LETTERS AT 3AM –

JAMES HILLMAN (1926-2011)

Austin Chronicle – January 13, 2012

Santa Barbara is a city on the California coast that teeters over the sea and will one day be submerged. What makes California California is that one lives in cities that know they are destined to die – a James Hillmanesque thought if ever there was one.

I’d ducked out of a conference in Santa Barbara to quaff a beer at a nearby bar. In walked Hillman.  Never had I expected Hillman, with all his exquisite erudition, to step into a bar in the middle of the afternoon. Without a hello or a nod, he sat on the stool next to mine.

     We had each spoken at the conference and had met before, but not one-on-one. I’d read lots of his stuff; he’d read a little of mine. He ordered his drink. I lit a cigarette. (You could still do that in a bar in the Eighties, even in California.) I waited for him to speak, because I didn’t know what to say to a man who could write that incredible book, The Dream And the Underworld, and conceive its central sentence: “Soul is made in the rout of the world.”

“You and I,” he finally said, “are very different, but we have the same enemy: monotheism.”

I knew what he meant and he knew I knew. He’d attacked monotheism using his exhaustive knowledge of the gods of ancient Greece; I’d attacked it from my study of vodun (commonly called Voodoo).

In general terms, he meant this: Monotheism posits an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good god. So how does monotheism account for what it calls “evil”? An all-powerful capital-G God who is good cannot be responsible for evil, so evil must arise from a counter-force, a Satan, who is God’s enemy, or from human beings infected by Satan. God’s hands stay clean. This construct sets up an either-or world of opposites and views life through a dynamic of opposites: us vs. them.

Polytheism is labyrinthine. Zeus or Damballah, Aphrodite or Erzulie, may do you good on one day and do you harm the next. Opposites blend in the same iconic figure, the same force, the same instant.  In the polytheist and pantheist constructs, every force contains, and will sooner or later exhibit, its opposite.

Monotheism is an either-or, us-vs.-them trap. Polytheism is a this’n’that, here’n’there moment.

That was our common intellectual ground. On that ground, our friendship began.

Flash forward a few years. LA Weekly Editor Kit Rachlis asked his star writers to list the most important thinkers of our time. Number one on my list was James Hillman. No one else at LA Weekly knew the name. Rachlis said,  “Ventura, write a cover story on Hillman. Tell us what he’s about.”

I would not dare generalize Hillman’s densely conceptual, beautifully written works — The Dream and the Underworld, Re-Visioning Psychology, Suicide and the Soul, or The Myth of Analysis (to name just a few). The only way was to let Hillman speak for himself. I did the interview, and on July 1, 1990, LA Weekly ran his photo on the cover with this headline: “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World’s Getting Worse.”

That issue was a hit — one of the Weekly’s most discussed, controversial numbers. The interview began with this:

James Hillman: “We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups – but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.

“What’s left out is a deteriorating world.

“So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense [sic]. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They’ve been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there’s been a tremendous political decline in this country. … Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.”

Hillman’s thought covers a far greater range, but that’s what he was thinking about when we interviewed. It was such a hot topic it became a book, still in print: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992). Technically, I co-authored the book, but only technically. We had many conversations, James and I, and recorded them. I edited the recordings into a book, but he was its force and fountain.

He died last October. I don’t know how to convey such a man. What do you say about an intellectual genius who learned to tap dance in his 60s? He fixed his attention upon you and his eyes pierced and were severe yet kindly. His knowledge was vast, his laughter infectious, his integrity absolute. Passionate thought, thoughtful passion – these concepts he embodied.

Will psychology produce another thinker of his stature? Since American therapists succumbed to so-called “managed care,” no such figure has appeared. The geniuses of psychology — Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, Hillman – are not the kind who can be managed.

In David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method, Viggo Mortensen’s Freud says to Michael Fassbinder’s Jung, “I assure you that in a hundred years’ time our work will still be rejected.”  That, in fact, has happened in the field that still calls itself “psychotherapy” but concerns itself not with the psyche but with coping techniques. Coping has its virtues but is it even half enough? Freud, Jung, Laing, and Hillman would agree that teaching people to cope with a crazy world roots them more firmly in craziness, whereas a psychotherapy that includes psychology – a study of the psyche – attempts to bring forth and strengthen a person’s wholeness.

It is no wonder that in his later years Hillman turned his back on a field that now shies away from the depths of what we are.

Weeks before he died James Hillman dictated to his wife, Margot McLean, these words for his friends:

“We are following a middle road, neither upbeat nor downbeat. And I am more and more convinced that upbeat tends to constellate its counter, so before wishing for recovery in the old sense, one should think twice. It’s what’s going on now and not what the imagination conjures regarding a so-called future. I am dying yet in fact, I could not be more engaged in living. One thing I’m learning is how impossible it is to lay out a border between so-called ‘living’ and ‘dying’.”

“One thing I’m learning” – dying, yet still learning. Still teaching.

That was the man.

[From Bob:]

Sometimes it’s pretty good being a dad with some talented sons. First Matthew wins the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and now this!

MICHAEL VENTURA

LETTERS AT 3AM –

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?

Austin Chronicle – Dec. 30, 2011

“Jesus Occupied Jerusalem”

Those words were lettered in lavenderish purple on brown paper and mounted on an easel at Occupy Austin.

Pundits pundificate (did I just coin that word?) and analysts analyze, but Occupiers speak for themselves with words they write and display wherever they stand, sit, sleep, or march.

Signs can be broken, rained on, confiscated, stolen, defaced, burned, or simply fade away, so here, on the eve this new year, I record for posterity as many as will fit. (Yes, some are on the Internet, but believe me, print lasts longer.) The signs here are mostly from Occupy Austin, with additions from Occupiers in Lubbock; Vancouver, Canada; Ashville, N.C.; Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and New York. I can’t duplicate their shapes and colors, but I’ll try to reproduce their emphases. The signs aren’t signed because Occupiers speak not for themselves alone but for us all.

“WELCOME to occupy Austin – Ask Anyone how to Get Involved”

“It’s not a recession – It’s a ROBBERY”

“I read the news today – oh boy”

“Stop stealing my and others’ future! — red, white and blue, please make the stealing STOP!”

“I can not afford to buy my own politicians to pass laws for my special interests – the hard working people of America — but I made this sign”

“What is Occupy Wall Street? Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on Sept. 17, 2011, in Liberty Square in New York City. It has spread to over 1,400 cities in the USA and created actions in 1,500+ globally. #OWS is fighting back against corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future. WE ARE THE 99%”

“This is our country – WE WILL OCCUPY IT – These are our streets – WE WILL OCCUPY THEM – We are here. We are growing. – WE ARE THE 99%”

“YOU ARE THE 99%”

“Do Not Litter”

“Equal Protection – Equal Representation – Corporations are not people”

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

“Unlimited money corrupts our government!”

“The Bill of Rights – Highest law in the land – Article I – Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances – basically for our purpose – Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the right of the people to peaceably assemble”

“Article IV of the Constitution of the United States of America – The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED, and no warrants issued, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Basically … The right of the people to be secure in their persons and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED.”

“We All Have Jobs – We’re Here to Save Yours” [That’s from Occupy Lubbock, where I confirm it is the truth.]

“I lost my job – now I have an Occupation” [That’s from New York.]

Excerpts from Occupy Austin’s activities board:

“2011: A Year of Revolution – Teach-in on this year’s uprisings – 10/24 – 5:30p / Yoga – Free Yoga Lessons from Black Swan – 10/24 – 6:00p / General Assembly (GA) – To consense on proposals, discuss issues, and CREATE UNITY – 10/24 – 7p / Nightly March – To outreach to the community – spread awareness of #OWS #OA – 10/24 – 9:30p”

From another Occupy Austin activities board:

“Service Industry March – 3pm @ Republic Park to City Hall / Racism and the criminal justice system – 5:30p teach-in / Jackson Duhon – 6PM / Capitalism 101 Teach-in 5pm / Sat Halloween March   4PM!”

“End corporate welfare”

“We are Too Big to Fail”

“OCCUPY: Overcome Corporate Corruption by Uniting Our People, Yes!”

“Money talks – 99% WALKS”

“Action speaks very loudly”

“2^nd time I’ve fought for my country, 1^st time I’ve known my enemy”

“’We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’ – Albert Einstein”

“Stop Lobbyists! Occupy K Street!”

“You know things are messed up when librarians start marching!”

“I could lose my job for having a VOICE!”

“I’m 84 and Mad as Hell”

“Feeling marginalized? Come down to our OPEN HOUSE!”

“The Revolution will not be televised, but it will be broadcast on Live-stream”

“We Don’t Need No Stinking Permits (We’ve Got the FIRST AMENDMENT!!!)”

“Make Less Than $250K? Then You Need To Be On This Side!!!!”

“’If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a REVOLUTION tomorrow morning.’ – Henry Ford”

“Robin Hood Was Right!”

“FUCK ‘TRICKLE DOWN’ They’re just pissing on everybody.”

