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America Is Suffering From a Very Real Water Crisis That Few Are Acknowledging |
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Tuesday, 24 January 2017 09:03 |
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Cousins writes: "The problem with Flint, and the problem with many water delivery systems throughout the United States, is that lead pipes are time bombs."
A man fills a glass with tap water. (photo: Adam Lister/Getty Images)
America Is Suffering From a Very Real Water Crisis That Few Are Acknowledging
By Farron Cousins, DeSmogBlog
24 January 17
 n January 16, 2016, President Obama declared a federal emergency for the city of Flint, Michigan, over the contamination of the city’s drinking water.
One year later, not only is the city still struggling to provide clean sources of water to the Michigan city’s population, but the plight of residents in Flint has opened up the conversation about a water crisis in the United States that very few people even knew existed.
The sad story of Flint, Michigan, gained national attention because it was a crisis that was entirely avoidable, at least for the time being. Republican Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was looking for ways to cut costs, so he hired an outside manager to come up with ideas on how to do that. Unfortunately, one of the ideas that was put into action was to change the source of Flint’s drinking water from the Detroit water system to the Flint River, which was known to be heavily polluted. When that contaminated water hit the city’s aging water delivery infrastructure, the chemicals interacted with the lead pipes, causing dangerous levels of lead contamination for residents who did not have water filters.
The problem with Flint, and the problem with many water delivery systems throughout the United States, is that lead pipes are time bombs.
Like most metals, lead will break down over time, especially when it is exposed to corrosive water throughout its existence. When you have close to 1.2 million miles of lead pipes for water delivery in America — pipes that only have a lifespan of about 75 years and many are reaching that age — you have a recipe for disaster that experts warn will cost close to $1 trillion to fix.
The only reason that the crisis in Flint, Michigan, was brought to the public’s attention was because of one woman, a pediatrician named Mona Hanna-Attisha, who began noticing the symptoms of lead poisoning in an extremely large number of children from Flint. Dr. Hanna-Attisha went public with this information, which prompted investigations from civil engineers, leading to the unveiling of the problem. At the time of Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s discovery, the contaminated water had been flowing through taps in Flint for two years.
Sadly, Flint is just a tiny piece in a much larger story. Likely the reason the crisis in Flint made national headlines is because of the level of political incompetence that went along with it. But the story did wake people up to the idea that dangerous water could be anywhere, and that led to investigations by reporters who uncovered one of the potentially most overlooked stories of 2016.
On December 19, 2016, Reuters released a startling report about America’s drinking water. Reuters’ investigation concluded that there were nearly 3,000 other locales in the United States where the lead contamination in drinking water was at least double the rates found in Flint’s drinking water. These were not areas where the contamination was the same, or even slightly elevated. No, these 3,000 areas have contamination levels that came in at least twice as high as Flint.
From the Reuters report:
The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.
Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or industrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning.
To identify these locations, Reuters examined neighborhood-level blood testing results, most of which have not been previously disclosed. The data, obtained from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracks poisoning rates among children tested in each location.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 2.5 percent of children in the United States have elevated levels of lead in their blood, a direct result of drinking contaminated water.
The World Health Organization, as reported by the Huffington Post, says that infants and small children may exhibit no signs of lead poisoning in their early years, but that the effects of lead on brain development become evident in adolescence. According to the Huffington Post:
Once kids reach school age, cognition problems, including lower IQ and ADHD-like symptoms start to show up. Lead exposure has been linked to physical problems, such as anemia, kidney dysfunction and high blood pressure, as well as behavioral problems, including aggressive behavior and problems with the criminal justice system.
We should also note that in these studies of contamination, researchers focused only on lead contamination. The levels of other toxins such as mercury, arsenic, and commercial and household chemical contamination could potentially make the water in these areas and others far more toxic than this set of data indicates.
Complicating matters further is the fact that testing children for lead contamination typically falls on states and municipalities, and that funding is drying up quickly. In short, states not only lack the funds to repair their aging water infrastructure, but they also lack the necessary funds to study the negative effects of that aging water delivery system on the public.
While the widespread contamination should raise alarm bells for every American, what might be even more terrifying is the fact that analysts are predicting that in a few decades, we’ll be lucky if we can even afford to drink contaminated water.
According to a new report from Michigan State University (MSU), a variety of compounding factors in the United States could easily push large portions of the population out of the financial range to even afford water in the future.
