deconsumption reading room

Bruce Beach's Nuclear Crisis Preparation Website

Nobody likes to think about nuclear warfare, but at the same time we have to accept that we live in a time when the potential for swift and massive devastation of our planet via nuclear war is a very real possibility--in fact it could be argued that at some theoretical point out into the future the "potential" for nuclear escalation approaches "inevitability". So we should probably face the fact that bomb shelters and nuclear fallout are something we really should become knowledgeable about, as they may form a responsible part of our crisis preparations.

In this light, an excellent website providing a wealth of practical and detailed information is Bruce Beach's (untitled) website. Bruce is a U.S. trained and Canadian government certified Radiological Scientific Officer, which means he is qualified to train officers to become advisers to government agencies about how to prepare for and respond to a nuclear crisis. He's been featured in major newspapers and magazines, in addition to having taught or spoken at several colleges and "numerous conferences on survival"...

Bruce's site is contains a wealth of experience and is exceptionally well-presented. Heck, he's even got a good sense of humor!

Bruce Beach's Website - Main page
( www.webpal.org )

Link to excellent introductory article "You Will Survive Doomsday"
( http://www.webpal.org/webpal/d_resources/survival/books/doomsday/index.htm )

[FYI - The above links may or may not work from this page. If not then just copy the links in parenthesis to your web-browser and enter the site manually.]

The Final Empire by William H. Kotke

I have to give many thanks to Ran Prieur for finding the following link to what is very likely the most important single work I've yet discovered on where humankind is headed and why we are headed there. Published in 1993, William Kotke's The Final Empire is a breathtaking and comprehensive analysis of why modern human civilization, in the form in which it has developed over the preceding millennia, is no longer (and has never been) sustainable within the limits of the Earth's resources. With a scope that ranges far beyond just "Peak Oil", Kotke illustrates in depth the general conditions which reveal that the human race has run its course...and then dedicates equal research and energy to outlining what a truly sustainable civilization would entail.

As of this writing, I am only a few chapters into The Final Empire, but I can't speak highly enough of this work. It appears that so much of what a great many people are struggling to discover and comprehend for themselves has already been consolidated and presented with masterful understanding by William Kotke.

And this 400 page work is presented freely, to either read online or download for printing. If you gain as much from it as I suspect you will, you might consider sending a donation to the address at the top of the page-link (note: "Middletwon, CA" should read "Middletown, CA").

The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future by William H. Kotke

From the introduction:

"Our generation is on the verge of the most profound catastrophe the human species has ever faced. Death threats to the living earth are coming from all sides. Water, sunlight, air and soil are all threatened. When Eskimos of the far north begin to experience leukemia from atomic radiation and Eskimo mothers’ milk contains crisis levels of PCB’s, we must recognize that every organism on the planet is threatened.

Compounding this crisis is the fact that the prime forces in this affair, the civilized humans, are unable to completely understand the problem. The problem is beneath the threshold of consciousness because humans within civilization (civilization comes from the Latin, civis, referring to those who live in cities, towns and villages) no longer have relationship with the living earth. Civilized people’s lives are focused within the social system itself. They do not perceive the eroding soils and the vanishing forests. These matters do not have the immediate interest of paychecks. The impulse of civilization in crisis is to do what it has been doing, but do it more energetically in order to extricate itself. If soaring population and starvation threaten, often the impulse is to put more pressure on the agricultural soils and cut the forests faster.

We face planetary disaster. The destruction of the planetary life system has been ongoing for thousands of years and is now approaching the final apocalypse which some of us will see in our own lifetimes. Far from being a difficult and complex situation it is actually very simple, if one can understand and accept a few simple and fundamental propositions...."

The Invisible Hand (of the U.S. Government) in Financial Markets

Hopefully this essay will appeal even to those who don't have much interest in the workings of financial markets, because it reveals the enormous intent and degree to which "monetary controls" have pervaded the U.S. government's raison d'etre. In my 15 years of studying the financial markets, I've seen countless times how individual stocks or markets experience a sudden and incongruous "buying" precisely at moments of critical breakdown. So I know these controls are both systematic and systemic, and have been for years. In fact, with every passing year the interventions become larger and more flagrant, so that until I had read this article I had not encountered anyone who believed that they could pull it off any longer.