“Wall Street Short-Sellers Selling America Short!”

“Tear Down This Wall Street!”

“You Can’t Arrest an Idea – We Are the 99%”

“We are the 99% — We will no longer remain silent”

“This is it”

“People over profit”

“I am here because I am scared for my country”

“We are a human alarm system”

“You Have the Right to Remain Silent But I Don’t Recommend It”

“’None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ – Goethe”

“THE ONLY WAY to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion”

“Warning: Do not confuse the complexity of this movement with chaos”

“This Is So Not Over”

“I Am A Born Again American”

“’First they Ignore you, then they Laugh at you, then they Fight you, then you win.’ – Ghandi”

“Occupy Together”

“I care about you”

The year 2012 is upon us.

Happy Occupy.

The World Of Free Energy 

By Dr. Peter Lindemann

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28365

Global Research, December 27, 2011

In the late 1880′s, trade journals in the electrical sciences were predicting free electricity and free energy in the near future. Incredible discoveries about the nature of electricity were becoming common place. Nikola Tesla was demonstrating “wireless lighting” and other wonders associated with high frequency currents. There was an excitement about the future like never before.

Within 20 years, there would be automobiles, airplanes, movies, recorded music, telephones, radio, and practical cameras. The Victorian Age was giving way to something totally new. For the first time in history, common people were encouraged to envision a utopian future filled with abundant modern transportation and communication, as well as jobs, housing and food for everyone. Disease would be conquered, and so would poverty. Life was getting better, and this time, everyone was going to get a piece of the pie. So, what happened? In the midst of this technological explosion, where did the energy breakthroughs go? Was all of this excitement about free energy, which happened just before the beginning of the last century, just wishful thinking that “real science” eventually disproved?

Current State of Technology

Actually, the answer to that question is no. In fact, the opposite is true. Spectacular energy technologies were developed right along with the other breakthroughs. Since that time, multiple methods for producing vast amounts of energy at extremely low cost have been developed. None of these technologies have made it to the consumer market as an article of commerce, however. Exactly why this is true will be discussed shortly.

But first, I would like to describe to you a short list of free energy technologies that I am currently aware of, and that are proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The common feature connecting all of these discoveries, is that they use a small amount of one form of energy to control or release a large amount of a different kind of energy. Many of them tap the underlying Æther field in some way; a source of energy conveniently ignored by modern science.

1) Radiant Energy. Nikola Tesla’s magnifying transmitter, T. Henry Moray’s radiant energy device, Edwin Gray’s EMA motor, and Paul Baumann’s Testatika machine all run on radiant energy. This natural energy form can be gathered directly from the environment (mistakenly called “static” electricity) or extracted from ordinary electricity by the method called fractionation. Radiant energy can perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity, at less than 1% of the cost. It does not behave exactly like electricity, however, which has contributed to the scientific community’s misunderstanding of it. The Methernitha Community in Switzerland currently has 5 or 6 working models of fuelless, self-running devices that tap this energy.

2) Permanent Magnets. Dr. Robert Adams (NZ) has developed astounding designs of electric motors, generators and heaters that run on permanent magnets. One such device draws 100 watts of electricity from the source, generates 100 watts to recharge the source, and produces over 140 BTU’s of heat in two minutes! Dr. Tom Bearden (USA) has two working models of a permanent magnet powered electrical transformer. It uses a 6-watt electrical input to control the path of a magnetic field coming out of a permanent magnet. By channeling the magnetic field, first to one output coil and then a second output coil, and by doing this repeatedly and rapidly in a “ping-pong” fashion, the device can produce a 96-watt electrical output with no moving parts. Bearden calls his device a Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, or MEG. Jean-Louis Naudin has duplicated Bearden’s device in France. The principles for this type of device were first disclosed by Frank Richardson (USA) in 1978. Troy Reed (USA) has working models of a special magnetized fan that heats up as it spins. It takes exactly the same amount of energy to spin the fan whether it is generating heat or not. Beyond these developments, multiple inventors have identified working mechanisms that produce motor torque from permanent magnets alone.

3) Mechanical Heaters. There are two classes of machines that transform a small amount of mechanical energy into a large amount of heat. The best of these purely mechanical designs are the rotating cylinder systems designed by Frenette (USA) and Perkins (USA). In these machines, one cylinder is rotated within another cylinder with about an eighth of an inch of clearance between them. The space between the cylinders is filled with a liquid such as water or oil, and it is this “working fluid” that heats up as the inner cylinder spins. Another method uses magnets mounted on a wheel to produce large eddy currents in a plate of aluminum, causing the aluminum to heat up rapidly. These magnetic heaters have been demonstrated by Muller (Canada), Adams (NZ) and Reed (USA). All of these systems can produce ten times more heat than standard methods using the same energy input.

4) Super-Efficient Electrolysis. Water can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. Standard chemistry books claim that this process requires more energy than can be recovered when the gases are recombined. This is true only under the worst case scenario. When water is hit with its own molecular resonant frequency, using a system developed by Stan Meyers (USA) and again recently by Xogen Power, Inc., it collapses into hydrogen and oxygen gas with very little electrical input. Also, using different electrolytes (additives that make the water conduct electricity better) changes the efficiency of the process dramatically. It is also known that certain geometric structures and surface textures work better than others do. The implication is that unlimited amounts of hydrogen fuel can be made to drive engines (like in your car) for the cost of water. Even more amazing is the fact that a special metal alloy was patented by Freedman (USA) in 1957 that spontaneously breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen with no outside electrical input and without causing any chemical changes in the metal itself. This means that this special metal alloy can make hydrogen from water for free, forever.

5) Implosion/Vortex. All major industrial engines use the release of heat to cause expansion and pressure to produce work, like in your car engine. Nature uses the opposite process of cooling to cause suction and vacuum to produce work, like in a tornado. Viktor Schauberger (Austria) was the first to build working models of implosion engines in the 1930′s and 1940′s. Since that time, Callum Coats has published extensively on Schauberger’s work in his book Living Energies and subsequently, a number of researchers have built working models of implosion turbine engines. These are fuelless engines that produce mechanical work from energy accessed from a vacuum. There are also much simpler designs that use vortex motions to tap a combination of gravity and centrifugal force to produce a continuous motion in fluids.

6) Cold Fusion. In March 1989, two chemists from the University of Utah (USA) announced that they had produced atomic fusion reactions in a simple tabletop device. The claims were “debunked” within six months and the public lost interest. Nevertheless, cold fusion is very real. Not only has excess heat production been repeatedly documented, but also low energy atomic element transmutation has been catalogued, involving dozens of different reactions! This technology definitely can produce low cost energy and scores of other important industrial processes.

7) Solar Assisted Heat Pumps. The refrigerator in your kitchen is the only free energy machine you currently own. It’s an electrically operated heat pump. It uses one amount of energy (electricity) to move three amounts of energy (heat). This gives it a co-efficient of performance (COP) of about 3. Your refrigerator uses one amount of electricity to pump three amounts of heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator. This is its typical use, but it is the worst possible way to use the technology. Here’s why. A heat pump pumps heat from the source of heat to the “sink” or place that absorbs the heat. The source of heat should obviously be hot and the sink for heat should obviously be cold for this process to work the best. In your refrigerator, it’s exactly the opposite. The source of heat is inside the box, which is cold, and the sink for heat is the room temperature air of your kitchen, which is warmer than the source. This is why the COP remains low for your kitchen refrigerator. But this is not true for all heat pumps. COP’s of 8 to 10 are easily attained with solar assisted heat pumps. In such a device, a heat pump draws heat from a solar collector and dumps the heat into a large underground absorber, which remains at 55° F, and mechanical energy is extracted in the transfer. This process is equivalent to a steam engine that extracts mechanical energy between the boiler and the condenser, except that it uses a fluid that boils at a much lower temperature than water. One such system that was tested in the 1970′s produced 350 hp, measured on a Dynamometer, in a specially designed engine from just 100-sq. ft. of solar collector. (This is not the system promoted by Dennis Lee.) The amount of energy it took to run the compressor (input) was less than 20 hp, so this system produced more than 17 times more energy than it took to keep it going! It could power a small neighborhood from the roof of a hot tub gazebo, using exactly the same technology that keeps the food cold in your kitchen. Currently, there is an industrial scale heat pump system just north of Kona, Hawaii that generates electricity from temperature differences in ocean water.

There are dozens of other systems that I have not mentioned, many of them are as viable and well tested as the ones I have just recounted. But this short list is sufficient to make my point: free energy technology is here, now. It offers the world pollution-free, energy abundance for everyone, everywhere.

It is now possible to stop the production of greenhouse gases and shut down all of the nuclear power plants. We can now desalinate unlimited amounts of seawater at an affordable price, and bring adequate fresh water to even the most remote habitats. Transportation costs and the production costs for just about everything can drop dramatically. Food can even be grown in heated greenhouses in the winter, anywhere. All of these wonderful benefits that can make life on this planet so much easier and better for everyone have been postponed for decades. Why? Whose purposes are served by this postponement?

