The question of regressing consciously to a simpler way of life that is less resource based is not a simple one, but the resource limits of inhabiting a planet that is a closed system, except for sunlight and cosmic debris, and the constraints that those limits impose must be part of our present agenda.
The abrupt climate change we are presently experiencing a small taste of is indicative of resource use that is out of balance with the planetary processes that normally provide an invisible free lunch.
Pollution is feed back: it says you are generating ‘waste’ at a rate that the planet can’t handle within time frames that will sustain your ‘standard’ of living.
The ‘west’ – mainly the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan – have fostered a capitalism that is not sustainable. To allow this model to be transmitted to China, India, Brazil and others is the madness of our times.
The present economic correction is a small indication of how crazy it has all become.
The market as GOD is a fundamentalism that must be countered. Genuine human satisfaction must be an inherent part of any new structure that rises from the present ashes. Profit must take second place to satisfying real needs.
The market must be constrained and the propaganda of the free market must be exposed for the lie that it is. The life created for most by the constant consumption of useless objects is pitiful.
Europe, due to its sensible safety net can better weather the storm that is still in its early stages. The USA is naked and bankrupt – impaled upon a greed that seems infinite as one reads Lewis’s “The End” and other reports from the frontlines.
Reflect on Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton and then think about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears and you will sense how degraded we have become.
Turn off your TV, let your cell phone relax and above all be radical in this time of change: STOP CONSUMING.

Take this recent joke:

Doctor, I have a problem.
Where does it hurt?
Just give me some medicine.
But, I must examine you.
Do you want me to die?
Here’s a blank prescription form.
How many $billions should I make it out for?

All the effort to rebalance the economy has so far been absurd, as we don’t know how large the problem is, as we have been taking the word of the greedy liars who created the problem.
To get the real data, we must nationalize the banks. If not now, when?

“Say it ain’t so Joe, Alex, Mark, Barry, etc.”

9/11 was minor compared to the harm that the bankers have done to both American reality and American power. Yet those even thought, wrongly, to be associated with 9/11 have been the victims of rendition (sent to another country to be tortured) tortured at Gitmo, held without charge for years and then when determined, grudgingly, to be innocent, deprived of the right to compensation by the use of a court precedent that has been shown to be based on a flagrant lie.
Bankers are crying about bonuses when they ought to be stripped naked and beaten through the streets of New York City. They have totally failed to carry out their basic fiduciary responsibilities and they and those who allowed torture to sully the name of America must be publicly exposed and punished.
We can only move on when the past is exposed and sunlight is applied to those who treated the constitution as a document of convenience instead of being the bedrock upon which the nation rests.
The crimes that have shamed the USA must be exposed. Bi-partisanship must not be extended to criminals.
It is [hypocrisy]² to arrest and convict a thief when those who stole our economy and good name go free. W, Cheney and company ran the country like a kleptocracy. They must be held accountable for their deeds.

I was a consultant, official and unofficial, for a decade at the highest levels of corporate America. I would only agree to consult and give my opinion when I had looked at all the facts.
You can’t turn around a bad situation, if you do not know what the facts are. That is particularly true in our economic crisis. Money given to a bank that is technically bankrupt is lost money.
The entire top tier of the economy, fuelled by greed and abetted by a sleeping president and financial rating agencies that ought to be dissolved, has created the worst financial crisis in capitalist history.
It is unique, so the Barnackes, the Geithners, the Sommers, who are very intelligent men, are using tools that may not apply to 2009: they are generals fighting the last war. See the incredible debacle of WWI, if you need an example.
All that said as preamble, the facts are not known, so most of the money so far allocated may be money thrown down a rathole.
We must know the exact financial situation of all of our large banks and financial institutions. Until we do, any money given to them would better be distributed by wind from the top of the Empire State Building.
We may have to nationalize the banking system to do this. Consider AIG, given ca. $170 billion, now selling $.43 share and bankrupt again.
To give money to G.M. is madness. It is still managed by those who created the crisis. Let it die. Creative destruction, perhaps the end of capitalism, but the image of Mrs. Clinton holding out the begging bowl to the Chinese tells the real story.

We are beholden to the Chinese and USA Hyperpower has become USA Beggar. Brought to our knees by men who must be exposed and punished for their lack of fiduciary responsibility.

“’One of the shortcomings of American society’, another billionaire financier George Soros, has written, is ‘an excessive admiration of success – measured in monetary terms – to the detriment of more intrinsic values. The buffet cult epitomizes the shortcoming.’”Richard Davenport-Hines quoting Alice Shroeder, The Snowball.

