Change
The Panoramic Wisdom stemming from evolutionary energy systems’ applications and understanding, will dissolve all current worldwide threats, including poverty, and permit progress to new levels of 21st Century Life.
StarSteps: written for the layman, not theoretical physicists
• StarSteps Part one http://www.fuel2000.net/starsteps1.pdf
• StarSteps Part Two http://www.fuel2000.net/starsteps2.pdf
• StarSteps Part Three http://www.fuel2000.net/starsteps3.pdf
Thumbs up to Tom
Englehardt for writing the following article with such clarity, insight and courage.
Editor's note: Adding the application portion of The promise of energy for everyone will
open the doors to a boundless future for all new Grads, as well as to Dream of a Nation's goals and
David Korten's Living Economies,
with a surety and ease impossible to imagine now.
Kids, the country isn't all right
June 29, 2012 5:39 PM By Tom Engelhardt
Editor’s note: Dumbing Us Down is just plain NOT Freedom, nor Survival, from any point of view "Preponderance of evidence" UFOs exist: expert - Is there really someone out there, or not? Rebecca Jarvis and Terrell Brown spoke with James Fox and Erin Ryder of the new National Geographic Channel show"Chasing UFOs" about their findings. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7413402n&tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.10
TomDispatch) [Author note: No one invited me to give this
graduation speech. It was concocted freely in the campus of my mind and it's
meant for the rest of us in the class of 2012.]
Class of 2012, greetings! It's a deceptively glorious day,
even under this tent in the broiling heat of an August-style afternoon in
mid-June on this northeastern campus. Another local temperature record is being
set: 98
degrees. And yes, let's admit it, the heat, the sun, the clearness of the azure
blue sky stretching without a cloud to the horizon, the sense of summer
descending with a passion, it's not quite as reassuring as it might once have
been, is it? I suspect that few of you, readying yourselves to leave this
campus, many mortgaged to your eyeballs (some for life no matter what you do),
and heading into a country on edge, imagine personal clear skies to the
horizon.
And while we're admitting things, let's admit something else
about the heat today, as you bake under your graduation gowns: whether or not
you have the figures at your fingertips, whether or not you know the details,
who doesn't sense that this planet is on edge, too? I mean, here you are, the
class of 2012, and like the classes of 2011, 2010, and so on, you are surely
going to spend your first months out of college enduring one of history's top ten
heat years.
As so many Americans have noticed, this was a spring
for the record books just about everywhere in the continental United States.
And keep in mind that at the moment we also seem to be making a beeline for a
potentially record-setting
summer, the months of your job hunt for a future, and maybe the hottest
year in American history as well.
And records or no, this year is no anomaly. Look at a temperature
map of the United States, 1970-2011, and every state -- every single
state -- is, on average, hotter now than it was four decades ago. Imagine that.
And now, imagine this. If climate change is the main culprit
and the burning of fossil fuels is threatening to turn Hell, which you were
once supposed to visit after death for your sins, into a pit stop on planet
Earth, and if you want to do something about it, brace yourself. What you're up
against is the power of the richest, most
profitable corporations in history at a time when the sky's the
limit, not just for carbon
dioxide, but for the infusion of private and corporate money into
what we once called democratic (with a small "d") politics.
In other words, the giant energy corporations that rake in
tens of billions of dollars every quarter and whose lifeblood is the burning of
fossil fuels are essentially capable of buying more or less anything they want
in Washington. That includes continuing massive subsidies
-- via "your" Congress (via your tax dollars) -- of their
unbelievably profitable operations.
And what exactly can you buy? How many lawyers, lobbyists,
and politicians can fit in your less than spacious pockets? Okay, you don't
want your world, and that of your children, hotter than hades? That's
understandable, but tell it to ExxonMobil.
It has money to burn and specializes in mobilizing some of those billions in
profits to employ ranks of lawyers, hordes of well-organized
lobbyists, klatches of politicians, and even its own armed
mercenary warriors. If the planet burns as well, so be it.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
Believe me, I don't say this to discourage you in your
passage into adult life. But who said it was going to be easy?
In large part, what I want to tell you has to do with the
grade-school principle that what goes up must come down. Consider for a moment
just what's gone up and what's come down in our American world in these last
years.
For more than four decades, in the United States -- and
possibly a good part of the rest of the world -- money, income, wealth, moolah,
it's all been heading upwards, like migrating salmon, toward the top of
society, toward the crew that only last year we started calling "the
1%" (Thank you, Occupy Wall Street!), although maybe the .01% or the .001%
would be more appropriate terms.