Four Invisible Forces

There are four gigantic forces that have worked together to create this situation. To say that there is and has been a conspiracy to suppress this technology only leads to a superficial understanding of the world, and it places the blame for this completely outside of ourselves. Our willingness to remain ignorant and actionless in the face of this situation has always been interpreted by two of these forces as implied consent. So, besides a non-demanding public, what are the other forces that are impeding the availability of free energy technology?

In the United States, and in most other countries around the world, there is a money monopoly in place. I am free to earn as much money as I want, but I will only be paid in Federal Reserve Notes. There is nothing I can do to be paid in Gold Certificates, or some other form of money. This money monopoly is solely in the hands of a small number of private stock banks, and these banks are owned by the wealthiest families in the world. Their plan is to eventually control 100% of all of the capital resources of the world, and thereby control everyone’s life through the availability (or non-availability) of all goods and services.

An independent source of wealth (free energy device) in the hands of each and every person in the world, ruins the plans of the wealthiest families for world domination, permanently. Why this is true is easy to see. Currently, a nation’s economy can be either slowed down or sped up by the raising or lowering of interest rates. But if an independent source of capital (energy) were present in the economy, and any business or person could raise more capital without borrowing it from a bank, this centralized throttling action on interest rates would simply not have the same effect.

Free energy technology changes the value of money. The wealthiest families and the issuers of credit do not want any competition. It’s that simple. They want to maintain their current monopoly control of the money supply. For them, free energy technology is not just something to suppress, it must be permanently forbidden!

So, the wealthiest families and their central banking institutions are the first force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology. Their motivations are the imagined divine right to rule, greed, and their insatiable need to control almost everything except themselves. The weapons they have used to enforce this postponement include intimidation, “expert” debunkers, buying and shelving of technology, murder and attempted murder of the inventors, character assassination, arson, and a wide variety of financial incentives and disincentives to manipulate possible supporters. They have also promoted the general acceptance of a scientific theory that states that free energy is impossible (laws of thermodynamics).

The second force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology is national governments. The problem here is not so much related to competition in the printing of currency, but in the maintenance of national security. The fact is, the world out there is a jungle, and humans can be counted upon to be very cruel, dishonest, and sneaky. It is government’s job to provide for the common defense. For this, police powers are delegated by the executive branch of government to enforce “the rule of law.” Most of us who consent to the rule of law do so because we believe it is the right thing to do, for our own benefit. There are always a few individuals, however, that believe that their own benefit is best served by behavior that does not voluntarily conform to the generally agreed upon social order. These people choose to operate outside of the rule of law and are considered outlaws, criminals, subversives, traitors, revolutionaries, or terrorists.

Most national governments have discovered, by trial and error, that the only foreign policy that really works, over time, is a policy called “tit for tat.” What this means to you and me is, that governments treat each other the way they are being treated. There is a constant jockeying for position and influence in world affairs, and the strongest party wins! In economics, it’s the Golden Rule, which states: “The one with the gold makes the rules.”

So it is with politics also, but its appearance is more Darwinian. It’s simply survival of the fittest. In politics, however, the fittest has come to mean the strongest party who is also willing to fight the dirtiest. Absolutely every means available is used to maintain an advantage over the adversary, and everyone else is the adversary regardless of whether they are considered friend or foe. This includes outrageous psychological posturing, lying, cheating, spying, stealing, assassination of world leaders, proxy wars, alliances and shifting alliances, treaties, foreign aid, and the presence of military forces wherever possible.

Like it or not, this is the psychological and actual arena national governments operate in. No national government will do anything that simply gives an adversary an advantage for free. It’s national suicide. An activity by any individual, inside or outside the country, that is interpreted as giving an adversary an edge or advantage will be deemed a threat to “national security.”

Free energy technology is a national government’s worst nightmare! Openly acknowledged, free energy technology sparks an unlimited arms race by all governments in a final attempt to gain absolute advantage and domination. Think about it. Do you think Japan will not feel intimidated if China gets free energy? Do you think Israel will sit by quietly as Iraq acquires free energy? Do you think India will allow Pakistan to develop free energy? Do you think the USA would not try to stop Osama bin Laden from getting free energy?

Unlimited energy available to the current state of affairs on this planet leads to an inevitable reshuffling of the balance of power. This could become an all-out war to prevent “the other” from having the advantage of unlimited wealth and power. Everybody will want it, and at the same time, want to prevent everyone else from getting it.

So, national governments are the second force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology. Their motivations are “self-preservation.” This self-preservation operates on three levels. First, by not giving undue advantage to an external enemy. Second, by preventing individualized action capable of effectively challenging official police powers (anarchy) within the country. And third, by preserving income streams derived from taxing energy sources currently in use. Their weapons include the preventing of the issuance of patents based on national security grounds, the legal and illegal harassment of inventors with criminal charges, tax audits, threats, phone taps, arrest, arson, theft of property during shipment, and a host of other intimidations which make the business of building and marketing a free energy machine practically impossible.

The third force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology consists of the group of deluded inventors and outright charlatans and con men. On the periphery of the extraordinary scientific breakthroughs that constitute the real free energy technologies, lies a shadow world of unexplained anomalies, marginal inventions and unscrupulous promoters. The first two forces have constantly used the media to promote the worst examples of this group, to distract the public’s attention and to discredit the real breakthroughs by associating them with the obvious frauds.

Over the last hundred years, dozens of stories have surfaced about unusual inventions. Some of these ideas have so captivated the public’s imagination that a mythology about these systems continues to this day. Names like Keely, Hubbard, Coler, and Henderschott immediately come to mind. There may be real technologies behind these names, but there simply isn’t enough technical data available in the public domain to make a determination. These names remain associated with a free energy mythology, however, and are sited by debunkers as examples of fraud.

The idea of free energy taps very deeply into the human subconscious mind. A few inventors with marginal technologies that demonstrate useful anomalies have mistakenly exaggerated the importance of their inventions. Some of these inventors also have mistakenly exaggerated the importance of themselves for having invented it. A combination of “gold fever” and/or a messiah complex appears, wholly distorting any future contribution they may make.

While the research thread they are following may hold great promise, these deluded inventors begin to trade enthusiasm for facts, and the value of the scientific work from that point on suffers greatly. There is a powerful, yet subtle seduction that can warp a personality if they believe that the world rests on their shoulders or that they are the world’s savior. Strange things also happen to people when they think they are about to become extremely rich. It takes a tremendous spiritual discipline to remain objective and humble in the presence of a working free energy machine.

Many inventors’ psyches become unstable just believing they have a free energy machine. As the quality of the science deteriorates, some inventors also develop a persecution complex that makes them very defensive and unapproachable. This process precludes them from ever really developing a free energy machine, and fuels the fraud mythologies tremendously.

Then there are the out right con men. In the last 15 years, there is one person in the USA who has raised the free energy con to a professional art. He has raised more than $100,000,000, has been barred from doing business in the state of Washington, has been jailed in California, and he’s still at it. He always talks about a variation of one of the real free energy systems, sells people on the idea that they will get one of these systems soon, but ultimately sells them only promotional information which gives no real data about the energy system itself. He has mercilessly preyed upon the Christian community and the patriot community in the USA, and is still going strong.

This man’s current scam involves signing up hundreds of thousands of people as locations where he will install a free energy machine. In exchange for letting him put the free energy generator in their home, they will get free electricity for life, and his company will sell the excess energy back to the local utility company. After becoming convinced that they will receive free electricity for life, with no out-front expenses, they gladly buy a video that helps draw their friends into the scam as well. Once you understand the power and motivations of the first two forces I have discussed, its obvious that this person’s current business plan cannot be implemented. This one person has probably done more harm to the free energy movement in the USA than any other force, by destroying people’s trust in the technology.

So, the third force postponing the public availability of free energy technology is delusion and dishonesty within the movement itself. The motivations are self-aggrandizement, greed, want of power over others, and a false sense of self-importance. The weapons used are lying, cheating, the “bait and switch” con, self-delusion and arrogance combined with lousy science.

The fourth force operating to postpone the public availability of free energy technology is all of the rest of us. It may be easy to see how narrow and selfish the motivations of the other forces are, but actually, these motivations are still very much alive in each of us as well. Like the Wealthiest Families, don’t we each secretly harbor illusions of false superiority, and the want to control others instead of ourselves? Also, wouldn’t you “sell out” if the price were high enough, say, take a million dollars, cash, today? Or like the governments, don’t we each want to ensure our own survival? If caught in the middle of a full, burning theater, do you panic and push all of the weaker people out of the way in a mad, scramble for the door? Or like the deluded inventor, don’t we trade a comfortable illusion once in a while for an uncomfortable fact? And don’t we like to think more of ourselves than others give us credit for? Or don’t we still fear the unknown, even if it promises a great reward?