The economic system that is currently very ill (terminal?) and that rules a great deal of the planet is the most vicious economic system that I have encountered as it has an implacable ruler, profit, and only one aim, more.
If one wishes to learn about the system that is at present making life so difficult, there are three basic books to read: Adam Smith’s “The wealth of nations”, Marx’s “Das Kapital”, and Keynes’ “General Theory”. Most other economic works are major or minor commentaries on these three giants.
In the midst of such a major failure of our economic system, it is difficult for those struggling to keep the system afloat, to think about real fundamentals and the possibility of reconstituting our economies on a different basis but as the Talmud says: if not now, when.
It is not possible for someone unschooled in economics to suddenly come up with a new system that works: that is not how social change comes about nor do I have such a goal in mind. What I wish to do is review the three giants and make suggestions while the turmoil is upon us and the suggestions can find fertile ground.
The need to go back to basics is obvious as has been the inability of those “in charge” to grasp the extent of what our unregulated greed has loosed upon so many innocent lambs.

I have watched, more closely than normal, for economics is not a major interest, the continuing failure of the pundits to grasp the seriousness of the situation and the consequent failure to act, producing a present situation of such instability that what we are facing is much larger than a recession and could easily dwarf the 30s, in spite of 60 years of “greater” knowledge and supposed tools (quantitative easing for one which involves the Federal Reserve trading created money for toxic assets, thus allowing a bank to meet its reserve requirement and theoretically to lend money and ease the situation) that have not been available in the past.
Spending (consuming) is the definition of modern life and from a historical perspective very recent in the USA and even more recent in Europe.
The driving force of this change has been Capitalism and its incessant need to turn everything movable or immovable into a consumable object that will turn a profit and produce more capital for the capitalist to invest.
Somewhere in this process of commodities and abstract financial dealing we have lost sight of the reason for all this activity: basic human satisfaction. We have also failed to realize just how destabilizing unfettered economic activity can be on a planet that has limited resources.
Economic theory, suffering as all social sciences do, from physics envy, now writes partial differential equations to talk about house work, but has no sense that there is a limit or a boundary condition that should be integral to all their theory and equation writing.
Economists are also stuck in a 19th century scientific model regarding conservation laws and equilibrium theory, but physics has moved on and quantum mechanics and uncertainty is key.
Risk can be calculated, but as a the recent collapse illustrates, the analysis did not go far enough and what we failed to calculate has destroyed Wall Street and made life miserable for many older people who are literally facing the fact of street time as their houses and savings are gone and they are too old to work. The extent of this horror is unfolding daily before our eyes and can’t be wished away. Yes we need to move on, but not without a very extensive airing of responsibility (a word seemingly alien to the administration that has now vacated), for what has happened to us economically and ethically (torture, gitmo, rendition and other morally reprehensible acts) we are dead in the water, if we don’t. I am not suggesting a witch hunt, but we must look at the past eight years very critically, using the full power of the Congressional subpoena to ascertain as many of the facts as possible and to understand the motivation and culpability of those who are responsible.
So far, almost all the gifts have gone to those who have created the mess, operating upon a seat of pants decision making process that appears to be an ad hoc form of triage.
The problem of restarting an economic space ship as big as the Earth is not going to be easy, even in perfect conditions and the conditions are far from perfect. As we are only 21 months away from a mid-term election for a third of the Senate and the entire House. A constraint along with cloture that will severely limit what Obama and his cohort can do and will constrain him even more once the honeymoon is over and the election approaches.
The second and bigger constraint, particularly in the US, involves the need to deleverage and clear up the immense unsustainable consumer debt. The consumer sustains the American economy. His pocket is locked which of course means less spending and consequent job loss. That creates contraction and a psychological sense of fear that has an enormous knock-on effect.
Few will lend in such a situation and only those with money to burn (a small percentage of Americans) or great courage will spend in the face of such conditions.
Thus putting people back to work and removing the fear is top priority within the limits of the political reality and the problem that past debt and a flood of new American paper on the market will cause. If anyone blinks regarding the dollar, and there is plenty of reason to do so, the USA as presently constituted will be history.
Monetary policy has reached its limit as money ($) is there for the asking, who is going to make products that will not be bought.
Thus Keynsian fiscal policy is the answer, but if one does the math (I will not bore you with it) it does not seem to be enough. The stimulus may just be a wave on the surface without the depths of the problem being touched and then we might enter a tunnel wherein there is no light in sight.
At that point, which I hope we do not reach, many might want to do the re-reading I’ve just begun.

A Nobel Prize winning economist has estimated that the Iraq War – one that never should have been fought – will have an eventual total cost of between two and three trillion dollars. Think of Obama’s proposed $500 billion worth of Keynsian spending with that fact in mind. You will immediately realize just how irresponsible the previous inhabitant of the White House has been.

“As long as he religiously respects the lives and the money of his fellow citizens, nothing more is asked of him. He may beat his wife, mistreat his servants, ruin his children, and it is no-one’s business. Society condemns only those facts that do it harm; it is not concerned with private life.” George Sand, 1832.

Reflect upon the George Sand quote for a moment to allow the enormous change in perspective to sink in.
Her 1832 statement reflects a basic assumption of our civilization that is integral to that civilization and is captured clearly in the following two quotes which are classic examples of the concept:
“Men unite for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I shall call by the general name – property.” John Locke
“So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the common good of the whole community.” Blackstone.

