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In his pathbreaking 2001 book Resource Wars, Michael Klare wrote: “Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence.  The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials.  But we are placing increased pressure on those supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion.”  More than ever, as he points out today, this remains a planetary reality with which we have still not truly come to grips.  Since the beginning of this new century, however, climate change has joined resource scarcity in a way that will make for a far more combustible and explosive reality in the coming decades.

As John Vidal reported recently in the British Observer, leading scientists now believe that, by 2050, the pressures of climate change -- of record floods, intensifying extreme heat, and droughts -- could change the face of farming on this planet and lead to a doubling of prices for food staples, the very basics of life, as populations continue to rise.  This, in turn, will undoubtedly mean destitution or worse for millions of the poor, particularly in Africa and Asia.

On a planet rapidly changing in ways that have not been part of our repertoire in the rest of human history, TomDispatch has been, and will be, asking some of its regulars to peer into the murkiness of the human future and offer us a sense of what we may face.  From the next stages of weaponry in the American high-tech arsenal and the future aridification of the American Southwest to Washington’s limited view of a world roaring toward 2030, our writers have already begun doing so.  Today, Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, and a man always ahead of the curve, offers his views on a world too potentially explosive not to be attended to. Tom

Entering a Resource-Shock World
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion
By Michael T. Klare

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you.  Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict.  Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states.  At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

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[Note from TomDispatch: TomDispatch is increasingly dedicated to reasonable risk assessments of the actual dangers in our world.  Today’s piece is the third in a recent series on where exactly to find the real violence in our lives.  This January, Rebecca Solnit launched the subject in a striking way at TD with her piece “A Rape a Minute, A Thousand Corpses a Year”; Ann Jones took it up in March, offering a provocative connection between “domestic violence” and America’s war zones in “Men Who Kick Down Doors”; and today TD's director of social media Erika Eichelberger reminds us that, contrary to everything we’ve been taught, the most dangerous place in our American world may not be that ominous dark street, but your well-lit house -- with Rebecca Solnit, pitching in again, and adding an intro. Tom]

At a certain point in my life, I studied shotokan karate with a remarkable teacher, and then, unable to find her equivalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, took up wing chun for a while with a very amusing guy. At that point, I realized that the main threat to my health and well-being was my own stress level and -- well, you can see where this is going: yoga. There should be a national equivalent of that little trajectory from East Asian techniques for dealing with others to South Asian techniques for dealing with the self when it comes to real threat assessment: Americans die of lousy health and our lousy healthcare system, of natural disaster, and -- at levels unequalled throughout the affluent world -- of each other. Gun deaths in the U.S. in 2011: more than 11,000; in Japan that year, seven. From foreign terrorism in the U.S. that year: 0.

Some fears are convenient: terrorism has devoured money and civil rights and government surveillance at a rate that is itself terrifying. And it’s made “security” into doublespeak. In terms of actual American deaths, terrorists are right down there with sharks. (Zero domestic shark deaths in 2011, 12 worldwide.) Some fears are inconvenient: if you look at leading causes of death and injury for women, the terms “terrorist” and “husband” should perhaps be interchangeable. Male violence, much of it by partners and former partners, is the second highest cause of death for women between 15 and 44, worldwide.  And in the U.S., suicide kills more of us than homicide, as Erika Eichelberger points out in her timely piece today.

To acknowledge what really threatens us is to upset two of the most guarded citadels in this country: the military and masculinity.  They are perhaps the same force on different scales.  Armed intervention is imperial machismo in the same way a raging husband or father is the military dictator of a household. Maybe “domestic terrorist” should be twinned with “domestic violence.”  After all, the seldom acknowledged main form of such terrorism in this country in recent decades, anti-abortion violence, fits in comfortably, being an assault on women’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

At the Republican National Convention in New York City back in 2004, I coined the term “safe dangers” to describe how some perils are too dangerous to name and the way they are instead transformed into more conventional and acceptable dangers. The activists in Manhattan’s streets then threatened the legitimacy and hegemony of the Republicans and brought up unsayable things about our wars, our leaders, and the state of our union. We were a threat.

To acknowledge what kind of threat we were, however, would have meant acknowledging first that we had real power -- the power to change the conversation and rock the boat (as Occupy would do, so threateningly, in that same city seven years later). It would mean opening up a genuine conversation, while framing the status quo as a construct of interested parties rather than the natural order of things. Instead, we were essentially reclassified as terrorists or criminals by a mainstream media taking its orders straight from the Bush Administration.

To acknowledge the real lay of the land is always dangerous when rhetoric and reality are out of joint. And are they ever over guns these days! The debate over gun control will never go anywhere as long as the anti-regulation side continues to argue from their inner Clint Eastwood: he who will always be faster on the draw, know just who the bad guys are, and drop them with a shot into a crowd, from a dead sleep at home, in a moment of utter surprise, in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse... Call it the machismo-industrial complex: it sold more than 17 million guns last year, enough to arm every soldier in NATO five times over.