You see, really, all four forces are just different aspects of the same process, operating at different levels in the society. There is really only one force preventing the public availability of free energy technology, and that is the unspiritually motivated behavior of the humans. In the last analysis, free energy technology is an outward manifestation of divine abundance. It is the engine of the economy of an enlightened society, where people voluntarily behave in a respectful and civil manner toward each other, where each member of the society has everything they need, and does not covet what their neighbor has, where war and physical violence has become socially unacceptable behavior and people’s differences are at least tolerated, if not enjoyed.

The appearance of free energy technology in the public domain is the dawning of a truly civilized age. It is an epochal event in human history. Nobody can take credit for it. Nobody can get rich on it. Nobody can rule the world with it. It is simply, a gift from God. It forces us all to take responsibility for our own actions and for our own self-disciplined self-restraint when needed. The world as it is currently ordered, cannot have free energy technology without being totally transformed by it into something else. This civilization has reached the pinnacle of its development, because it has birthed the seeds of its own transformation. Unspiritualized humans cannot be trusted with free energy. They will only do what they have always done, which is take merciless advantage of each other, or kill each other and themselves in the process.

If you go back and read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or the Club of Rome Report, it becomes obvious that the wealthiest families have understood this for decades. Their plan is to live in the world of free energy, but permanently freeze the rest of us out. But this is not new. Royalty has always considered the general population (us) to be their subjects. What is new, is that you and I can communicate with each other now better than at anytime in the past. The Internet offers us, the fourth force, an opportunity to overcome the combined efforts of the other forces preventing free energy technology from spreading.

The Opportunity

What is starting to happen is that inventors are publishing their work, instead of patenting it and keeping it secret. More and more, people are giving away information on these technologies in books, videos and websites. While there is still a great deal of useless information about free energy on the Internet, the availability of good information is rising rapidly. Check out the list of websites and other resources at the end of this article.

It is imperative that you begin to gather all of the information you can on real free energy systems. The reason for this is simple. The first two forces will never allow an inventor or a company to build and sell a free energy machine to you! The only way you will ever get one is if you, or a friend, build it yourself. This is exactly what thousands of people are already quietly starting to do. You may feel wholly inadequate to the task, but start gathering information now. You may be just a link in the chain of events for the benefit of others. Focus on what you can do now, not on how much there still is to be done. Small, private research groups are working out the details as you read this. Many are committed to publishing their results on the Internet.

All of us constitute the fourth force. If we stand up and refuse to remain ignorant and actionless, we can change the course of history. It is the aggregate of our combined action that can make a difference. Only the mass action that represents our consensus can create the world we want. The other three forces will not help us put a fuelless power plant in our basements. They will not help us be free from their manipulations. Nevertheless, free energy technology is here. It is real, and it will change everything about the way we live, work and relate to each other. In the last analysis, free energy technology obsoletes greed and the fear for survival. But like all exercises of spiritual faith, we must first manifest the generosity and trust in our own lives.

The source of free energy is inside of us. It is that excitement of expressing ourselves freely. It is our spiritually guided intuition expressing itself without distraction, intimidation or manipulation. It is our open-heartedness. Ideally, the free energy technologies underpin a just society where everyone has enough food, clothing, shelter, self-worth, and the leisure time to contemplate the higher spiritual meanings of life. Do we not owe it to each other to face down our fears and take action to create this future for our children’s children?

Free energy technology is here. It has been here for decades. Communications technology and the Internet have torn the veil of secrecy off of this remarkable fact. People all over the world are starting to build free energy devices for their own use. The bankers and the governments do not want this to happen, but cannot stop it. There will be essentially no major media coverage of what is going on. Tremendous economic instabilities and wars will be used in the near future to distract people from joining the free energy movement.

Western society is in many ways spiraling down toward self-destruction due to the accumulated effects of long-term greed and corruption. The general availability of free energy technology cannot stop this trend. It can only reinforce it. If, however, you have a free energy device, you may be better positioned to support the political/social/economic transition that is underway. The question is, who will ultimately control the emerging world government-the first force or the fourth force?

The last great war is almost upon us. The seeds are planted. After this will come the beginning of a real civilization. Some of us who refuse to fight will survive to see the dawn of the world of free energy. I challenge you to be among the ones who try.

LIST OF RESOURCES:

Books:

Living Energies by Callum Coats The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity by Peter Lindemann, D.Sc. Applied Modern 20th Century Aether Science by Dr. Robert Adams Physics Without Einstein by Dr. Harold Aspden Secrets of Cold War Technology by Gerry Vassilatos The Coming Energy Revolution by Jeane Manning Websites:

http://www.free-energy.cc/ developed by Clear Tech, Inc. and Dr. Peter Lindemann http://jnaudin.free.fr/ developed by JLN Labs in France http://www.keelynet.com/ developed by Jerry Decker in the USA http://www.xogen.ca/ site for super electrolysis technology http://www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/16/content1.htm excellent site by Geoff Egel, Australia For links to other excellent resources: http://www.WantToKnow.info/resources#newenergy

Free Energy News Articles Breakthroughs in major media that should have been headline news:

Below are verbatim quotes taken from articles at links provided dealing with free energy

Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car February 17, 2006, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml

The star at last week’s Philadelphia Auto Show wasn’t a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car-one that combines performance and practicality under one hood. The car that buyers have been waiting decades [for] comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot. A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver’s interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No-just…five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School.

Iceland the First Country to Try Abandoning Gasoline January 18, 2006, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1518556

Iceland has already started…turning water into fuel – hydrogen fuel. Here’s how it works: Electrodes split the water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Hydrogen electrons pass through a conductor that creates the current to power an electric engine. Hydrogen fuel now costs two to three times as much as gasoline, but gets up to three times the mileage of gas, making the overall cost about the same. As an added benefit, there are no carbon emissions – only water vapor.

Fuel’s paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head November 4, 2005, The Guardian (one of the UK’s leading newspapers) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. “We’ve got 50 independent validation reports, we’ve got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles,” he said. “We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here.

Magnetic energy? Perhaps, September 7, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/07/BUG9NEJD3L1.DTL

“All we know is that we’re seeing more energy output than input. Does Goldes realize what’s he’s saying — that he’s perhaps discovered a clean, inexhaustible energy source? “That’s exactly what it appears to be,” he answered. A handful of other companies worldwide are believed also to be pursuing zero-point energy via magnetic systems. One of them…is run by a former scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, the Pentagon and at least two large aerospace companies are actively researching zero-point energy as a means of propulsion.

Solar Challenge Finishes in Calgary July 28, 2005, Open Source Energy Network/Detroit News
http://pesn.com/2005/07/28/9600141_Solar_Challenge_results
http://www.detnews.com/2005/schools/0507/28/01-262474.htm
Detroit News http://wwmt.com/engine.pl?station=wwmt&id=18269&template=breakout_local.html  – CBS affiliate

The ten-day solar car race from Austin to Calgary came to a successful finish yesterday. U of Michigan takes prize, finishing the 2500-mile course in 54 hours. They also set a record by averaging 46.2 mph in this, the world’s longest solar car race.
Eco-car more efficient than light bulb July 5, 2005, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/07/04/eco.car

The hydrogen-powered Ech2o needs just 25 Watts — the equivalent of less than two gallons of petrol — to complete the 25,000-mile global trip, while emitting nothing more hazardous than water. But with a top speed of 30mph, the journey would take more than a month to complete. Ech2o, built by British gas firm BOC, will bid to smash the world fuel efficiency record of over 10,000 miles per gallon at the Shell Eco Marathon. The record is currently….5,385 km/per liter [over 12,000 mpg!].

Advanced vehicles demonstrate zero oil-consumption, reduced emissions May 18, 2005, Boston Globe
http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=8474  (article removed from Globe website)

Top prize for the Monte-Carlo Rally went to a modified Honda Insight [which] broke the 100-mile-per-gallon barrier over a 150-mile range. The car actually got 107 miles-per gallon. St. Mark’s High School in Southboro, and North Haven Community School, North Haven, ME, demonstrated true zero-oil consumption and true zero climate-change emissions with their modified electric Ford pick-up and Volkswagen bus.

Fans of GM Electric Car Fight the Crusher Washington Post, March 10, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21991-2005Mar9

GM agrees that the car in question, called the EV1, was a rousing feat of engineering that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in under eight seconds with no harmful emissions. The market just wasn’t big enough, the company says, for a car that traveled 140 miles or less on a charge before you had to plug it in like a toaster. Ted Flittner, a…Costa Mesa industrial engineer…said, “they have such a brilliant solution they’ve developed. They’ve put it on the market and proved it works. People still want it and they’re taking it away and destroying it.”

