It Ain't Just Mubarak -- 7 of the Worst Dictators the U.S. Is Backing to the Hilt

Peacenik watched the Superbowl and was appalled, amused, and entertained by all the hoopla. Like the U.S. has no problems. All is well with the world. What a celebration. WOW. War criminal George Bush was in the owner's box, along with a whole bunch of other "celebrities/criminals". What other country celebrates the worst of their society? (Btw George Bush had to cancel a trip to Switzerland to avoid getting arrested for war crimes.) What other country celebrates the worst of their society? Take a look at the list of dictatorial regimes the U.S. supports below. And every other banana republic you can think of. Better than Roman circuses before the collapse. At least the Packers won.

From Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan to Chad, the U.S. keeps some very bad autocrats in power.

February 5, 2011 | Embattled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whose regime has received billions in U.S. aid, has been in the global media spotlight of late. He's long been “our bastard,” but he's not alone.Petitions by Change.org|Get Widget|Start a Petition �

Let's take a look at the other dictators from around the planet who are fortunate enough to be on Uncle Sam's good side.

1. Paul Biya, Cameroon

Biya has ruled Cameroon since winning an “election” in 1983. He was the only candidate, and did pretty well, getting 99 percent of the vote.

According to the country's Wikipedia entry, “The United States and Cameroon work together in the United Nations and a number of other multilateral organizations. While in the UN Security Council in 2002, Cameroon worked closely with the United States on a number of initiatives. The U.S. government continues to provide substantial funding for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and African Development Bank, that provide financial and other assistance to Cameroon.”

Amnesty International details unlawful executions, journalists being thrown in jail and a host of other nasty business.

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Will California become America's first failed state?

Peacenik hasn't posted anything about the economy for a while. Peacenik has been watching in disbelief as the stock market continues to rally. Meanwhile insiders are selling like crazy. Revenue in New York State collapsed by 38% in the last quarter. State after state is unable to balance its budget. The big banks in the states are still being kept afloat by shady accounting and public tax dollars. And California is paying its workers with IOU's.

But the market goes up and in Canada the housing bubble keeps bubbling along. Of course the Canadian banks just got another handout from the feds. And mortgage rates are artificially low. And federal and provincial deficits across the country have exploded. And unemployment and underemployment is growing. And pension plans, big and small, are unable to keep either their promises, nor their legal obligations. But all is good. Until the Minsky Moment arrives. Then watch out.

Paul Harris

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state government is issuing IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

Patients without medical insurance wait for treatment in the Forum, a music arena in Inglewood, Los Angeles. The 1,500 free places were filled by 4am. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

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Watching Myths Unwind

This article gave Peacenik a slightly different take on the media and political leadership's seemingly willful ignorance of reality. Is it possible they really do believe the myths propping up America? Maybe. Or they don't believe them but can't imagine any other course of action other than trying to get the status quo back. Leaders don't preserve the status quo. Losers do.

by Dan Bednarz, PhD

A few generations from now our descendants will wonder, “What took them so long to figure out that we’d reached the limits to growth?” The answer, of course, is that growth is the core of the myth holding the American psyche together. If it’s false, what’s the meaning of “life, the universe, everything?”

Karen Armstrong writes:
“We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.”

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Tuna, Toilet paper, and Timing

When Peacenik read about Wave 3 being on its way, Peacenik's thoughts immediately turned to planning for the consequences of Wave 3. Peacenik already has a portable toilet. Peacenik already has some supplies. Then Peacenik read this article about intergenerational equity. Peacenik has never thought (Peacenik thinks) about intergenerational equity before. But Peacenik finds it reassuring that someone is thinking about it. Maybe there will be a way forward. After Wave 3.

by Nate Hagens

Concern about global resource depletion, at least in certain circles, is generating individual hoarding behavior - I don't know how prevalent this is, the potential advantages it will ultimately confer, or any of the subtleties of the'must have' list. This brief Campfire essay is a (somewhat disjointed) exploration of the short term translation of financial capital into basic goods, from the perspective of long term timing and social trajectories. (I expect it will generate some good discussion, especially following Luis' piece on Sustainability)

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Will America's Beseiged Middle Class Snap?

It looks like Peacenik isn't the only one wondering about how our dystopian present will play out. Yesterday Charles Hugh Smith was writing about a devolutionary spiral. Today Yves Lavinge is wondering when the middle class will snap. Peacenik is finding it curious and worrisome that more and more people are finding it difficult to understand how the sheeple are letting themselves be raped and pillaged....without objection.

It seems to Peacenik that the only thing holding society together right now is society's willful ignorance. The Oil Drum had this interesting post on this the other day, Does knowledge of the collapse contribute to the collapse? What will it take to get you off your ass and into the streets with a pitch fork? Hunger? Homelessness? Sickness? Revenge? Hopelessness? How much longer is society going to hold the illusion together that things are ok....or might be ok? Peacenik doesn't think much longer. Have a good weekend.