Mere statistics about who actually uses guns on whom just don’t get in their way. (You know, the tiny numbers of intruders actually deterred and the startling number of family members knocked off.)  Nor does testimony from people like gun-carrying Joe Zamudio.  He was the man who came upon a group of people, including his congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, being shot by a lone gunman in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Someone had already wrestled the gun away from the killer.

Zamudio almost shot that bystander by mistake.  He wisely hesitated, ended up wrestling the actual shooter to the ground, and then simply lay on top of him.

Not at all like Dirty Harry, that role model for massacre perps -- also mostly white guys, speaking of the unmentionable -- exacting their own vengeance on a world insufficiently obedient to their idiosyncratic needs and notions. Clearly, we need counters to Hollywood, and militarism, and machismo.  We also need to take stock of the real dangers in our country. That’s exactly what Erika Eichelberger does here. In the immortal words of Pogo Possum, we have met the enemy and he is us. Rebecca Solnit

House of Horrors
Violence on the Home Front 
By Erika Eichelberger

Since the Newtown massacre, visions of unfathomable crazy mass killers and armed strangers in the night have colonized the American mind. Proposed laws have been drawn up that would keep potential mass murderers from getting their hands on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, or that would stop hardened criminals from buying guns. But the danger out there is both more mundane and more terrible: you're more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And you'll probably be at home when it happens.

Between 2005 and 2010, 60% of all violent injuries in this country were inflicted by loved ones or acquaintances. And 60% of the time those victimizations happened in the home. In 2011, 79% of murders reported to the FBI (in which the victim-offender relationship was known) were committed by friends, loved ones, or acquaintances. Of the 3.5 million assaults and murders against family members between 1998 and 2002 (the last time such a study was done), almost half were crimes against spouses. Eleven percent were against children. But the majority of violent deaths are self-imposed. Suicide is the leading cause of violent death in the U.S., and most of those self-killings happen at home.

Violence Against Women

Vanette has plastic, rose-tinted glasses on and cowrie shells weaved into her braids. Her nails are long and thick and painted purple-brown. She has ample gaps in her teeth, and she's sitting at the communal dining table at a “transitional home” in Washington, D.C., telling me about the time her boyfriend broke her knee.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next step in TD's expanding social media empire is operational: a TomDispatch tumblr site. Crackerjack intern Cos Tollerson is working on it with me. Check it out by clicking here. Tom]

“Shell shock,” the psychological scourge of World War I, occurred after “a man has been buried, lifted, or otherwise subjected to the physical effects of a bursting shell or other similar explosive.”  So wrote Charles Myers, an officer in the British army’s medical corps, in his 1940 book, Shell Shock in France, 1914-18. Additionally, he noted, shell shock could result even “when the soldier is remote from the exploding missile, provided that he be subject to an emotional disturbance or mental strain sufficiently severe.” Of course, Myers warned, the effects of shell shock could also appear in those “who have never been near any such exploding missile... or indeed have never come under fire at all.”

Shell shock without the shells or the shock? What in the world did that mean? What did it say about war and those called upon to fight in them?

War-related psychiatric conditions have long been a slippery subject. Soldier’s heart, Da Costa syndrome, trench neurosis, shell shock, war neurosis, acute combat stress reaction, battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) -- each of these maladies has been a product of its time and each has been all too real, painful, and debilitating to the men and women who have suffered from them.

In his 1919 text, Shell-Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems, Elmer Southard -- an Army veteran, Harvard Medical School professor, and former director of a unit of the U.S. Army’s Neuropsychiatric Training School -- profiled a Russian officer who became afflicted by tremors, was incapacitated by fear that “the Germans were going to break through and capture him [and] shells were about to burst over his head,” and started suffering “hallucinations of shots and the voices of soldiers” that he was unable to distinguish from reality. In February 1915, this officer was medically evacuated, but not from the front lines. He had, Southard explained, never served there nor even “had occasion to visit the line or the trenches.”

In fact, a study of a group of British soldiers suffering from war psychoses during World War I found that just 20% had been under fire.  Late in World War II, a study of Australian psychiatric casualties concluded that 60% had had no contact with the enemy.  Given all of this, it isn’t surprising that TomDispatch regular Jeremiah Goulka’s brief tour in Iraq has continued to affect him years later despite the fact that "he hardly saw a thing."

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, almost 30% of the post-9/11 veterans -- close to 250,000 men and women -- treated at V.A. hospitals and clinics have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. To that total, you would have to add American civilian advisors and contractors like Goulka, State Department officials, CIA agents, mercenaries, aid workers, reporters, and others who also bear the psychic scars of America’s recent wars. And then consider all those Iraqis and Afghans, millions of them, combatants and noncombatants -- without a veterans’ administration in sight, benefits of any sort, or even the possibility of psychiatric counseling. Consider all those inhabitants of American war zones who have had no choice but to spend not a few weeks, several tours of duty, or even the length of a world war under such stress, but often a decade or more in countries wracked by violence, privation, and distress. Perhaps we need yet another diagnosis to accurately capture the essence of what war has done to them. Neither shell shock nor PTSD seems remotely sufficient. Nick Turse

It Doesn't Take Much 
On Almost Getting PTSD in Iraq 
By Jeremiah Goulka

I was one nightmare short of PTSD.