From the MSU report:
A variety of pressures ranging from climate change, to sanitation and water quality, to infrastructure upgrades, are placing increasing strain on water prices. Estimates of the cost to replace aging infrastructure in the United States alone project over $1 trillion dollars are needed in the next 25 years to replace systems built circa World War II, which could triple the cost of household water bills…
Over the next few decades, water prices are anticipated to increase to four times current levels. Prices could go higher if cities look to private providers for water services, who have a tendency to charge higher rates than public providers. These pressures on water systems, combined with the fact that water is a vital necessity to sustain life, place this issue at the forefront of 21st century infrastructure challenges. While studies have found that Americans are willing to pay more to maintain and ensure access to water resources, this willingness to pay may conflict with their fundamental ability to pay for water.
The report notes that water prices across the country have risen by about 41 percent since 2010, and if this particular trend continues, 35.6 percent of American households will not be able to afford water services within the next five years.
In short, the water affordability crisis is not something that is a few decades off, or even a single decade off: More than 40 million American citizens could find themselves unable to afford water in the next five years if both stagnating incomes and increasing water prices stay on their current trajectories.
These problems are very real, and they are problems that are generally not gaining very much attention. While the water contamination crisis will occasionally steal a headline or two, virtually no attention has been paid to the fact that we’re pricing a third of United States citizens out of the water market.
Resource scarcity breeds conflict. That’s been true throughout human history. And when we’re talking about something like water — the single most important thing to sustain life — the looming scarcity should be a top concern for every American citizen.
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To Christy on Facebook, Who Doesn't Need the Women's March |
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Monday, 23 January 2017 14:58 |
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Speer writes: "Christy doesn't need this march. Why do any women need this march? Here is my response to Christy, and by association, all the women who agreed with her."
People wear pink hats to the march. (photo: Amanda Voisard/WP)
ALSO SEE: Solidarity - Plus 10 Other Reasons Women Showed Up to March
To Christy on Facebook, Who Doesn't Need the Women's March
By Susan Speer, Medium
23 January 17
 n response to the millions of women who marched yesterday, there’s a Facebook rebuttal going around by a woman named Christy. Apparently, there are quite a few women who agree with her.
The summary: Christy doesn’t need this march. Why do any women need this march? This is America, I have everything I need, and if you don’t, it’s your own fault, and marching won’t fix that for you.
Here is my response to Christy, and by association, all the women who agreed with her:
Hi Christy. We don’t know each other, but your #notmymarch post is getting shared a lot today. It showed up in my feed, thanks to a few of my friends who like what you’re saying.
In some respects, our worlds probably aren’t too far apart.
I’m going to make assumptions — and I could be wrong — but I’m a college-educated, professional mom. I live in a safe neighborhood with nice houses, surrounded by big, shady trees. My days are filled with the stuff of suburbia: My kids get a warm breakfast before school, and I go to work or the gym. I get my groceries delivered to my door. I’m a single mom and my life gets messy sometimes, but I’m grateful for everything my kids and I have and I fully understand that there are women in this country who don’t have a sliver of what I have and no matter what they do, they never will. And it isn’t because they aren’t trying hard enough.
Christy, I’m going to ask you an important question.
Besides the cashier at Target — the one who watches you swipe your bank card and walk out with your $195 worth of whatever you buy at Target — besides that woman, or the woman who stretches out of the drive-thru window to give you your grande skinny latte that you paid for with the app on your phone…. (and here’s the question) When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with a woman whose life isn’t pretty much like yours?
Take all the time you need.
You said you were being made to feel like you’re a “disgrace to women” because you don’t agree with women who marched yesterday.
That’s a clever opener to get a boost from the girlfriends who might be on the edge of feeling the way you do, and were waiting for someone to say it so they could agree with you. It’s like saying, “I know I’m fat and ugly,” so your friends will rush to your side to reassure you that you’re not.
You say your voice is heard. You say you’re not a second-class citizen. So what’s the problem, amirite?
Again, I’m full of assumptions here, but you feel like your voice is heard, because maybe you have no idea what it feels like to not be heard. You don’t feel like a second-class citizen, because you’ve never been one.
You feel like you have control over your body.
