Questions Raised About Integrity of Keystone XL's Southern Route After Conditions Added for Northern Leg

by Julie Mermansky, DeSmogBlog, June 3, 2014

The Keystone XL pipeline's southern route passes under Eleanor Fairchild's Texas property, so she got angry when she learned that the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has added two new conditions to the 57 already required for construction of the pipeline's northern route.

“My fears were confirmed,” Fairchild told DeSmogBlog. “The regulators knew the southern route wasn’t built safely. It is like they have said to hell with us in Texas and Oklahoma.”

Eleanor Fairchild was defiant when TransCanada started installing the pipeline on her land. She kept a watchful eye during the installation and repair of the pipeline. ©2012 Julie Dermansky

Julia Trigg Crawford, another Texas landowner who fought TransCanada in the courts, shared a link to an Associated Press story that focuses on the two new conditions. “Read this ASAP to see why Texans and Oklahomans were so outraged about TransCanada's abysmal construction record on the southern leg of the Keystone XL,” she wrote.

Julia Trigg Crawford was labeled an activist by TransCanada attorney James Freemand. She considers herself a patriot for standing up for all Americans' property rights. ©2013 Julie Dermansky

The conditions require TransCanada to hire a third-party contractor chosen by PHMSA to monitor the construction and make reports to the U.S. government on whether the work is sound. Additionally, TransCanada must “develop and implement a quality management system that would apply to the construction of the entire Keystone XL project in the U.S. to ensure that this pipeline is — from the beginning — built to the highest standards by both Keystone personnel and its many contractors.”

The Tar Sands Blockade, an activist group that independently monitored the pipeline installation after failing to stop it, wrote on its blog that the new conditions suggest there are serious problems with the southern route.

“TransCanada’s internal quality management and PHMSA’s external inspection program were inadequate, if not fatally flawed. The failures implied by these new conditions beg the question: If TransCanada wasn’t adequately inspecting its own work, and PHMSA didn’t have the third-party inspection company it needed for effective oversight, was anyone actually watching TransCanada?”

Tar Sands Blockade activists protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline at a construction site in Winnsboro, Texas. ©2012 Julie Dermansky

The new conditions weren't based solely on the construction issues found in the southern route of the pipeline, now called the Gulf Coast pipeline. They were the result of “observations in the field during construction projects from several pipeline operators over the past few years,” Damon Hill, spokesperson for PHMSA, told the Associated Press.

The new conditions were based on “systemic problems regulators found in the pipeline industry, not just the Keystone XL's southern route,” Richard Kurpewicz, president of Accufacts, Inc., a consulting firm that provides pipeline expertise, told DeSmogBlog.

Richard Kurpewicz at a pipeline safety conference in New Orleans. ©2013 Julie Dermansky

Fairchild and Crawford are part of a group of landowners who live with the southern route of the Keystone XL pipeline on their property and who, along with environmentalists, met with Roderick Seeley, director of the Southwest Region of PHMSA, to ask questions about the inspection process they witnessed in January.

The group presented documentation of shoddy construction practices and questioned the regulators about their absence during the pipeline installation and repair process. PHMSA representatives conceded they don't have enough inspectors to watch everything but said, despite their absence in the field, they have “faith in the process.”

“At the meeting, PHMSA assured us that all the problems we referenced had been fixed, even though that assertion was based almost entirely on taking TransCanada’s word for it,” the Tar Sands Blockade recently wrote on its blog. “PHMSA's inspections only occurred an average of 2 to 3 times per month.”

The group that attended the meeting requested that a new pressure test of the pipeline be done to test the welds on the numerous repairs. A pressure test can pinpoint faulty girth welds. For each repair that required a segment of pipe be replaced, new girth welds were made.

“If girth welds fail, there is the danger of a rupture,” Kurpewicz told DeSmogBlog.

Evan Vokes, a former TransCanada mechanical engineer turned whistleblower, points out: “Flaws in girth welds are not easy to catch, so each new section introduced into the pipeline adds another potential weakest link.” He too believes a new pressure test is merited.

Evan Vokes at a pipeline safety conference in Dallas, Texas.  ©2013 Julie Dermansky 

The new conditions PHSMA added to the U.S. Department of State Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on the Keystone XL Pipeline came after meeting with the concerned landowners in January.  