That top 1% now controls at least 40%
of American wealth. Meanwhile, with your student loans
(something like 60%
of you have them), many of you -- in what used to be called the American middle
class -- are already essentially broke, and getting you this far, many of your
parents are undoubtedly strapped as well.
It's not a far-fetched guess that in the audience today are
proud parents who lost way too much in the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 and
the subsequent bad years that show no signs of ending. Some are undoubtedly
living in houses that are "underwater," while their cumulative wealth
(largely in housing) -- to judge by the most recent figures we have -- might
have been cut by 40%.
(If you are Hispanic or African-American, those numbers could look horrifically
worse.) And as I'm hardly the first to say, there's no one around
with any intention of bailing you out.
Only the rich have made out like -- and it's a perfectly
reasonable descriptive word -- bandits. Thought of another way, over these last
decades, your people bailed out their people and, ingrates that they are, they
now have no intention of returning the favor.
Over those years, their wishes have become the political and
legal system's commands. After all, they have the money, Bain
Capital-style amounts of it, to invest in keeping you where you are.
They have the money to buy what matters most to them. You don't. But who said
it would be easy?
What goes up must come down, and the money that went up is
now coming down big time. If you want to understand American politics today,
just look at the two presidential candidates zipping
around like wind-up toys, hustling
from one fundraiser to the next, begging the rich and powerful to pour money
into their campaigns. What time could they
have left for whatever else matters, including you, once they've
done the necessary due diligence?
And the money? Wow! The predictions are that this will be by
far the most expensive presidential campaign in history, with an estimated
price tag of $2 billion or
more. Just consider that the other day a single casino mogul wrote a check
to one of Mitt Romney's Super PACs for $10 million -- and that was just an
appetizer. Or consider that, in 2010 in the Citizens
United case, the Supreme Court guaranteed the future of 1% elections
(as did Barack Obama by rejecting
the public financing of the last election).
So as those of you who would like to change our political
system for the better leave this campus and venture into the "dark
money" universe of American politics, don't forget to bring
your $10 million checks with you. Then again, no one promised you a rose
garden.
For four decades, money -- in the form of your parents' tax
dollars -- has also been migrating upward into an ever-expanding national
security complex, now so large it staggers the imagination. It doesn't matter
how you measure it -- in new office space for the U.S. Intelligence Community
(the equivalent
of at least 22 U.S. Capitol buildings), in the number of people with top-secret
clearances (heading for one million, with 4.2 million
having security clearances of some sort), in the number of government documents
classified annually (92 million
in 2011), in the 30,000
people tasked with monitoring private American conversations of various sorts,
in... well, really and truly, it doesn't matter. Whatever your yardstick may
be, the Complex now dwarfs its previous Cold War iteration, when the U.S. was
at least facing a major imperial power armed with nuclear weapons, not a couple
of minority insurgencies and small numbers of stateless jihadis, and jihadi
wannabes.
It is now so much more powerful, so much farther above the law,
so much less
accountable, and so much more dedicated to perpetual war abroad and
a perpetual national security lockdown at home than at any previous moment in
your -- or even my -- lifetime. And of course, even a Pentagon and intelligence
bureaucracy engorged on your tax dollars wasn't enough.
In 2002, a second Department of Defense called the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up and, with more than 230,000
employees (who says there are no jobs?), like the Pentagon but in a smaller
way, it was quickly embedded
in its own mini-homeland-security complex, surrounded by crony corporations
and the usual set of former
officials and politicians as lobbyists.
And on that same up-down principle, across the country,
often with the help
of the DHS, specialized military-style training and weaponry are raining down
on local police forces, which are being "weaponized"
in ways previously unknown here. Some now have robot subs,
tanks or armored
personnel carriers, airborne drones,
or super-sophisticated surveillance
systems, the sorts of things with which you might normally go to
war. Like the Pentagon and the DHS, they, too, are increasingly surrounded by
sets of crony
corporations ready to sell them more of the same.
And speaking of what goes up and comes down in the world of
weaponry, for the last four decades, money's been heading upward by the
barrelful into the coffers of giant arms manufacturers like Lockheed
Martin and various crony corporations like KBR
and various mercenary outfits like Academi (formerly Xe, nee Blackwater)
through which American-style war has been so profitably
privatized.
Their CEOs now tend to be in the top .001%
of income earners who make more than $9 million a year (often way more).
Whatever may be on the decline here, however much manufacturing has headed
offshore, however much the middle class is going underwater, we Americans still
turn out to be great at making things that go boom in the night (whether on
screen or on the battlefield).