I have control over my body, too, so I hear ya. In fact, next week, I’m going for my annual pap and mammo. It’s covered as a well exam on my insurance. But, a few years ago, my OB-GYN recommended that I get an IUD. Medically, this was a better choice for me than other hormonal birth control, or no birth control. But the insurance plan I had at the time didn’t cover IUDs. It was going to cost $1,000. The other stuff — pills, implants — was covered 100%, but weren’t right for me, medically. I passed on the IUD and decided to just deal. Because I didn’t need the IUD to prevent pregnancy, but that’s another thing entirely. Sure $1,000 is a lot of money. I could have paid it, but I was pissed off that it was singled out as the one that had a price tag — and a big one at that. I wasn’t going to die and my uterus wasn’t going to be diseased if I didn’t get the IUD, so it was a choice I could make for myself.
Have you ever skipped an annual pelvic exam or mammogram, because your kid needed new shoes and you had to choose and hope for the best?
Not everyone gets free reproductive healthcare in this country. Have you ever stopped using birth control because the clinic in your neighborhood closed, and the closest one now is across town, and you can’t get there because you’re working two jobs and someone else in your family uses the one car in the driveway? If you’re feeling OK, putting off that exam for a year, or two, or three is almost always an easy decision when you literally have to decide how to spend the $50 in your hand and your kids need stuff.
Have you ever been sexually assaulted? Shoved around by a drunk ex-boyfriend? Felt unsafe around someone? If so, did you have control over your body then?
I don’t think this needs explaining, but maybe it does. Violence against women doesn’t know zip codes or security gates. It happens to women no matter what their life and economic situation. It may be happening in a house on your street. When women are assaulted (and this has a very broad definition), women have no control over where or how they get hit. Or cut. Or pushed up against a wall. Or followed too closely by a weirdo in a parking lot. Or when fucked with their own hot curling iron. Or dragged by the hair while her kids hear something behind that closed door and they’re crying in the next room and she’s trying to be quiet so she doesn’t scare the kids, but it’s hard to be absolutely silent when she’s sure this will be the time her husband will kill her. It’s really something you should care about and you need to understand that this is in your bubble, even if you don’t know it.
You say you can go out and get a job if you want.
You are fortunate. So am I. I don’t have to “get permission” to work (some women in this country do). I don’t have to feel like the hole that is my life is getting deeper and blacker because I don’t have the skills to get the job I want that will pay more, put more food on the table and more gas in the tank. Or don’t have a way to get to work. There are millions of women out there who desperately want to work and can’t afford the childcare. Do you know anyone who has these barriers?
You can vote.
So can I. And I always do. This last election, for the first time, I got more involved, and I spent Election Day working at a voting precinct. I was that person who checked your ID to make sure you were voting in the correct location. I was the person who gave directions to the confused elderly couple who thought they were at the right place but needed to go a couple of miles down the road. I was the person who congratulated young voters who were voting for the first time; I wanted that day to feel important to them. I checked the IDs of women who dressed up to vote because it’s a special day, and people who showed up in torn, dirty shirts and crusty work boots. I welcomed moms with kids in strollers and people pushed in wheelchairs. I was the person who apologized to the woman in a hurry, because she was on her lunch break, and I had to tell her that the address on her ID didn’t match what was in the system. She moved to this neighborhood recently, but hasn’t had time to get her drivers license updated. There’s no way she can get to her old precinct and back in the 20 minutes she’s got left, and she’s crying, because she really wanted to vote. Or the woman who ran in at 6:57 p.m., breathless and hoping she wasn’t too late. We celebrated her as the last voter of the day. She cried too.
All of these people were lucky — just like you and me, they knew they could vote. They had an idea of where they should go to vote. They had a way to get there. They had the ID that I checked against the precinct’s rolls, probably because they drive. But, just as a single example, I live in a city that’s nearly 70 percent minority, and the older women come from a time, place and culture where their husbands always drove; and they never learned to drive, never got a license. Her husband died, and she found a ride so she could vote. She fumbles in her pocketbook for something with her name on it. A Medicare card? Can I take her Medicare card? “I’m sorry, ma’am. I know, it’s a government card, but it’s not on the list of IDs I can accept.”
I turned a few others away, too. Not because they were the “fraudulent voters” we’re told hover around our polling places, waiting to cast an illegitimate vote. I didn’t see a single one of those, even in my city full of immigrants and people who live in the shadows, even though they don’t have to. I had to turn away veterans, old people, young people, I had to turn them away for a whole bunch of different reasons brought about by the fear that someone who shouldn’t vote, might try.
You say you feel heard.