Crawford finds the timing suspect. “The new conditions indicate trust and faith are no longer enough for the regulatory agency,” she told DeSmog Blog.

According to the Associated Press story on the new conditions, the defects in the southern route of the pipeline “have all been fixed,” but the story doesn't explain how they came to that conclusion.

TransCanada is singing from the same song sheet.

“The Gulf Coast Pipeline is the safest oil pipeline built in the United States to date,” Davis Sheremata, spokesman for TransCanada, told DeSmogBlog. “TransCanada is implementing a construction quality and integrity program like none before. The fact we conducted investigative digs after our inspections discovered these issues is a sign that our quality management programs work.”

Repair site on the southern route of the Keystone XL in Texas. ©2013 Julie Dermansky 

PHMSA's warning letters to TransCanada and the advocacy group Public Citizen’s report about the southern route of the pipeline tell another story. A high rate of welding failures are cited by PHMSA, and Public Citizen’s report cites code violations that call into question the pipeline's integrity.

“We have very few tools to work with,” Jeffrey Wiese, PHMSA's safety official, told industry insiders at a pipeline safety conference in New Orleans in 2013,  according to an Inside Climate News report. But that doesn't explain why regulators did nothing more than issue warning letters to TransCanada after identifying code violations, opting not to fine or sanction the company.

Vokes doubts the new conditions will change anything. “If sanctions are not levied, there will be no improvement in the system,” he said.

“If PHMSA believes the public is in danger, they have the power to shut down a project,” Kurpewicz told DeSmogBlog.

And that is what the Tar Sands Blockade is asking PHMSA to do now. They have called for the pipeline to be shut down until a new pressure test is done.

Fairchild can't understand why the government won't require a new test. It was the government that allowed TransCanada to confiscate people’s land using eminent domain laws to build the pipeline, so the government should at least assure its safety.

In May, Fairchild reached a settlement with TransCanada over the company's use of her land and a SLAPP suit. Criminal charges for trespassing on her own land with Daryl Hannah to stand in the path of earth-moving vehicles were dismissed as part of the settlement.

Fairchild insisted that TransCanada apologize to her for calling her an eco-terrorist before she would accept the settlement. She got the apology, but it is of little consolation since she is living next to a pipeline that she is certain will fail.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/06/03/questions-raised-integrity-keystone-xl-southern-route-conditions-added-northern-leg

George Monbiot: The Elite Insurgency -- Superversion, an attack from above

Elite Insurgency

by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 15th October 2013

Subversion ain’t what it used to be. Today it scarcely figures as a significant force. Nation states are threatened by something else. Superversion: an attack from above.

It takes several forms. One is familiar, but greatly enhanced by new technology: the tendency of spooks and politicians to use the instruments of state to amplify undemocratic powers. We’ve now learnt that even members of the Cabinet and the National Security Council had no idea what GCHQ was up to(1). No one told them that it was developing the capacity to watch, if it chooses, everything we do online. The real enemies of state (if by state we mean the compact between citizens and those they elect) are people like the head of MI5, and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who appears to have failed to inform her Cabinet colleagues.

Allied to the old abuses is a newer kind of superversion: the attempts by billionaires and their lieutenants to destroy the functions of the state. Note the current shutdown – and the debt ceiling confrontation scheduled for Thursday – in the United States. The Republicans, propelled by a Tea Party movement created by the Koch brothers and financed by a gruesome collection of multi-millionaires(2,3), have engineered what in other circumstances would be called a general strike. The difference is that the withdrawal of their labour has been imposed on the workers.

The narrow purpose of the strike is to prevent the distribution of wealth to poorer people, through the Affordable Care Act. The wider purpose (aside from a refusal to accept the legitimacy of a black president) is to topple the state as an effective instrument of taxation, regulation and social protection. The Koch shock troops in the Republican party seem prepared to inflict almost any damage in pursuit of this insurgency, including – if they hold out on Thursday – a US government default, which could trigger a new global financial crisis(4).

They do so on behalf of a class which has, in effect, seceded(5). It floats free of tax and the usual bonds of citizenship, jetting from one jurisdiction to another as it seeks the most favourable havens for its wealth. It removes itself so thoroughly from the life of the nation that it scarcely uses even the roads. Yet, through privatisation and outsourcing, it is capturing the public services on which the rest of us depend.

