15 Comments

1. Michael Pugliese:

   Fwiw, Engdahl has many articles published in the magazine of the LaRoucheites, the Executive Intelligence Review. I’d exercise some caution publishing anything from someone affiliated w/them.
   Results 1 - 10 of about 304 English pages for Engdahl EIR.
   http://www.google.com/search?q=Engdahl+EIR&btnG=Google+Search
   A-list message, Re: [A-List] William Engdahl?
   I met Bill Engdahl around 1980 at LaRouche’s EIR offices in New York, when I was trying to find out what they were all about. (Truth-in-advertising: I later …
   archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2005w10/msg00020.htm - 8k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
   A-list message, Re: [A-List] William Engdahl? - Inquisition by …
   Firstly, where did I accuse anyone, other than Mr Larouche and EIR, … Secondly, it seems a bit rich Engdahl accusing me of trying to establish …
   archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2005w10/msg00081.htm

   STAN: I published at FTW, where everyone but me was edging toward survivalism and everyone but me believed that Bush planned 9-11. They were also gold bugs. That doesn’t discredit what I wrote. They let me publish without changing my content; and the checks cleared. Your link doesn’t work, so I’m not sure what’s there, tho I recognize it as A-List, where Mark Jones, Micheal Keaney, Henry Liu, you Michael, and even I from time to time posted. Is there anything in this article that is in error? It’s laid out in understandable paragraphs, and subject to critique. Guilt-by-association is not imho a critique.

   14 August 2007, 10:25 pm

2. DeAnander:

   It is alas one of the world’s unsatisfactory dissonances that just because someone draws conclusions that we abhor from a given set of facts, they are not necessarily wrong about the facts. Even if the person is one whom we would abhor, s/he may still be right about the facts.

   As I have written elsewhere, it is lunacy to pretend that one planet can sustain an infinite human population. Therefore population and resource consumption are valid issues, and cries of “Malthusianism!” do not make the facts (the drawdown of vital resources, the rising population/consumption curve, the consequences) go away. But in possession of these facts we may draw very different conclusions: there is a world of diff between a Malthusian who says “there are too many of us,” and one who says “there are too many of Them.”

   The competition between machines and people for biotic resources has reached a point of fracture; I don’t think the facts allow of any other conclusion. The ideological or moral question — where I am pretty sure I, or Stan, would disagree with someone like Engdahl rather sharply — is what is to be done about this.

   15 August 2007, 4:44 pm

3. skol:

   Some are gleefully reporting the end of the era of “cheap food.”

   I always thought they (Monsanto, etc) had us (Me, etc) figured out…But can someone tell me or anyone else why this doesn’t have major oversight written all over it?

   If the fuel in the semi is raising the price of the food in the semi; and the cost of running a supermarket brings up the cost of food yet more; and considering the rising cost of going to the supermarket at all… Not that vicious cycles are new, but this hits real close to home. To a struggling family living in the suburbs, what will these costs look like on a spreadsheet compared to the cost of growing the food in your lawn (and I mean reasonably quantifiable despite risk)? “Control the food, control the people”? Isn’t that currently predicated on the power of countries importing food anyhow? What does this mean for us and the people exporting the food to us?
   (I don’t think there’s a reasonably-sized nutshell to fit that all into…)

   15 August 2007, 9:17 pm

4. Dirk:

   Hello from Germany,
   “Is there anything in this article that is in error?”

   Maybe not.

   But it reminds me in many ways of the Counterpunch policy towards an open racist like Paul Craig Roberts. And even more so, the policy of Roberts toward Counterpunch.

   He never writes his racist nonsense in Counterpunch articles. And very few people seem to care. Robert’s conspiracy theory about the political correct memorial of 911 outconspires every other conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard of.
   “Cultural Marxism has achieved a dominant position in American education. Consequently, there is a breakdown in enculturation. An appreciation of Western civilization is not being passed on even to native born whites attending the best universities.