I feel like I’m heard, too. Imagine, though, if you lived with any or all of the things I described above, and nobody cared, or your senator heard a lobbyist’s voice over yours and voted to cut off funding for your kid’s after school program, or neighborhood clinic, or changed a bus route that got you to work and back? Or took away your family’s health coverage? Imagine if that was your life. And nobody cared. Worse, people write about it on Facebook and declare your life as a poor choice and you should have made better decisions?
The only person who can stop you is yourself.
I feel that way about my life, too. I was raised in an environment where I was nurtured and encouraged. I’m going to guess you were, too. We take that for granted, because we were told from the time we understood language that we could do and be anything we wanted. We were never on the other side of that, where families shrug their shoulders and are a little disappointed when their daughter decides not to finish high school. Her mom and grandma never finished high school, either, College? That’s for kids who live in the neighborhoods where she’s cleaning houses with her aunt; she never finished school, either. Just like the bubble you and I live in, she’s got her own bubble, except it’s not as nice. If you don’t know any women who finished high school or anyone who’s gone to college, and if you aren’t surrounded by people who tell you what’s possible, it’s easy to think it’s not your reality.
But what about the horrible things that happen to women in Pakistan, Mali and Guatemala?
Yes. I know. Horrible things happen to women all over the world. I also ache for their oppression, their abuse, their poverty, their lack of schools and clean water. But that’s a whole different conversation. In case I haven’t made myself clear yet, there’s a lot of women right here, in this country, who need things they aren’t getting, and they deserve their own conversation.
Which brings me to The Women’s March.
I didn’t march because I personally feel marginalized. I marched because I can. I marched because a lot of women can’t, even if you don’t see them. I marched for women of privilege, women who don’t have shit, women who are raising awesome children with their same-sex partner who has to legally adopt the child that is biologically hers, and might find herself spontaneously unmarried in the eyes of the Supreme Court. I marched for women who need reproductive healthcare of any kind. I marched for the 17-year old pregnant girl who dropped out of school to sort my clothes at the dry cleaners for $7.25/hour. She has to quit when the baby comes because she doesn’t get any time off, paid or otherwise. Her next job will be minimum wage, too, because she hasn’t gotten her GED yet and doesn’t know if she can get in the night school program because she’ll need someone to stay with her newborn. I marched for the woman who was raped in college and still hasn’t even told her best friend, after all these years.
I even marched for you, Christy. Even if you don’t feel like you need anyone to march for you.
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FOCUS: The Future by Committee: The Collective 'Wisdom' of the US Intelligence Community |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 23 January 2017 11:15 |
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Engelhardt writes: "They call themselves the U.S. 'Intelligence Community,' or the IC. Since 9/11, expansion has been the name of its game, as the leading intelligence agencies gained ever more power, prestige, and the big bucks, while wrapping themselves in an unprecedented blanket of secrecy."
John Brennan. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
The Future by Committee: The Collective 'Wisdom' of the US Intelligence Community
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
23 January 17
 hey call themselves the U.S. “Intelligence Community,” or the IC. If you include the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in 2005 began as a crew of 12 people, including its director, and by 2008 had already grown to a staff of 1,750, there are 17 members (adding up to an alphabet soup of acronyms including the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA). The IC spends something like $70 billion of your taxpayer dollars annually, mostly in secret, hires staggering numbers of private contractors from various warrior corporations to lend a hand, sucks up communications of every sort across the planet, runs a drone air force, monitors satellites galore, builds its agencies multi-billion-dollar headquarters and storage facilities, and does all of this, ostensibly, to provide the president and the rest of the government with the best information imaginable on what’s happening in the world and what dangers the United States faces.
Since 9/11, expansion has been the name of its game, as the leading intelligence agencies gained ever more power, prestige, and the big bucks, while wrapping themselves in an unprecedented blanket of secrecy. Typically, in the final days of the Obama administration, the National Security Agency was given yet more leeway to share the warrantless data it scoops up worldwide (including from American citizens) with ever more members of the IC.
And oh yes, in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, several of those intelligence outfits found themselves in a knock-down, drag-out barroom brawl with our new tweeter-in-chief (who has begun threatening to downsize parts of the IC) over the possible Russian hacking of an American election and his relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the process, they have received regular media plaudits for their crucial importance to all of us, our security and safety, along with tweeted curses from the then-president-elect.