The legal situation has changed radically, bringing the private sphere under increased scrutiny and rapidly calling the very nature of privacy into question. Obvious to anyone with knowledge of what both young men and women are doing through the net where in sending naked pictures of oneself to a stranger has become the norm and the language in British newspapers would have brought obscenity actions not too long ago.
Along with this “openness”, there has developed a dangerous puritanical legal trend that has turned the desire to protect former victims, as mentioned in the Sand quote, into courtroom heroes, producing a raft of unsafe convictions: tailing innocents in the name of protecting the weak.
Having personally delved into a number of such cases, at great length, has made me acutely aware that the institution of law in the United States requires a total transformation as injustice is now the norm.

Until very recently a Pennsylvania senator, now thankfully retired by his constituents, could argue that there was no constitutional guarantee to privacy, thus officers could arrest two adult males for engaging in sodomy within the confines of their own home.
And a bit farther back in time, I can recall a life sentence meted out in a Southern state for receiving a blow job. Ludicrous, but not to the recipient.
Contrast those two cases with the accepted practise of the father taking the oldest daughter into his bed when his wife died. When I mentioned this practise at a Thanksgiving dinner in France, two English social workers challenged me the way anthropologists used to challenge any reports of cannibalism.
While the above discussion was going on, a local well educated man just kept smiling at me. When I called upon him to comment he was terse and to the point: “It is a common local practice.” The year was 1996.

The problem as raised can only increase as the movement of people upon the earth encysted groups of people who operate under the aegis of religious norms or tribal mores, among a larger policy.
Think upon the practise of ritual female circumcision; the ritual slaughter of lambs to end weeks of Muslim daytime fasting, protest against which has brought Bridget Bardot in conflict with the law; the murder of a disobedient daughter for failing to abide by the father’s choice of a husband or choosing one of her own; or the use of Peyote in religious ritual.
At what point does statutory law have the right to impinge upon religious practise.
I mused upon these issues as I glanced a picture of a prostitute spread across the middle of my op-ed Tribune page for January 5, 2009. she is missing one eye, gouged out by her owner/madam in a fit of anger when the prostitute told her she could not work after a second painful abortion.
Nicholas D. Kristof is trying to help prostitutes and thousands who are in similar situations. In his January 12, 2009 op-ed piece in the Tribune, he describes his purchase of two Cambodian teenagers (for $150 and $203) five years ago, complete with a receipt confirming that one of the girls was now his property.
I would not fight to secure the oil in Iraq (what the war is, was about), but I would certainly fight and risk my life for prostitutes and others in similar situations.
That “fight” is a metaphor as at 69 (in May), I am not about to be sent to war.
The conflicts mentioned above are current. The free pass that religion has had in the West is rapidly been called into question.
The pictured depicted below is indicative of that. The “probable” relates to the British requirement for truth in advertisement. The ad is appearing on 800 British buses.
And never forget: the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 for daring, among other things, to suggest that the sun was just among many.

Living amidst the detritus of black enslavement, a veteran of the 60s who carried on throughout the 70s until I was blown out of the water; in exile for twenty years; then returned under pretense to a country that had lost its soul and was lead by a crass incurious leader whose constant ignorance and ideological nonsense could only sicken, how could I but welcome Obama when faced with Sarah Palin and McCain’s false self.
Yet I know that the task of putting humpty-dumpty together again is nigh on impossible and the illusory return of sane attitudes as expressed by Joan Didion: “Irony was now out
Naiveté translated into ‘hope was now in
Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized
Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.”

might be a barrier to success rather than an aid to solving problems. Problems that must be handled pragmatically always with the idea of seizing the possibility of change when a window opens. Attitudes that can be reinforced by both renewed hope and a lack of irony, but must now become ideological, for it is ideology that killed the best of the 60s and ideology could easily kill this wonderful surge that swept Obama into office and left Ms. Clinton and the Republicans with a sense of having missed something.
Obama must govern from the center. The USA is a centrist country and we need leadership, now; leadership that represents as many of us that can crowd into the wide tent that is being created.
Those who demur can provide a loyal opposition, if they raise their tone. What Palin and the media that support her have created is mainly cacophony that can mostly be ignored and due to the fact that Rush and other ideologues similar to him represent millions, indicative of how far out of touch with reality so much of our policy has become: background radiation that speaks of distant events.
We are facing economic meltdown. 2008 could eventually be seen as being as important a date as 1945 (the defeat of fascism) and 1991 (the defeat of communism).
The brand of cowboy capitalism that has scorned the working man and left the American middle class – the bedrock of any civilized society – feeling raped is over.

Capitalism is very productive. Wherein it fails is commonsense and distribution. Its focus on a linear variable, profit or more is destructive of both the environment, not in a green sense, but in the deepest meaning of the word survival. We are on a course to destroy the very basis of our existence and those who deny the data could produce a greater catastrophe than our present occupant who just demonstrated the results of eight years of ignoring data.
Two concepts would help us all think about the future in a constructive way – both indicate the need to displace profit or more as the center of our economic focus, which, alas, for so many Westerners (lead by Americans) defines the totality of their life.