   Before our very eyes history is being transformed into politically correct fantasy. Everyone knows the photograph of the three white firemen who raised an American flag on September 11 on the rubble of the World Trade Center. A 19-foot bronze statue of the photo has been commissioned for the site—only first the race of the firefighters had to be changed.

   A statue true to fact is “insensitive” and “divisive.” A clay model shows one white, one black and one Hispanic.

   Firefighters are complaining that a historical event has been turned into a politically correct event. Carlo Casoria, who lost his firefighter son in the rubble, said: “They’re rewriting history in order to achieve political correctness.” The multicultural reply is: “The artistic expression of diversity [s]hould supersede any concern over factual correctness.”

   Multicultural diversity has made such a hash of truth that the U.S. cannot truthfully represent in a public monument the defiant response, burned in every American’s memory, to al Qaeda’s successful attack on the World Trade Center. ”
   http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060801_rerun.htm

   Here’s another quote from Rorberts:
   http://www.buchanan.org/blog/?p=64

   Engdahl believes in nuclear energy and abiotic oil.
   He lives in Germany since 20 years or more (maybe he has replaced Tarpley, I don’t know…).

   During the 70’s he was one of the key-figures in the european Larouche-Movement party EAP (Europäische Arbeiterpartei - European Labour Party) and one of the leaders of the hate-campaign against the later murdered Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
   http://www.agpf.de/Lorscheid+Mueller-LaRouche-Teil2.htm
   (only german)

   “Olof Palme, an evil beast, Axmurder, the devil” etc. ppp.

   Whatever you make of this, I guess it must be allowed to deliver the kind of information, websites like Counterpunch never ever mention.

   Maybe as a german, I’m kind of biased towards Counterpunch anyway. I will never forget, how Alexander Cockburn started a very successfull campaign against “new fascism in Germany” about 20 years ago - when leftists and liberals made kind of progress in Germany against the fascist Scientology-cult. I could have thought about 2198 other reasons to start such a campaign against new fascists and fascisms in Germany, but not the one, he started. Cockburn then was quoted and interviewed all over the world.

   FTW, on the other hand, seemed to be transparent to me.
   Ruppert never was a leftist and he never claimed to be one. Maybe he became obsessed with Peak Oil because after all these years, he wanted to find his kind of “Religion”, the one issue that allowed him to make sense of it all. And maybe he had some ego-problems (I really don’t care). But he did some impressive work.

   I have to admit, there are so many right-wing nut jobs and Larouche-kind of guys, who seem to have such an impact on the US-left and US-liberals and start to have a tremondous impact on the european left, too, that my alarm bells ring, whenever I see the name of one of these idiots posted on a website like this.

   Can’t we do better than this?

   I openly admit: I’m ignorant. I didn’t even read Engdahl’s article.
   I’m just tired of all this nonsense. In Germany, in Europe, in the USA: Tarpley, Engdahl, Roberts, Ron Paul etc. are all over the place.

   Dirk

   STAN: Again, folks. Ad hominem, guilt-by-association, and finally ” I didn’t even read Engdahl’s article.”!?!? I don’t care if the author is Bugs Bunny. What about the content?

   16 August 2007, 2:03 am

5. Dirk:

   After reading Engdahl’s article:
   what kind of information and warnings does he offer, that were not mentioned many month ago, among others, from Fidel Castro in march 2007:
   http://flametree.blog-city.com/castro_hits_out_at_us_biofuel_use_.htm

   The only things, Engdahl added, are his agenda-code words:
   Bio-fuel — gasoline or fuel produced from refining food products — is being hyped as a solution to the CONTROVERSIAL Global Warming problem. Leaving aside the FAKED science and the political interests behind the sudden HYPE about dangers of global warming, bio-fuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under best conditions.”

   Sudden? - Yes!
   Political Agenda (Al Gore) - Yes!
   Hype? - No!

   If I would be a native english speaker, I would rip this whole article apart.

   And could it be possible that Mr. Cockburn, after his “global warming swindle” articles - he doesn’t seem to mention them anymore and he doesn’t seem to reply to his critics anymore - has chosen to publish Engdahl as one of his “comrades” to regain at least a part of his lost credibility?