Let me lay my own cards on the table here. Based on the relatively little we can know about the information the Intelligence Community has been delivering to the president and his people in these years, I’ve never been particularly impressed with its work. Again, given what’s available to judge from, it seems as if, despite its size, reach, money, and power, the IC has been caught “off-guard” by developments in our world with startling regularity and might be thought of as something closer to an “un-intelligence machine.” It’s always been my suspicion that, if a group of smart, out-of-the-box thinkers were let loose on purely open-source material, the U.S. government might actually end up with a far more accurate view of our world and how it works, not to speak of what dangers lie in store for us.
There’s just one problem in saying such things. In an era when the secrecy around the Intelligence Community has only grown and those leaking information from it have been prosecuted with a fierceness unprecedented in our history, we out here in what passes for the world don’t have much of a way to judge the value of the “product” it produces.
There is, however, one modest exception to this rule. Every four years, before a newly elected president enters the Oval Office, the National Intelligence Council, or NIC, which bills itself as “the IC’s center for long-term strategic analysis,” produces just such a document. The NIC is largely staffed from the IC (evidently in significant measure from the CIA), presents “senior policymakers with coordinated views of the entire Intelligence Community, including National Intelligence Estimates,” and does other classified work of various sorts.
Still, proudly and with some fanfare, it makes public one lengthy document quadrennially for any of us to read. Until now, that report has gone by the name of Global Trends with a futuristic year attached. The previous one, its fifth, made public just before Barack Obama’s second term in office, was Global Trends 2030. This one would have been the 2035 edition, had the NIC not decided to drop that futuristic year for what it calls fear of “false precision” (though projections of developments to 2035 are still part of the text). Instead, the sixth edition arrives as Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress, an anodyne phrase whose meaning is summarized this way: “The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before. Whether promise or peril prevails will turn on the choices of humankind.” According to the NIC, in producing such documents its role is to identify “key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a couple of decades into the future” for the incoming president and his people.
Think of Global Trends as another example of how the American world of intelligence has expanded in these years. Starting relatively modestly in 1997, the IC decided to go where no intelligence outfit had previously gone and plant its flag in the future. Chalk that up as a bold decision, since the future might be thought of as the most democratic as well as least penetrable of time frames. After all, any one of us is free to venture there any time we choose without either financing or staff. It’s also a place where you can’t embed spies, you can’t gather communications from across the planet, you can’t bug the phones or hack into the emails of world leaders, no drones can fly, and there are no satellite images to study or interpret. Historically, until the NIC decided to make the future its property, it had largely been left to visionaries and kooks, dreamers and sci-fi writers -- people, in short, with a penchant for thinking outside the box.
In these years, however, in the heartland of the world’s “sole superpower,” the urge to control and surveil everything grew to monumental proportions leading the IC directly into the future in the only way it knew how to do anything: monumentally. As a result, the new Global Trends boasts about the size and reach of the operation that produced it. Its team “visited more than 35 countries and one territory, soliciting ideas and feedback from over 2,500 people around the world from all walks of life.”
As its massive acknowledgements section makes clear, along with all the unnamed officials and staff who did the basic work and many people who were consulted but could not be identified, the staff talked to everyone from a former prime minister and two foreign ministers to an ambassador and a sci-fi writer, not to mention “senior officials and strategists worldwide... hundreds of natural and social scientists, thought leaders, religious figures, business and industry representatives, diplomats, development experts, and women, youth, and civil society organizations around the world.”
The NIC’s two-year intelligence voyage into a universe that, by definition, must remain unknown to us all, even made “extensive use of analytic simulations -- employing teams of experts to represent key international actors -- to explore the future trajectories for regions of the world, the international order, the security environment, and the global economy.” In other words, to produce this unclassified report on how, according to NIC Chairman Gregory Treverton, “the NIC is thinking about the future,” it mounted a major intelligence operation that -- though no figures are offered -- must have cost millions of dollars. In the hands of the IC, the future like the present is, it seems, an endlessly expensive proposition.
A Grim Future Offset By Cheer
If you’re now thinking about tossing your Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler novels into the trash bin of history and diving into the newest Global Trends, then I’ve done you an enormous favor. I’ve already read it for you. And let me assure you that, unlike William Gibson’s “discovery” of cyberspace in his futuristic novel Neuromancer, the NIC’s document uncovers nothing in the future that hasn’t already been clearly identified in the present and isn’t obvious to you and just about everyone else on the planet. Perhaps Global Trends’ greatest achievement is to transform that future into a reading experience so mind-numbing that it was my own vale of tears. A completely typical sentence: “The most powerful actors of the future will be states, groups, and individuals who can leverage material capabilities, relationships, and information in a more rapid, integrated, and adaptive mode than in generations past.”
