs got twenty times more difficult, twenty times more stressful, twenty times more demanding or they did a twenty times better job? Ha! Cough! Yike! The fact is the Friedmans of finance, those gurus of GDP, gods of globalization, have used every crisis over the past few decades to tighten the screws a little bit tighter on Joe Sixpack (yes, Jack and Jill's neighbour whose home is also under water), reducing benefits, outsourcing labour and increasing the profit margin. The rise of lobbyists and PACs has meant that those with the most money have the loudest voice in forming public policy, ensuring that every piece of legislation, from health care to financial reform, will have one intended winner, not the people but the Masters of the Universe. The Citizen United Supreme Court ruling making corporations people will only serve to make a bad situation worse as money becomes not only speech but also the only words those in power will bother to listen to. There's a reason politicians are vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than those of modest means, they know who butters their bread. As Larry Bartels notes in his study on income inequality and political representation, what we are seeing is a "debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on".

Money poured into "think tanks" and "research centres" in an effort to mold a new and unchallenged economic model. Industrial dynasties have spent not insignificant parts of their fortunes on the conservative agenda. In the1980s , the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill Clinton. But the real wizards behind the curtain are the Kochs. Only the brothers know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than 48 million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, spent more than 28 million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a 120 million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Koch has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

Have you heard of the Cato Institute? Heritage Foundation? The Hudson Institute? The Independent Women’s Forum (seriously!)? The Mercatus Center (yeah, part of George Mason Univerity, publicly funded but fighting to end public funding)? Citizens For a Sound Economy? Citizens For the Environment (with no citizen membership)? Economic Education Trust or Triad Management? Remember the climategate kerfuffle over the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia. Wonder why formaldehyde isn't listed as a "known carcinogen to humans" substance by the EPA? Confused as to why “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community”? All are Koch created or funded, their main purpose helping ensure the maintenance of the status quo, the one that enriches them while raping the planet. Their activities and goals dovetail menacingly with the secret 1971 memo that then Virginia attorney Lewis Powell wrote two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors such as Dow Chemical and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society" - intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Convincing people to oppose action to save the world!

Um, did I mention so what? Why should we care that equality is not only increasing, but set to get worse even faster. Simple. Inequality is/was the major cause of the Great Recession. No, I'm not only pointing to the fact that income inequality was at similar levels just prior to the Great Depression and it's less powerfully named sibling, the Great Recession. After all, then I'd have commentators screaming that correlation is not causality. There's too much else going on here. Bank failures tend to coincide (notice the influence of financial deregulation) with times of growing income inequality. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality. Finally, inequality has a substantial negative impact on overall consumption by creating a drag on effective demand. This is intuitive as well as scientific as it is obvious that the rich spend a lower percentage of their income than the rest of us thus robbing the economy of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs. Worse yet, the rich don't necessarily spend their earnings and savings on and in their own country, being far more likely to spend it where they will get the highest returns, whether in a tax haven such as the Caymans or a holiday on the French Riviera. Remember that top 1% of earners? Well from 1980 to 2005 they took in more than 80% of the total increase in Americans' income. 80%! Leaving 20% to add to the spending power of the rest of us. Is there any wonder WalMart is so big?

You like graphs? We've got 'em!

A rising tide lifts all boats? What was once true is simply no longer the case. If you're born in rags, you're more likely to die in those same rags than those born in previous generations. Let's take a look at the most obviously method of perpetuating a plutocratic society. Estate taxes had been used for much of the century to help distribute wealth from top to bottom. There's no question that it should be everyone's right to pass on what they have created in their lifetime to their children. The question is how much is enough while trying to encourage a society in which members can move up and down the social ladder based on their knowledge, contribution and a little bit of luck. Once upon a time, this movement, let's call it social mobility, was fluid in the United States. Over the past 30 years however (why does that number keep coming up?) we have seen a dramatic calcification of this process. No matter, if you have a lot of money, you're happy with the new reality and therefore want your children to carry the mantle, after all meritocracy is so overrated. We need to eliminate the estate tax. Enter the right-wingnut spin doctor. Abracadabra, alakazam, poof - the estate tax becomes a 'death tax'. Fun with words! "No one likes a death tax! Let's get rid of it". And it was so, a one year moratorium that Republicans now want to make permanent, give to the rich and pass the costs on to the rest. Never mind that the estate tax was the most progressive and meritocratic tax in the country with the first $3.5 million being tax free impacting only the richest 0.3% of estates. We can always continue to misquote Alexis de Toqueville: "America is the best country in the world to be poor". That way we can delude ourselves into believing that Horatio Alger still exists. Sorry folks, "It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Finally, income inequality is one of the worst diseases a society can have. People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies - all people. In a project intended to solve the reason why health within a population gets progressively worse the further one moves down the social scale, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett accidentally made a discovery big enough to change political thinking. It is no wonder rightwingnuts have been so vehement in their condemnation and more fantastical than usual in their attempts to discredit Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. What they found was that in states and countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children's educational performance and literacy scores are worse. Unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum having the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes and the resultant best record of psycho-social health. Those nations with the widest gulf between rich and poor come out worse and have the most health and social problems - Portugal, Great Britain and of course the United States of America. Oh, it's not only the poor who suffer from the negative effects, everyone does. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal societies.