But in this essay, Robert Bell, Chairman of the Economics Department, Brooklyn College, N.Y., shows how the government "subsidy" of the economy goes far beyond mere market controls. He also draws out and references direct connections and evidence to illustrate how it's being orchestrated for perhaps the last time here in the final desperate moments of capitalism's demise. In truth, I can't myself find one criticism of the scheme he has outlined. My only question is how it will all play out in the face of the more generalized and imminent global collapse of systems. Because in the final analysis, the American Jobs Creation Act, which Bell shows is the catalyst for this last hurrah, is predicated on the belief that multi-national corporations will be seduced into "re-patriating" much of the funds they've been hiding away outside the moribund American economy. And I suspect that some of them, at least, won't....

The Invisible Hand (of the U.S. Government) in Financial Markets by Robert Bell

"...the year 2005 began with most U.S. and international speculators holding short positions on U.S. bond markets. Obviously this is because they had foolishly looked at the underlying economic reality, and failed to understand the profound import of the American Jobs Creation Act. Most people were utterly unaware of it until at least January 13, when the U.S. Treasury, under whose direction the Plunge Protection team works, announced the specifics of what the grand skim could and could not be spent on. As noted, the list included stock market pumpers—takeovers."

"A Propaganda Model" by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent)

Noam Chomsky has authored a large and highly-respected body of intellectual work. He is considered one of the world's most insightful and original modern social critics, and a shining illustration that a healthy sense for "conspiracy theory" actually comes part-and-parcel with expanded critical faculties....

In essence, Chomsky attempts to reveal the mechanics by which a media "of, by and for" the 'workers' will serve to instill and reinforce value-systems and social frameworks which support and maintain the way of life desired by the 'workers', and a media "of, by and for" the elite will serve to instill and reinforce value-systems and social frameworks which support and maintain the way of life desired by that elite. Thus a rather effortless and institutionalized system of censorship and propaganda is established which is yet free of any identifyable instruments of 'control'.

"A Propaganda Model" by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent)

"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent."
[...]
"A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism [or "terrorism" in our recent time - Ed. note]. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable."

Testimony before Congress of Dr. Carol Rosin

Dr. Carol Rosin is the President of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, a former educator, space and missile defense consultant, aerospace executive for Fairchild Industries, and spokesperson for the late Dr. Wernher "father of rocketry" von Braun. She has testified before the US Congress and numerous international leaders. Dr. Rosin is regarded to be the original political architect of the move to stop the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) and ASATs (Anti-satellite weapons).

The following transcript is from a Congressional testimony she gave in December, 2000. It has been fairly widely disseminated in the alternative news circles, primarily because it revealed von Braun's repeated assertion (in the early 1970's) that unnamed power-elites were determined to create space-based weapons systems despite the significant dangers, costs and fallacies involved, all based on a successive series of invented 'threats':

"He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy....Then terrorists would be identified....Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. "And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie."

What Dr. Rosin indicates in this testimony seems to become more and more prescient each day. And it reveals so many telling facets about how our society is progressing that I feel it deserves a place here in the reading room.

Testimony before Congress of Dr. Carol Rosin

"I have been tracking the space-based weapons issue for about 26 years.

I have debated Generals and Congressional Representatives. I have testified before the Congress and the Senate. I have met with people in over 100 countries. But I have not been able to identify who the people are who are making this space-based weapons system happen. I see the news. I see the administrative decisions being made. I know that they are all based on lies and greed.

But I have yet to be able to identify who the people are. That is after tracking this issue for 26 years....But I have concluded that it is based on a few people making a lot of money and gaining power. It is about ego. It is not about our essence and who we really are on this planet and loving each other and being at peace and cooperating. It isn't about using technology to solve problems and heal people in the planet. It isn't about that. It is about a few people who really are playing an old, dangerous, costly game for their own pocketbooks and power struggle. That is all it is."

[...]