   I somehow guess that - maybe besides Willy Nelson - every leftists and everyone, who might at least be convinced that every human being has the right to have decent food, whater and housing, can see through the cynicism of bio-fuels: become green, become ecologic: Feed your Mercedes-Benz with what other people would like to eat! I don’t need Counerpunch or Mr. Engdahl to know this.
   Dirk

   16 August 2007, 3:30 am

6. Stan:

   The reason I posted this is because the issue itself is (1) extremely important, (2) poorly understood, and (3)has implications for a new kind of politics.

   Over at Insurgent American, we’ve been more explicit, and the Homeland Security series is more explicit still, that the crisis of peak oil/energy war/finance-capital-house-of-cards are the first act in a tectonic shift in human relations and social organization that we are already seeing all over the world. It’s invisible in the metropoles because we have made it invisible via thoroughgoing ideological mystification. We are heading toward a kind of Haiti writ-large, if we don’t take action and damn quick. The interesting thing is that there is one issue that tends to override all others in Haiti on a day-to-day basis — which also happens to be an issues that sells bizzillions of books in Metropolitan airports… food. Society is not composed of abstractions, but of human beings… mammals, primates, entities that are embodied… as in existing as biological bodies.

   One thing I noted in Haiti was that people in the countryside who still know how to crop are poor, but they eat enough to maintain their body metabolisms. Food crisis hits cities hardest.

   The short film Power of Community, about Cuba’s urban agriculture program development after the fall of the Easter Bloc, shows how there is a way out, but it also points out that this is a matter of “pure political will.”

   Note that no political figures in either party have made it their vocation to take on Big Agra. Also note that there are agri-independence movements all over the world (read extensively what Vandana Shiva and others have written). Also also note that more than half of the US population now lives in the exurbs/suburbs, incapacitated in the absence of private automobiles, and helplessly ignorant of even the basic required to start a small organic raised bed.

   There are so many facets to a politics-of-food that relate effectively to a post-marxist political resistance paradigm. I use that term to point out that the bourgeois-proletarian contradiction that forms the basis of ortho-marxist politics has not been integrated (because of orthodoxy, imo) with the implications of the deeper historical materialism embodied in, eg, Alf Hornborg or Ivan Illich. The implication that capitalism and industrialism were always Siamese twins, and that the boss-worker contradiction does not bear within it the latent revolution everyone thought. Both poles of this contradiction are dependent within industrialism; and when industrialism itself collapses in the face of diminishing energy substrates, both poles will be left stranded and helpless. For a simple reason. They don’t know how to crop.

   A politics of practical skills is called for, which is synonymous with a politics of independence from the industrial grid. Permaculturists have already moved well ahead of the pack, and political organizers need to catch up. There is a world of policy out there that does not relate to the older priorities, and that can mobilize people at the grass roots. It relates to food. We just have to develop the language and the organization and integrate them with the practical skills.

   Ag-subsidies in the US are one of the very bases of US imperial power!!! And American workers don’t need a better shake as proletarians. They need to abandon the whole polarity of boss-worker by systematically going “off the grid.” Every person who remains on the grid during the collapse is a potential reactionary; and everyone who learns to live off it is a potential cadre for the next rev.

   16 August 2007, 6:13 am

7. skol:

   Politics notwithstanding, it’s difficult to find a good resource on the ‘net that a singular person, or a family, can find info on the skills needed to get off the grid. There are thousands of resources on constructing compost bins, building enviro-friendly houses, swales, etc and all this other tangential information. I have difficulty finding anything that will near-literally hold you by the hand, or slap you in the face: “stop smoking, turn off the AC, plant a seed in the ground with good sun, water the plant, stop with the diet cokes”… Maybe I’m wrong, but this is common sense only to those who have these particular grasps on things. Most articles/sites assume a drive beforehand.
   I don’t think your common suburban family wants a slap in the face, either, but not entirely because they fear it and its implications, but because there isn’t quantifiable data that actually makes this effort worth considering. How things look in the grand scheme of things is too terrifying to comprehend, but it has little baring on practical and pragmatic matters so far as whomever can see. I might be rambling nonsense, but this ties well with the the Huffkos thread before (statistics):
   currently, you’re spending x; do this, you will spend y (radically underestimating their denial (American dream lies, etc) in the face of these basic, and likely inevitable, statistics.
   Just a rant/ramble/idea/maybe-unintelligible-nonsense. I could be wrong. Just a big ol’ table of numbers, no politics, just money.