Instead of facing reality and looking in the mirror, the rich will attempt to keep the the status quo while trying to maintain the belief of the plebs in the false gods of market liberalization and tax cuts by stoking the populist anger at the heart of groups such as the Tea Party. Their success has been breathtaking, twisting the truth to suit their purposes. From climate change to death panels and tax policy, misinformation has been the key to their success in controlling the media's agenda. Take the economic stimulus package, instead of acknowledging its limited success, limited by the fact it was too small, the right-wingnuts have managed to turn it into a dirty word. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it reduced unemployment by somewhere between 0.8 and 1.7 per cent in recent months. Economists at various Wall Street houses suggest that it boosted GDP by more than two per cent. And a recent study by Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, economists from, respectively, Moody’s and Princeton, argues that, in the absence of the stimulus, unemployment would have risen above eleven per cent and that GDP. would have been almost half a trillion dollars lower. Yet polls show that a sizable majority of voters think that the stimulus either did nothing to help or actively hurt the economy, and most people say that they’re opposed to a new stimulus plan. The hostility has numerous sources. Many voters conflate the stimulus bill with the highly unpopular bailouts of the banking sector and the auto industry; Republicans have done a good job of encouraging such misconceptions, as when Representative Mike Pence, of Indiana, referred to the “bailout stimulus.”

Oops!

No, it is much easier to attack and criticize than reflect and offer solutions. The battle over the upcoming expiry of the Bush tax cuts will be instructive as to the direction America chooses to go. Does it want to continue to perpetuate a broken system, one in which California has built only one new college since 1984, but 21 new prisons, or will she decide to heal herself by implementing policies to guide us back to sanity. Things don't look good with money not only pouring in from special interest groups but ever more staggering amounts are also being spent by candidates themselves. At times I find myself wanting to see the Tea Party lead the Republicans to victory in the mid-term elections and ride the wave of misinformation through 2012 to usher in the era of Palin just to see how bad it gets but I know we'd all be swept away by the ensuing tsunami. Instead of letting ourselves be tricked into chasing bogeymen who are figments of our imagination we need to go about fixing the problems that we're faced with. The economic progress made over the past couple of centuries since the days of Adam Smith are undeniable, truly a goose laying golden eggs. Greed leads us to want to slice it open and grab all the gold today. A tool is only as good as its user, and capitalism, no matter how superior an economic system, is just that, a tool. We have to remember the users here are little different than monkeys and we all know what happens when monkeys are given tools.

From Nothingness to Everythingness

Can a decade really be nothing? One can always find bright spots, diamonds in the rough, hope for the future, right? After all, it could've never been if those Millennium Bug doom sayers we're right 10 years ago (just imagine my disappointment, waking up with a massive hangover on a beach on the equator in Ecuador, learning that the civilized world hadn't crashed down). While we may have misunderestimated the truthiness of so much we were led to believe, pwned by the meme that bling would bring us happiness, making us look like n00bs I feel some kind of recognition of the success of just having the decade is in order. Therefore today we'll look at the flip-side of nothingness, the top ten everythingnesses of the decade.

10. We haven't blown ourselves up yet, or otherwise completed self-annihilated. It's true, Kim Jong Il blew up a couple little firecrackers, but with over 20,000 warheads in their combined arsenals, Russia and the US could have caused a lot more damage. Negotiations are ongoing to replace the START treaty, which expired earlier this month, with a sitting US president who has stated his desire to see "a world without nuclear weapons". As was the case on July 31, 1991 when the original treaty was signed, the timing of a new agreement could help make the world a safer place. The original treaty was signed during the break up of the USSR and was instrumental in ensuring the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were completely disarmed. Today, in order to have any leverage in negotiations with Iran and North Korea or any other nation, sharp reductions in the numbers of warheads in the world are necessary.

At the same time pressure must be brought to bear upon the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Article 6 of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons states that each nation already possessing nuclear weapons "undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear-arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control". A strong commitment to reduce current warheads coupled with internationally agreed bans on nuclear tests and on the production of weapons-grade fissile material are desperately needed to avoid seeing the number of nuclear-armed states double in the next decade.