"This is what our economy has been based on in this country and spreading around the world--war. People suffer as a result. It is not fair. It never has been. People have screamed: "out of swords let us build plow shares, let's have peace and hold hands around the world," but it hasn't worked because too many people are benefiting. Not only are they benefiting financially, but from what my experience is there are people who actually believe that Armageddon should happen so we have to have these wars.

So, it is going from the pocketbook, to the religious right: some people actually believe that we have to have wars for these religious reasons. There are people who just love war."

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth

Ran Prieur, who authors the addictive ongoing "reality"-serial Landblog, offers up 9 Steps to ponder on the path to deconsumption. Ran artfully weaves together practical strategies informed with an ideology of responsible being, to give a vision of our future that offers more hope and promise than other, more simplistic, "survival guides".

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth by Ran Prieur

In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.
[...]
You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.

I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that we'll have plenty of time to get together geographically.

Richard Heinberg's Closing Address for 2004 Peak Oil Conference

Heinberg is a long-time Peak Oil researcher and journalist. The 2004 Peak Oil Conference was held on Nov. 12-14 in Yellow Spring, OH. About 150 people attended.

Short, hopeful, clearly spoken and authoritative, this is perhaps as good a primer as any to give to people you care about who either don't wish to see or don't have the time to recognize what is ahead of us.

Richard Heinberg's Closing Address for 2004 Peak Oil Conference

So what do you do if you are living at the end of an empire? I suppose one rational response would be to eat, drink, and be merry. Why not? It sure beats worrying oneself to death over events one can’t control, and thus squandering whatever moments of normalcy and chances for happiness may remain before the end comes.

Somehow, I think that you here have other ideas about what to do. I suspect that if you had been passengers on the Titanic, you would not have been drinking yourselves into a stupor at the bar; you’d have been strapping deck chairs together, finding a way to increase the signal strength of the ship’s radio, or invent waterproof buoyant suits that could be remanufactured from hemp ropes using equipment commandeered from the ship’s machine shop.

I probably can’t tell you anything you should be doing that you are not already doing about as well as you can under the circumstances. We all know the drill—grow more of your own food, conserve energy, become active in your local community, learn useful arts and skills, stock up on handtools. In essence: we must plant the seeds for what can and will survive; for a way of life as different from industrialism as the latter is from the medieval period; a way of life whose full flowering we ourselves may never see in our brief lifetimes.

Can America Survive? by Joseph George Caldwell

Here is the most extensive and well-referenced treatise I've found on the coming "population adjustment". In fact it's a whole book really, with an Index and several Appendices.

Now for the disclaimer. While I certainly appreciate the scope of the author's effort, I don't personally condone some of the views in this work. In fact, the whole of it is closed-minded, to say the least. I don't mean that as a personal slight...rather, the umbrage I take is primarily with his views that our present leaders should take it upon themselves to oversee the "culling" of our population and the establishment of a single global government. From my own viewpoint, our world leaders haven't shown much responsibility or competence in the growth of our modern civilization, so I have absolutely no faith whatsoever that they would be any more capable in "reducing" it. And I certainly don't look forward to what they could accomplish in a world that had been beaten and fatigued by crisis, hunger and warfare....

If I had my druthers, I'd prefer to see them forced to take a back seat, and let Nature can take the wheel from here....

Can America Survive? by Joseph George Caldwell

Also, for a much more digestible summation of the above, the following link is to a synopsis by the same author, and which runs about 18 pages or so.

The End of the World, and the New World Order by Joseph George Caldwell

Finally, here is a link to Joseph George Caldwell's website, which has many papers on similar and varying subjects.

[Update 3/07/05--If you've read the full treatise above, you'll undoubtedly find this response by Caldwell to various questions, criticisms and concerns (my own included) quite interesting and thought-provoking: Who Am I? Hint--while it's rather long, it's really only about half as long as the browser "scroll bar" leads you to believe....]

The Origins of the Overclass

Steve Kangas' article is impartial, well-organized and appears to be reliably researched. It provides an excellent overview of the history and role of the CIA: not as a tool for securing Democracy and American freedom, but for subverting it...almost solely as a means for maintaining the power and authority of large corporations and the Pretenders That Be.

The Origins of the Overclass by Steve Kangas

"The CIA’s contacts with big business quickly spread. ...One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it’s impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal.