Using an unreformed political funding system to devastating effect(6), this superversive class demands that the state stop regulating, stop protecting, stop intervening. When this abandonment causes financial crisis, the remaining taxpayers are forced to bail out the authors of the disaster, who then stash their bonuses offshore.

One result is that those who call themselves conservatives and patriots appear to be deeply confused about what they are defending. In his article last week attacking the Guardian for revealing GCHQ’s secret surveillance programmes, Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, characterised his readers as possessing an “over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best.”(7) Strangely, this suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best does not appear to extend to the security services, whose assault on our freedoms Dacre was defending.

To the right-wing press and the Conservative party, patriotism means standing up to the European Union. But it also means capitulating to the United States. It’s an obvious and glaring contradiction, which is almost never acknowledged, let alone explained. In reality the EU and the US have become proxies for something which transcends national boundaries. The EU stands for state control and regulation while the US represents deregulation and atomisation.

In reality, this distinction is outdated, as the handful of people who have heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will appreciate. The European Commission calls it “the biggest trade deal in the world”(8). Its purpose is to create a single transatlantic market, in which all regulatory differences between the US and the EU are gradually removed.

It has been negotiated largely in secret. This time, they’re not just trying to bring down international trade barriers, but, as the commission boasts, “to tackle barriers behind the customs border – such as differences in technical regulations, standards and approval procedures.”(9) In other words, our own laws, affecting our own people.

A document published last year by two huge industrial lobby groups – the US Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope – explains the partnership’s aims(10). It will have a “proactive requirement”, directing governments to change their laws. The partnership should “put stakeholders at the table with regulators to essentially co-write regulation.”

Stakeholder is a euphemism for corporation.

They want it; they’re getting it. New intellectual property laws that they have long demanded, but which sovereign governments have so far resisted – not least because of the mass mobilisation against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act in the US(11) – are back on the table, but this time largely inaccessible to public protest. So are data protection, public procurement and financial services(12). You think that getting your own government to regulate bankers is hard enough? Try appealing to a transnational agreement brokered by corporations and justified by the deemed consent of citizens who have been neither informed nor consulted.

This deal is a direct assault on sovereignty and democracy. So where are the Mail and the Telegraph and the other papers which have campaigned so hard against all transfers of power to the European Union? Where are the Conservative MPs who have fought for an EU referendum? Eerie silence descends. They do not oppose the TTIP because their allegiance lies not with the nation but with the offshored corporate elite.

These fake patriots proclaim a love for their country, while ensuring that there is nothing left to love. They are loyal to the pageantry – the flags, the coinage, the military parades – but intensely disloyal to the nation these symbols are supposed to represent. The greater the dissonance becomes, the louder the national anthem plays.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/06/prism-tempora-cabinet-surveillance-state

2. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers

3. http://www.youtube.com/user/astroturfwars

4. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/krugman-rebels-without-a-clue.html

5. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/

6. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/29/capitalism-bankrolls-politics-pay-price

7. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/12/left-daily-mail-paul-dacre

8. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/

9. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/

10. US Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope, October 2012. Regulatory Cooperation in the EU-US Economic Agreement.

http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/businesseurope-uschamber-paper.pdf

11. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248298/sopa_and_pipa_just_the_facts.html

12. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/setting-the-terms-for-global-trade-the-transatlantic-trade-and-investment-partnership

The Tea Party is an anti-populist elite tool. And it has progressives fooled

This is not some spontaneous uprising. It's the newest incarnation of a rich, elite, right-wing tradition

by Michael Lind, Salon, October 22, 2013

EnlargeTed Cruz (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

In recent essays for Salon I have argued that progressives and mainstream pundits are making a profound mistake by treating Tea Party radicalism as an outburst of irrationality by moronic “low information” yokels, rather than understanding it as a calculated (if not necessarily successful) strategy by the regional elite of the South and its allies in other regions. In an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Tea Party and the GOP Crackup,” William Galston presents data that reinforces this conclusion:

Many frustrated liberals, and not a few pundits, think that people who share these beliefs must be downscale and poorly educated. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.