100 MPG Car Heralded by London Times in 2002 – Where is it now? December 2 , 2004, WantToKnow.info/LondonTimes
http://www.WantToKnow.info/carmileage  -
WantToKnow.info (includes text of London Times article)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,588-451038,00.html  – London Times

The Toyota Eco Spirit was the talk of the fuel economy car industry in 2002. At over 100 MPG and with the lowest exhaust emissions and a very reasonable sticker price, the Eco Spirit’s debut was widely anticipated. (see London Times article). What happened to it? 1908 Ford Model T: 25 MPG, 2004 EPA Average All Cars: 21 MPG Detroit News/WantToKnow.info, June 4, 2004
http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg

Ford’s Model T, which went 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline, was more fuel efficient than the current Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle — which manages just 16 miles per gallon.

Note: This last article is an excellent summary of eye-opening contradictions which have received very little media coverage, including links to major media articles to back up the facts presented.

Patents: This list is a sample of inventions that produce free energy.

The links provided will take you directly to the patent on the website of the U.S. Patent Office.

To search for patents by number on the US Patent Office website:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm

Tesla USP # 685,957
Freedman USP # 2,796,345
Richardson USP # 4,077,001
Frenette USP # 4,143,639
Perkins USP # 4,424,797

Some people think that the problem of unemployment or underemployment  would be worse without massive military spending, but economic theory is quite clear that the repair expenditures that follow a rock breaking a window do not add to the total wealth, but divert it, forcing someone to spend on repairs what s/he otherwise would have had available to spend for other things, or invest. Spending doesn’t make one richer unless the spending is in the form of a productive investment.

Thinking about that argument sent me looking for an Eisenhower quotation about excessive military spending I remembered he had made very early in his presidency, and via Google I found this interesting website –

http://www.strategicpeacemaking.org/Budgetary_Realignment_index.html — that begins thus:

Eisenhower’s Wisdom

When we think about budget priorities, we should recall the wisdom of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from an address on “The Chance for Peace” that he delivered on April 16, 1953. So important is this speech to Eisenhower’s heritage that his family had three key sentences carved into the wall of his tomb in Abilene, Kansas.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

In between these oft-quoted sentences Eisenhower said,

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

Someone with Eisenhower’s views could not be nominated by the Republican Party today, nor by the Democratic Party, and if nominated could not win. If that’s not an unmistakable sign of political, social and spiritual decay, show me a better one.

- Austin Chronicle – December 16, 2011

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

The person who created that sign in Zuccotti Park put her or his anonymous finger on the heartbeat of Occupy.

Many wonder what Occupy stands for and why Occupy has not made specific demands – as though it’s not enough that, in Occupy’s brief existence, its participants have emblazoned the difference between the 1% and the 99% upon the consciousness of America. As my longtime colleague Ginger Varney said, “They’ve changed the conversation.”

In his recent speech about the economy, the president referenced the 1% and 99% disparity because he had to; for now, no one can credibly discuss economics without mentioning the 1% and the 99%. Occupy has, indeed, changed the conversation – an achievement that cannot be overestimated.

It’s not my place to speak for Occupy, but I’ll use my own “people’s mic” to offer a proposal: that Occupy demands a constitutional amendment to reverse Supreme Court decisions that have given corporations the rights of citizens. Carefully craft this amendment to make clear, beyond doubt, that a corporation does not enjoy or deserve the constitutional rights of a citizen. Rather, a for-profit corporation is a commercial venture subject to the republic’s laws governing commerce. This amendment must state and enforce that corporations are not people.

Change the Supreme Court’s stance that corporations are people and you change the fundamental rule under cover of which corporations conduct themselves. The passage such an amendment would go a very long way toward getting corporate money out of American politics.

That would be a revolution. It would change the electoral playing field.

In the election year of 2012, anyone running for any office should be made to take a stand on this amendment and answer this question: Do you believe a corporation should have the rights of an individual citizen — yes or no?

The answer to that direct and simple (but not simplistic) question would indicate which side an office-seeker is on, the 1% or the 99%?

Thus the 2012 election would not be about Democrats, Republicans, independents, tea partiers, or Occupy. Instead, the election would be about one central, crucial issue: Do you serve the 1% or the 99%?

You can’t call it a “class war” when the class you defend is 99% of the population.

Make the “corporations are not people” amendment central to the election and you begin the nonviolent, constitutional revolution in commerce that we desperately need.

Now let’s clarify a matter of history.

Economic conservatives – servants of the 1% — claim that all challenges to their conception of capitalism are European in origin, a not-so-subtle way of calling challenges to corporate capitalism un-American.

Those conservatives need a history lesson.

Robert L. Heilbroner, in his classic economics study The Worldly Philosophers (Revised Seventh Edition), reminds us that in Boston in 1639 – just nine years after Puritans founded the city — “one Robert Keayne … [was] charged with a heinous crime: he [had] made over sixpence profit on the shilling, an outrageous gain. The court [debated] whether to excommunicate him for his sin, but … it finally [relented] and [dismissed] him with a fine of two hundred pounds,” an enormous sum in that time and place. Kearyne was so contrite that “before the elders of the Church” he “with tears acknowledged his covetous and corrupt heart.” The first Anglo-Americans considered undue profit “covetous and corrupt.”

That wasn’t the end of it. The minister of Boston used Kearyne’s offense to “thunder forth in his Sunday sermon on some false principles of trade.” In the minister’s words, the most heinous and false principle of trade was this:

“That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.”

Heilbroner: “Even to our Pilgrim forefathers, the idea that [commercial] gain might be a tolerable – even a useful – goal in life would have appeared as nothing short of a doctrine of the devil.”

The ideals of Occupy are as American as the Pilgrims.

Fast forward to Dec. 3, 1861. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican president, included these words in his Annual Message to Congress (excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865):

“[T]here is one point … to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government [Lincoln’s italics]. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor. … Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. … This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all – gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty – none less inclined to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.”

Occupy’s ideals are as American as Abraham Lincoln.

When the Supreme Court bases decisions on the precedent that corporations have the rights of people, it does what Lincoln feared:  It fixes new disabilities and burdens upon us, “till all of liberty shall be lost.”

We can change this. It’s been done before.

Until the Civil War, the Supreme Court justified slavery. The 13^th and 14^th amendments (1865 and1868) changed that.

Until 1920, American women were denied the vote. The 19^th amendment changed that.

Until 1964, Southern states enforced segregation by tactics such as poll taxes. The 24^th amendment made those tactics illegal.

Through an amendment to the constitution, we can change the legal status of corporations. We can do it now.

Mayer Vishner, a lifelong activist, has witnessed Occupy Wall Street up close since the first day. He tells me, “Occupy is not an event, it’s not a movement, and it’s not a protest. It’s a consciousness shift.”

America was created by a shift in consciousness, as recalled by John Adams in an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

“What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”

Occupy is as American as Adams and Jefferson. Occupy marks a shift in consciousness that can lead to a new and freer world. Occupy is not about this or that plot of ground. The mission of Occupy is to occupy the future.

The major difference that he does not address here is that of permanent investment. Employees come and go, and the decisions they would make might not be the best for the longer-term interests of the enterprise. Management of larger corporations (as opposed to owners) also comes and goes, and makes bad decisions when considered long-term. There should be some recognition of the difference between those with only short-term interests and those with either permanent or longer-term interests. I don’t know what it would be, but that’s something to be addressed.

This essay leaves my admiration for Ventura’s thinking apparatus untouched. He’s an amazing individual.

LETTERS AT 3AM – FLASH MOB DANCE REVOLUTION: PT. 3

December 1, 2011

My draft of a workers’ manifesto:

Labor is essential to your enterprises, but labor is paid the least and granted few, if any, rights. In your so-called free market, workers have few, if any, alternatives; most have to accept that the game is fixed and go to work regardless.

That is oppression. That is theft. Yet, if we were to call you thieves you would be mightily offended, and rightly so. Most of you are honest, by your lights, and hard working. You participate in theft, yet you are not criminals. Rather, you passively accepted participation in a massive crime – a criminal activity sanctioned and enthusiastically promoted by every authority you’ve trusted. You didn’t want to see that, and you don’t want to change, not because you’re evil, but because you’re comfortable – and you’re afraid.

It must be admitted that we don’t care how nice you are or what good works you do; your equity is based on stealing the fruits of our labor; your affluence costs too much. We do not say you’re bad. We do say that you failed to think things through, and that this failure to look clearly at how your money is actually produced has consequences.

But we do not wish the terror of those consequences to overwhelm you. That is why it is important for you to think now. We wish you no harm. We have no desire to burn your houses or rob your safes. But the economic terror and theft that you’ve participated in – that ends now. We do not demand all the power, only the power that is ours by right. Investment, invention, and labor – these are the three essentials of commerce. Justice, and the stability that justice generates, requires that these three elements benefit equally.

It is crucial to dispense with the term “unskilled labor.” That term is a device to divide the workforce against itself. Labor must be valued according to its necessity, not its skill. If fruit pickers, busboys, cashiers or receptionists are essential to an enterprise, then they are essential, and that’s that. Their essentialness, not their skills, must determine their value. They merit a third of the profits and a third of the say.

Yes, everyone will have to learn a lot and must learn it as they go, and many mistakes will be painfully made and painfully corrected; it will take years to work out protocols that are mutually understood, but that is a small price to pay for justice.

