[Gasification] More on ORCs -- food for thoughts

[Peter Singfield]

At 08:21 AM 2/3/2007 -0600, Ed Woolsey wrote:
>Hey Peter,
>
>Have you ever read any of Jan Lundbergs rantings?  He use to author a
>petroleum newsletter I subscribed to in a previous life.  His topics
>usually include something related to peak oil.
>Ed  
>Iowa
>Zero degrees or so this week.
>
>http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9
>9&Itemid=2#cont
>
>

Hi Ed -- have appended an article that was sent to me by someone up in the
US yesterday -- I figure it paints the right picture -- a kind of soft
landing if you will -- but totally dependent on American's ability to scale
back their life styles.

I am posting this to the entire list -- as I find myself to short of time
to discuss matters -- and this is a subject that should remain dear to
everyone's hearts.

I flatly state that you all are thinking to "large" -- and knee jerk to
centralized -- over specialized - -activity to much.

If I was still in the power seat of my old company -- Precision Energy
Systems -- in Montreal -- I would be negotiating with Ormat for 10,000 of
those small units to market -- everyone has natural gas in Montreal -- and
they would be just the right thing for power failures -- especially in
winter -- as they would give clean heat as well as clean power. Most power
failures there occur in the winter months.

I probably would have sold those 10,000 units to businesses as emergency
power back ups -- alone!!

But with everyone thinking so big and rich "now" -- we sure are missing to
opportunity to gear up for real times when they come.

Ergo -- there might not be a soft landing -- but rather panic in the
streets and social unrest approximating the French Revolution way back when.

It is not so much about the world running out of oil any time soon -- it is
all about an expansive empire that has to quickly spent itself into
economic bankruptcy -- again -- read the true History of the French
Revolution - -and what led up to it.

At that time France was the richest of all countries -- the most
technologically advanced -- etc --- basically -- the center of the known
universe.

Who could ever have believed it could have self destructed to fast and so
brutally -- but it did.

And all because of it's never being able to stop deficit spending -- and
printing more and more -- till way to much -- paper money to cover it's
back-side -- till it all went "poof" --

So -- it your choice now -- all you people "up-there" - -what will it be --
soft landing or panic in the streets??

Just try to remember but one thing -- your balloon most definitely has
sprung some major leaks -- and it will be coming down -- no matter what!!

Or is the modern American now evolved into Dodo territory??

You know -- and over specialized life form that evolved in an environment
of absolutely no real dangers so it ended up being unable to detect dangers
and thus move out of the way from it -- when things changed -- and the
sailors landed.

Peter / Belize



**************appended*********************



Published on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 by TomDispatch.com
Empire v. Democracy
Why Nemesis Is at Our Door

by Chalmers Johnson

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a
country -- like the United States today -- that tries to be a domestic
democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract
subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say a few
words about my new book, Nemesis, and explain why I gave it the subtitle,
"The Last Days of the American Republic." Nemesis is the third book to have
grown out of my research over the past eight years. I never set out to
write a trilogy on our increasingly endangered democracy, but as I kept
stumbling on ever more evidence of the legacy of the imperialist pressures
we put on many other countries as well as the nature and size of our
military empire, one book led to another.

Professionally, I am a specialist in the history and politics of East Asia.
In 2000, I published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire, because my research on China, Japan, and the two Koreas persuaded
me that our policies there would have serious future consequences. The book
was noticed at the time, but only after 9/11 did the CIA term I adapted for
the title -- "blowback" -- become a household word and my volume a bestseller.

I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated
around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just
mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign
countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations
carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public.
These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments
various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in
the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign
countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that
seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as
well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that
these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation
does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the
American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not
surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge
intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of
lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of
blowback.

A World of Bases

As a continuation of my own analytical odyssey, I then began doing research
on the network of 737 American military bases we maintained around the
world (according to the Pentagon's own 2005 official inventory). Not
including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, we now station over half a
million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others on military
bases located in more than 130 countries, many of them presided over by
dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision
to let us in.

As but one striking example of imperial basing policy: For the past
sixty-one years, the U.S. military has garrisoned the small Japanese island
of Okinawa with 37 bases. Smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands,
Okinawa is home to 1.3 million people who live cheek-by-jowl with 17,000
Marines of the 3rd Marine Division and the largest U.S. installation in
East Asia -- Kadena Air Force Base. There have been many Okinawan protests
against the rapes, crimes, accidents, and pollution caused by this sort of
concentration of American troops and weaponry, but so far the U. S.
military -- in collusion with the Japanese government -- has ignored them.
My research into our base world resulted in The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, written during the run-up
to the Iraq invasion.