I have also argued that the Tea Party is not a new movement that sprang up as a result of spontaneous populist anger against Wall Street bailouts in the Great Recession, but rather the “newest right,” the most recent incarnation of an evolving right-wing tradition that goes back beyond Reagan and Goldwater to mostly Southern roots. Galston notes the high degree of overlap between the Tea Party and mainstream Republican conservatives:

Nor, finally, is the tea party an independent outside force putting pressure on Republicans, according to the survey. Fully 76% of its supporters either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Rather, they are a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration.

Against progressives and pundits who insist on blaming the white working class for Tea Party radicalism, I have argued that the radical right agenda serves the interest of the economic elites of the South and some areas in the Midwest and other regions — particularly those whose business models are threatened by unions, high minimum wages and environmental regulations. Here, too, Galston understands what most commentators miss:

Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.

I have high regard for Galston’s abilities as a political analyst, and no small regard for my own. But this is not rocket science. All of this has been obvious to anyone who bothered to examine the polling and voting data, since the term “Tea Party” first entered the national dialogue following the crash of 2008.

Why, in the face of all of this evidence, are so many progressives and pundits convinced that the white working class, rather than affluent and educated conservative elites, are the driving force behind the right? Why do so many American progressives blame the masses for a movement of the classes? The answer is that the American center-left has been misled for half a century by the bad scholarship of the historian Richard Hoftstadter (1916-1970) and by German Marxist emigres of the Frankfurt School.

In the U.S., as in Western Europe, coalitions of populist farmers who united with organized urban workers were the social base of progressive movements like the New Deal. This was recognized by the liberal historians of the 1930s and 1940s, who tended to celebrate the contribution of populism to the evolving New Deal tradition.

Throughout the progressive and New Deal eras, to be sure, urban American intellectuals like H. L. Mencken tended to despise rural people, in every country; Mencken despised European “peasants” as much as he despised the provincial American “booboisie.” Hoftstadter infused Menckenseque contempt for rural and working-class Americans into postwar intellectual liberalism, by means of influential books like “Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915” (1944); “The American Political Tradition” (1948); “The Age of Reform” (1955); “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963). By emphasizing genuine examples of racism and anti-Semitism among agrarian Populists, without pointing out that these biases were widely shared among American Anglo-Protestant elites who often despised the Populists, Hoftstadter convinced several generations of American college students and professors that the Populists were a kind of incipient fascist force. By the 1960s, all too many American liberal intellectuals looked at their working-class fellow citizens and saw, not the heroic workers of the new Deal era murals, but peasants with pitchforks and proto-Nazis.

Many mid-century liberal intellectuals blamed first McCarthyism and then the rise of the Goldwater-Reagan movement on a deranged, white, working class. They found confirmation for this theory not only in Hofstadter but also in “The Authoritarian Personality,” a 1950 collection of essays by sociologists led by Theodor W. Adorno, a refugee from Hitler who had been part of the “Frankfurt School” of Marxist sociology. As Jon Wiener has explained:

The Age of Reform was framed around the theory of “status politics,” which came from an essay by German sociologist Max Weber, published in the United States by Hofstadter’s Columbia colleague and friend the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Hofstadter’s “status politics” thesis held that the Populists were driven to irrationality and paranoia by anxiety over their declining status in an America where rural life and its values were being supplanted by an urban industrial society. Populism, in this view, was a form of reactionary resistance to modernity. Here Hofstadter was the Jewish New York intellectual anxiously looking for traces of proto-fascism somewhere in middle America. He saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest. It was history by analogy—but the analogy didn’t work.

The scholarship of Adorno and Hofstadter has long been discredited. In the case of Germany, the historian Michael Mann has demonstrated that National Socialism was widely supported by Germans of all classes, including elites. During the 1930s, the would-be leaders of American fascism tended to come from the American elite, including Lawrence Dennis, a Harvard-educated foreign service officer, and Philip Johnson, an upper-class trust-funder who later became the most celebrated American architect of the second half of the 20th century. Johnson’s fling with fascism in the 1930s became a scandal in his later years. An “embedded reporter” with the Wehrmacht during its invasion of Poland, considered a reliable American friend of the Nazi regime, the young Johnson wrote: “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”

Recent scholarship on Goldwater-Reagan conservatism has demolished the idea that it represented a rebellion by disoriented yahoos. Indeed, in 1984 Reagan took 62.7% of the college-educated vote, compared to Walter Mondale’s 36.9%. Working-class “Reagan Democrats” notwithstanding, Reaganism was a revolt of the privileged against the New Deal order that had been built by the farmer-labor alliance in coalition with middle-class progressives.