Yes, unforeseen difficulties, unintended consequences, will sprout everywhere while we learn to apply a value other than money to human beings and to life itself. But to say it cannot be done is to deny the incredible variety of all we have already done in the ongoing experiment that is the human journey.

So how might this work in practice?

Let’s consider a small business. In a restaurant, say, the employer is often a primary laborer, an inventor (inventing the concept, the menu), and an investor. In a fair system, that employer would retain a large measure of profit and authority, because she or he would participate in the laborer’s, the inventor’s, and the investor’s share. But other employees would be paid according to the necessity of their labor and merit a share of the profits and a one-third vote in decisions that affect the entire enterprise. Investors, too, would share in no more than one third of profit and decision power.

Using this model, a larger business would be run like a republic. A work force of 10,000, say, would elect representatives who would comprise one- third of the board of directors; the workforce would share one-third of the profits (over and above wages, which are an operating expense), while the remaining two-thirds of boardroom votes would be divided among investors and inventors. All essential elements would be represented equally.

It gets trickier in an enterprise like a school. Maintenance crews, teachers, and administrators are the school’s laborers. Yet teachers are also inventors, composing lesson plans and upholding standards of learning. Maintenance is an essential function, but a janitor should not make education decisions – that’s common sense. However, in decisions that affect the future of the enterprise that is the school, maintenance deserves a seat at the table.

It’s not about every person voting on every decision. It’s about each contributor – laborer, investor, and inventor – having equal equity and an equal say. It’s not a consensus. It’s a republic. Conflict and good old- fashioned horse-trading are givens. It’s messier than militaristic top-down hierarchy, but it affords the possibility of justice and liberty.

Some people, and some enterprises, will be richer than others because some are more creative, some are smarter, some are luckier, and some work harder. But everyone will have a stake and a say. And, most importantly, nobody will steal anyone else’s labor. For labor is time. And time is life. No amount of investment confers the right to steal life.

This will be truly free enterprise: each enterprise competing in a truly free market. Private property respected. Private liberty protected. Nobody owning anybody else. Nobody with arbitrary power over anybody else. Everybody taking their chances in a fluid system that depends, ultimately, on every individual effort (and, of course, the vicissitudes of Providence). The ideal of the present system – that those with the best ideas and those who work the hardest reap the most rewards – will be retained. What will be added is a just return for the investment of one’s time. For “time” is only another word for “life.”

There is a way to live without stealing from one another – and without the frantic efforts to control one another that lead ultimately to oppression. There is a way to live in which the present is flexible enough to open organically to the future without costly dislocations. There is a way to create a system that puts a check on its own power. There is a way to live – risky, as all existence is, but fair – in which time and life are not wasted nor exploited.

We see a world in which a worker in any business – large or small, manufacture, agriculture or service – gets a piece of the action. A fair piece, because labor is valued equally with invention and investment, since no element is potent without the others. We see a workplace where workers are integral in the decision-making process of all company policies. Where we don’t just have “input,” we have power. A world with no fetters on expression, organization, or nonviolent action.  We see a world in which businesses that affect an entire community (utilities, communications) or affect the environment must have major decisions ratified by the community affected. We see a world where, under these conditions, businesses compete freely, with no centralized control.

Yes, there will be inequalities. That’s life. But they will be inequalities of talent and luck, not inequalities of opportunity and authority. Yes, there will be conflict. That’s life, too. But it will be conflict among people with equal access, equal voice. We see a world where “free enterprise” doesn’t mean freedom to be ruthless but freedom to go as far as creativity and courage allow – a freedom limited only by its constant give-and-take with the freedoms of others. A world of cooperation and conflict but not domination, where no one is silenced by the fear of losing their livelihood.

“All men are created equal,” “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – these are ideals that often fall short in practice, yet these are ideals that have freed millions. “Commerce of the people, by the people, and for the people” will also often fall short in practice, but it is an ideal with the power to extend and evolve our freedoms.

We cannot achieve a better world without aspiring to the best of worlds.

A longer version of this essay will appear in Six Memes for the New Millennium (ZgPress, January 2012), edited by Rosetta Brooks. My thanks to Rosetta for allowing this essay, written last July at her request, to debut in the Chronicle.

Naturally, he isn’t perfect. Some of his history isn’t quite right, and doesn’t quite prove what he thinks it does. A couple of serious examples in this week’s column. That isn’t necessarily fatal. After all, a supporting example that isn’t quite right doesn’t necessarily invalidate the argument it is supporting. A much more serious problem is that Greer seems to think he knows what the future will look like.

He knows that no seemingly magical source of energy (cold fusion comes to mind!) will radically transform the problem.

He knows we face a future of scarcity.

Well, he may be right, but he seems to be forgetting that he may be wrong. Two relevant quotations come to mind from those two sages, Yogi Berra and Tip O’Neill. Berra is said to have said that “predictions are always hazardous, especially when they involve the future.” O’Neill said that “what worries me about Ronald Reagan isn’t what he doesn’t know, but what he knows for sure that isn’t so.”

However, with those two caveats, Greer is still well worth reading and pondering.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Pepperspraying The Future

A whiff of pepper spray rising from a suburban big box store, a breathtakingly absurd comment by an American politician, a breathtakingly cynical statement from a Canadian minister: three scraps of data sent whirling down the wind unnoticed by most of today’s disinformation society, which are also three clues to the exceptionally unwelcome future the industrial world is making for itself. Let’s take them one at a time, in reverse order.

On Monday, as a new round of climate change talks got under way in Durban, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent confirmed earlier media reports that Canada will refuse to accept any further cuts in its carbon dioxide output under the Kyoto treaty. Since Canada is one of only two countries on Earth that uses more energy per capita than the United States—an impressive feat, really, when you think about it—you might be tempted to believe that there was room for some modest cuts, but that notion is nowhere in Kent’s view of the universe. Those same media reports claimed that Canada was preparing to extract itself from the Kyoto treaty altogether; Kent dodged that question, but as Bob Dylan sang a good long time ago, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

The week before, in a debate among candidates for the GOP’s presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich responded to a question about oil supplies by insisting that the United States could easily increase its oil production by four million barrels a day next year, if only those dratted environmentalists in the other party weren’t getting in the way. This absurd claim was quickly and efficiently refuted by several peak oil writers—Art Berman’s essay over on the Oil Drum is a good example—but outside the peak oil blogosphere, nobody blinked. Never mind that the entire United States only produces 5.9 million barrels a day, that it took twenty years for the Alaska North Slope fields (peak production, 2 million barrels per day) to go from discovery to maximum output, or that the United States has been explored for oil more thoroughly than any other piece of real estate on the planet; the pundits and the public alike nodded and went on to the next question, as though a serious contender for the position of most powerful human being on the planet hadn’t just gone on record claiming that two plus two is whatever you want it to be.

All of which brings us inevitably to a Los Angeles suburb on Thanksgiving, where a woman seems to have pepper-sprayed her fellow shoppers to get a video game console to put under her Christmas tree.

To be fair, the situation seems to have been a bit more complex than that sounds at first hearing. If you’re still thinking of Thanksgiving Day in America in terms of lavish turkey dinners and visits from relatives, think again. Nowadays it serves mostly to mark the beginning of the year’s big shopping season, and stores on the cutting edge of American marketing open their doors Thanksgiving night to give shoppers their first shot at whatever overpriced gewgaws the media has decreed will be the hot item this year. The store where the pepper spray incident happened was one of these. There, the mob that formed, waiting for the sale to start, turned unruly; there was apparently shoving and shouting, and then the pepper spray came out. According to witnesses, the woman who used it incapacitated enough of the competition to get to one of the video game consoles that were the center of the agitation, hurried off with it to a checkstand, bought the console and got away. Twenty people, some of them children, needed treatment by medics at the scene.

A fair amount of self-important clucking in the American media followed the incident, though I don’t think anyone quite had the bad taste to point out that at least this year nobody was trampled to death by mobs of shoppers—yes, this happens every few years. Stephen Colbert, as usual, landed one in the bull’s-eye by pointing out that the incident would make a great video game. He’s right enough that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Black Friday, in which shoppers punch, spray, stab, and shoot each other to get choice gifts for Christmas, turns out to be the hot new video game sensation next year, and no doubt inspires pepper sprayings and tramplings of its own.

What all these three news stories have in common is that they display an attitude—it could as well be described as a belief, or even a religion—that treats the satisfaction of short term cravings for material goods as the only thing that really matters. The shopper with her pepper spray, the politician with his absurd claim, and the government with its blind disregard for national survival, each acted as though getting the stuff is all that matters, and any obstacle in the way—whether the obstacle was other shoppers, the laws of physics and geology, or the fate of Canada’s future generations—was an irrelevance to be brushed aside by any available means.