9. We not only speak in terms of trillions for dollars of taxpayer money given to banks but also volts thanks to those folks at CERN. A project that became more famous for it's end of the world potential and chronic problems seems to have finally hit its stride. They've spent the better part of the last 15 years and $10 billion dollars building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom-smasher, a 27-kilometre long tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border. The goal of the project is no less than learning what the universe was like at the time of the Big-Bang and discovering what has become known as the God Particle, or the Higgs Boson, theoretically the provider of 70% of the mass of the universe. While no big discoveries have been made yet, they did manage to become the world's most powerful particle accelerator by accelerating its twin proton beams to 1.18 TeV (or 1.18 trillion electron volts).

It's been a strange ride for those wacky scientists over at CERN. The LHC's official start up a little over a year ago was accompanied by as many stories about the end of the universe as the beginning. Some went so far as to try to block it's start-up in court. But something funny happened on the road to discovery. Something kept going wrong. Ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture it have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons. In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird.

All this got some deep thinkers deep thinking. In the same way that a coin couldn't keep coming up heads forever, it would be impossible for the LHC to keep breaking down for more and more absurd reasons unless something else was at work. In a twist on the Quantum suicide experiment, the theory is that the particle they are trying to create can travel back through time and undo the universe in such a way that the particle cannot be created. Or put another way, the fact that we exist now meant that the machine wouldn't work. So each time they tried to start it up something would happen to stop them. First a busted magnet then a stray bird, next a lightning strike or falling airplane waste; each time its stopped the series of events that stopped it would become more and more improbable. Alas, with the LHC now showing signs of fulfilling its destiny, perhaps it will disprove time travel at the same time it offers a glimpse of the beginnings of the universe.

8. Of course the LHC wouldn't have been as securely financed if the European Union experiment hadn't similarly moved forward a couple of unsteady steps, now featuring a boatload of new countries and a shiny new currency to boot. Up to 27 countries now and it's starting to look like it won't be one of the new countries this decade, 12 in all, that'll bring it down. Unknown to those member who joined this decade, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta in 2004 and lastly Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the Trojan Horse had already been deposited.

Instead of trying to enter Troy with a huge wooden horse, the Greeks have built a mountain of debt that threatens to collapse the grand experiment. Of course it might not be the Greeks that bring about the unions demise, but being a Eurozone country, (as in using the Euro as currency, the new ones aren't, except for Cyprus, Slovenia and Slovakia, and of course neither is Great Britain, at least 'til the pound completely tanks) their imminent bond default is sure to cause some kind of domino effect. The biggest obstacle to a solution, besides the idiots being too in debt, is that EU members can't give bailouts to each other, only banks. Well, I guess they could bail out non-EU countries, doubt that's covered in the constitution. Added to the financial woes (Ireland, Italy and even Spain aren't all that secure at the moment either) is the specter of religious infighting, from abortion fights in the European court of human rights to crucifixes in school classrooms and of course the whole Turkey question. Oh yeah, the non-democratic constitution forced on us is rather off-putting as well. How did the EU get on this list again?

7. I'm not in Yemen anymore. Having spent part of the last decade there I think I got out while the getting was good. Hey it's my blog, so seeing as I chose to wind up in Poland, perhaps the only EU member to have avoided recession heading into the next decade, that's at least something, if not everything. Seems like the Yemeni government is in a world of hurt in both the north, going so far as to spill into the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and south, where only a couple decades back they were independent of Sana'a. To make matters worse, America seems to have been reminded that Yemen is the home of al-Queda. Things have gotten worse by the day, to the point where some are calling it a third front of the 'war on terror'. Let's see, we've got a slow-motion oil spill, another slow-motion build-up to war, the slow-motion takeover of the world economy by the banksters, the slow-motion demise of the dollar, the slow-motion loss of national powers to the EU. Today I'll add one more - the slow-motion slide to a failed state. Yep, seems like the world may be left without a country beginning with 'Y' if things continue down this path in Yemen.

For years it has been seen as a safe haven for terrorists as most Americans would remember Yemen as the site of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole. Travellers know it as a place to avoid in case of kidnapping. Saudi's have known it as a place to steal land from to gain access to black gold. Somali's as a safe haven from complete lawlessness. Yemen, in it's current form hasn't even been around for 2 decades, having seen the North and formerly communist South, centred in Aden, unite May 22, 1990. Twenty unsteady years later and it appears to be coming apart from top to bottom. Up north, fighting has even spilled into, heaven forbid, the Kingdom of oil, the Bush's buddies, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's were forced to retaliate after incursions by Houthi rebels, named after their leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, into their territory. Many fear they are being supported by the Iranians in an attempt to set up a Shi'ite state or perhaps just a Yemeni version of Hezbollah, a permanent thorn in the side of the oily kingdom. 