Admittedly, every now and then you stumble across a genuinely interesting stat or fact that catches your attention (“one in every 112 persons in the world is a refugee, an internally displaced person, or an asylum seeker”) and, on rare occasions, the odd thought stops you momentarily. Generally, though, the future as imagined by the wordsmiths of the IC is a slog, a kind of living nightmare of groupthink.
Whatever quirky and original brains may be hidden in the depths of the IC, on the basis of Global Trends you would have to conclude that its collective brain, the one it assumedly offers to presidents and other officials, couldn’t be more mundane. Start with this: published on the eve of the Trumpian accession, it can’t seem to imagine anything truly new under the sun, including Donald J. Trump (who goes unmentioned in this glimpse of our future). Even as we watch our present world being upended daily, the authors of Global Trends can’t conceive of the genuine upending of much on this planet.
Perhaps that helps explain why its leadership felt so caught off-guard and discombobulated by our new president. In him, after all, the American future is already becoming the unimaginable American present, tweet by tweet. (And let me here express a bit of sympathy for President Trump. If Global Trends is typical of the kind of thinking and presentation that goes into the President’s Daily Brief from the Intelligence Community, then I’m not surprised that he chose to start skipping those sessions for almost anything else, including Fox and Friends and spitball fights with Meryl Streep and John Lewis.)
As the IC imagines it, the near-future offers a relatively grim set of prospects, all transposed from obvious developments in our present moment, but each of them almost mechanistically offset by a hopeful conclusion: terrorism will undoubtedly spread and worsen (before it gets better); inequality will increase in a distinctly 1% world as anti-globalist sentiments sweep the planet and “populism,” along with more authoritarian ways of thinking, will continue to spread along with isolationist sentiments in the West (before other trends take hold); the risk of interstate conflict will increase thanks to China and Russia (even if the world will not be devastated by it); governing will grow harder globally and technology more potentially disruptive (though hope lurks close at hand); and the pressures of climate change are likely to create a more tenuous planet, short on food and especially water, and filled with the desperate and migrationally inclined (but is also likely to foster “a twenty-first-century set of common principles”). In essence, in the view of the National Intelligence Council, for every potentially lousy news trend of the present moment projected into the future, there’s invariably a saving grace, a sense that, as the report puts it, “the same trends generating near-term risks also can create opportunities for better outcomes over the long term.” In fact, by 2028 according to one of its scenarios, we could be “entering a new era of economic growth and prosperity.”
In truth, even the grimmest version of the IC’s future seems eerily mild, given the onrushing present -- from a Trumpian presidency to the recently reported reality that eight billionaires now control the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the planet’s population. (Only a year ago, it took 62 billionaires to hit that mark.) According to the Engelhardt Intelligence Council, the likelihood is that we’re already entering a future far more extreme than anything the NIC and its 2,500-plus outside experts can imagine.
The Global Trends crew seems incapable of imagining futures in which some version of the present doesn’t rule all. Despite the global wars of the last century that leveled significant parts of the planet, the arrival of climate change as history’s possible deal-breaker, and the 9/11 attacks, disjunctures are simply not in their playbook. As a result, their idea of futuristic extremes couldn’t be milder. In one of the report’s three scenarios, even the surprise use of a nuclear weapon for the first time since August 9, 1945 -- in a 2028 confrontation between India and Pakistan -- is relieved of most of its potential punch. The bomb goes off not over a major city, killing hundreds of thousands, but in a desert area. And at what seems to be remarkably little cost, the shock of that single explosion miraculously brings a world of hostile powers, including the United States, China, and Russia, together in a strikingly upbeat fashion. (By 2028, it seems that Mr. Smith has indeed gone to Washington and so, in Global Trends, “President Smith” heartwarmingly shares a Nobel Peace Prize with China’s president for the “series of confidence-building measures and arms control agreements” that followed the nuclear incident.)
