Such negligence causes an impending public relations disaster. Next officials caught in the line of public outcry will vigorously shift the blame to anyone who is least equipped to endure being tagged the bogeyman. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in equally predictable cynical fashion avoided paying any personal or legal punishment but opportunistically announced six current and former state employees with numerous felonies and misdemeanors. Of course this charade features one level of government filing a lawsuit against another and followed thereafter with additional class action lawsuits. This chronic litigation cycle obscures the underlying problem. The story is deleted from the national media after feigned outrage is exhausted during a few news cycles. The controversy quickly dissipates after public officials stage appearances for damage control.
The Flint experience should open the public's collective eye to the extent of water systems' contamination:
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s report said federal data show that in 2015, more than 5,000 community water systems across the U.S. violated federal regulations aimed at treating, monitoring and maintaining low lead levels in the water coming out of consumers’ taps. Only 5.7 percent of the violations had been corrected by the end of the year, and just about 10 percent of violations were subject to any kind of state or federal enforcement action. [1]Willful neglect of the decaying infrastructure leaves many large urban areas in the dust. It appears so. The elites' focus seems to be on expanding virtual worlds that use the surveillance state to maintain power over everyone. Such a world renders unnecessary the elites' control of large land masses because everyone's communication devices (more now an extension of human's arms and hands) links them into a grid where neat traceable digital footprints are recorded.
The U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) states in their assessment that major shortages of food and water threaten to affect much of the global population:
An extrapolation of current trends in per capita consumption patterns of food and water shows the projected extent of the problem during the next couple decades. Demand for food is set to rise by more than 35 percent by 2030, but global productivity gains have fallen from 2.0 percent between 1970 and 2000 to 1.1 percent today and are still declining. The world has consumed more food than it has produced in seven of the last eight years.b A major international study finds that annual global water requirements will reach 6,900 billion cubic meters (BCM) in 2030, 40 percent above current sustainable water supplies. [2]Extrapolations can often yield inaccurate predictions. What we must consider from this assessment is whether the authors publish their findings to express alarms about scarcity and to find solutions before it inflicts mass hardships? Or, do they want to condition the masses to accept tragic-inducing levels of scarcity as inevitable?
The U.S. NIC states in a fictionalized scenario how climate change may impact the functioning of one of the most indispensable and sacred institutions of the elites: the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE):
An extreme weather event—as described in this scenario—could occur. Coping with the greater frequency of such events, coupled with other physical impacts of climate change such as growing water scarcities and more food crises, may preoccupy policymakers even while options for solving such problems dwindle. In this example, relocating the New York Stock Exchange to a less vulnerable location is considered, but serious consideration also would be given to relocating other institutions to ensure continuity of operations. [3]The "continuity of operations" is essential in their minds. They need to create a tragedy-disruption-proof version of finance capitalism. The example is hypothetical but remember how quickly the Western "liberators" opened Libya's "new" central bank following Libya's exploding into a "civil war?"
The "Day of Rage" that erupted on February 17, 2011 is credited by some as the beginning of the Libyan revolution. Next, after the UN Security Council voted on March 19, 2011 for the Orwellian "No-Fly Zone," NATO soon began bombing Libya. According to Bloomberg,
Events like this help demonstrate how elites obsess over the primacy of the functioning of central banks. Although its functioning is of primary importance to the Libyan government and elites, it proved to be inadequate to serve as a great unifying institution. In 2014 the reigniting of the civil war resulted in their Central Bank splintering into separate central banks.The Council also said it “designated the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and the appointment of a governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” [4]
Libya's parallel central banks has created a conflict between both of them. They cannot agree on the powers vested in the eastern version (in the Libyan city of Bayda) of the central bank:
This controversy reached such urgency that predictably the U.S. needed to interject itself, expressing its concern over alleged counterfeit currency printing:Ali al-Hibri, the governor of the Bayda-based CBL announced on Tuesday that 4 billion Libyan dinars in 20 and 50 notes had been printed in Russia and would be in circulation across Libya from Wednesday June 1. Following a meeting with commercial bank managers in Bayda Al-Hibri told Iqtisadia Channel that there was no risk of there being two parallel currencies because the new bank notes were exactly the same as the old ones. [5]
Now U.S. diplomats can cite numerous "agreements" and legalistic language that justifies its criticizing of such monetary policy actions. But, the fact that such extensive efforts occur to govern central banking activity underscores the major point here: institutions that serve the functioning of finance capital are prioritized over other human concerns. I'll let an establishment pundit like Thomas Friedman or even Paul Krugman argue that finance capitalism serves humanity.Reacting to the disclosure, the US administration declared that it concurred with the GNA Presidency Council in saying that the new currency was “counterfeit” and could “undermine confidence in Libya’s currency and the CBL’s ability to manage monetary policy”. [6]
The U.S. Empire stands as a world power whose actions show it believes it possesses the unique and unprecedented resilience to ignore signs of its mortality. Trillions of dollars of debt (public, private, foreign etc), stagnant average wages, increasing social and economic inequality are acute problems that deserve little more attention than dated platitudes expressed by elites. But, the legal provisions in effect authorize the U.S. President to assume dictatorial powers in the event of an emergency or crisis or dire-sounding conditions. My referring to such powers is easily seen as paranoid rantings bereft of any realistic understanding of the challenges of crisis management. Nonetheless, the fact remains the U.S. President is vested with such powers.