The US got nervous enough for Obama to order some of those pinpoint accurate cruise missile strikes earlier this month, you know, the kind that only kill around 100 innocent civilians. The situation has led to yet another international refugee crisis that few seem to care about, except for getting the last remaining Jews out of the area. Oh yeah, plus the country is sure to run out of water soon as it currently diverts more than half of this scarce resource to the raising of the national addiction even during drought. Yep, gotta keep the populace and soldiers high on qat all day, otherwise President Ali Abdullah Saleh might have a real uprising on his hands. Now the drumbeat of the war on terror is emanating from the US as it seems Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Nigerian suspect who tried to ignite explosive chemicals with a syringe sewn into his underwear aboard a US flight, may have been equipped and trained by an al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, AQAP. The US was already hunting Anwar al-Aulaqi, the radical Yemeni American cleric linked to the gunman charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., Nov. 5. Welcome to drone attack mayhem Yemen.

6. We've set the table for the world's next superpower. Ha! I can just see you rolling your eyes saying, "just what I need to read right now, another bit about China displacing the USA". Well, ha, ha, again. It's not China, in fact it's not even a country yet. "Whaaaaa? Shane's on the crazy juice again it seems." Nope, wrong again. Well, no more than usual at least. OK, here it is. Greenland. Yep, you heard me right, put all your chips on green for the next spin of the economic roulette wheel because folks, they've struck it rich in rare earth metals.

Oh boy, where to start. The misnomer 'Greenland'? How is it that Greenland is an island while Australia is a continent? What on earth is a rare earth metal? Shouldn't 'earth' be capitalized'? How can it be a superpower if it's not even a country? Questions, questions. First, yeah, it's a bit weird naming it green when 85% is covered in ice, apparently it was the first swampland in Florida type of real estate ploy, pulled off by Erik the Red back in 986. Second, here. Third, and finally we get to the gist of the story. Rare earth metals are:

A collection of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, namely scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanoids. Scandium and yttrium are considered rare earths since they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanoids and exhibit similar chemical properties.

Fourth, no. And fifth, well, in case you missed it, Greenland is on the fast track to full-fledged nation status.

Fortunately, only questions two and five need to be examined closer today, and aren't we lucky, China will play an important part to the story. You see, while rare earth metals aren't really in fact so rare (another misnomer, great), about 93% of the world's supply is currently mined in China. Why do we care? For the simple reason that they are becoming more and more useful in today's technologies. They are essential in the production of smartphones, hybrid cars (the electric motor in a Prius requires 2 to 4 pounds of neodymium), precision weapons, catalytic converters, superconductors and low-energy light bulbs. China mines 99% of the output of the two most needed elements for these applications, dysprosium and terbium. The timing of the recent Greenland find couldn't have been more important as only a couple months ago China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a report which called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. The report, titled "Rare Earths Industry Development Plan, 2009-2015" also said other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs. Even crazier, Deng Xiaoping, then China's leader, gave us all fair warning as far back as 1992 saying, "There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China".

Denmark has ruled Greenland since 1776, only conceding limited home rule in 1979. It's been a long road towards independence and I'm sure that the irony of the fact that the melting ice has made the latest steps possible isn't lost on many. Remember, we're talking about the biggest island in the world here, so there's lots of good stuff being revealed by the retreating ice. Gold has been discovered and is already being mined, although so far at a loss, and there are deposits of other minerals such as zinc that could be exploited, and don't forget about the discovery of a 2.4-carat diamond at Garnet lake in west Greenland. Oil giants are negotiating licences to explore blocks of the coastline covering thousands of square miles. Although there are no proven sources, the US Geological Survey estimates there are 31.4 billion barrels of oil off the northeast coast alone. Greenland’s west coast may hold more oil than the North Sea, but harsh conditions could push the cost of extraction as high as $50 a barrel. Oh yeah, melting ice means water and therefore hydro-electricity. The vast lakes and melting ice cap provide enormous potential for electricity free from fossil fuel; in total Greenland holds 10% of the world's freshwater reserves. And now the discovery of rare earth metals.

All this has made independence a near reality as of June 22 of this year, when fireworks and celebrations in the capital, Nuuk, marked the latest step. Six months after 75% of voters (from a total population of 56,000 scattered over an area almost the size of Europe) said 'yes' to claiming control over all areas but defence and foreign policy. Under the self-rule agreement, Greenlanders will be recognized as a distinct people with the right to self-determination and Greenlandic will become the territory's official language. That means they now have full control of their natural resources which will be key to weening the country off the DKr3.4 billion ($590m) annual grant from Denmark which pays for public services like education and health care. Copenhagen and Nuuk have agreed to split profits earned from natural resources. For every two Danish crowns that Greenland earns, Copenhagen will reduce its subsidies by one crown. Greenland additionally will have control over its own justice and police affairs starting next June. As part of the new home-rule agreement, Copenhagen will also consult Nuuk when making foreign affairs and security decisions concerning the island. It may take a bit of time to rise to superpower status, but it's definitely no longer an option to buy Greenland outright, as America tried to do shortly after World War II. In any case, the going rate would be much higher than the $100 million the US offered the Danish government 60 years ago.

