Truth And Reconciliation

                                                                                                             written 20 Feb 2022

                                                                                                         published 27 Feb 2022

        

            A few weeks ago, we watched a 60 Minutes segment on the Native American Residential Schools, prompted by the recent discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at a former school in British Columbia, Canada.

            The following is from Wikipedia.

            "Beginning in the 1800's, the goal of these Residential Schools was to assimilate the Indigenous community into the beliefs, tradition, and overall European/Christian culture.  In Canada, 139 schools were funded by the government, operated mostly by Christian churches.  America funding 350 schools, with similar methods and goals.  Hundreds of thousands of children were "processed", and tens of thousands died."

            "Native American Residential Schools embodied institutionalized victimization to assimilate children into mainstream society by eradicating Native cultures.  Children as young as 5 were forcibly removed from their homes.  Their tribal names were replaced with English-language names, or sometimes just numbers, as part of assimilation to "Christianize" them.  Their long hair, a source of pride for many Native peoples, was cut short.  Their traditional clothing was exchanged for uniforms and a life influenced by strict military-style regimentation.  Contact with family and community members was discouraged or forbidden altogether."  

            "Stripped of their personal possessions, and separated from their families, they were forbidden to speak their native language.  If they did, members of the staff would beat and assault them physically or sexually.  By abusing the Indigenous children for practicing their own culture, the school was able to install fear and negativity, diminishing the chances the students would still continue to practice their culture." 

            "Unclean and overpopulated living conditions led to spread of disease and many students did not receive enough food.  Many who died were buried

anonymously.  Investigations have revealed documented cases of sexual, manual, physical and mental abuse occurring mostly in church-run schools, where the sexual abusers were the teachers, nuns, and priests who were supposed to educate.  Students suffered severe disorders such as depression and PTSD and substance abuse increased.  Bounties were offered for students who tried to run away, and many students took their own lives.  Boarding schools for Indigenous students were mainly used to torture them into mainstream American culture."  

            "Damning evidence of years of abuses in off-reservation boarding schools contributed to the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, giving Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child's placement in a school, and the last schools closed in the 1990's."

            After centuries of unrelenting slaughter, these schools were an attempt at cultural genocide of the Native culture.  This is a repugnant expression of a dominator society.

            It is to Canada's credit that they established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007, to begin healing this profound institutional injustice.  The 60 Minute segment showed testimony of people sharing the pain of their own experiences.  It bought tears to our eyes listening, for the pain could not be denied.  The speakers were not condemning, but simple sharing their remembered feelings.  They were speaking truth, and everyone could feel it.  Despite everything, these people had survived, and to some extent healed, having made a reconnection to their true self through the spiritual roots of their culture.  But the trauma produced lifelong consequences of rage, anger, and depression, which were inflicted on their family and society for decades, with untold pain and cost.

            Reconciliation is an opportunity for the dominate culture to evolve.  Admitting that an injustice happened is an important beginning, and allows for the culture to heal and move forward.  The Native American regard for the sacred nature of the Earth is needed these days, an antidote to our dominant culture of mindless, limitless consumption.  It is significant that the Catholic Church has yet to fully acknowledge their part in this trauma, even after all these years. That failure may be part of why Church membership is declining.  

            Americans need to embrace Truth and Reconciliation ourselves, recognizing not only the trauma inflicted on Native Americans, but also the trauma inflicted on African Americans.  The current Republican hissy fit over critical race theory, or even the mention that slavery was a traumatic experience, shows how far we have to go for real cultural maturity.  A similar reconciliation must happen with regard to the endemic misogyny in our culture.  If we continue to deny the uncomfortable realities of our history, we have little hope for a healthy future.

 

 

Republican Transformation

                                                                                                             written 13 Feb 2022

                                                                                                         published 20 Feb 2022

  

            In the summer of 1955, when I was 8, my father contracted polio.  The decade long epidemic had already infected 34 million Americans, sickening 1 percent, while killing 17,000.  The Salk vaccine was developed in early 1955, and as a family with a polio case, we had access to some of the first doses.  I received two more doses as a wide spread vaccination campaign, including schools, ended the epidemic.

            That was when Republicans still believed in science and public health.  President Eisenhower even initiated the federal interstate highway system, the largest socialist infrastructure project in American history, and warned about the growing power of the military industrial complex.  How times have changed!

            An article in Daily Kos by Andy Schmookler presents that the American ideal of "equal justice for all", has been stymied by two significant forces: White Supremacy and Corporate Greed.  Both of these forces are symptoms of the same flawed illusion of separation, fundamentally at odds with our unity reality.

            "For centuries, White Supremacy has fueled the unjust treatment of one race by another.  From the beginnings of slavery even into our times, that force has generated a great deal of cruelty.  Foreign observers regarded racial oppression to be America’s original sin.”