Suboptimalization is one. It defines a situation in which the exclusive focus on one variable in a system, compromises the entire system. Just slow down for a moment, read and ponder instead of scanning.
Think upon what has happened recently: the protection afforded to risk – all those complex alphabetical conundrums – has become the basis of enormous risk itself, due to the total focus on profit. In such a system, risk has suboptimized the system it was supposed to protect.

The second concept is requisite variety. It postulates that a complex system requires a number of variables that can be monitored and modulated when necessary. To attempt to maintain a system as complex as the world economy with essentially one linear variable is to court disaster.

As we attempt to cure the problem, we must do a number of things. One of them, perhaps the most difficult, is to shift into a measurement system that is more complex than profit.
Another task, just as difficult, is to reconstitute as much of our economy on a basis that allows us to use as little non-renewable energy as possible, re-employ as much “waste” as possible and focus tens of billions of dollars upon conservation.
If we had listened, with only one ear, to Amory Lovens since the 1970s about conservation – doing more with less – we would be leading the world by example instead of being the focus of so much hatred.
An adequate society, one as wealthy as ours, can provide the basics for all. It would not destroy our wealth, but it would life us all. My experience in living in Stockholm, in France, Dublin, a Spanish island and the English countryside made this clear.
No economy, no society, can solve all human problems. But provision of the basics for everyone certainly aides the quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Americans seem so afraid of words that speak of providing for those less fortunate, yet are very charitable.

To regain our place at the head of the table will require some deep changes in a dangerous world as Mumbai has made clear.
We can only do it by example. The real work is to slowly bring the USA back to its senses. Most of ours systems are not functional. That is particularly true of our justice system: a fact that I have experienced directly.

Humankind can’t bear very much reality. We live by myths. When myths fail, they destroy entire interrelated systems of belief. I have experience that directly in the total failure of the law in my criminal case.

Justice has been destroyed in America. The law is no more. I see that in case after case. The identical kind of collapse of sustaining myths is happening economically as the very basic laws that supposedly support and maintain our economic system have been abrogated in a series of actions that have dissolved capitalism’s myth.

Trust is the essence of commercial interaction. When it collapses, commerce collapses, and those daily tasks, that yesterday had been as simple as turning on a light switch, suddenly become problematical, requiring conscious attention and focus. Our present economic crisis, fuelled by a great intensification of greed, is a crisis of trust based on a lack of transparency.

“There is a complete lack of confidence,” said Jim O’Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs in London. “It’s the most extreme since the credit crisis began.” (International Herald Tribune, September 19, 2008)

Financial instruments have been created (trillions of dollars worth of them) that few understand and no-one can value, thus no-one knows who is solvent. Thus when the various central banks make money available, it is not being used for its intended purpose. It is frozen money that banks are putting into very safe instruments. Releasing money into such a situation (the Central Bank behaviour) is akin to pouring cold water onto a deeply frozen pond. It isn’t going to melt the ice.

But unless the banks now do thinks they are loathe to do, they, like Wagner’s Dragon Fafner, will sit on their hoard, and try to wait out the process, for any amount of money they lend out will diminish their cash reserves and could prove to be their financial undoing.

This behaviour will not solve the crisis. Only increased liquidity (flows of money, lending) will diminish the crisis, but to repeat, no-one knows whom to trust with a loan or how much their opaque assets are worth.

The re-establishment of trust, after a shock to that most precious of human traits, is a slow process, so there is no quick fix to the loss of trust.

Just think what happened after 9/11: Muslims were attacked at random; or during the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe during World War II: Jewish families were suddenly brutally murdered by neighbours that had lived next to each other (their families) for hundreds of years. The disappearance of trust. Think on it.

Faces are pressed too closely to the screens that surround. Turn off all the devices that connect you for a moment. Bear the silence for a moment. Go to a quiet spot in your house for a few moments or a back yard if you have one and calmly reflect upon how in an eye blink, Wall Street is no more. Just reflect upon that fact.

Most are not taking it in. Until you take time to take it in, you will not experience the magnitude of what has just happened. The financial center of the Empire has vaporized in a very short historical moment. After almost 18 months of failure to face the disintegrating process that brought it about.

We were spoon-fed lies, ideology and fairy-tales while the rot spread. For eight years, we have been treated in a similar way by most of our leaders. The simple fact has become an ideological play thing of those who do not have our best interests at heart. It is time to slowly awake to the disaster that surrounds us.

Wall Street is gone and the image of Henry Paulson on his knees before the speaker of the house begging for her help, a master of the universe on his knees. Savor the image, but don’t gloat. The work ahead is immense and all hands must be on deck. O back to the screens slowly, and don’t let distraction get to you: Wall Street has gone.