I, of course, don’t have thousands of experts to consult in thinking about the future, but based on scientific work already on the record, I could still create a very different South Asian scenario, which wouldn’t exactly be a formula for uniting the planet behind a better security future. Just imagine that one of the “tactical” nuclear weapons the Pakistani military is already evidently beginning to store at its forward military bases was put to use in response to an Indian military challenge. Imagine, then, that it triggered not world peace, but an ongoing nuclear exchange between the two powers, each with significant arsenals of such weaponry. The results in South Asia could be mindboggling -- up to 21 million direct deaths by one estimate. Scientists speculate, however, that the effects of such a nuclear war would not be restricted to the region, but would spark a nuclear-winter scenario globally, destroying crops across the planet and possibly leading to up to a billion deaths.
Living in an All-American World
Such grim futures are, however, not for the NIC. Think of them as American imperial optimists and dreamers only masquerading as realists. If you want proof of this, it’s easy enough to find in Global Trends. Here, in fact, is the most curious aspect of that document: the members of the U.S. Intelligence Community evidently can’t bear to look at the last 15 years of their own imperial history. Instead, in taking possession of the future, they simply leave the post-9/11 American past in a roadside ditch and move on. In the future they imagine, much of that past is missing in action, including, of course, Donald J. Trump. (As a group, they must be Clintonistas. At least I can imagine Hillary wonkishly making her way through their document, but The Donald? Don’t make me laugh.)
Give them credit at least for accepting the obvious: that we will no longer be on a “unipolar planet” dominated by a single superpower, but in a world of “spheres of influence.” (“For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War...”) But you can search their document in vain for the word “decline.” Forget that they were putting together their report at the very moment that the first openly declinist candidate for president was wowing crowds -- who sensed that their country and their own lives were on the downhill slope -- with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Nor were they about to take striking aspects of present-day America and project them into a truly grim future. Take, for example, something that amused me greatly: you can search Global Trends in vain for all but the most passing reference to the U.S. military. You know, the outfit that our recent presidents keep praising as the “finest fighting force” in world history. Search their document top to bottom and you still won’t have the faintest idea that the U.S. military has been fighting ceaselessly in victory-less conflicts for the past 15 years, and that its “war on terror” efforts have somehow only fueled the spread of terrorist movements, while leaving behind a series of failed or failing states across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. None of that is projected into the future, nor is the militarization of this country (or its police), even though the retired generals now populating the new Trump administration speak directly to this very point.
Or to pick another example, how about the fact that, in a world in which a single country -- the very one to which the IC belongs -- garrisons the planet with hundreds of military bases from Europe to Japan, Bahrain to Afghanistan, there is but a single futuristic mention of a military base, and it’s a Chinese one to be built on a Fijian Island deep in the Pacific. (A running gag of Global Trends involves future newspaper headlines like this one from 2019: “China Buys Uninhabited Fijian Island To Build Military Base.”) What will happen to the present U.S. military framework for dominating the planet? You certainly won’t find out here.
But don’t think that the United States itself isn’t on the mind of those who produced this document. After all, among all the stresses of the decades to come, as the IC’s futurologists imagine them, there’s one key to positive national survival in 2035 and that’s what they call “resilience.” (“[T]he very same trends heightening risks in the near term can enable better outcomes over the longer term if the proliferation of power and players builds resilience to manage greater disruptions and uncertainty.”)
And which country is the most obviously resilient on Planet Earth? That’s the $100 (but not the 100 ruble or 100 yuan) question. So go ahead, guess -- and if you don’t get the answer right, you’re not the reader I think you are.
Still, just in case you’re not sure, here’s how Global Trends sums the matter up:
“For example, by traditional measures of power, such as GDP, military spending, and population size, China’s share of global power is increasing. China, however, also exhibits several characteristics, such as a centralized government, political corruption, and an economy overly reliant on investment and net exports for growth -- which suggest vulnerability to future shocks.
“Alternatively, the United States exhibits many of the factors associated with resilience, including decentralized governance, a diversified economy, inclusive society, large land mass, biodiversity, secure energy supplies, and global military power projection capabilities and alliances.”
So if there’s one conclusion to be drawn from the NIC’s mighty two-year dive into possible futures on a planet we still garrison and that’s wracked by wars we’re still fighting, it might be summed up this way: don’t be China, be us.