            "The corrupting force of greed, operating through those economic powers that came to dominate the American economy, especially as industrial capitalism took off following the Civil War, warped American politics, enacting policies, and concocting constitutional interpretations, that gave more wealth to the richest and more power to those already mighty."

            "Those two forces were mostly divided between the two major parties.  From before the Civil War up until the mid-1960s, the White Supremacists operated politically as a component of the Democratic Party, which protected white oppression of blacks to hold its coalition together.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party was the “Party of Big Business,” advancing the interests of the corporate world at the expense of other components of the society."

            "That division was fortunate, because neither party’s most extreme elements were dominant, and the more benign elements generally played by the rules, and mostly worked to move the nation forward.  But the balance changed in the mid-1960s, when the Democrats passed Civil Rights legislation, putting an end to legal segregation, and the Democratic Party lost the South, which began changing Republican, and the “Party of Lincoln,” the Great Emancipator, became the Party of Strom Thurmond, defender of segregation."

            "As a result, the two main dysfunctional forces in American politics were joined in the same party and formed an alliance.  Over time the mostly decent elements of the Republican Party were gradually subdued, or squeezed out, by the combined power of unbridled greed and racial hostility and oppression.  The darkened Republican Party then turned to brilliant propagandists to bring the Republican base along to support such a party, like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, the FOX network, and Karl Rove."

            Added to this is the rise of Christian Nationalism.  Despite Christ's core teachings being "Love God" and "Love Each Other", expressions of the unity reality, we see "fear God" and "hate everyone not exactly like us" being promoted as Christian morality, manifesting the illusion of separation.

            The consequences of this new Republican Party alignment are apparent.  The Republican Senate has prioritized reducing taxes on the very wealthy, stonewalling any Democratic legislation while proposing no policies of their own despite the serious issues facing our country, and stacking the entire judicial system with conservative corporatist judges.  Obligingly, the Republican Supreme Court has allowed corporations to buy elections with unlimited funds, gutted the Voting Rights Act by permitting gerrymandering and racially discriminating voting regulations, and is dismantling long standing social legislation and environmental protection to maximize corporate profits.  

            The question before us as a nation is: who are we?  Do those obsessed by greed and hate represent your idea of America?  Do corporations care about you and your family?  Or are they only a very vocal minority, simply expressing the worst aspects of humanity?  Money is not speech, it only amplifies speech, like a bullhorn.  When the noise is so loud, it is sometimes hard to notice how few people are really speaking.  I believe most Americans are of good will.  We need to decide what world we want for our children, and then work together to make it so.

The Other Oil Problem

                                                                                                               written 6 Feb 2022

                                                                                                         published 13 Feb 2022

     

            Burning oil drives climate change, risking economic collapse and human extinction, but an equally pressing problem is that it is finite.

            From 1850 until 1972, America dominated global oil production, because we had the technology and extensive domestic reserves.  We controlled the price by pumping as much as needed, even as global demand increased steadily every year since 1920.  But our resource was finite.  Despite searching for new domestic reserves everywhere, in 1972, American oil production, and our economy, peaked.  Within 2 years Russia, and then Saudi Arabia, produced more oil than the US.  The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began controlling the global price, and oil jumped from $22/barrel in July 1973 to $60/barrel 8 months later.  

            Oil was already essential to every aspect of our economy, and this extreme increase was a huge inflationary pressure.  The prime rate rose from 4.75% in February 1972 to 11.75% two years later, and peaked at 21.5% in November 1980.  It suddenly was no longer a felony to charge more than 10% interest, because the banks now needed this rate of return, not just loan sharks.  The rapid and extreme interest rate change destabilized the Savings and Loan industry, which paid low long term interest rates to savers.

            A new phase of capitalism began, shifting from production to digestion of existing companies.  Hostile takeovers, using leveraged buyouts, became common, and asset strippers dismantled companies for parts, ruining local economies.  Junk bonds became a fiscal product, as the attraction of very high yields, despite high risks, began to dominate "prudent" fiscal investing.  Wages stagnated from 1980's on.

            In 1979, the US made an agreement with Saudi Arabia to sell oil on the world market only in dollars, helping stabilize the US domestic price of oil, giving the US a measure of control in the world.  Part of the bargain is that the US never comments of the Saudi financing of global Sunni Muslim terrorists organizations.  From the middle 1980's the price of oil was relatively stable around $40/barrel, until 2000, when it began climbing to a peak of $178/barrel in June 2008, helping precipitate the economic crash of 2008.  It wasn't clear at the time, but global conventional oil production peaked in 2005.

            The oil industry has searched every corner of the planet looking for new oil reserves, but by the 1960's, new oil discoveries fell behind growing depletion rates.  We have already discovered all the oil there is to find, for the most part.  But some oil is not worth recovering. 