   16 August 2007, 7:10 am

8. Mitch:

   I read Engdahls article. I took it to heart. It was a very good piece. I got the impression from this pience that several US administrations have been pusuing biofuels. I also felt like the author predicts an inevitable proposition. Instead, he seems to lack any faith in the nex generation of thinkers. I get the sense the younger US folk are interested in more sidewalks and less sprawl. You can check into this but my town, Garner, NC, has an ambitious sidewalk master plan. Look into your town’s plans. Not everyone is happy driving everywhere. Predictions should take into account thye next generation, soemthing the author never mentions. BTW, Stan can I be published now?

   STAN: Note to readers/writers. FS is moderated by a couple of busy folks. So sometimes your comments are sitting in the moderation queue waiting for one of us to get to her/his computer. If we didn’t do that, the comments sections would fill up quickly with spam and flamethrowing. THX

   19 August 2007, 7:49 pm

9. super390:

   I’m beginning to think that the relationship between the anti-Bush right and the anti-Bush left is like that of the various anti-Saddam Hussein factions inside Iraq before the US invasion. The Sunni Islamists, Shia Islamists, bourgeoise liberals, and leftists could not overthrow a tyrant by themselves, so they were stuck stewing and conspiring and accusing. Worse still, each of them had an agenda that the others so opposed that obviously if Saddam were overthrown, they would soon take to killing each other. You can’t just sit outside and tell them they should unite under one agenda. It takes a powerful belief to stand up to a tyrant, and there simply was no one belief strong enough to gather enough followers. And such strong beliefs rarely encourage tolerance.

   So now we sit under the tyrant, stewing and conspiring and accusing. We wait for some big thing to bring us to power. We copy and re-post nasty stories about the tyrant from the other factions’ outlets. We all publicly use the vaguest language about restoring American liberty, but each faction is plotting to impose a vision that the other factions would fight to the death - which we would know if we weren’t so obsessed with adding up the numbers of all the factions and calling that a “mass resistance”.

   The racist/neo-confederate right definitely has some plans they want to impose. They’re strong on energy conservation (like Congressman Bartlett), neo-isolationism, and persecuting immigrants. You can’t pry apart those beliefs, they’re related in their minds. They will not hesitate to organize armed Klans to put down the rest of us in a post-imperial collapse.

   The libertarian right has no plans but the destruction of any institution that could do any public good. So they want out of Iraq, confident that the market will magically solve the energy crisis. They want the US empire retired, because they don’t accept that our empire is needed to prevent a global revolution by the poor, who LOVE peaceful greedy America. They will leave racists free to re-install Jim Crow, because hey, man, that’s a local issue. Perfect patsies for the neo-Confederates.

   Now if we magically came to power, how many of these two groups would try to sabotage our agenda? And how long before our People’s Committees started drawing up arrest lists?

   There’s not much we can do now to prevent our children from wielding power drills and Kalashnikovs. We can put a little more attention into:

   1. Experiment and prove urban sustainability. Non-urban America is deeply reactionary. If we disperse into the countryside after a collapse, the neo-Confederates will have us in chains in months, while they impose the time-tested feudal model they’ve secretly lusted for all along. If we can produce enough food and energy within large defensive perimeters around our cities, we will be like the Greek city-states, which has good and bad sides. We don’t have to grow everything, but we have to be able to create a viable trade relationship with the Handmaiden’s Tale gang, as sickening as it seems.