Of course, no one should be surprised by such a conclusion, since you don’t rise in the government by contrarian thinking but by going with the herd. This isn’t the sort of document you read expecting to be surprised, not when the nightmare of every bureaucracy is just that: the unexpected and unpredicted. The Washington bubble is evidently too comfortable and the world far too frightening a place to imagine a fuller range of what might be coming at us. The spooks of the NIC may be living off the money our fear sends their way, but don’t kid yourself for a second, they’re afraid too, or they could never produce a document like Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress.
As a portrait not of the future but of the anxieties of American power in a world it can’t control, this document provides the rest of us with a vivid portrait of the group of people least likely to offer us long-term security.
The last laugh here belongs to Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and other authors of their ilk. If you want to be freed to think about the many possible futures that face us, futures that we will help create, then skip Global Trends and head for the kinds of books that might free your mind to think afresh, not bind it to a world growing more dismal by the day.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: Resist and Disrupt |
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Monday, 23 January 2017 11:12 |
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Galindez writes: "We must keep the pressure on. The unprecedented local marches around the world in over 600 locations showed that opposition to Trump exists in every community. This is not the time to rest."
Saturday's Women's March on Washington attracted over half a million people. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Resist and Disrupt
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
23 January 17
 onald Trump is president of the United States. We can talk about how he is not our president all we want, but those are just words. It is time for action. Remember the Tea Party? Remember their reaction to the election of Barack Obama?
Say what you want about the Tea Party, but one thing they were was effective. We need to learn from their example. The Tea Party successfully put a monkey wrench in a lot of what Barack Obama wanted to accomplish. Imagine if members of Congress had not been disrupted in their town hall meetings during the winter recess in 2009. Is it possible that senators like Olympia Snow would have voted for Obamacare with a public option? I am convinced that with a public option Obamacare would not have had the same problem controlling costs that it is having now.
So what am I getting at? It is time to Tea Party Donald Trump and the GOP. We need to be at every public event our Members of Congress (MOCs) have. There is a document that is going viral on the internet called “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” It was written by former congressional staffers who watched the Tea Party resist Obama’s agenda.
We thought they were racist nut jobs freaking out when a black man became president. Many of them were. Their leaders, however, were shrewd political operatives who were channeling the anger into an effective political movement. It is our turn.
Think Globally, Act Locally
Politics is local. We can have huge marches on Washington, but they are not as effective at influencing your MOC as local actions. A well-planned local action is on the evening news and covered in the local paper. MOCs are in constant re-election mode. They don’t care what people outside their district think of them – it is how they are viewed by constituents that matters.
They don’t like to be embarrassed or upstaged. We can use many tactics. Blending in with the crowd, asking questions, and making statements in opposition in a polite manner is one tactic. That could work, especially if there are many people in opposition spread throughout the room. This gives the impression that it wasn’t organized and that many voters in the district feel the way you do.
You can also be disruptive and treat it like a protest. When they tell you to sit down and wait your turn, remind them of 2009, when the Tea Party disrupted members of Congress when they held meetings with constituents. It is our turn to express our anger.
When they tell you the election is over and you should respect the results, tell them we are. More people voted against Donald Trump than voted for him. They are not respecting that. The American people rejected Trump’s agenda by 3 million votes. Tell them to respect the will of the people.
Join a Group
Our Revolution is a chance to get involved in a new grassroots group that is still defining its identity in your community. Some places like Des Moines have existing community groups that are affiliating with Our Revolution. Iowa CCI is where I will connect with Our Revolution. If there isn’t an affiliate in your community, start one.
Indivisible is also building a directory of groups resisting Trump in your area.
You should also get involved in other groups like MoveOn, Democracy for America (DFA) and Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). The important thing is to get involved. There is power in numbers.
We will need to lean on each other for support. It will not be an easy time, and it will be easy to get discouraged. Finding like-minded people to lean on will be important. When you do join a group, socialize. It shouldn’t be all work. Build community, go for coffee after a meeting, and make friends.
Keep the Pressure On!
This past weekend, the Women’s March showed the depth of the opposition to the Trump agenda. We must keep the pressure on. The unprecedented local marches around the world in over 600 locations showed that opposition to Trump exists in every community. This is not the time to rest. Don’t just point to the numbers and go back to your couches. Join a group. Organize, organize, organize. We must continue to build a progressive movement. Our day is coming.
Download the Guide: https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
Join Our Revolution: https://ourrevolution.com/
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott moved to Des Moines in 2015 to cover the Iowa Caucus.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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ow should journalists cover people who lie routinely and brazenly, and whose plain goal is to delegitimize the traditional press as an institution?