Just recently, for instance, in the worst of times, the U.S.
arms business has experienced a bonanza. With the help of the State Department,
it set a 2011 record of $44.28
billion in arms sales to 173 nations (including some that State denounces as
human rights violators). This was a rise of $10 billion over the already
staggering 2010 figures (and keep in mind that they don't include arms sales to
other governments funneled through the Pentagon, which reached $34.8 billion in
2011). And 2012 has started off -- excuse the phrase -- with a bang. Those
State Department-sponsored sales are already at $50 billion
with three months to go in the fiscal year.
Betting on the Future
In other words, you're about to head off campus into a world
in which the concentration of wealth, power, and war-making capability is
unprecedented, at least in our time, and yet here's the counterintuitive thing:
at a moment when it looks like all of you couldn't do less, this planet never
needed you more. This country never needed you more. American politics never
needed you more. We never needed you more. But it won't be easy.
In societies organized in such a top-heavy way, who can be
surprised when a bunch of kids head for Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park to
protest and the powers-that-be strike back devastatingly? Who can be surprised
when demands, even requests, are twisted and shredded, when the world doesn't
turn on a dime the way it turns on $10 million?
Think of it this way, class of 2012: for 40 years, they've
been busily rigging the game, stacking the deck. Now, with their power at the
ready and regularly on display, they would like you to think that you've got
nothing going for you, that your only choice is to accept the world they have
on tap for you on their terms.
What they don't bother to mention is that you have the
biggest thing of all going for you, the one thing their money can't buy, their
lobbyists can't win over, their lawyers can't negotiate out of existence, their
politicians can't legislate into passivity, their policemen and hire-a-guns
can't pepper spray or bludgeon into submission. I'm talking about the future,
the one thing they haven't a hope in hell of controlling. It's yours at least
as much as theirs, if not more so, no matter what they do.
Time and again, the future turns out to have its unexpected
surprises, and no matter how our rulers prepare, they are invariably caught off
guard. That explains the remarkable initial successes of both the Arab Spring
and Occupy Wall Street. However much money the powers-that-be can put out, the
future's surprises are their hell on earth.
Yes, of course, they can and will strike back, sometimes all
too effectively, other times dumbly beyond belief. Give New York's Mayor
Bloomberg credit, for instance. ("I have my own army
in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world.") When he
sent that occupying
army into lower Manhattan, he seemed to grasp that Occupy Wall
Street was less a coherent movement than a location -- and that if you ordered
your uparmored legions to clear the place (or rather those places, since
mayors, supported by
the Department of Homeland Security, did this all over the United States), you
would set Occupy adrift, as has happened.
Now, they are undoubtedly well prepared for Occupy II, as
long as it occurs in more or less the fashion that the last one did. It's your
job to be prepared not for the last time around, but for the next.
In the meantime, graduation speeches are, of course,
vehicles for advice from the old to the young. Here's mine. I can't mainline
into the future any better than anyone else, so I have no idea what Occupy
movements or Tahrir Squares may (or may not) be lurking around the next corner
or the one after that. In the meantime, my advice couldn't be simpler: make
yourself useful. And don't be afraid to let yourself be used. As a book editor,
I can tell you that being used by others and so useful to them is one of the
better things in life.
Admittedly, on a planet that needs so much, that's
exceedingly small-ball advice. Then again, we're small, even when we're waiting
for big things. So do what's small, what's around you, what's possible, and
while you're at it, place your money on a future potentially full of surprises
you can help to spring. Put it on the value of acting against the lopsided odds
made in Washington and on Wall Street. And don't spend your time worrying about
what effect, if any, you're going to have. You'll probably never know.
Meanwhile, it's still their world and welcome to it, class
of 2012. The time has come to form into your serried ranks and ready yourself
to cross the grassy expanse of this campus, head through those familiar gates,
and out into an overheated, unforgiving world. Admittedly, by now many of you
have already mortgaged your lives -- $180,000 you didn't have and may not have
60 years from now when you graduate into your grave. This is the living
definition of a subprime education in an increasingly subprime country on an
increasingly subprime planet.
So congratulations, class of 2012: it's one tough world
you're walking into. When the odds are this lousy, stop worrying about them.
Bet instead on the one thing they can't control. It just could be yours. And
while you're hanging in there, waiting for what neither you nor they can even imagine,
don't forget: be useful. Help someone or something on this planet. You'll
figure out how and you won't regret it.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of "The United
States of Fear" as well as "The End of
Victory Culture," runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book,
co-authored with Nick Turse, is "Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050." To
listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt
discusses drone warfare and the Obama administration, click here or
download it to your iPod here.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