When the protection afforded for risk becomes the basis of enormous risk, there is something wrong with both our economics and our language.

The following quote from the conclusion to Kai Bird’s book on the most powerful man in America from 1940-1975 partially defines our present problem, though the book on John McCloy was published in 1992:

“The costs of building this military and intelligence apparatus have been staggering; the end of the Cold War has left America with an uncompetitive economy burdened with debt, high unemployment, low growth, and income levels more unevenly divided at any time since the beginning of the Cold War.”

Bird’s book, “The Chairman”, read along with “The Wise Men” by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas (published in1986), will begin to give one adequate insight into the present mess that is impacting upon every American. “The Wise Men” is a group biography of McCloy and five of his friends: men whose actions created the structure of events that produced the results described in the quote above.
Sixteen years on the problems are much greater and are greatly exacerbated by environmental problems that both limit our options and the time frame in which we can act.

We live in a world of instant information conveyed by a worldwide media web maintained by advertisement that is interested in only one thing: your attention, and will subvert facts on behalf of sensation to achieve it, thus the news will spend 15 seconds on the war between Russia and Georgia and 15 minutes on the sexual behaviour of John Edwards.
Such distraction has become the norm: “and what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (Nicholas Carr, Atlantic, July/August 2008)

The problems we face are enormous. They require long range thinking, quiet and deep contemplation. They will not be solved by those who have their faces pressed to a screen or afraid to turn off their cell phones, and alas the possible solutions will not even be grasped by those who have been conditioned by our media to diffuse their concentration.

Since my return to the United States seven years ago, I have been struck by many things as twenty years absence has deeply deconditioned my habitual responses to register impressions that are invisible to others.
What has impressed me the most is the almost pathological inability of most Americans to think quietly about their situation. Peace and quiet seems to threaten and be quickly filled with noise. This kind of behaviour is inimical to deep thought and concentration.

“Soon after the publication of Structure, Kuhn received a letter from Ira Einhorn, a 24 year-old English instructor at Temple University, in Philadelphia. ‘A book such as yours,’ Einhorn began, ‘makes one realize that there are still a few bright lights burning in the wasteland of modern Humanistic thought.’ Einhorn’s 4 page letter continued: ‘A few books are leading the men of thought to accept the consequences of the revolution started by Nietzsche and continued by modern art and science – your book must be placed in the forefront.’ Einhorn also offered suggestions for Kuhn’s future investigations.

Kuhn replied that Einhorn’s letter was ‘by all odds the most perceptive response I have yet received to my book, and it helped my morale immeasurably.’

‘For what it is worth,’ Kuhn continued, ‘I thoroughly agree that the concept of ‘paradigm’ needs all sorts of additional work. I began to se vaguely how some of it must be done, but though I firmly intend to get on with it, I have not yet got clear ideas, much less publishable work on the subject. When there is some, I shall do my best to make sure that you see it.’ Kuhn (who was writing to Einhorn from Berkeley) suggested that they get together when he reached the East coast: and they did.”
Keay Davidson, letter, 10/14/2005

Philip Coppens has dealt most directly with an aspect of my life that 1000s of articles have neglected and so-called friends have refused to speak about, for the taint of pariah might rub off.

The cowardice of those refusing to speak even the simple truth of my network activity has made me aware that I live in a country that has lost its soul, for so many have lied or just remained silent out of fear of association, though anyone with an overview of the tangled web of my relationship to most would say: they owed him a few.

But forgetting is foremost in this country devoted to celebrity and TV sports.

Certainly information wants to be free and wants to be circulated, for unlike soap it does not degrade when others use it, for it does not live under the aegis of the second law of thermodynamics, though how it functions and its law are just as opaque today as they were 40 years ago when I realised that information was more powerful than money and set out to prove such an assertion by living a life dedicated to information not money.

By 1979, when the powers that be decided to cut short my experiment, I was surrounded by the most intelligent people on the planet and had access to scads of the wealthy and powerful.

The network I created to service an end: paradigm change, had grown out of all proportion to its original intent: a theory group to aid those working on the data that Uri Geller was generating in the lab.

Work that I had first seen in Andrija Puharich’s Beyond Telepathy. It is a book that heralds a yet to be achieved change. I convinced my Doubleday editor and now dead friend Bill Whitehead to republish it along with Andrija Puharich’s first book: The Sacred Mushroom.

It is the seminal book in a still outré area of human knowledge, now including the quest for consciousness, that physics refuses to acknowledge, continuing to build ever more expensive matter smashers, though the future was offered to the discipline on a plate or should I say a spoon.

That failure has reduced it to a minor layer in the knowledge arena, for the excitement, genius and the money has gone elsewhere and the house of cards called string theory appears to be the Iraq of physics.

I’m an oceanic intuitive able to espy the entire whale from a tooth, but unlike most oceanic intuitives, I hack up my vision with extensive reading and consultation, so when I envisioned the environmental disaster, now unfolding before our eyes, in 1971 I began to think about how to bring about a massive paradigm shift – something I had been discussing with Tom Kuhn since our first meeting.

