Interview on Business Matters

Rest your eyeballs and prick up your ears: Thomas White of Business Matters gets right past the happy-shiny talk prevalent in the mass media with the help of his two guests: me and Catherine Austin Fitts.

Interview on KOWS FM's What Now with Ken Rose

A lengthy and wide-ranging interview during which Ken asked good questions and lent a sympathetic ear. Ken is right that what I have to say is difficult, unsettling and disturbing; so, to offset that, here's a crazy picture of our cat Zoë eating Baby's Breath.

Financial Totalitarianism

A particularly annoying question I am often asked and have come to hate is: “How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?” The short answer is: “Nohow. Money will not survive collapse; not yours, not anyone else's.” But that answer is not acceptable, because accepting it would require a profound loss of faith—faith in money, a profound Götterdämmerung for a civilization based on the worship of money. People want continue to believe all sorts of things: that they can own land (i.e., shares in the Earth), or that they can do good through philanthrophic spending and charity, or that the world with which they have grown up and have lived their lives can collapse all around them, but that if they are informed and prepared, they can survive with all of their middle-class trappings intact. I am told that there is good money to be made in telling them such things.

Those who care to look can easily turn up plenty of evidence that the value of every type of financial asset, not just fiat currency or debt instruments, is unsupported. Its value derives from the goods and services provided by a functioning global industrial economy, which is quickly running out of every type of resource it requires; not just high-EROEI fossil fuels, but also metals, rare earth elements, phosphate, irrigation water and arable land. As industrial activity dwindles, worker productivity will decline precipitously. Many people point to precious metals as the ultimate storehouse of value, but without industrial equipment a man can only put out about 100 Watts of energy—a light bulb's worth—and won't dance any faster no matter how many gold or silver coins you throw at him.

This eventual outcome is the result of long-term physical trends: physical processes that move at predetermined rates and in only one direction. It is not possible to un-burn oil or coal or to un-mine gold or silver. But the short-term political and financial trends point in an altogether different direction: that of the global industrial economy turning boutique. You see, one shoe has already dropped: the level of industrial activity that can be sustained today is already insufficient to provide anywhere near full employment and a reasonable quality of life for vast numbers of people; the solution is to disenfranchise them, to confiscate their savings, to cancel their retirements, to concentrate all of the remaining wealth in as few hands as possible, and to create a boutique economic and financial environment in which the lucky and unscrupulous few can continue to live comfortably, and... wait for the other shoe to drop, I suppose. That will happen once the industrial economy becomes sufficiently disrupted by social and political upheaval that even its boutique version finally crashes.

A feeble (feeble-minded?) counter-reaction to these trends can be discerned: many people want to somehow find an escape from this system while still clinging to their money. This may seem like a contradiction in terms—“fleeing the money system while clinging to the money itself”—but this point seems lost on many people. Most of this counter-reaction is focused on the stampede to precious metals (gold and silver). This train of thought starts out as a smart market play: precious metals have been and continue to be a spectacular investment, and a good way to avoid being robbed blind by the out-of-control printing presses at the US Treasury. But eventually it goes off into ontological self-delusion—that gold and silver are “real” money, as opposed to paper fiat currency, which is “fake” money. Ladies and gentlemen, it doesn't matter whether or not it's shiny; it's all as real or as fake as you are. Some people go straight over the edge and decide to take the law into their own hands and, waving about a dog-eared copy of the US Constitution, set off to coin their own “coin of the realm,” not realizing that the realm isn't theirs. If the realm is financially stable, it will simply change the rules to make such a gambit unprofitable. If the realm is financially distressed and teetering on the verge of collapse, it will panic, shout “Terrorism!” at the slightest provocation, and the result is long-term political imprisonment for the ontologically deluded:

March 21, 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A North Carolina man was convicted for creating and distributing a counterfeit currency that was very similar to the real dollar, a U.S. Attorney said.

Bernard von NotHaus, 67, minted Liberty Dollar coins in the value of $7 million dollars. The conviction concludes an investigation that was started in 2005.

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” Anne Tompkins, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, said in a statement on Friday.

“While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” she said.

