Forecast

"The coming years will prove increasingly cynical and cruel. People will definitely not slip into oblivion while hugging each other. The final stages in the life of humanity will be marked by the monstrous war of all against all: the amount of suffering will be maximal." Pentti Linkola

As for the natural world, we must try to restore wonder there too. We could start with that photograph of the earth. It may be our last chance. Even now it is being used in geography lessons, taken for granted by small children. We are the first generation to have seen it, the last generation to take it for granted. Will we remember what it meant to us ? How fine the earth looked, dangled in space ? How pretty against the endless black ? How round ? How very breakable? How small ? It is up to us to try to experience a sense of wonder about it that will save it before it is too late. If we cannot, we may do the final damage in our lifetimes. If we can, we may change the course of and consequently, the course of evolution, setting the human lineage firmly on a path toward a new evolutionary plateau. The Tangled Web: Melvin Konner, 2002: pg 436.

Links

Cassandra's Legacy

CollapseNet

Future of Humanity Institute

Transition US

Transition Greater New Haven

United States of Fury (Gore Vidal)

10 Reasons To Be Hopeful About 2009 -- and 3 Reasons To Be Terrified (1/2/2009)

The End of American Hegemony

If you doubt any of this check out the bibliography.

Macarthur Foundation grants

Yes Virginia. Our generation IS robbing yours now. Wages are falling, pensions disappearing, benefits shrinking, working hours longer, vacation time is less, debt is increasing personally and at all government levels, most of the growth rewarded the already wealthy, politics is degraded, and the Constitution is at risk. (See The Great Risk Shift: by Jacob Hacker.)

The Bush agenda was never for the people, but always for the Corporations (That, by definition, is called Fascism.) In fact: union busting, less job security, outsourcing, stronger CEOs, shady book-keeping, auditor's collusion, corruption, and crony capitalism ran rampant. Manufacturing jobs hemorrhaged to third-world sweat shops in what was called globalization. (See Naomi Klein's book "Shock Doctrine".) You will be competing for third-world wages. You will not earn more than we did. Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court have reliably continued his policy of corporate supremacy.

Financial instability will be evident as the assault on the New Deal continues, energy prices continue to rise, trade deficits get worse, housing foreclosures impact the middle class, inflation escalates, and so does debt. The Fed is out of weapons. The stock market could fall out of bed. The market is responding to Republican deregulation. Their bank deregulation, the rollback of Glass-Steagle, was particularly unwise. New regulation could restore financial stability, but there are powerful forces in opposition. Because consolidation has produced institutions too big to fail, it will likely be much worse next time.

The two Bush Presidential elections WERE stolen. (See Conyer's report). The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) became dysfunctional. Any candidate that would serve the people (with, for example, peace) was disqualified. Only Kucinich dared utter such thoughts but he was easily marginalized, kept off the debate stage, and ridiculed by the main stream media. Since the Supreme Court ruled that unlimited corporate money into elections, expect the end of any real democracy in the US.

Media, already bad, will get worse. It is a major cause of a culture of violence, toxic politics, and of education failure in the US. The three Republican Commissioners of the FCC decided, with strong Bush encouragement, to further consolidate ownership. (Be realistic; every country manages the news.) Last time they attempted this there was a massive public outcry, but Bush promised to veto any Congressional action if there was any attempt to roll back the new standard. Yet another perk for media moguls. Less foreign reporting, hardly any investigative reporting, new legal obstacles for reporters, more classified information, less whistleblower protection, more shock jocks, and more consolidated, down-sized media. It is evident that US media keeps people distracted, exploited, subservient, misinformed, juvenile, ignorant, and angry for the wrong reasons. Since people don't really have information to make an informed decision, there can be no democracy. Don't trust anything you hear from US media, particularly talk radio.

The issues that matter don't get much press: i.e. healthcare, pensions, falling wages, union busting, outsourcing, offshoring, environmental damage, etc. What you WILL hear about is deficits, tax cuts for the wealthy, illegal immigrants, religious fervor from Republican candidates, hate speech from Republican shock jocks, If they can get you asking the wrong questions, the answers don't matter. In addition to inciting anger, Republicans insist that everyone has a right to carry guns. How do you think that will work out ?

Federal agencies, under Bush, were populated with party hacks, and career civil servants left in disgust. Incompetence was rampant. There won't be any press for this though. Federal agencies are foxes guarding the henhouses.

The US economy crashed and is returning to feudalism because of spectacular income inequality. It will build walled communities for the affluent, there will be walls along the borders to keep 'them' out, and there will be a steady increase in the population of detention camps.

The Republican War on Science continues to introduce religion into the public dialog and the classroom. Creationism will get a hearing. Ideology trumps science. That's the Republican agenda for improvement of education. Scandinavian education is well ahead of us.

We have passed peak oil, and without cheap oil our current lifestyle, food and transportation will be unsustainable. Climate change will result in food shortages, drought, volatile weather events, fisheries collapse, and will leave future generations with a hostile planet. Population will need to fall to sustainable levels. This will not be an option.