In recent years, there’s been a fair amount of intellectual effort devoted to the attempt to prove that this is inevitably how human beings will act, and this effort has had an influence well beyond the borders of, say, cognitive neuroscience. Glance over anything the peak oil blogosphere has to say about the absurdity of today’s public policies on energy, the environment, or the economy, for example, and it’s a safe bet that somebody will post a comment insisting that this is how human beings always behave. In point of historical fact, though, this is far from true. The popularity of the monastic life across so many cultures and centuries is hard to square with such claims; it has not been uncommon for anything up to ten per cent of the population of some countries and times to embrace lives of poverty, celibacy and discipline in a monastic setting. Clearly, whatever drives push our species in the direction of the satisfaction of short term cravings are not quite as omnipotent as they’ve been made out to be.

More to the point, those of us who had the chance to get to know people of the generation that came of age in the Great Depression have a solid counterexample to mind. A great many Americans who lived through that long ordeal came out of the experience with a set of attitudes toward material goods that were radically different from the ones we’ve just been discussing. They were, to judge by the examples I had the chance to know, as materialistic as any other American generation has ever been, but the shadow of 1929 lay permanently across any notion that pursuing short term gains at the cost of long term disaster could possibly be a good idea. It’s not accidental that the gutting of regulations on banks that made the current economic debacle possible did not happen until the generation that had witnessed 1929 had passed from public life—nor that it was the generation of the Baby Boom, the first to grow up after depression and war had definitively given way to Pax Americana, that first put today’s culture of short term satisfaction into overdrive.

The behavior of a society, in other words, has at least as much to do with its recent experience of the world as it does with the deeper but more diffuse influence of the biological drives its members share with the rest of the species. Ironically, Gingrich’s response in the presidential debate pointed this up, though I suspect he himself will be the last person on the planet to realize this. He insisted that just as the United States was able to crush the Axis powers in the Second World War, a mobilization on a similar scale guided by the same optimism and can-do attitude could overwhelm any conceivable petroleum shortage and crash the price of oil. It’s a common metaphor—how many times have people in the peak oil scene, for example, called for a new Manhattan Project?—but in the present context it’s hopelessly misleading.

The Second World War, if anything, is a textbook case in what happens when optimism and a can-do attitude runs up against the hard facts of thermodynamics. All things considered, the Axis powers had better generalship, more disciplined military forces, and a much keener grasp of the possibilities of mechanized warfare than the Allies had at first, and Germany, at least, was ahead of the Allies in advanced military technology all the way through the war. What they did not have was secure access to fuel—and lacking that, they lost. Russia’s Baku oilfields and the immense US petroleum deposits in Texas and elsewhere more than made up the difference, providing the Allies with practically limitless supplies of energy, and thus of troops, weapons, mobility, and everything else that makes for victory in war. Having those things, they won.

It’s all the more ironic in that a similar struggle had a similar result on Gingrich’s home turf a century and a half ago. No one can possibly accuse the Confederacy of a shortage of optimism or can-do attitude, and the chief Confederate generals were incomparably better than their Union rivals. What those same Union generals finally figured out, though, was that the North’s larger population and vastly greater economic base meant that generalship didn’t matter; the North simply had to force the South into one meatgrinder battle after another, because even if the Union losses were larger, they could be replaced and the South’s could not. Appomattox followed in due order.

One of the points that needs to be drawn from these examples, and the many others like them, is that optimism and a can-do attitude are in large part effects rather than causes; or, to put matters a little differently, they are relevant to certain circumstances and not to others. In the twentieth century, a nation with abundant supplies of coal, oil, and iron ore could well afford boundless optimism, and got along better with boundless optimism than without it, because the resource base was there to back up that optimism and give it muscles—and, when necessary, teeth. A nation that lacks such resources but still sets out to act on the basis of boundless optimism, on the other hand, risks ending up in roughly the same condition as the American South in 1865 or Germany and Japan in 1945. Such a nation needs to foster entirely different qualities than the ones just mentioned: circumspection, patience, and a keen sense of the downside risks of any opportunity come to mind. Equipped with these, it’s possible for a nation with few resources to distract, dissuade, and ultimately outlast its potential enemies. That’s the secret of Switzerland’s survival, to cite one example among many.

The wild card in these calculations comes into play when shifts in technology, on the one hand, or the depletion of nonrenewable resources on the other, changes the status of a nation faster than its internal cultural shifts can adapt. Britain’s history is a case in point. Britain’s empire happened to come of age just as the Industrial Revolution was dawning, and coal—of which Britain had huge and easily accessible deposits—was the essential fuel of that revolution, powering the steam engines and (in the form of coke) the iron and steel foundries that were essential to economic and military power in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the dawn of the 20th century, though, petroleum—far more energy-rich than even the best anthracite coal, and irreplaceable as fuel for gasoline and diesel engines, which were busy putting coal-fired steam power out of business—elbowed coal out of the way. Britain had next to no petroleum supplies of her own, since the offshore drilling techniques that made the North Sea fields accessible were still decades in the future.

The result was a tremendous new range of vulnerabilities that next to nobody noticed in time. Twice in twenty-five years, accordingly, Britain blundered into a land war in Europe and found itself abruptly scrambling for survival. In both cases, it had to turn to its erstwhile colony, the United States, to bail it out, and the price tag on those bailouts finally included Britain’s empire and its status as a major world power. (There were several other countries just as eager as we were to buy Britain’s empire and status, but—well, basically, we pepper-sprayed them and left the store with our prize.) Optimism and a can-do attitude counted for very little, for example, when German submarines could throw a noose around the British islands that Britain alone couldn’t break.

The end of the age of petroleum promises another set of upsets on the same scale, but this time it’s not because some more convenient and concentrated resource has suddenly come on the scene. It’s because the world’s production of conventional petroleum peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since. A desperate scramble to fill the resulting gap with what appear on the charts as “other liquids”—ethanol, biodiesel, tar sand extracts, you name it, if it can be poured into a fuel tank and burnt, it gets counted—has filled in the gap, at least for now, but all these “other liquids” require much more energy to produce than ordinary petroleum does, and of course those energy inputs aren’t accounted for in the totals. Thus, on paper, we’ve been chugging along a bumpy plateau for six years now, while in the real world—because of the rising energy inputs demanded by the “other liquids”—the supply of fuel available to do anything other than produce more fuel has been steadily sliding.

The problem we face right now is that it’s only been a few short years since world petroleum production was expanding, and next to nobody has begun to think through the implications of the shift. Neither the United States nor anybody else has the vast supplies of energy and other raw materials that would be needed to back up the confident, brash optimism of an earlier day, and yet we still cling to the notion that those attitudes are the appropriate response to any crisis, because that’s the approach we know. Patience, prudence, hard realism, the cold-eyed assessment of potential risks—those are foreign concepts to the leaders and the populace alike in most of the world’s industrial nations, and especially so here in America, where the cult of enthusiastic optimism has been welded solidly in place since before the birth of the Republic. It has always worked before, and most Americans at every point on the socioeconomic spectrum are firmly convinced that it will work again.

But it will not work again, because the resources that would allow it to work again no longer exist.

That is why, dear reader, if you happen to live for another few decades, and have the chance to look back from that vantage point on the years just ahead of us, you are likely to see those years littered with the scraps of any number of grandiose plans meant to overcome the rising spiral of crises taking shape around us right now. None of them will have worked, because none of them will deal with the driving force behind that spiral of crisis—the hard fact that we’ve exhausted most of the easily extracted, highly concentrated energy sources on this planet, and are going to have to downscale our expectations and our collective sense of entitlement to fit within the narrower and more burdensome limits that dependence on renewable energy sources will impose on us. Quite the contrary; every one of these projects will start from the assumption that optimism and a can-do attitude can overcome those limits—and the tighter the limits press and the more obvious it becomes that the limits aren’t budging, the more passionate the claims that one more heroic effort will defeat them once and for all.

Those claims will come from every point on the political spectrum, and will wrap themselves in every conceivable scrap of rhetoric that comes to hand. Before all this is over, I expect to see people who now call themselves environmentalists advocating for the strip-mining of our national parks—in an environmentally sensitive manner, to be sure. We’ve already seen erstwhile environmentalists such as Stewart Brand and George Monbiot championing nuclear power; how poisoning the biosphere with radioactive waste makes more sense than flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide may well puzzle you as much as it does me, but straining at greenhouse gnats and swallowing nuclear camels is apparently a job requirement in their field these days.

What neither the pundits nor the politicians nor ordinary people are willing to consider, in turn, is the one option that offers a meaningful way forward: learning the old and necessary lesson that our desires need to be held within the bounds that the universe provides for us, and that long term goals and values need to trump short term cravings, especially where material goods are concerned. We can no longer afford the sort of attitude that insists that it’s okay to pepperspray our fellow shoppers to get that brand new video game console, or pepperspray the laws of physics and geology to get that extra four million barrels a day of oil (or, more precisely, to get the presidency by pretending we can get that extra four million barrels a day of oil), or pepperspray Canada’s grandchildren to get the right set of pretty figures on the national balance of trade and federal budget. Still, for the foreseeable future, pepperspray will be popular in the corridors of power and the corner tavern alike, and it will take a certain number of unnecessary disasters before that ends and people in the industrial world begin to come to terms with the new reality.