As our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into major fiascoes,
discrediting our military leadership, ruining our public finances, and
bringing death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of civilians in
those countries, I continued to ponder the issue of empire. In these years,
it became ever clearer that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their
supporters were claiming, and actively assuming, powers specifically denied
to a president by our Constitution. It became no less clear that Congress
had almost completely abdicated its responsibilities to balance the power
of the executive branch. Despite the Democratic sweep in the 2006 election,
it remains to be seen whether these tendencies can, in the long run, be
controlled, let alone reversed.

Until the 2004 presidential election, ordinary citizens of the United
States could at least claim that our foreign policy, including our illegal
invasion of Iraq, was the work of George Bush's administration and that we
had not put him in office. After all, in 2000, Bush lost the popular vote
and was appointed president thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court
in a 5-4 decision. But in November 2004, regardless of claims about voter
fraud, Bush actually won the popular vote by over 3.5 million ballots,
making his regime and his wars ours.

Whether Americans intended it or not, we are now seen around the world as
approving the torture of captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram
Air Base in Kabul, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at a global network of
secret CIA prisons, as well as having endorsed Bush's claim that, as
commander-in-chief in "wartime," he is beyond all constraints of the
Constitution or international law. We are now saddled with a rigged economy
based on record-setting trade and fiscal deficits, the most secretive and
intrusive government in our country's memory, and the pursuit of
"preventive" war as a basis for foreign policy. Don't forget as well the
potential epidemic of nuclear proliferation as other nations attempt to
adjust to and defend themselves against Bush's preventive wars, while our
own already staggering nuclear arsenal expands toward first-strike primacy
and we expend unimaginable billions on futuristic ideas for warfare in
outer space.

The Choice Ahead

By the time I came to write Nemesis, I no longer doubted that maintaining
our empire abroad required resources and commitments that would inevitably
undercut, or simply skirt, what was left of our domestic democracy and that
might, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or -- far more likely --
its civilian equivalent. The combination of huge standing armies, almost
continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the
military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous
military expenses as well as a vast, bloated "defense" budget, not to speak
of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the
Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican
structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican
structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate
checks and balances that the founders of our country wrote into the
Constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which
they greatly feared.

We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our
empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all
empires come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and
global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.

History is instructive on this dilemma. If we choose to keep our empire, as
the Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly
await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. There is an
alternative, however. We could, like the British Empire after World War II,
keep our democracy by giving up our empire. The British did not do a
particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire and there were
several clear cases where British imperialists defied their nation's
commitment to democracy in order to hang on to foreign privileges. The war
against the Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s and the Anglo-French-Israeli
invasion of Egypt in 1956 are particularly savage examples of that. But the
overall thrust of postwar British history is clear: the people of the
British Isles chose democracy over imperialism.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher
Hannah Arendt offered the following summary of British imperialism and its
fate:

"On the whole it was a failure because of the dichotomy between the
nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other
people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance
or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that 'administrative
massacres' could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public
opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have
been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to
commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the
glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to
liquidate the empire."

I agree with this judgment. When one looks at Prime Minister Tony Blair's
unnecessary and futile support of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq,
one can only conclude that it was an atavistic response, that it
represented a British longing to relive the glories -- and cruelties -- of
a past that should have been ancient history.

As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent
of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to
combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is
hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or
it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

The Road to Imperial Bankruptcy

The American political system failed to prevent this combination from
developing -- and may now be incapable of correcting it. The evidence
strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches of our
government have become so servile in the presence of the imperial
Presidency that they have largely lost the ability to respond in a
principled and independent manner. Even in the present moment of
congressional stirring, there seems to be a deep sense of helplessness.
Various members of Congress have already attempted to explain how the one
clear power they retain -- to cut off funds for a disastrous program -- is
not one they are currently prepared to use.

So the question becomes, if not Congress, could the people themselves
restore Constitutional government? A grass-roots movement to abolish secret
government, to bring the CIA and other illegal spying operations and
private armies out of the closet of imperial power and into the light, to
break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and to establish genuine
public financing of elections may be at least theoretically conceivable.
But given the conglomerate control of our mass media and the difficulties
of mobilizing our large and diverse population, such an opting for popular
democracy, as we remember it from our past, seems unlikely.

It is possible that, at some future moment, the U.S. military could
actually take over the government and declare a dictatorship (though its
commanders would undoubtedly find a gentler, more user-friendly name for
it). That is, after all, how the Roman republic ended -- by being turned
over to a populist general, Julius Caesar, who had just been declared
dictator for life. After his assassination and a short interregnum, it was
his grandnephew Octavian who succeeded him and became the first Roman
emperor, Augustus Caesar. The American military is unlikely to go that
route. But one cannot ignore the fact that professional military officers
seem to have played a considerable role in getting rid of their civilian
overlord, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The new directors of the
CIA, its main internal branches, the National Security Agency, and many
other key organs of the "defense establishment" are now military (or
ex-military) officers, strongly suggesting that the military does not need
to take over the government in order to control it. Meanwhile, the
all-volunteer army has emerged as an ever more separate institution in our
society, its profile less and less like that of the general populace.

