Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
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Wednesday, January 25, 2006
PEAK OIL AND CIVIL LIBERTIES - IN THE SIGHTS OF THE GUN
George W. Bush is on a campaign to justify his war on the American people. He and his team are now appearing everywhere to convince us that spying on us is "good for us." They are saying that intercepting domestic communications is legal. The big lie, repeated often enough, becomes the truth. And it wears the opposition down. Bush is big time into showing all of us that he "won't give up." He wants to protect us.
I believe this is the first-step in conditioning the American people to get used to martial law. We are soon to have a Supreme Court that will give the "president" maximum authority. They will make Bush the king and put the "law of the land" ribbon on top for good measure.
This must be done because of the coming economic turndown that is bound to happen when you are spending $500 billion on a war in Iraq and jobs are leaving the country the way they are. In the past 10 years over $1.3 trillion of American companies have been bought by foreign investors. The U.S. economy is hanging by a thread.
Add to that the reality of peak oil and you can see we are in the sights of the loaded gun. Peak oil means that the world is running out of fossil fuels and experts predict that prices are going to rise for oil, and oil based products, dramatically in the next few years. When that happens food production becomes overwhelmingly expensive, home heating oil becomes overwhelmingly expensive, driving cars or flying becomes overwhelmingly expensive. The economy hits the wall. The people begin to yell and scream and hit the streets. By that time Bush has set in motion the shutdown of freedom of speech in the USA.
Saudi Arabia is reported to be pumping 70% water out of its oil wells these days. When that happens you know we are in trouble.
The way out won't be biofuels - the growing of corn and turning it to fuel. We are going to need all available arable land for food production, which will suddenly be very labor intensive, as oil for tractors and fertilizers becomes cost prohibitive.
We are going to need massive installation of solar but right now Japan is the world's primary producer of solar panels and Germany is buying them all up. There are waiting lists to purchase solar panels. We need to expand solar production and windmill production in the U.S. right now!
When gas hits $7, $8, $10 per gallon we will need an alternative. Hell, we need one now. It is called public mass transit. We need local, state, and national rail systems to go under production today. Forget trying to power your car with vegetable oil. We need trains. We need to get on our bicycles.
Conservation will become a major source of energy. What we don't use won't have to be replaced. This is something that the energy wasting U.S. economy will have to learn and learn fast.
The corporate and political world will suggest we go nuclear so we can continue the mass produced, centralized power system. And when electrical power costs hit the wall, many people will want to go for that quick and "easy" solution. Already we are seeing the early stages of a campaign by the nuclear power industry to prepare the people for this "solution." But nuclear power is not a solution. The massive amount of nuclear waste will remain a huge problem. And we need to move away from "centralized" power. We need to decentralize power creation and distribution. The way to do that is with solar and wind. The problem with solar and wind is that the big corporations can't hook up the meter to it and make you pay them every month the way they now do with coal, oil and nuclear.
The next ten years are going to be very difficult times for us. That is why we all must begin to talk today about where we must go before it is too late. We must talk to each other daily about solar, wind power, and public transportation. We must turn our front and back yards, now heavy fertilized useless green lawns, into healthy organic gardens producing our food. Local food production will literally mean survival.
The sooner we begin to turn this ship the better our future will be. Discount these warnings as ravings of a mad man at your own peril.
Fight for free speech, the right to peacefully assemble, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures now before it is too late. Bush, and his right-wing Extreme Court, are coming with the clamp down.
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