This Reuters story has since been taken down, after being ignored by media in the US (but not in Russia). Von NotHaus is looking at 20 years in jail. This is a lot, you might think, for stamping some politically edgy shiny trinkets, but then Stalin gave out similarly long sentences to millions of people for doing absolutely nothing, so let us count our blessings. Let's get one thing straight, though: in the United States, by law, anyone who, “except as authorized by law, makes or utters or passes, or attempts to utter or pass, any coins of gold or silver or other metal, or alloys of metals, intended for use as current money, whether in the resemblance of coins of the United States or of foreign countries, or of original design . . .” faces a fine or imprisonment. It is the same in every other country: the term “coin of the realm” implies that it is the realm that controls creation of all coinage and its circulation. You can wave your US Constitution around, or you can swat flies with it, or you can use it as kindling: the result will be exactly the same.

You cannot create your own global money system, and you cannot change the way the global money system works; either you are part of it, or you are out. Most of us lack the ability to sever all ties with the financial realm, but, as with so many things, having the right attitude is very helpful. To that end, let me drop a Bible-bomb on you. (I do this as someone quite free of any religious sentiment; I just find the Bible to be an interesting and useful work of world literature, filled with highly quotable, pithy remarks.) Here's a particularly nice quote from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Never has a truer phrase been written. Many of the more recent self-styled or so-called “Christians” have attempted to distort it to mean that it doesn't imply depriving yourself of any worldly goods, and that “poor in spirit” is a special, strictly spiritual sort of poverty. That is, of course, nonsense. You do not have to dig deep for the real meaning: “Poor” just means “poor,” and “in spirit” means “on purpose, not as a result of, say, injustice, misfortune, or being lazy, stupid or a gambler.” Oh, and “blessed” means “not damned.” Accordingly, Christian monks take the vow of non-acquisitiveness, which is a virtue, with the corresponding vices of stinginess (“what is mine is mine”) and greed (“what is yours is mine”). It is rather difficult to embrace such basic tenets while remaining within a culture that has elevated avariciousness and rapaciousness to the status of virtues. But here is a key insight: being poor on purpose is much easier than being poor as a result of suddenly having less than you are accustomed to having. Voluntary poverty is a hell of a lot easier than involuntary poverty.

And so, the answer to the perennially annoying question “How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?” is this: “There is no answer to your question. Try asking a different question, to which there might be an answer.”

Interview on Keiser Report

Fleeing Vesuvius, the US Edition

This hefty tome was published in Europe by Féasta, Ireland's Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. It contains two articles by me: the first is a text version of the presentation I gave at the Féasta conference in Dublin two summers ago, which you can read right on this blog.

The US edition will be released on April 5, 2011.  You can pre-order yours at a savings of $9.67. All the money will go to support Féasta.
 
My second article in this volume—Sailing craft for a post-collapse world—is a long piece that I wrote exclusively for this publication. It spells out the transportation options that will still exist once fossil fuels are no longer available, concentrating on sail transport. It pulls together pertinent information that is currently scattered across many academic disciplines, and is also informed by my personal experience as an ocean sailor and live-aboard who does all of his own maintenance.

The full table of contents can be found here. The book can be purchased through Amazon.

Fleeing Vesuvius draws together many of the ideas our members have developed over the years and applies them to a single question—how can we bring the world out of the mess in which it finds itself?
Fleeing Vesuvius confronts this mess squarely, analyzing its many aspects: the looming scarcity of essential resources such as fossil fuels—the lifeblood of the world economy; the financial crisis in Ireland and elsewhere; the collapse of the housing bubble; the urgent need for food security; and the enormous challenge of dealing with climate change.

The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and financial system, but they go much further: this substantial, wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we live. While it doesn't discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It will arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems. It's a book that can be read all the way through or used as a resource to dip in and out of.

Nuclear Meltdowns 101

[Update: The longer this disaster goes on, the more news articles appear confirming my suspicions from the very beginning. As they do, I add links to them below. So far, cooling has failed, and containment has failed. Next, radioactive lava will leak out of what were once the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The new feel-good mantra is "It's not as bad as Chernobyl." But it is already safe to conclude that the world is no longer safe enough (that is, economically, socially or politically stable enough) for nuclear power to exist. So please do the following exercise: take a map, mark every nuclear installation around where you are, draw a 50km radius circle around each, and then start seeing to it that you, your family and your friends are not in any of these circles. Pay attention to prevailing winds and coastal and ocean currents, which should extend your personal nuclear exclusion zone. Take a look around: there is no longer the money or the political power or even the technical expertise to immediately shut down and properly dismantle all of these installations and to store the nuclear waste in a way that will require zero maintenance for the thousands of years it will stay lethal. The best we can do now is evacuate ourselves ahead of time, and hope for the best.]