5. Americans, as individuals, are actually saving money as a country right now. Yep, maybe the crisis has taught the majority something as the rate, which subtracts what we collectively spend from what we make and then expresses the result in percentage terms, turned positive this year and was 4.4 percent in October. In 2009, it has ranged from a low of 3.4 percent in February to a high of 6.4 percent in May, which was the highest figure since 1993. Quite a turnaround from 2005 when the rate actually fell below zero! Alas, I fear it may be too little too late, like a heroine addict who just can't help himself, the country has dug a hole that may be impossible to get out of. Just last week the US Congress voted to temporarily raise the government debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion, but will need to do it again by February. Now, the US faces a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal. Like the smack addict, they've painted themselves into a corner by shortening the due date on the bills to lower the rate and will now have over $2 trillion in debt coming due in the coming months in addition to the estimated $1.5 trillion in additional debt financing they will need this year. It's no longer just the harbingers of doom prophecising the demise of the dollar, it's Greenspan himself, or at least Greenspan-Guidotti. Remember what happened to the economy when confidence was lost in the banks, try not to imagine what'll happen this year when the same thing happens to governments. How is this good again? Oh yeah, if you bought gold when it was only $1000/oz.

4. Panem et Circenses. Yeah, I know we have to put up with reality TV, but the oh-ohs (2000's, get it? mine, called it) also gave us tons of entertainment. From sports to film, books to music and some video games in between, we've been given some tasty pablum to trigger enough endorphins to keep us docile. Authors such as Orphan Pamuk, Zadie Smith and Khaled Hosseini have woven magical yarns. The Lord of the Rings trilogy wowed even the non Frodofiles on the big screen and we were treated to some bonus Bill Murray's genius and Amelie, even if it was impossible to get that soundtrack out of our head. The cure would've been Coldplay for many, but we also got some cool tunes outta OutKast, Daft Punk and Radiohead. Beyonce was pretty good to look at too. Throw in a Led Zeppelin reunion and the death of the King of Pop and music was covered. Sports team of the decade? The French national football team and Zinedine Zidane went from Euro and World Cup champions to headbutters and handballers, while Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona and AC Milan battled for club supremacy over here and probably those pesky Patriots of New England across the pond. Though I'm sure Red Sox fans would say otherwise having broken the 'Curse of the Bambino'.

3. Science is still pretty cool (and weird). Fifteen years after its discovery, Ardipithecus ramidus or Ardi, the oldest known skeleton of a putative human ancestor, was finally unveiled in 11 papers in print and online in October. The discoverers of the 4.4-million-year-old fossil proposed that she was a new kind of hominin, the family that includes humans and our ancestors but not the ancestors of other living apes. Another step towards the missing link, I know there isn't one, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees but rather through a series of progenitors starting from a distant common ancestor that once occupied the ancient forests of the African Micoene, but it's closer than Ida. This past decade also brought the mapping of us, the Human Genome Project, water missions on Mars and less spectacularly, our own moon, stem cells, commercial space flights, an explosion of planets, of the exo kind outside our galaxy and a new dwarf of our own, poor Pluto. While NASA's space faring potential is set to expire and then hopefully be replaced by Ares, interest in space has slowly been shifting to the private sphere as we saw the first space tourists while Virgin Galactic has inched closer to reality.

2. People Power. Yep, I'll throw the social media thing into this witches brew of good and evil, after all this is supposed to be about everythingness, and if it's anything, social media is everything these days. After all we started the last decade with a dot-com bubble and we ended it with the word 'unfriend' being the Oxford American Dictionary word of the year. Twitter brought us the Green Revolution in Iran, Facebook connected us with our ninth-grade girlfriend, Wikipedia told us everything else, Google not only became a verb it has also become as powerful as Goldman Sachs, and of course blogs and the rest of the internet has empowered us to such an extent that we, an all-knowing populace will be able to make informed decisions about our future.