When Andrija Puharich tumbled into my life with Uri in tow, soon after, I immediately shifted my energies in that direction, much to the consternation of most of my ecological friends who didn’t understand.

I still lectured extensively on ecology but my focus had shifted for I saw that physics and Uri equalled a paradigm change that would rival Copernicus, opening up technological possibilities that would solve our energy/pollution problem.

Andrija and I began spending more time together, talking through many nights; Ossining became a second home. Ed Mitchell had been promised mucho dinero that never materialized, but he did help finance the SRI work that freaked the intelligence community when Uri turned out to be real and to be able to wipe computer screens.

Disinformation took over; a full spectrum of doubters arose as wiping computer screens implied that nukes wouldn’t function.

The entire tale should be told one day, as an object lesson for social change agents.

Suffice it to say that Uri did his very potent demos for enough top people to produce data that should have changed physics, but the doubters also freaked and letters (some begging) were written that if published, even today, would shock.

I always played fair witness, so my desk became a mare’s nest of explosive information, I found hard to believe.

Uri got tired of being disbelieved.

The story was very powerful, so I put Andrija under house arrest, took over the phone and the mail, held visits to a minimum (we were constantly briefing a host of heavies) and put a pen in his hand.

What emerged was a tale that dwarfed the wildest of sci-fi novels for Uri had put Andrija back into contact with forces whose strange effects were an integral part of our context, but to me were secondary to the paradigm change that I saw as totally necessary for species survival. Andrija, however, had been taken over by the need to save the world, so the forces became his focus, even after Bill Whitehead and I cut the book in half. Andrija was adamant, so Bill and I gave in, as it was Andrija’s tale, I had seen much to confirm the phenomenal side of the tale and the public agreed: Uri was an international bestseller.

But scientists freaked and Andrija became a laughing stock as I found out the next time I was in London and went to see Arthur Koestler with whom I had become quite friendly. His upset communicated deeply, making me aware that a phase of the work was over.

The question of why Andrija suddenly sabotaged his life’s work is complex. We had been warned and spied upon – that is not at issue.

It is also clear to me that Andrija had been taken over by a series of experiences that had become his truth and his telling of that truth was as integral to his on-going survival as was Leary’s relationship to LSD or McKenna’s to DMT.

I had seen it with LSD and wit so many who shaved their heads or started to wear orange: it was a conversion experience and had to damp itself out.

Yet upon deep reconsideration of The Stargate Conundrum, there is obviously more to the story.

The network continued in much enhanced form spreading out to 28 countries including a number that were behind the Iron Curtain.

Tesla, mind control, P.K. Dick and psychotronic weapons became my daily bread (not nourishing). I found myself courted by intel from both sides and given explosive information that few were capable of evaluating. Information I shared with almost no-one.

In the midst of all this Holly Maddux disappeared. I mourned for months and got deeper into matters that required more backup than I had.

The Rockefeller circle tried to recruit me directly, but public office was not of interest and I was too busy to give it even a second thought.

Then the Institute of Politics – a Kennedy organization – located at Harvard – offered me a position.

I spent three months meeting the people who run our politics and being courted by the CIA.
I was asked by the Prince of Iran (the shah’s nephew) to run his soon to be established satellite network; I refused for political reasons.

I went off to Yugoslavia and found myself (in retrospect) in the middle of a complex cold war game, though Tesla was my focus.

I was asked to help write and act in a high level soap about the gods. Omni began a major interview. Etc. Then my first life ended.

The right to express an opinion is a precious right protected by the first amendment. That amendment and the nine others that form the Bill of Rights was given to our nation very early in its existence by the assiduous work done by James Madison; a man who is finally being given his historical due. Our other rights enumerated in the first ten amendments to the constitution, are slowly being rendered null buy the fear mongering that W and his ilk had been using to destroy our 230 year old experiment in democracy.

These freedoms form the very basis of our way of life, consumption or should I say over-consumption notwithstanding. Our ancestors died to give us those freedoms that Turks, Chinese or some Europeans don’t fully have. The time may come and shortly, alas, when some of us may again have to bleed to protect such rights.

Yet so many of the opinions expressed today are based upon ideology or incorrect facts. Our media and blogs are often filled with sheer bluster producing a clash of opinions that does not produce clarity, but confusion and chaos instead.

Any discussion that leads to greater understanding must be based upon a grasp of the facts that underlie the situation under discussion.

Iraq is a good case in point. It is now costing us $338,000 a minute. Its final bill will probably reach two trillion dollars. Over 15,000 dead and seriously injured. Many lives disrupted and destroyed. Our reputation in taters. And worse, what we have done to the Iraqis and their environment. Shame is all I can feel as the images flicker in my mind.

All based upon lies and years of using ideology instead of facts to understand the situation in Iraq. We’ve made an unholy mess that will haunt us and the suffering Iraqis for decades.