This, finally, is why I’ve spent the last year and a half passing on what I learned, decades ago, of the do-it-yourself green wizardry of the Seventies, and why I’ve supplemented that over the last two months with some of the basic elements of magic—the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will—which I also began to learn in the Seventies, and which had rather more than a nodding acquaintance in those days with the movements focused on appropriate technology, organic gardening, and the rest of it. During the years immediately ahead of us, unless I’m very much mistaken, the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the industrial world can be counted on to do just about anything other than a meaningful response to the crisis of our age, and any meaningful response that does happen is going to have to come from individuals, families, and community groups.

During those same years, I suspect, every available effort will be made to convince as many people as possible that the nonsolutions on offer are actually meaningful responses, and the things that might actually help—using less, conserving more, and downscaling our burden on the planet—are unthinkable. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the world changes, and structures and institutions adapted to an old reality turn out to be hopelessly unworkable in the new one. Next week we’ll talk about what might follow that period, and wrap up the discussion of green wizardry and magic alike for the time being.

*****

Those of my readers who enjoy modern dance and are interested in supporting what, as far as I know, is the world’s first peak oil-related dance performance may be interested to know that choreographer Valerie Green and her dance troupe, Dance Entropy, are seeking sponsors and donors for their upcoming piece Rise and Fall, which is based in part on my book The Long Descent. It’s a worthy cause, and certainly has more to recommend it than dodging pepper spray in a big box store…

As usual, the facts are quite a bit different from the political issues. From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html?emc=eta1

Hiring Locally for Farm Work Is No Cure-All

Matthew Staver for The New York Times

John Harold found himself short of workers to harvest his corn and onions after he decided to try to hire more local residents and fewer foreign laborers for his 1,000-acre farm.

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: October 5, 2011

Olathe farmers sought workers for July through October.

That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.

LETTERS AT 3AM –

THE MOB, 9/11, AND YOUR GARBAGE

Austin Chronicle – Oct. 21, 2011

The years between 1966 to 1973, during which the World Trade Center was built, were the sunset years of the mob’s so-called Five Families. The mob was a powerful presence on the docks, in trucking and garbage collection, and in construction – besides traditional mob businesses like brothels, illegal gambling, loansharking, money laundering, violence-for-hire, and its growing control of the dope trade. During those years, New York City was up for sale: dirty cops, judges, regulators, inspectors, prison guards. In that wild, dirty era, the wild and dirty ruled.

New York is squeaky now, right? As U.S. Attorney (1983-1989 and mayor of New York City (1994-2001), Rudy Guiliani famously cleaned up the town, and his successor, Michael Bloomberg, has kept it clean. That’s the story, anyway.

Well, welcome to the New York construction in this clean era:

“A concrete-testing laboratory faked results for La Guardia Airport control tower, the new Yankee Stadium, the Lincoln Tunnel and more than a dozen other projects. … [T]he case spotlighted the stubborn presence of concerns about fraud in an industry important to the safety of a city of skyscrapers and subways. … [The lab’s] 12 years of fraud continued even after another major lab was indicted and city officials tightened oversight…‘The volume of fabricated tests was egregious,’ …netting the company millions of dollars for results ‘that were no more than worthless pieces of paper,’ District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., said” (The Associated Press online, Aug. 4).

“[N]one of the nearly 3,000 test reports that investigators seized … contained legitimate test results (The New York Times, Aug. 5, p.1).”

Got that? None. Zero. Not one.

The AP report documented another company “convicted in 2010 of faking concrete and steel strength for nearly 120 projects around the city, including ground zero’s centerpiece skyscraper [my emphasis].”

Both AP and the Times included lame not-to-worry notices. AP: “Prosecutors said they believed any safety concerns had been addressed by retesting, plus some upgrades in projects they wouldn’t specify.” Check for yourselves what those retesting standards are; they are typically less than 1% of the questionable material.

The Times was cuter. Concrete cracks were found in various buildings, but “officials said they did not represent serious structural threats… because most of the concrete poured in New York is of high quality.”

Say what? Notice the “officials” are anonymous. No one is about to put his or her name to that contention.

AP added coyly that “Engineers generally design buildings to make sure they will be safe even if there are problems with some materials.” A polite way to say: Engineers and architects know this shit goes down in most cities and design accordingly.

(Do they ask themselves, “What if a jet loaded with fuel crashes into my building?” I doubt it.)

Neither report mentioned any of the outfits that have replaced the so-called Five Families, but the ever-cautious Times hinted: “The defendants and the company are charged under the state’s racketeering law.” Also, the testing investigation grew from an investigation into labor racketeering.

Sounds like mob to this Sicilian. Same old same old in today’s “clean” New York. It buggers up the mind to imagine what went down during New York’s fattest skyscraper project ever – when the city was openly dirty.

September 11th conspiracy theorists point to the collapse of World Trade Center building 7 as the “smoking gun” that proves them right, but they overlook how substandard construction might be undermined by earthquakelike thuds when two across-the-court skyscrapers fall down.

Any 9/11 analysis based on blueprint specs is as questionable as any statement by architects and engineers who fail to admit that, in their professions, the price of doing business includes knowing when to look the other way. As the AP coyly noted, those professionals routinely compensate for routine corruption. They do not factor in the unusual. In Fun City, “unusual” includes earthquake stresses above a 4.01 magnitude and jets full of fuel.

As we say in Lubbock, Texas: I’m just sayin’. Stop spinning your wheels, boys, ‘cause accurate data can never be known. As it can never be known if projects touched by the latest scandals are up to extreme stress. As Lenny Bruce once said, “Everybody’s ass is up for grabs.”

“Everybody” includes you and me. Because, as Orson Welles put it, “It’s a bright, guilty world.” Bright and guilty, everywhere and evermore.

How’s that for a conspiracy theory? Now, let’s talk about your garbage.

Why does your local mob favor control of private garbage collection?

Obvious answer: It’s easy to move contraband in a garbage truck. Drugs. Weapons. Slave-girls. Whatever. (I’m not being flip. I’ve watched this shit since I was a kid. It’s horrible. It’s all around you. That’s life in these United States, and it always has been. How’s that for a conspiracy theory?)

In the Bronx and Brooklyn of my tender years, the dialogue went like this:

I’m a mob guy with a territory. There are 500 restaurants in my territory. I collect standard fees weekly — $50 off the books. And $50 times 500 equals

$25,000 weekly, or $1.3 million yearly. Cash flow is all. On a whim, I up it to $100 weekly, $5.200 a year each. (Understand, that’s just one of my scams. I’ve got lots. I’m pulling a couple million a year off everybody’s books.)

Sallie’s Pizza on Jerome Avenue – Sallie balks. He’ll won’t go for $100. (He’ll go eventually, but he wants to be the last to agree. He’s got pride.)

I tell my driver: “Sallie’s Pizza – that’s the best on Jerome, right?”

“If you say so. Me, I like Irish Johnny’s on Tremont.”

“You’re a fucking heretic. I’ll report you to the Pope. So – Sallie’s – you can’t pick up his garbage ‘cause your clutch is fucked.”

“How long my clutch is fucked for Sallie’s?”

“Til I unfuck it.”

No restaurant of any kind, high or low, can stand for a pile of garbage to stink up the joint for weeks. Sallie will cave. So will the fanciest joint in town. Cash flow will double without one knee crushed into uselessness.

Next year, me, the local boss, I double it again.

I keep 10% officially. Actually, I skim a little more, for my private stash. My boss expects that. If I skim too much, I’m replaced – gruesomely. The trick of being a long-lived wiseguy is to skim just enough. So a guy I don’t even know, I guy I maybe see on the news, a guy who’s name is “Bonano” or “Gotti” or “Luciano” or some friggin’ un-American, Lith-uanian-fuckin’ name – he gets 90% and dolls it out how pleases.

Me, I’m a small businessman – just like they talk about in Congress. I depend on my employees to steal from me – a 10% kinda thing. If they steal more, I smash their knees. If you balk, I smash yours. If I screw up, somebody smashes mine. It goes on everywhere. All the time. Bright and guilty. I’m your local boss. I get a piece of everything that’s moved by truck.

I leave government stuff alone – post office, military, they’re outta my league. But everything else….

That garbage bag under your sink – I got a piece of that. Know what means, you passive, ignorant muthafucka? Means I got a piece of you.

Recycling? You gotta be kidding. It’s me who does that. And where it ends up is where it ends up — you know what I’m sayin’? Those plastic containers you feel so righteous about? Well, fuck you. I know where they go. Recycle, my ass.

Please, don’t look into your garbage collection too closely. I refuse responsibility for your shattered, forever useless knees. Peer all you like into conspiracies worldwide, but poke not into conspiracies profitable on your block. That gets serious.