Huh? What's that you say? People seem to be more interested in retweeting what music their friends are listening to and besides, it doesn't seem like the Green Revolution has brought the Iranian Revolution to an end, I guess it's tough when a mere 0.027% of the population use Twitter; Earth to Gordon Brown, Twitter cannot prevent another Rwanda. Your Facebook wall has become more important than your bedroom wall in expressing who your identity, becoming a black hole for your time, mind and ego. Wikipedia and Google are conspiring to make us stupid. Blogs have provided a forum for the semi-literate to spew their hate while the internet has heralded the demise of journalism. Instead of increasing the spectrum of ideas that users are exposed to, most choose to instead limit their sources of information to a narrow group of like-minded writers. With the huge problems the world is facing right now, progressives should be in position to move society forward, yet we still find ourselves in dangerous times as the bill for cleaning up the mess is still coming in. It may be forgotten that most of the problems of today, ranging from income inequality and lack of mobility, excessive debt, chronic underemployment to inaction on global warming and involvement in intractable wars are all problems to be laid on the doormat of the right-wing nutters. The disinformation experts are still spreading lies attempting to obfuscate the matter of who's to blame and seldom suggesting sane solutions; witness the rise of the warbloggers beating the drums of war, birthers trying to discredit a new president, death panel fear mongers, GW/CC deniers and their ilk.

Yet, it seems that all is not lost. We're still in early days, but there are some positive signs with former apostates of evil getting the message. Reagonomics architect Bruce Bartlett derides the Republicans one note cry of tax cuts. David Frum, who co-wrote with Richard Perle the standard neocon foreign-policy text, An End to Evil, wrote "I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure". David Brooks has disowned Sarah Palin. Ronald Bailey saw the light on global warming. With the coming challenges to be faced by the world on climate and globalization and to the US specifically, spiralling debt, an aging population, intractable conflicts, the old answers will no longer solve the problems. No, the internet didn't cause stupidity, it just facilitates its dissemination. Imagine if the status quo had these intertubes back in the day to spread the gossip of the evil that introducing child labour laws, enfranchising women, creating social security and introducing clean-air regulation would bring about the end of the world.

1. Hope. Not the kind served up by the Barack Obama show, but the real kind, the one America voted into the White House. Sure, Time magazine has called the last 10 years the decade from hell, after all it led off with a stolen election in the home of modern democracy, saw a dot-com bust, wound through 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq only to be topped off with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. While this may look bad from an American perspective, it could be good for the rest of the world. Maybe it's a good thing that the last decade was so bad, coming just in time to save us from our own hubris. Perhaps we'll learn to look to ourselves instead of the stars and stripes as it becomes more and more apparent that its empire is in the stage of decline. At the very least, we should start to get the idea that we've going about things the wrong way for awhile now. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil”, it seems the soil of our beliefs needs to be changed.

We began the decade believing we, by that I mean the west, by that I mean America, were on the verge of truly becoming Masters of the Universe. Never ending economic growth, unchallengeable peace, limitless progress in all fields were within our grasp. Instead, the Dow opened the decade around 11,600 and will close around 10,500. Meanwhile, the BRIC nations and other emerging markets zoomed ahead. Cave-dwelling clerics now seem to pull the strings in a global game of whack-a-mole, a war on terror that has us in Iraq and Afghanistan with new fronts constantly threatening to open. While the US and to a lesser extent NATO fights, the Chinese are doing business, investing more in oil extraction in Iraq than the US while also becoming the highest source of tax revenue for the Afghan government. Maybe it's a good thing we've learned that our heroes, from Barry Bonds to Tiger Woods, weren't the ideals we should all aspire to be; that the market isn't infallible, sometimes we do need to be saved from ourselves, or at least Bernie Madoff; or that Elliot Spitzer - even Barack Obama - aren't going to be the ones to do it. Most articles looking back at the past decade either do so scornfully or confusedly, lamenting that we don't even have consensus on a name yet.

Once again, I say the oh-ohs, for while the past decade sucked, at least we recognize it, which is really the first step to fixing it. We've spent the last 10 years caught up in reality TV while being blissfully unaware of the illusions marketed to us from Iraq to the balloon boy. The fact is, from genetics to the environment, we are on the cusp of having the power to control or destroy our world in many novel ways, so it's a damn good thing we've been given a slap in the face that may finally wake us from our slumber. After all, the decade will end on a full moon and being the second one of the month, it's a blue moon, seems stranger things have happened?

The Decade of Nothingness

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;

         -Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act III, Scene 2

I heard, or rather read, the decade that's now coming to a close referred to as the aught's the other day. Looking back at the disastrous past ten years makes we think we need a more descriptive moniker. The Brits say noughties but maybe we should have something with zero in it seeing as the world hasn't put any points on the scoreboard over the decade, I guess the double zeros would do, or double oh's, the oh-oh's. (Is it the teens next before the 20's, the tens?) For a variety of reasons no one seems to even try to understand the problems we face anymore, instead they rely on some talking head's opinion or blogger's spin. Ten years ago we had the Kyoto Protocol, hopes for a final Mideast peace agreement and an economic boom with no end in sight. How did it all go so wrong? Fear could be one explanation. Fear that our beliefs are wrong, fear that our lifestyles are destroying our world and fear of the other. Fear, the old fight or flight, paralyzes and poisons as it confuses, robbing us of our self-control. Most frustrating of all, faced with the triple threat of climate, finance and terrorism, instead of focusing on facts and solutions, the rhetoric of fear has driven us onto a self-destructive path through lies and misinformation.