This czar-empowerment to manage crises is codified for example in The Defense Production of 1950 ,As Amended (enacted September 26, 2014), and an Executive Order entitled National Defense Resources Preparedness signed by President Obama on March 16, 2012.
If such a crisis occurs, the President is empowered under legislation to manage all major industrial, food, and water resources. If our society currently tolerates such levels of inequality, then why would the President-cum-resource-czar be entrusted during a crisis or famine to allocate the aforementioned to the masses to ensure social justice and material survival? Maybe a crisis will awaken the elites' consciences, creating a new Social Contract? Regretfully, though, the trends in the distribution of income in the advanced world show little promise of such an elite awakening to the challenges of reduced upward mobility:
Between 65 and 70 percent of households in 25 advanced economies, the equivalent of 540 million to 580 million people, were in segments of the income distribution whose real market incomes—their wages and income from capital—were flat or had fallen in 2014 compared with 2005. This compared with less than 2 percent, or fewer than ten million people, who experienced this phenomenon between 1993 and 2005. [7]This trend of increasing inequality portends no relief to the working and impoverished classes should we see a complete collapse of the entire base of economic production.
Another sobering trend shows that the socioeconomic promise of urban renaissance in many major cities is mostly over hyped images of hipsters. Such excess hype masks the increasing marginalization of working classes. Production methods are better enabling elites to earn larger percentages of income and wealth without their relying on much poorer classes to both produce and consume goods and services in order to maintain this system. Joel Kotkin observes this phenomenon in The New Class Conflict:
Manuel Castells, writing as early as the 1980s, believed that an 'informational city' would generate nodes of prosperity that increasingly communicated with themselves while shunning the rest of the metropolitan areas. Most of the metropolitan population, historically a key source of customers and workers for major businesses, would have a 'decreased relevance' for the more elite nodes. In such a society, the benefits of 'post-industrialism' would, unlike in prior periods of growth, concentrate in selected metropolitan areas as opposed to throughout the country as a whole. [8]Evidence already exists that justifies skepticism about the power of the post-industrial economy in the U.S. to improve the quality of life for the masses:
In many of the most celebrated new urbanist cities, middle-and working-class employment has faded, leaving the Yeomanry and the poor struggling to make ends meet, even in the most successful, but high-cost, urban regions. Indeed when average urban incomes are adjusted for the higher rent and costs, the middle classes in metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Miami, and San Francisco have among the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area. [9]
What appeals to the mass media are images of an emerging class of hipsters whose "empowering" use of new technology provides a catalyst of urban renaissance. Look at Wired to see such attempts at promoting the hipster economy in urban America. The reality of urban conditions which are much less appealing than the facade of a hipster revolution deserve more attention. Sure many major urban "renaissance" projects produce trendy warehouse districts of bars and gourmet foodie eating. But Hipster heroics aside the actual infrastructure in such cities continues to deteriorate to 3rd world status. For instance:
The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its 2013 'report card' on the state of American infrastructure, rated it overall as a D+. Decades of boutique wars costing trillions and money wasted on reckless pork barrel projects or siphoned off into overseas tax havens appear to have taken their toll: in some places, money is no longer available even to maintain properly paved roads. Reversing a century-long trend in developed countries, many rural jurisdictions in Ohio, Michigan, North Dakota, and other states are grinding up their rutted and dilapidated paved roads and reusing the ground-up asphalt as a gravel-like surface. John Habermann of Purdue University's College of Engineering has called it "back to the stone age." [10]If these civil engineers' assessment is accurate, then the U.S. is experiencing less an urban renaissance or revolution and much more an urban regression.
An ominous trend is occurring whereby elites function seamlessly in a system integrated across developed, developing, and failed states alike. Meanwhile, large segments in each of these nations are by becoming more visibly expendable. Many poor people in Detroit possibly share more in common with many Libyans. Both live in failed states. One resulted from a world power neglecting its poor. The other resulted from that same world power acting on its self-proclaimed humanitarian intervention to create a failed state.
Scenes of contaminated water, and the deployment of resources to maintain a surveillance grid and finance capital foreshadow an endangering of the masses being consigned to a large class of expendables.
[1]. Delaney, Arthur. "Our Drinking Water Regulation Is So Weak Even Flint's Water Got A Pass." June 28, 2016. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/flint-water-lead_us_57727d8be4b0f168323ae089
[2]. The National Intelligence Council. "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Trends December 2012. https://globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf or view electronic version https://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/global-trends-2030
[3]. The National Intelligence Council. "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World." November 2008. https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf or view electronic version www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html
[4]. Varner, Bill. "Libyan Rebel Council Forms Oil Company to Replace Qadaffi's." Bloomberg. March 22, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-03-21/libyan-rebel-council-sets-up-oil-company-to-replace-qaddafi-s
[5]. Libya's Channel. "Row as east Libyan central bank prints own bank notes." May 26, 2016. http://en.libyaschannel.com/2016/05/26/row-as-east-libyan-central-bank-prints-own-bank-notes/
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Gurdgiev, Constantin. "McKinsey's 'Generation Worse.'" True Economics. July 20, 2016. http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2016/07/20716-mckinseys-generation-worse.html
[8]. Kotkin, Joel. The New Class Conflict. Telos Press Publishing. Candor, NY. 2014. Kindle version. location 1899-1906.
[9]. Ibid.
[10]. Lofgren, Mike. The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. Viking. New York. 2016. Kindle version. location 3321.
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