I am no nuclear expert, and that is probably a good thing. I did do a lot of reading about Chernobyl back when it happened. And now I am, as I was then, and as I am sure many of you are, getting really fed up with incomplete, inaccurate, misleading and generally unsatisfactory explanations that are being offered for what is going on at Fukushima. Either information is not available, or it is a flood of largely irrelevant technical minutia designed to thrill nuclear nerds but bound to bamboozle rather than inform the general reader. And so, for the sake of all the other people who aren't nuclear experts and have no ambition of ever becoming one, here's what I have been able to piece together.

Just hydrogen? Or a chain reaction?

What do they mean when they say “hydrogen explosions”? The hydrogen gas is being vented from inside the reactors and from spent fuel pools that are directly above them. Since it is very hot, it explodes as soon as it mixes with the outside air. It is formed from the rapid oxidation of the zirconium pipes that hold in the pellets of nuclear fuel. At Fukushima, some of the fuel pellets are made with uranium, while others are made with plutonium from reprocessed nuclear weapons. Zirconium is a metal which, like aluminum, instantly forms a thin, protective layer of oxide on contact with air, but doesn't oxidize further—unless it is heated up, that is. The zirconium-clad fuel rods must be kept submerged in water at all times, ocr they do heat up, and then the zirconium cladding oxidizes (burns) very rapidly and disintegrates into a powder. This is already enough information to tell us that a lot of the “fuel rods” at Fukushima are no longer rod-shaped, because the zirconium cladding has disintegrated, and that the fuel pellets must have fallen out and accumulated at the bottoms of the reactor vessels, where they are packed close together and heating up further. How much further they heat up will determine whether they will melt through the bottoms of the reactors. If they do, they would probably melt into the ground below and form a large pancake of hot, molten slag, which will slowly crumble into radioactive dust over many years, as has happened at Chernobyl. There is also a small chance that the fuel pellets will “go critical,” if the mass of them becomes sufficiently compact to restart the nuclear chain reaction; if that happens, the telltale tall brown cloud should be easy to spot from as away as Tokyo. This seems unlikely, but then nobody seems to be able to definitively rule it out either.

What do they mean when they say that they are cooling the reactor with seawater? Seawater is corrosive, and is probably the worst coolant imaginable. Normally, nuclear reactors are cooled with fresh, filtered, deionized water. The crew at Fukushima used seawater because they had no other choice. When the cooling pumps failed because the tsunami caused a blackout, they called in the fire brigade, and the fire engines there apparently use seawater. The reactor cooling systems are plumbed with stainless steel pipes, which degrade rather rapidly on contact with sea water because of the chlorine in it, especially if they are hot (which they are). At Fukushima, “containment” has already become a relative term, since the reactors are vented to the outside air in any case to keep them from bursting, but once these pipes disintegrate (a process that might take a few days to a few weeks) the containment vessels will become riddled with holes, letting in outside air and, if by then there is any zirconium left to burn, possibly causing hydrogen explosions inside the reactors, compromising them further. Their radioactive contents will then be carried to the atmosphere in aerosol form. We will probably know when that happens because the Geiger counters in the area will peg out. Nothing has been said about the destination of the copious amounts of now contaminated seawater that is being pumped through the damaged reactors and spent fuel pools. At Chernobyl, the water that that was used to "cool" the by then nonexistent reactor formed a large radioactive lake which threatened to poison Pripyat river. At Fukushima, we must suspect, all of that contaminated seawater is draining straight back into the Pacific, where tidal currents will carry it up and down the coast, contaminating the entire coastline with long-lived radioactive elements. Which brings us to a very general question:

What is the difference between radiation and radioactivity? This is a basic enough distinction, but, listening to the news coverage, I have observed a great deal of confusion. (Some of it seems intentional, if not malicious: I heard some nuclear expert/twit (a retired Oxford don, I think) on NPR explain how "wadiation" can be "thewapeutic" and never once did he mention "wadioactivity," and it made me quite mad.) Do not use the two terms interchangeably unless you want to sound like you don't know what you are talking about. Radiation, of a non-lethal kind, is what you get from a light bulb, an X-ray machine, at the beach or in a tanning booth. Radioactivity, or radioactive contamination, is what you get when a nuclear bomb or a nuclear power plant explodes, and it stays around and produces radiation for years. Both radiation and radioactivity are invisible and hard to measure, but that's where the similarity ends. Radiation consists of subatomic particles that generally go in straight lines at close to the speed of light. Given enough radiation, initially non-radioactive materials can in turn become radioactive. Radioactivity, on the other hand, is caused by radioactive materials, which decay into other materials, some also radioactive, some stable, plus some radiation, at some rate, either quickly or not so quickly. Uranium and plutonium hang around for many thousands of years. Radioactive substances can be pulverized and carried up into the atmosphere by explosions (not necessarily nuclear ones) in which case they drift with the wind for thousands of kilometers and pollute huge stretches of land and ocean. Exposure to excessive levels of radiation causes radiation poisoning, from which people can fully recover, while the various radioactive elements pollute the environment and are taken up by living organisms in a wide variety of ways, many of them not yet understood by science, poisoning them and causing a wide assortment of cancers and genetic defects. Some may be flushed out, while others become lodged in the lungs or in the bones for the life of the individual, where they remain radioactive, weakening immune systems, causing cancers and birth defects and shortening lifespans. I once spent a few hours at the airport in Minsk, waiting for a flight to Frankfurt with a group of “Chernobyl children” being flown out for treatment. They were quite a sight!

What about these “spent fuel pools” that keep catching on fire? Well that's probably the most insane thing about the nuclear power industry. They haven't figured out what to do with the spent fuel rods, so they store them tightly packed in pools of water directly at the site, or, in the case of Fukushima, since land in Japan is at such a premium, stacked directly on top of the reactor itself. The reactors at Fukushima are quite old, and so their spent fuel pools are packed full. The spent fuel rods, which accumulate over the entire lifetime of the power plant, have to be kept submerged to keep them cool, or the zirconium cladding burns away (causing hydrogen explosions) and the fuel pellets accumulate at the bottom of the pool, burning through it if the fuel is fresh enough (which, in some cases, it might be). The result is the same as with the fuel rods disintegrating inside the reactor itself, except that here there is no containment vessel to keep (at least some of) the radioactive material out of the environment.

Why do we have nuclear energy in the first place? This all sounds completely insane, doesn't it? Well, if it weren't for the nuclear bomb, anyone who proposed building a commercial fission reactor would have been laughed out of the room. But having nuclear bombs (which are by far the scariest things on the planet) makes nuclear fission reactors that much less scary, relatively speaking. And the reason we have nuclear bombs is because the only thing scarier than a nuclear bomb is not having one, since that opens you up the possibility of having one dropped on you by someone who does, such as the USSR (in theory) or the USA (as an historical fact). Compared to nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors seem "peaceful," although this is clearly not the case. Compared to nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs are as safe as houses, because they don't start a chain reaction until somebody pulls the trigger, whereas nuclear reactors maintain a controlled chain reaction during most of their existences. It's like comparing having a gun safely in your possession to heating your house with ammo, in which case, surely enough, accidents will happen.

What do people mean when they say that nuclear power is “safe” when compared to planes, trains and automobiles? What they mean is that the nuclear power industry has so far killed many fewer people per unit time. They have no data on how many people it will kill eventually, although by now they know that, unlike planes, trains and automobiles, which do crash and burn with some regularity, but cause limited damage, nuclear disasters do not have any definable upper bound on their destructive potential. I am pretty sure that there is enough above-ground radioactive material sitting in spent fuel pools and inside reactors to kill just about everyone. It will stay dangerous for over a million years, which is a lot longer than the expected lifetime of the nuclear power industry, or any industry, or any human civilization, or perhaps even the human race. When nuclear experts say that a nuclear reactor is safe, they can only mean that it is safe for the rest of the afternoon; beyond that they can't possibly have any actual data to support their claim. All they can do is extrapolate, given a rosy “everything will always remain under control” scenario, and that is not a valid approach. When they say that nuclear power is safe, what they are really saying is that it is safe given their perfect ability to accurately predict that the indefinite future will remain economically and socially stable, and we already know this to not be the case.