It didn’t take much, that’s what surprised me.  No battles.  No dead bodies.  I spent just three and a half weeks as a contractor in Iraq, when the war there was at its height, rarely leaving the security of American military bases.

For several years now, Americans have become increasingly aware that a large number of veterans have gotten post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Studies estimate that at least 1 in 5 returning vets -- possibly as many as 1 in 3 -- have it. Less notice has been given to the huge numbers of veterans who suffer some PTSD symptoms but not quite enough to be diagnosed as having the disorder.  Civilian employees of the U.S. government, contractors, and of course the inhabitants of the countries caught up in America’s wars have gotten even less notice.

The thing is: It doesn't take much to develop the symptoms of PTSD.  Our idea of what used to be called "shell shock" tends to be limited to terrible battles, not just the daily stress of living in a war zone or surviving a couple of close calls.

This is a story of how little it can take. I hardly saw a thing.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s post is part one of a two-parter.  Part two will focus on the must-read new book by Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield. But this essay, while filled with long-time TomDispatch themes, was sparked at least in part by my reading of that remarkable work. Tom]

The Enemy-Industrial Complex
How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe
By Tom Engelhardt

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.

It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult.  If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.

In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a "cold war" between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America's Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror."  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

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Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military -- aka defense -- spending.  Hagel is considered a “realist” and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we’re likely to get out of Washington for a long time to come.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the best is pretty poor stuff.

The speech was filled with the sort of complaints we’ve already grown used to hearing from the Pentagon about the “deep cuts... imposed by sequester.”  These, Hagel insisted, will result in “a significant reduction in military capabilities.”  (In fact, President Obama's just released 2014 budget calls for only a miniscule 1.6% cut in the Pentagon's bloated budget.)  There was also the usual boilerplate stuff about the U.S. global military stance -- “America’s responsibilities are as enormous as they are humbling” -- and about the “vacuum” we’d create on planet Earth if we reduced it in any way.  As the Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss wrote, “Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it isn’t the job of the United States to go stumbling into every regional conflict, humanitarian crisis, failed state, and would-be terrorist nest that arises. Whatever those things are, they’re not ‘vacuum’ to be filled.”

Like Leon Panetta before him, Hagel, who took a voluntary sequester pay cut, managed to make it sound as if the U.S. military were teetering at the edge of some financial cliff.  He spoke mournfully, for instance, of the Pentagon having “significantly less resources than the department had in the past.” Well... no, as Mark Thompson of Time magazine pointed out, it just ain’t so.

The facts aren’t difficult to sort out, even for those of us who aren’t secretaries of defense.  In a world filled with the most modest of enemies, after those “sequestration” and other planned cuts in the military budget are taken into account, the country would still be spending at levels that weren’t reached in the Cold War years when there were two overarmed superpowers on the planet.  As the Congressional Budget Office concluded last month, “In real terms, after the reduction in 2013, DoD’s base budget is about what it was in 2007, and is still 7% above the average funding since 1980.”

Among Hagel’s more accurate, if disheartening, comments was his praise for the way the U.S. military had, in the post-9/11 era, grown “more expeditionary.”  Back in the nineteenth century, that phrase would instantly have been recognized as code for “imperial” -- for, that is, a great power exerting its muscle by policing the far frontiers of the planet.  In ending his speech, Hagel added definitively, “America does not have the luxury of retrenchment.”  So here’s a simple budget-cutting formula for you: if you can’t retrench and become less “expeditionary,” then significant cuts to the military, not to speak of the full-scale national security state, including the homeland-security complex and the intelligence-security complex, simply will not happen.  There’s only one way to cut the national security budget in a meaningful way: downsize the mission.

With tax day looming, we asked TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer to get the number crunchers at the invaluable National Priorities Project to work on what a people’s budget might look like with genuine military cuts in a less imperial world.  Her answer: don’t underestimate the much-ignored wisdom of the American people on where their tax dollars should (but won’t) go. Tom

A Tax Day Plan for Righting the Republic 
Just Doing What’s Popular Would Make Us Healthier, Wealthier, Wiser, and Less Indebted 
By Mattea Kramer

After heroic feats of arithmetic and a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine interpretation of opaque rules and guidelines, millions of Americans will file their taxes by this Monday, April 15th.

Then there’s the bad news.

For anyone who takes a peek at where his or her income tax dollars are going, Tax Day can be maddening. Outsized chunks of our taxes fund the military, rising healthcare costs, and interest on the federal debt. Comparatively tiny amounts go to education, science, alternative energy, and the environment.

Category by category, this is contrary to what Americans want -- and what we the people want is pretty clear. Despite near-constant news about how polarized our nation is, a careful look at opinion polls indicates that a strong majority of Americans actually have a coherent to-do list for Washington: we want more jobs, smaller deficits, more education funding, reduced reliance on fossil fuels, higher taxes on the wealthiest, plus -- the kicker -- Medicare and Social Security benefits preserved. You know, it’s the typical story of wanting to have our cake and gobble it down, too. Right?

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