Nonetheless, military coups, however decorous, are not part of the American
tradition, nor that of the officer corps, which might well worry about how
the citizenry would react to a move toward open military dictatorship.
Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib
prison and killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to enlisted
troops that obedience to illegal orders can result in dire punishment in a
situation where those of higher rank go free. No one knows whether ordinary
soldiers, even from what is no longer in any normal sense a citizen army,
would obey clearly illegal orders to oust an elected government or whether
the officer corps would ever have sufficient confidence to issue such
orders. In addition, the present system already offers the military high
command so much -- in funds, prestige, and future employment via the famed
"revolving door" of the military-industrial complex -- that a perilous
transition to anything like direct military rule would make little sense
under reasonably normal conditions.

Whatever future developments may prove to be, my best guess is that the
U.S. will continue to maintain a façade of Constitutional government and
drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy
will not mean the literal end of the U.S. any more than it did for Germany
in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2002. It might, in fact, open
the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system -- or for
military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet
imagine.

Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard
of living, a further loss of control over international affairs, a sudden
need to adjust to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and
a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow
exceptional compared to other nations. We will have to learn what it means
to be a far poorer country -- and the attitudes and manners that go with
it. As Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of
American Nationalism, observes:

"U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of
the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable. . . The empire can no longer
raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal
states are no longer reliable. . . The result is that the empire can no
longer pay for enough of the professional troops it needs to fulfill its
self-assumed imperial tasks."

In February 2006, the Bush administration submitted to Congress a $439
billion defense appropriation budget for fiscal year 2007. As the country
enters 2007, the administration is about to present a nearly $100 billion
supplementary request to Congress just for the Iraq and Afghan wars. At the
same time, the deficit in the country's current account -- the imbalance in
the trading of goods and services as well as the shortfall in all other
cross-border payments from interest income and rents to dividends and
profits on direct investments -- underwent its fastest ever quarterly
deterioration. For 2005, the current account deficit was $805 billion, 6.4%
of national income. In 2005, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component
of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high of $725.8
billion, the fourth consecutive year that America's trade debts set
records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.6 billion, the
highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since
mid-2000, the country has lost nearly three million manufacturing jobs.

To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised
the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96 trillion. This was the
fourth time since George W. Bush took office that it had to be raised. The
national debt is the total amount owed by the government and should not be
confused with the federal budget deficit, the annual amount by which
federal spending exceeds revenue. Had Congress not raised the debt limit,
the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would
have had to default on its massive debts.

Among the creditors that finance these unprecedented sums, the two largest
are the central banks of China (with $853.7 billion in reserves) and Japan
(with $831.58 billion in reserves), both of which are the managers of the
huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States. This
helps explain why our debt burden has not yet triggered what standard
economic theory would dictate: a steep decline in the value of the U.S.
dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy when we
found we could no longer afford the foreign goods we like so much. So far,
both the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid
in dollars in order to sustain American purchases of their exports.

For the sake of their own domestic employment, both countries lend huge
amounts to the American treasury, but there is no guarantee of how long
they will want to, or be able to do so. Marshall Auerback, an international
financial strategist, says we have become a "Blanche Dubois economy" (so
named after the leading character in the Tennessee Williams play A
Streetcar Named Desire) heavily dependent on "the kindness of strangers."
Unfortunately, in our case, as in Blanche's, there are ever fewer strangers
willing to support our illusions.


So my own hope is that -- if the American people do not find a way to
choose democracy over empire -- at least our imperial venture will end not
with a nuclear bang but a financial whimper. From the present vantage
point, it certainly seems a daunting challenge for any President (or
Congress) from either party even to begin the task of dismantling the
military-industrial complex, ending the pall of "national security" secrecy
and the "black budgets" that make public oversight of what our government
does impossible, and bringing the president's secret army, the CIA, under
democratic control. It's evident that Nemesis -- in Greek mythology the
goddess of vengeance, the punisher of hubris and arrogance -- is already a
visitor in our country, simply biding her time before she makes her
presence known.

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of Asian Studies at the University
of California, San Diego. From 1968 until 1972 he served as a consultant to
the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume in his
Blowback Trilogy, is just now being published. In 2006 he appeared in the
prize-winning documentary film Why We Fight.
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