The decade of fear brought many global threats, from SARS and swine flu to Jenny McCarthy and Osama Bin Laden. The shadow of 9/11 pushed terrorism into our everyday lives with threat level updates and two intractable, open-ended conflicts. While acknowledging that we were dealing with a new kind of enemy, our leaders responded in the traditional manner, war and increased defence spending. The jingoistic fear factory pumped up the rhetoric as Dubya and his cronies fed a nation's desire for revenge with the Bush Doctrine which imperceptibly altered an entire country's mindset, guiding a bloodthirsty nation to war.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

-Otto von Bismarck

In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the window that opens between a shock and analysis, a disorientation gap where a new set of beliefs find fertile ground. When planes hit the WTC on September 11th, 2001, that window was blown wide open and a new narrative was created. First in Afghanistan, the "With Us or Against Us" doctrine provided the justification for not only pursuing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but also for deposing the Taliban. If you ever wonder why no one knows the reason we're still in Afghanistan, don't worry you're not alone, that was the idea. While Condi Rice first came up with the "no distinction" idea, it was Darth Cheney who first started calling it the "Bush Doctrine" in public. Blurring the lines between terrorists and states that harbour them was a propaganda coup. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."

It wasn't until the anthrax and smallpox threat hysteria broke out that the justification for war in Iraq achieved critical mass. With a leap of faith, and a huge dose of fabrication (think WMD's and "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."), Iraq was linked with every terror plot ever hatched against the US, giving birth to the war of preemption. Even today, many would link Saddam and Osama in their minds as one and the same threat. Only now, after Obama has picked up his Nobel Peace Prize, do we realize the extent to which the public have become disoriented. Instead of seeing the honour as an incentive to change and repudiate the disastrous actions of the last decade, the US press and public responded like a wounded animal, lashing out, forcing Obama's hand into escalating a war he cannot win.

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We've entered the truly bizarro world where putting an end date on a war is wrong after having wasted more that 8 years ensuring there can be no resolution to the conflict. The cognitive dissonance involved when claiming to promote liberal democracy on the one hand while supporting a corrupt leader who stole an election with the other at a cost of a million dollars per soldier must be painful (yes, 30,000 extra troops will cost about $30 billion a year). I guess it's nothing having fundamentally shifted from the knowledge that torture was wrong with even Reagan signing the UN Convention on Torture to a society that produces Abu Ghraib and believing torture can now be justified and certainly not prosecutable.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist
-Warren Buffett

The efficacy of fear as a manipulator has been further tested in the financial world, selling us the need to put capitalism on permanent life support. Taking a page out of the terrorism playbook, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson played a little game of fear tag team with Geithner, Bernanke, Bush, the IMF and Warren Buffet to pull off the greatest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the rich in history. Somewhere between $4.7 and $23.7 trillion in the US alone. Buffet, the world’s sometimes richest man, threw his weight behind the programme in order to avoid "an economic Pearl Harbour", then going further, saying "...we were at the brink of something that would have made anything that’s happened in financial history pale...I’m not saying the Paulson plan will eliminate the problem but it’s absolutely necessary, in my view, to avoid going off the precipice." Wasn't there a line about fear during the real Depression, yeah, some Roosevelt quote, er, what was it again? Oh yeah, "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself". How adorable, so folksy, but then again, that was another time. A time when instead of handing the economy over to those who ruined it, rules and policies were implemented to try to ensure it didn't happen again.

This time, normal legislative procedures were bypassed as congressmen were warned of civil unrest, martial law and stock market collapse if they failed to pass the bank bailout. Never mind the true cause of the failure of the economic model, an over-concentration of wealth and power brought about by globalization, tax-policy and focus on short term profits. Instead of fixing the inequity brought about by the failed policies of the past, the world was hoodwinked into transferring trillions over to those who caused the problem. A decade that began with the internet bubble and merger between AOL and Time Warner is ending with their quiet divorce and the entire financial world on life support. The warnings were there all along if we'd of just paid attention and connected the dots from WorldCom to Enron, Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, Tyco to Parmalat (a list of corporate scandals in 2000-2002 only!), putting power in the hands of the few as the world rushed to embrace the madness of the markets. Instead, every action seemed to reinforce bad behaviour; as CEO pay and bonuses grew, taxes were sliced for the privileged few. Those left behind saw their power shrink along with their wages until a breaking point was reached, inequality not seen since the Great Depression. The top 1% of earners now earn a higher percentage of income than anytime since 1928 while income mobility, the chances of being born poor and becoming rich, has shrunk to pre-Horacio Alger levels. Somehow though there isn't enough evidence to convince the true corporate shills, those Ayn Rand dreamers, who wholeheartedly believe in the superiority of the rich, that their financial pyramid is all an illusion. Fear of collapse seems to be enough to keep us all chasing our tails.