Today as in the Reagan era, the Democrats are the more downscale, less-educated party, while the Republicans tend to win the votes of educated and affluent white Americans. In 2012 Romney received the votes of 52% of college-educated white women and 55% of college-educated white men, losing only the tiny sliver of whites with post-graduate degrees like university professors.

While white voters of all age groups preferred Romney to Obama, the propensity of whites to vote for Republicans rises with income. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, “Among whites without a college degree, income has become a stronger predictor of the vote over time. But actually it’s those with less income, not more income, who are more likely to support Democratic presidential candidates. And again, there certainly no trend by which whites with below-average incomes and no college degree become more Republican.”

PRRI notes:

• White working-class voters in households that make less than $30,000 per year were nearly evenly divided in their voting preferences (39% favored Obama, 42% favored Romney). However, a majority (51%) of white working-class voters with annual incomes of $30,000 or more a year supported Romney, while 35% preferred Obama.
• Half (50%) of white working-class voters who have not reported using food stamps in the past two years supported Romney, while less than one-third (32%) supported Obama. By contrast, white working-class voters who reported receiving food stamps in the last two years preferred Obama to Romney by a significant margin (48% vs. 36%).

The white working class is pretty evenly divided among Democrats and Republicans in the Northeast, Midwest and West — only in the South are working-class whites overwhelmingly Republican.  It is the Southern white working class that skews the voting statistics and culture-war issues like “God, guns and gays,” on which white Southerners of all classes tend to be more conservatives than whites in other regions.

In general, the American white working class is as liberal on economic issues as it was during the New Deal era — and far more progressive than many of the socially liberal billionaires who finance the Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama:

• Seven-in-ten (70%) white working-class Americans believe the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, and a majority (53%) say that one of the biggest problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance in life.
• A plurality (46%) of white working-class Americans believe that capitalism and the free market system are at odds with Christian values, while 38% disagree.
• Nearly 8-in-10 white working-class Americans say that corporations moving American jobs overseas are somewhat (25%) or very (53%) responsible for Americans’ current economic distress.
• Over 6-in-10 (62%) white working-class Americans favor raising the tax rate on Americans with household incomes of over $1 million per year.

In light of all of this, it comes as no surprise that identifying the Tea Party with the white working class is a mistake:

White working-class Americans (13%) are no more likely than white college-educated Americans (10%) to say they consider themselves part of the Tea Party. White working-class Americans (34%) are also about equally as likely as white college-educated Americans (31%) to say the Tea Party movement shares their values.

If it wants to live up to its claim of being “the reality-based community,” the American center-left needs to dispense with the half-century-old anti-working-class mythology of Hofstadter and Adorno and look at real-world electoral and opinion data, for a change. By refusing to recognize that today’s right-wing radicalism serves the interests of elites — in particular, Southern elites — and blaming it erroneously on the non-Southern, white, working class, progressives only harm themselves, not least by confusing their enemies with their potential allies.

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/22/tea_party_is_an_anti_populist_elite_tool_and_it_has_progressives_fooled/

Tea Party: Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism

By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Source Free Inquiry.co
5-28-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:   1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.   2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.   3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.   4. Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.   5. Rampant Sexism: The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.   6. Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.   7. Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.   8. Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.   9. Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.   10. Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.   11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.   12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.   13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.   14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.   From Liberty Forum   http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_constitution&Number=642 109&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&t=-1 http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress

by Chris Hedges, truthdig, January 13, 2013

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long, planet-wide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky, it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact, the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we, like past societies in distress, will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”

“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”

“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113

Chris Hedges on American Fascism in the Religious Right

Many important things are discussed in this recording.  Pay close attention after minute 26 where the crushing of the Occupy movement is discussed.

Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer Discuss American Fascism

TruthDig, posted on Oct 11, 2013

Pixietart (CC-BY)

Note: Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer will be reunited this Sunday at a special event in Santa Monica. Click here for more information and tickets. Seating is limited. Hedges will give a major talk on the myth of progress and Scheer will moderate a follow-up discussion with questions from the audience. Please join us.

The two celebrated journalists discuss the collapse of vital institutions and the rise of demagogues and charlatans in post-meltdown America.

(Trouble listening? Click here to download the audio file.)