If we give up on nuclear energy, what will replace it? Nothing, probably. Let me try an example: if your lucrative murder-for-hire business suddenly runs afoul of a few silly laws (even though it has so far killed many fewer people than planes, trains or automobiles) that doesn't mean that you should keep killing people until you find another source of income. Same thing with electricity: if it turns out that the way you've been generating it happens to be criminally negligent, then you shut it all down. If you have less electricity, you will use less electricity. If this implies that economic growth is over and that all of your financial institutions are insolvent and your country bankrupt, then—I am sorry, but at this point in time that's not even newsworthy. Don't worry about that; just keep the nuclear accidents to a bare minimum, or you won't have anything else left to worry about.

Nothing Left to Steal

Michael Betancourt is an intellectual: he uses words like semiosis and actually knows exactly what they mean. Speaking on The Keiser Report, he made some interesting points about the pile of digital ephemera that the global financial system, and much of the economy with it, has devolved into. From 20:52 on, Michael has this to say on the current action in the financial markets around the world:

I wouldn't necessarily say "steal" ... I just don't feel that "stealing" is necessarily the right verb for this. It's something else. Stealing [implies] that there is some kind of physical commodity that's being stolen... that the currency is being debased implies that if we didn't do this the currency would be solvent, and the whole problem here is that the currency itself is disconnected from any kind of physical value. It exists as a debt against future production rather than a store of value. And all of this comes down to the immaterial basis that we are now living in. So, yes, in a sense you could say that they are stealing, [but] in another sense you could say that they are not stealing because there is nothing to be stolen... The reality is that this is an unsustainable system, and that the inevitability of its collapse has been there almost from the beginning, because the entire system is based on a currency that is not based on anything—it exists only in relation to other currencies...

On the protesters in Wisconsin and elsewhere:

What makes this even more perverse is that what they are fighting for is the continuation of their entrapment... The powers that are currently acting and that are causing these riots, protests, rebellions... are fighting for their own survival, and the shift that's happening is perverse because we are driving towards a collapse, and it is almost inevitable that we are going to have this collapse again at some point. To a certain extent I think it may have already started with the credit freeze in 2009. The attempt to print our way out of it isn't going to result in hyperinflation necessarily (although there are people who are saying that it will) so much as it will result in a complete revaluation of the system, in which we arrive at some other, new equilibrium. Part of the problem with getting there is that there are forces fighting over who has the largest number of these essentially immaterial objects, this immaterial currency. What will happen is that at some point they will have most of it (and we are moving towards that already, if you look at any of the various numbers on who has the wealth and who doesn't). What will happen when it gets concentrated enough is that the entire system will freeze up like it did in 2009. This is because the equilibrium and the maintenance and the survival of this system depends upon the circulation of these immaterial commodities. As soon as they start getting hoarded, or as soon as people who have them start cashing out and into some sort of physical commodity, both of these can trigger an imminent collapse, not necessarily in the sense of a bank run or a panic, but in the sense that the system can no longer feasibly maintain its own equilibrium... it drives towards ever greater disequilibrium, because that's the ground state for this sort of a situation, where you have vast immaterial production versus limited physical production.

I would tend to agree. The value of financial assets rests on the promise of future industrial production, which will fail to materialize due to shortages of multiple key resources. In the updated edition of Reinventing Collapse (which is scheduled to go to press next week), I try to get at much the same thing as Michael, trying hard to avoid big words like “disequilibrium”:

The extent to which we value money depends on our degree of confidence in the economy. At first, as the economy starts to collapse, we start to hoard money, to make sure that we don’t run out. Then, as the economy continues to wither away, supply disruptions and price spikes cause some of us to suddenly realize that we might not be able to gain access to the things we need for much longer, never mind the cost, and that running out of money is not fatal whereas running out of food, fuel and other supplies certainly can be. And then we start cashing in our paper assets in exchange for physical commodities we think might be more useful. Shortly thereafter everyone realizes that the chips they are holding are not all that valuable any more. It is this realization, more than anything else, that renders the chips instantly worthless. [RC 2.0 p. 54-55]

In recent months I have had many occasions to walk through Boston's financial district and look at all the suit-and-tie-wearing lab rats whose job is to push buttons to try to stimulate the pleasure center of some wealthy person's brain. The vast majority of what they trade is derived from debt secured by future production that will not exist. At what point will their patron's pleasure cross the pain threshold? Will we see the über-wealthy immolating themselves on pyres of their now worthless money, just to escape the anguish of being disencumbered of their phantom possessions? I hope for everyone to survive with their precarious sanity intact, but I can't help but look forward to a Bonfire of the Vanities to put this lengthy episode of breathless financial self-digiting behind us.