By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control."

Narco-Dollars for Beginners

Despite her Housing Agency and Corporate Boardroom background, Catherine Austin Fitts has made it her calling to educate people in ordinary communities about the criminal mismanagement of funds that goes on in our government (and also what they can do about it...see Solari Corp's webpage for her plan to encourage communities to reinvest their savings in themselves). This article is an often referenced classic in that attempt, and don't let the dumbed-down style deter you...it's her belief that complex financial arrangements can be explained to even the financially illiterate.

Narco-dollars for Beginners: How the Money Works in the Illicit Drug Trade by Catherine Austin Fitts

"The Department of Justice says that we launder $500 billion -$ 1 trillion...Now figure how much of that "income" gets run through the income statement of publicly traded banks and companies and multiply that number by the multiple of income at which their stocks trade.

Voila. I don't know what your number is. All I know is that, as Ed Sullivan used to say, it is "really, really BIG."
[...]
Indeed, what a history of narcotics trafficking and piracy and various other forms of organized crime over the last five hundred years show is that our leaders have been in a double bind for centuries. The only thing more dangerous than getting caught doing organized crime, is not being in control of the reinvested cash flows from it. This is why monarchs played footsie with pirates in Elizabethan times and no doubt have been doing so ever since.

After taxation, organized crime is a society's way of forming lots of pools of low cost cash capital. Organized crime is a banking and venture capital business."

Energy and Human Evolution

Perhaps the most concise and detailed description of Mankind's fundamental problem: that the human population explosion of the last couple centuries is entirely predicated on fossil fuels, and therefore it cannot end happily. In fact, from a more objective point of view, that may have been our sole reason for being in the first place.... Written in 1995 by Dr. David Price of Cornell University, referenced at Dieoff.org.

Energy and Human Evolution by David Price

"People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse. Human population has grown exponentially by exhausting limited resources, like yeast in a vat or reindeer on St. Matthew Island, and is destined for a similar fate.
[...]
Even if world population could be held constant, in balance with "renewable" resources, the creative impulse that has been responsible for human achievements during the period of growth would come to an end. And the spiraling collapse that is far more likely will leave, at best, a handfull of survivors. These people might get by, for a while, by picking through the wreckage of civilization, but soon they would have to lead simpler lives, like the hunters and subsistence farmers of the past. They would not have the resources to build great public works or carry forward scientific inquiry. They could not let individuals remain unproductive as they wrote novels or composed symphonies. After a few generations, they might come to believe that the rubble amid which they live is the remains of cities built by gods."

Address of Michael C. Ruppert to the Commonwealth Club - 8/31/04

The following is a transcript of an address given by Michael C. Ruppert, editor of the newsletter and online website called From the Wilderness, to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

It parallels his upcoming book Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil which promises to drop a bombshell on the upcoming elections. Michael Ruppert has a history of responsible research, as well as in exposing government agency mis-dealings, so this transcript, while rather long, is worth the effort.

Transcript of address by Michael C. Ruppert to the Commonwealth Club. [in PDF format]

"THE 9/11 ATTACKS WERE THE RESULT OF DELIBERATE PLANNING AND ORCHESTRATED EFFORTS BY IDENTIFIABLE LEADERS WITHIN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, AND THE ENERGY AND FINANCIAL SECTORS, TO SEE A PEARL HARBOR-LIKE ATTACK WHICH WOULD PROVIDE THE AMERICAN EMPIRE WITH A PRETEXT FOR WAR, INVASION AND THE SEQUENTIAL CONFISCATION OF OIL AND NATURAL GAS RESERVES, OR THE KEY TRANSPORTATION ROUTES THROUGH WHICH THEY PASS. 9-11 WAS A PREMEDITATED MURDER AND IN MY BOOK, AND HERE TONIGHT, I WILL NAME SOME OF THE SUSPECTS WHO COMMITTED THE CRIME. IN MY BOOK I WILL SHOW YOU OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE OF THEIR GUILT WHICH I WOULD BE PROUD AND CONFIDENT TO PLACE EITHER BEFORE A DISTRICT ATTORNEY OR A JURY."