            Conventional oil is the easiest and cheapest to develop.  Unconventional oil (deep water, shale oil, and tar sands) are more expensive to develop, both economically and energetically.  Economically, oil may just cost too much to be affordable in the larger society.  The energetic expense is called the "energy returned on energy invested" (EROEI).  For example, early oil fields were relatively shallow, and under high pressure.  Once a well was drilled, oil flowed for years.  These fields had an EROEI over 100:1, meaning 100 barrels were returned for every barrel of oil invested.  A technological economy requires an energy EROEI greater than 7:1.  American domestic oil production EROEI declined from 30:1 in 1970 to 11:1 in 2007.­­  The EROEI for tar sands is 4:1, and shale oil (fracking) EROEI can be as low as 1.5:1, which is why these are bankrupt industries.

            The world economy has recovered from the 2008 crash, for the moment.  However, global oil production peaked in 2018 at almost 100 million barrels per day.  There is still a lot of oil left, but less will be produced every year, and the EROEI will continue to decline.

            Our options are limited.  We can ignore our situation, inviting inevitable economic disaster and a desperate race to the bottom, with insufficient energy and a collapsing environment.  Or we can commit to shifting to another energy source while we still have the energy to accomplish that.  But it will take energy to fabricate the new hardware, so there will be even less to run what we have come to call "normal".  

            The good news is that we now have the possibility to shift to renewable power, which wasn't true a few decades ago.  This has to be global in scope, so the big question is whether we humans can cooperate. 

 

Projecting "Business As Usual"

                                                                                                               written 30 Jan 2022

                                                                                                            published 6 Feb 2022

                                                                                                

            Climate scientists unanimously agree that climate change is real, is already here, and is human induced.  Over thousands of years, as the Earth changed from the last ice age to the current warm period when humans flourished, atmospheric CO2 increased by half.  In the last 200 years, human fossil fuel consumption has added another 50 percent increase, with half of that in just the last 30 years.  The change is so rapid that we have yet to experience the full heating effects of our current CO2 level, let alone what we are adding each year.  Yet Republican leadership, and the fossil fuel corporations that fund them, deny this reality.

             This is almost understandable.  Adequately addressing the climate crisis, if possible, will require a rapid and complete shift of our entire energy economy, turning investments currently worth billions of dollars into expensive liabilities.  People currently making huge profits will lose their privileged position, so short term thinking explains their denial.  But what is not understandable is ignoring that "business as usual" risks destroying everything, including their profitable business.  Don't they have any children of their own? 

            Projecting into the future is always risky, but we already see where we are headed.  By the end of this century, global sea level rise is currently estimated to be an additional 8', assuming no new feedback loops accelerate the melting.  In Mendocino County, highway 1 will become more vulnerable at Pudding Creek, Little River, Navarro River, Elk Creek, and the Garcia River crossing, just to name a few.  Without massive infrastructure investments, disruption would begin with more frequent storm closures, then at most high tides, culminating is complete closure. 

            But that may be a life time from now.  Based on what we have experienced in the last five years, a more immediate impact will be felt due to increased wildfires.  Every year I read of some fire fighter, with decades of experience, saying they have never seen anything like what just happened.  As these fires grow in frequency and intensity, the costs to fight them expands.  In California, the 2021 increase was $1.2B, on top of the normal CalFire $3B budget.  The cost of the damages to property was estimated at $150B.

            The fire insurance industry is already very nervous about California, with many companies redlining parts of the state or considering leaving all together.  Even if they will write a policy, the premiums are becoming unaffordable.  As the insurance industry withdraws, the real estate and home loan banking industries are threatened.  This will only get worse, at some point threatening the entire State economy.

            Another near-term concern is the impact on the local wine industry.  Smoke taint already degrades the value of the crop in some years, and will become more common.  As the weather heats up, microclimates change, making some of the current grape varietals less suited to their region.  Drought issues will probably increase. 

            Electrical power will become more intermittent as the planet heats.  Hotter summers will increase air conditioning demands on an already congested grid, and increased Public Safety Power Shutoffs will leave more areas in the dark more often.  

            Food supplies will become more fragile.  In addition to the threats from drought and fire affecting local food production, other food growing areas of the country are threatened by flood and rain.  There have already been seasons where farmers in the Midwest have been unable to get into their fields for months.

            Our civilization is a complex interaction between millions of relationships.  As each of these processes get more difficult, or are eliminated, a tipping point can occur where whole systems stop working.  We saw some of that as the pandemic disrupted the smooth functioning of the global supply chain.  Just being out of synch can cause huge disruptions, let alone having critical sections fail completely.

            The Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure they regain control of the federal government.  If they do, their denial will run out the clock.  One problem with continuing on as usual is that by the time something critical fails, perhaps generating enough interest to make fundamental changes, the opportunity to make those changes will have been lost.  It is like waiting to fasten your seat belt until you notice you are about to go through your windshield: much too late.