   2. We have to be able to defend progressivism. The neo-Confederates will start out talking “local autonomy” but like their slaveowning ancestors they will look to stamp out any ideas that might inspire their serfs to demand dignity. Let’s face it, rednecks are better soldiers than us. That’s one of the great secrets of American history. We’re like the oh-so-cosmopolitan citizens of Sarajevo, surrounded by trained, vicious Serb militiamen. You know who saved Sarajevo from annihilation? The city’s gangsters. The hoodlums didn’t care about religious tolerance, they wanted to protect their turf. On their own turf, they were better soldiers than the Serbs.

   3. If we start planning these things now, and make it clear to the vdareites and LaRoucheites and Buchananites in the sticks that we will resist them, the smarter ones will wise up and accept a division of turf - the biggest failure of the Iraqi dissidents. Then comes trade. To their leaders, it’s just business, after all.

   This is not just to protect us from them, but to protect us from the hubris of all revolutionaries that they must impose their views on not only the unwilling, but the poor bastards under the firm control of the unwilling. Sustainability first. History shows that the urban custom of intellectual and cultural diversity is a winning hand. Eventually the serfs and handmaidens will start defecting to our side, but only if we keep our own houses in order.

   And don’t forget, those gangbangers in the cities might be saving your ass someday.

   23 August 2007, 10:01 am

10. Stan:

    I don’t keep a crystal ball, even a dystopian one. One simply cannot project that far into the future.

    The question is always, what do we do? Now.

    “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

    (Why are boys so attracted to these warlordist scenarios?)

    23 August 2007, 5:12 pm

11. DeAnander:

    (Why are boys so attracted to these warlordist scenarios?)

    looking back on the status of women in those old Greek city-states — a little more than livestock, a little less than slave — might offer a clue…

    23 August 2007, 5:38 pm

12. peggy:

    Re going off the grid. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable. That’s why it’s hard to get people to really commit to doing this when being on the grid is a viable option.

    24 August 2007, 7:19 am

13. Stan:

    It’s not only hard, it is impossible for many right now. That’s why it has to be done by systematic degrees, and will be adopted as a widespread strategy only when it becomes grim necessity.

    Learning HOW to go off the grid (now!) is the basis of future leadership, if the word is to have any practical meaning.

    24 August 2007, 5:08 pm

14. peggy:

    I don’t think there is any universally applicable way to go off the grid. It depends on where you are geographically, socially, and economically. In India, millions of people are both off the grid and starving, Here, in New Zealand where I live, it might be relatively accomplishable to live off the grid and neither starve nor go to jail, although even here I am not aware of anyone who lives entirely without money, or without the assistance of people who do have money, and as long as you are dependent on money you are dependent on the grid.

    So what are the things we must learn?

    How to have our own place where we can use the resources on that place to feed ourselves

    How to produce our own food, with no help from purchased materials. Can be done, if you have enough space and the right resources (e.g. good soil) on that place.

    How to get our own relatively clean drinking water. This in my view is the biggest obstacle to total local self-sufficiency in many places.

    How to organize the local community. From what I have seen, well organized communities are usually organic, and certainly not the work of one person or even one generation of persons. How do I start from where I am? How do you start from where you are?

    Ah but the questions go on forever. One does what one can, hoping it is the right thing.

    25 August 2007, 1:39 am

15. Sam:

    From the website at globalresearch.ca:

    http://globalresearch.ca/books/SoD.html

    NEW BOOK

    Seeds of Destruction

    The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

    by F. William Engdahl

    Global Research, 2007 ISBN 0-937147-2-7

    PUBLICATION LAUNCH: NOVEMBER 2007

    List Price US$24.95 plus taxes. PRE-PUBLICATION ONLINE PRICE US$14.00 plus s and h (incl. taxes where applicable)

    ORDER NOW The book will be mailed to you in November.

    This skillfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

    This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

    The author cogently reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

    Engdahl’s carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and World peace.

    8 October 2007, 6:57 pm

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