W and his team must be held to account. The reason for our making such an egregious mistake brought carefully to light, so that such behavior is seen for what it is – contemptuous – and that we can continue to protect that first amendment from that produced the criticism that lead to the election defeat that will allow the democrats to expose the secret decisions that underlie the empirical presidency of W.

It will cause dissension and great opposition.

W wants to hide his mistakes, but they must be exposed if we are to survive as a nation and to find a way to provide some recompense for destroying people and a land that is over 5,000 years old.

Controversy over the attacks on 9/11 continues. Despite UNITED 93, a film I found very compelling, there are those who think that crash and whatever hit the Pentagon were both fabrications. Even though there is no question that something hit the twin towers, a lot more people suspect the government had a hand in the collapse of the towers and neighboring WTC 7.

But those numbers pale in comparison to those who distrust the reasons given for attacking Iraq. Was Colin Powell misled or misleading is his presentation to the United Nations? Did the administration honestly think there were WMDs posing a nuclear threat to the region, or were we lied to in an attempt to get us to accept an action we never would have accepted otherwise?

After all, this administration has always operated in secrecy and doubt. Did polling officials in Florida and Ohio rig the results that favored Bush over Gore and then Kerry? Was the Diebold Corporation, which manufactured many of the voting machines, complicit? After all, the president of Diebold “promised” the state of Ohio to Bush.

After election, the administration established a pattern of secrecy. Documents that had been de-classified were re-classified. Wiretaps were ordered and first legitimized with claims of warrants. Then, even the pretense of warrants was dropped. Cheney, with close ties to big oil, formed an energy task force, refusing to release the identities of the participants. We do know that environmentalists, conservationists, and alternative fuel folks did not need to apply. Is it any wonder that the public feels bamboozled by the explanations for soaring fuel costs?

Halliburton, still doling out deferred payment to Cheney, wins no-bid contracts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and even when those contracts are executed with shabby accountability, they are renewed.

Bush told us he is a “compassionate conservative.” His compassion apparently extends only to big business and the rich, the primary beneficiaries of his tax cuts. The poor need not apply. He tried to privatize Social Security in the name of rescuing it, like rescuing a drowning man with a large, heavy rock. The Medicare Prescription Drug program? Tailored to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, and if you can’t figure it out, you must have Alzheimer’s, for which you need an expensive medication.

It seems like we’ve added a fourth branch of government, i.e., the Great American Lobby, headquartered on K Street, de facto president Jack Abramoff. The speaker of the House resigns in a flurry of charges of corruption. A congressman is caught on tape accepting bribes, the money is found in his freezer, and he has the audacity to complain about the F.B.I.’s intrusion. The Democrats and Republicans alike issue statements denouncing the F.B.I’s intrusion. Is that chutzpah or what?

Actually, that’s small potatoes. We got our knickers in a knot over the awarding of port security to Dubai Ports World, yet nobody even noticed that Treasury Secretary John Snow, under whose aegis the deal was awarded, is a former executive of CSX, a container shipping firm with links to Dubai Ports World and the Carlysle Corporation, which you learned about if you saw FAHRENHEIT 9/11. The revolving door of cronyism between government and industry spins again.

One after another corporation is exposed as running a shell game. The executives at Krispy Kreme were misleading their investors and employees right out of the Enron playbook both of which went belly-up after their executive officers reaped millions. Turns out the high and noble institution, the University of California, has been handing out bonus packages right and left, in blatant violation of its rules and procedures, hoodwinking the Regents, and the President of the University hardly seems ashamed. The lid is about to blow on Fannie Mae, the largest facilitator of mortgage lending in the country. Turns out the Army Corps of Engineers may have bungled the job in rebuilding the levees and floodwalls of New Orleans, not just now but in the past, but of course the Corps denies it. At least the President of the University of California had the decency to admit his wrongdoing. “Taking responsibility” has become rare and as ineffectual as taking umbrage.

Or perhaps taking confession. Instead of taking responsibility for its pedophilic priests and putting them out of the harm’s way of children, the RC Church simply rotated them from one parish to another, all the while denying any wrong-doing, until victims began collecting millions. Then something had to be done.

Before the threat of avian flu appeared to subside, our government had purchased millions of doses of Tamiflu, manufactured by Roche from a formula owned by Gilead. Who was the former chairman of Gilead before he became Secretary of Defense? You got it. Is it any wonder that bird flu is now being spoken of as a hoax?

Same with global warming. I happen to believe it is a reality, but I’m waiting for the next conspiracy theory to allege that the administration is doing it on purpose to facilitate drilling in Alaska.

Last but not least, our sports and entertainment industries. Barry Bonds is booed as he breaks Babe Ruth’s record. Was it skill or steroids? The last two contestants make it to the finals of “American Idol.” Was it votes or manipulation?