"They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
- Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Fear has been the sales tool of the decade. It's worked great for the military industrial complex, selling us two wars. It's worked even better convincing us that we need to have rich, large, powerful corporations controlling our lives. Sadly, we can be fooled into killing foreigners and giving money to bankers but we can't be 'tricked' by those pesky fear-mongering scientists into any kind of real action to prevent a global catastrophe resulting from climate change. It's become clear that this marketing tool doesn't always work as witnessed by the dismal failure to sell the world on the need to save it from ourselves. We've been inundated with stories of melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps, sinking islands and polar bears eating their cubs for the past decade in an attempt to convince the world that we're hurtling towards disaster. So why has shock and awe environmentalism failed so miserably? Why does it seem more important to the deniers that Al Gore may profit from green energy than Goldman Sachs profited from the bailout or Blackwater and Haliburton from the wars of preemption? How can we justify subsidizing an oil based economy that enriches kings in Saudi Arabia over investing in new technologies at home to lessen our reliance on others and spark a real economic recovery? Why is Obama labeled as 'dithering' for delaying a decision to send young men to die in a futile effort while the reality is he's playing the part of the prototypical Danish procrastinator Hamlet in his native land, trying to sell us some more smoke and mirrors wrapped in hope and change and carbon trading, driving us all to the inevitable tragic conclusion of the play?

God, time and money. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims to be "doing God's work while the same deity guided Dubya "'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did.". Meanwhile, those pesky scientists are once again questioning the divine by saying that man may actually be influencing his environment. Typical human arrogance, thinking we hold god-like influence over our planet. Fear also fails here due to the time scale, to work it cannot be an implied threat of something too far in the future, or people will lose interest. This is especially true as climate gets mixed up with weather all too easily in people's minds and there are too many cold winter days between now and the tipping point for people to feel any urgency. Given enough time and resources one can convince the majority of folks just about anything. The most remarkable aspect of the deniers success is that they've convinced a large segment of the population that they are really smart because they can recite the rhetoric the global plutocracy has tricked them into believing instead of actually believing in science. Such beauties as: "Remember global cooling", "Medieval Warm Period", "No warming since 1998", "Faulty evidence", "Solar energy output", "Plants need CO2", "Water Vapour is a greenhouse gas"; most have truth to them, but all have been misused and disseminated to the public in order to confuse the masses.

All the while the ultimate fear card is played over and over. "Climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth". It's here that the real irony starts to hit home. Not only can sharp reductions in emissions be attained with limited impact on growth at low costs, but an agreement in Copenhagen could have been the recipe for real economic recovery. But here's the real kicker. The fear factory may have already cost itself its place at the top of the global pecking order by refusing to see the obvious. Climate change feedback loops are self-reinforcing cycles; problems that echo off each other and quickly spiral out of control. Here’s how it goes: Melting tundra in Siberia releases methane into the atmosphere, which raises the water temperature, which melts sea ice, causing more solar heat to be absorbed by the oceans. As the Arctic has been melting and America has been acting the part of a 2-year old who can close his eyes and make the world go away, Russia and China have put themselves in position to reap the resource rewards, a sort of global power feedback loop. The last lie has been that we'll run out of cheap oil soon enough forcing the market to solve the problem for us. But the effects of a warmer planet are not only making it easier to dig up northern Alberta, it's also thawing the cover off of the final poisoned payload. Not only will we be sailing across the pole, a quarter of the world's mineral wealth will also be accessible, ensuring that we'll keep burning until we're truly burning. At the same time, China has positioned herself to lead the world, if not through some kind of carbon treaty, then she has at least bought up enough of Africa and South America to feed herself during the coming droughts and to maintain a steady supply of resources. Droughts? Let's not even get started on freshwater.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought 

-Shakespeare Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Put it all together with the latest "Climategate" (nice name-calling propaganda technique wouldn't you say?) scandal involving the hacked emails and public confidence in climatology is probably at its lowest point in at least the past decade. The facts are simple though. The planet is warming; for 150 years we've known that CO2, even in low concentrations, acts as a greenhouse gas; man is contributing to the increase in CO2. No, we don't know for certain that we are driving the warmth, but as then-Vice President Dick Cheney said when faced with concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response." Well Dick, I'd say that we're at least 1% sure about us playing a part in global warming, so, shouldn't we respond?

Cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? About $1 trillion to date
Cost of the financial bailout? About $5 trillion
Cost to save the planet? You guessed it...priceless