Expect resource wars, such as we are seeing in the middle east. The US reached peak oil in the 1970's and the world probably has reached a peak by now. What's going to happen when we run out of cheap gas to guzzle

Population pressure and lifestyle are the roots of environmental degradation. Recent collapse of the environment are plain to see in Haiti, Darfur, and others. Republicans are wrong in all of their population policies. Face it, there is no other habitable planet. Climate change, accompanied by extinction events, will cause massive dislocations of, mainly poor, people. Republicans, always in denial, refuse to mitigate the damage. Massive immigration is inevitable. Republican greed, hostility and subservience to the wealthy, makes hypocrisy of their 'religion'.

We were warned in the 70's when computer simulations were done to determine what might be the Limits to Growth for the planet. Results, which today are right on track, indicated that the economy would reach a plateau and then begin a decline. What was not considered in that simulation, was climate change. In 2005 the Stern Report estimated that "the costs of climate change, if not addressed, will be equivalent to losing 5 percent (and potentially as much as 20 percent) of the global gross domestic product (GDP) 'each year, now and forever'. Hundreds of millions of people chould be threatened with hunger, water shortages, and severe economic deprivation. Climate change, Stern wrote, is the 'greatest market failure the world has ever seen'. (From Technology Review, July/August 2011). Economic growth will peak and then decline.

In August, a number of notables including James Hanson, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibbon protested outside the White House against the Keystone Pipeline which is designed to transport oil from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Hanson, a NASA climate scientist, has said that approval of the pipeline is "game over for the environment".

Climate damage is settled science: and Republicans, since they care more about money than survival, and represent large energy interests, are in denial. (If the arctic ice caps melt, just think... we can drill for even more oil there.) It is well established that "losses in biodiversity are occurring globally at all levels". Global warming is real and the consequences are occurring more rapidly than the climate models predict. Glaciers are melting fast and that can dry out rivers that make much of the planet arable. Expect wierd weather, food shortages, desertification, more migration, species extinction.

Discontent with a falling standard of living, fewer good jobs, and a shredded safety net can turn many people violent. Widespread, uncontrolled gun ownership will have its consequences. You will not be safer.

The military-industrial complex is incredibly profitable, and it now rules. Massive military budgets, endless war, militarization of the country will inevitably produce a national security state. Civil liberties are collateral damage. Wiretapping, massive datamining, RFID, large scale surveillance will proliferate. You can forget about privacy. The Constitution will be all but meaningless. Corporations rule. Real government will be done in secret. The hallmark of a failed state is its unresponsiveness to its people.

The final stage of many empires in history results in 'strong man' head of state. The President has expanded his power so that he can now act in secret without the need to worry about the Geneva Conventions, International Law on Torture, Habeas Corpus, Posse Commitatus, and he can freely disappear or assassinate people even if they are citizens. He does not need to practice 'due process of law'. He is above the law...and the Roberts Supreme Court will likely agree. Congress will not be able to perform oversight because the 'executive branch' doesn't have to tell them anything. This means that we no longer have a Constitution. Checks and balances are history because the President has more power than the King we revolted against. See fascism.

The Presidency has continued to accumulate power at the expense of the democratically elected Congress. We appear to be headed for an imperial Presidency accompanied by an all-consuming effort to build an empire. Like every other empire in history, the outcome will be serious failure.

Because war is profitable expect more of it. Resource wars will become more frequent as climate change and mass migrations accelerate. The next war could be on our own soil and it can be more destructive than any of the past. In any event our military-Keynsian economy will self destruct.

Some are predicting that Israel will bomb Iran. (For good reason, the Constitution authorized the Congress the power to declare War, but, really, what's to stop any President from doing it ?)

Unless the US abandons its quest for empire, your generation will sacrifice for endless war for empire, but, since the US is broke, the empire will not last long. Bush created a lot of ill-will.

Although this may be a bleak assessment, the tea parties, the political parties, the compromised media, the shortsighted corporations, and a gridlocked government will likely keep us on our disastrous path toward apocolypse.

All the charts in Limits to Growth seen to show [collapse] nearly inevitable, since we didn't take our foot off the gas when we had the chance. And the seeming solidity of our civilization could be illusory. As Diamond shows with abundant example, "one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power." (in fact, that's exactly when you'd expect it to happen, because that peak wealth usually means peak impact on the environment). We're overleveraged in ways that resemble those past civilizations. In fact, they were pikers compared to us: the Anasazi may have died out when the climate shifted, but they din't make it happen. And if our societies start to tank, we'll be in worse shape than those who came before. For one thing, our crisis is global, so there's no place to flee. For another, most of us don't know how to do very much - in your standard collapse scenario, it's nice to know how to grow wheat. From Eaarth by Bill McKibbon

Collapse is likely. (See Michael Rupert's film: Collapse.)

"We must choose, and choose soon, either for or against the further evolution of the human spirit. It is for us, in the generation that turned the corner of the millennium, to apply whatever knowledge we have, in all humility but with all due speed, and to try to learn more as quickly as possible. It is for us, much more than for any previous generation, to become serious about the human future and to make choices that will be weighed not in a decade or a century but in the balances of geological time. It is for us, with all our stumbling, and in the midst of our dreadful confusion, to try to disengage the tangled wing." (The Tangled Web: Melvin Konner, 2002: pg 488)