I was inspired to compose this essay by rumors circulating about “American Idol.” Did Reuben win over Clay Aiken because the producers suspected Clay might be gay? Are the judges’ comments a not-very-subtle attempt to influence voters? Are the phone lines rigged (like voting machines) to give votes cast for one contestant to another contestant (a notion I would seriously consider if I found out Diebold makes the equipment)?

If you add up all the above aspects of life in which trust is at a minimum, corruption seemingly can’t get any more rampant, and the notion of “truth” is beginning to seem like a cruel joke, the mental state of America is somewhere between utter cynicism and blatant paranoia. The motto seems to be, or seems that it ought to be, “Trust no one.”

When I was growing up, i.e., until day before yesterday, it was during and after WWII. We were “good guys,” fighting for the “right” causes, not just for self-interest (at least until Pearl Harbor). Just about everybody did his or her part to support the war effort. The notion that FDR had links to industries that might be profiting from the war would have been unthinkable, and I don’t recall that notion ever being entertained.

Then it was perhaps Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex that brought the sobering awareness that something could begin to stink in the state of Denmark. The film, WHY WE FIGHT, spells out that thesis. In America, we hold history in low regard and scarcely remember our own. If it were otherwise, we would “remember” many periods in our history when government and various industries conspired against “the people.”

The next glass of cold water, as I recall, came when Spiro Agnew was exposed as a sleazy, two-bit crook, and I wondered how in the world Nixon came to pick him. Watergate answered that question for me.

Kennedy was my hero, but I’ll have to admit that my unmitigated admiration took a blow when I learned what a womanizer he was and the first “conspiracy” theory I can remember, that Marilyn Monroe had been offed because she knew too much.

The second conspiracy theory I remember lives on, namely that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were not isolated nut cases, acting alone, that perhaps our president had been assassinated by our government.

And then there were the lies about Viet Nam. As Robert McNamara relates in FOG OF WAR, Gen. Westmoreland once speculated that if we hadn’t “won” the war, he and McNamara would have been tried as war criminals for crimes against humanity. And they all lied, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, asking us not to believe our eyes as we watched the 6:00 news, asking us not to puke when the National Guard shot the students at Kent State.

That’s it, I think, the extent of lying, so prevalent that is has become the expectation. Maybe not even lying, more the Art of the Dodgeful Answer, “I did not have sex with that woman”…unless you count fellatio as sex. Forget “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” It’s more like “the parts of the truth that make me look good.”

“Integrity” is a quaint term that used to mean something in American society, a term that Webster defines as “steadfast adherence to a strict moral and ethical code.” It’s as though collectively, we have decided to abandon the code of honesty, in our commerce, our government and other higher institutions, even in our sports and entertainment. Not just caveat emptor, buyer beware, but citizen beware. That, my friends, to borrow terms from construction and real estate, is dry rot of the infrastructure of our character. Our piers and joists have been eaten away by the termites and beetles of greed and self-interest, unabated by compassionate enlightenment. Any house like that is bound to fall down, and there is no homeowners insurance for such losses.

If I am to believe the consensus of the letters and communication that I have received of late from those I most respect, time has run out on us and we are doomed as a civilization.

But: having led and participated in mass movements that changed the rhythms of my society, I cannot accept defeat so easily, though data overwhelms and that data, collected by others, is supported by my daily experience of abrupt climate change happening before my eyes.

It is January 4, 2007 in the mountains of West Central Pennsylvania as I write this.

January here is normally frost, snow, chilling wind and cloud covered sky.

Yet all I have experienced since the end of summer – usually in early September – has been more summer and a perpetual spring that has brought almost no ground frost, no frost to speak of, balmy days, blue sky, a six day period after Thanksgiving filled with dandelions, flies, butterflies and bees and now in January mornings filled with bird song, for the birds seem to be nesting and think that spring has come.

These changes are happening much faster than the models predict as the situation we are attempting to map is non-linear, in extreme perturbation and probably broken as the best informed thinker, James Lovelock, has recently declared.

Terrorism, Iraq and the other headlines are minor compared to the threat we are facing, yet we are spending trillions ($1012) on such flea bites and almost nothing on the impending and ever accelerating disaster that threatens.

The failure of leadership defies description.

We need to create a planetary situation room that has a broadcast facility with satellite and internet links that slowly gears up to real-time coverage.

We need to get the best on the planet involved in operation energy transformation.

We need a global Manhattan Project directed toward perfecting new clean energy sources with a practical adjunct that produces new working models of everything that uses energy.

We need thinkers focused on ecological economics, so that we can replace our present system manned by a blind priesthood. We need to replace more the only value capitalism honors, with a broad measure of personal and ecological well-being.

The concentration on survival, if done with calmness and determination, could provide a new focus for the present madness of consumption that is eating the planet alive.

But, the time is very limited, for the human response to the coming environmental destruction will be far worse than the actual destruction itself.

Once it gets going our civilization and our future will dissolve before our eyes.

We built a bomb in a very short time.

Surely we can mobilize to change our energy use when the threat is greater and the stakes are higher.

Can’t we? Or are my friends correct?