Naked Capitalism

A paradox arises to the extent that it is true that the market is dependent on normative underpinning (to provide the pre-contractural foundations such as trust, cooperation, and honesty) which all contractural relations require: The more people accept the neoclasical paradigm as a guide for their behavior, the more the ability to sustain a market economy is undermined. This holds for all those who engage in transactions without ever-present inspectors, auditors, lawyers, and police: if they do not limit themselves to legitimate (i.e. normative) means of competition out of internlized values, the system will collapse, because the transaction costs of a fully or even highly "policed" system are prohibitive. This holds even more so for the regulators that every market requires. If those whose duty it is to set and to enforce the rules of the game are out to maximize their own profits, a-la-Public Choice, there is no hope for the system

Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics

I’ve been amazed at the complacency of Americans in the face of rape and pillage by the moneyed classes. Of course, I underestimate the impact of overwork and media brainwashing. If you are a member of the dwindling middle class, you are probably devoting all your energies to hanging on to your job and trying to be a decent partner and for those with families, parent. Any kind of sustained political action (unless you grew up with it in a serious way) is unlikely to rate as high as a tertiary concern. In our total information society, protesting has high odds of getting one’s mug in a video that could come back to haunt you. An arrest would show up in a background check. What a great way to keep the peasantry in line.

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Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Published: April 7 2009 20:02 | Last updated: April 7 2009 20:02

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

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Peacenik has mentioned Black Swan events before. Highly improbable events with huge impacts. Like the collapse of capitalism. Like the collapse of society. The world is now witnessing the consequences of the biggest black swan event in history. Historians will name it in the future. Is it possible to black swan-proof the world.? Probably not. Does it make sense to plan for a black swan event? Probably not. But read Taleb's list and start thinking about black swan events. Past, present and future. Here's chapter one of Taleb's book The Black Swan.

Perestroika 2.0 beta

by Dmitry Orlov

Congratulations, everyone, we have a new president: a fresh new face, a capable, optimistic, inspiring figure, ushering in a new era of responsibility, ready to confront the many serious challenges that face the nation; in short, we have us a Gorbachev. I don't know about you, but I find the parallel rather obvious.

Obama wishes to save the economy, and to inspire us with words such as "We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." [Inauguration speech] At the same time, he cautions us that "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense" -- an echo of Dick Cheney's "The American way of life is non-negotiable." And so we descend from the nonexistent but wonderfully evocative "clean coal" to the more pedestrian "Put a little dirt in your gas tank!"

But these are all euphemisms: the reality is that it is either fossil fuels, which are running out while simultaneously destabilizing the planet's climate and poisoning the biosphere, or the end of industrial civilization, or (most likely) both, happening in that order. According to the latest International Energy Agency projections, the half-life of industrial civilization can be capped at about 17 years: it's all downhill from here. All industrial countries will be forced to rapidly deindustrialize on this time scale, but the one that has spent the last century building an infrastructure that has no future -- based on little houses interconnected by cars, with all of the accompanying moribund, unmaintainable infrastructure -- is virtually guaranteed to fall the hardest. An American's two greatest enemies are his house and his car. But try telling that to most Americans, and you will get ridicule, consternation, and disbelief. Thus, the problem has no political solution. Tragically, Obama happens to be a politician.

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Dmitry Orlov is the author of Closing the Collapse Gap. He foresees the U.S. collapsing just like the Soviet Union collapsed. Peacenik thinks Orlov is on the something. Peacenik thinks the U.S. is going through a slow motion collapse right now. Will the U.S., in a state of societal collapse, be worse than the Soviet Union when it collapsed? Can the world survive a U.S. societal collapse, without falling into global thermal nuclear war, or world resource wars? Will the Coyotes survive in Pheonix? These are things that Peacenik thinks about. Have a good weekend.

"Personal Survival Skills: Life at the Twlight of Empire

By Michelle Fealk, Adriana Guillen, Colin Peacock, Sarah Rios, and two anonymous contributors

We are a small group of students with diverse backgrounds and life goals. We began this journey relatively uninformed about the impacts of peak oil and other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, and our opinions differ as to how accurate or biased those scenarios are. But we share a common interest in personal survival as the chance of civilization collapsing increases, and we wish to share our newly accumulated knowledge with others who are similarly concerned about their own futures.

This report is intended to serve as a guide along the path we have, thankfully, already trodden and worn down, along with several thousand scientists, conspiracy-theory crackpots, and average frustrated chumps as we have come up against a world in turmoil. Specifically, we face an ambiguous future in a world that grows increasingly dependent on oil even as global supplies fall.

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After yesterday's doomsday article by Ilargi Peacenik thought that Peacenik should offer up something useful and upbeat. A survival guide. Enjoy.

A shattering moment in America's fall from power

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over.

John Gray The Observer, Sunday September 28 2008

Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

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Peacenik has been mentioning this possibility in several recent posts. When Russia was faced with the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than lash out in anger and frustration, it simply acquiesced. The danger is that the United States, when faced with a similar situation, may choose to go down with guns blazing. This article by John Gray is a nice summary of the U.S.'s short term prospects. Peacenik has only just started trying to contemplate the consequences for Canada. Peacenik is going to stock up on Kraft dinner just in case.

Rx: Depression

John Michael Greer

By the time you read these words they will have been sitting on my computer for most of a week; the chance to attend the annual ASPO peak oil conference in Sacramento was too good to pass up, and I’ll be on the road during the window of time I normally use to compose these essays. It’s an interesting time to be second guessing the future, too, for as I type these words, the world’s financial markets are in chaos. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the longest established brokerage houses in the New York market, followed by the forced sale of Merrill Lynch and the near-collapse of insurance giant AIG, seem finally to have made it clear to the world’s investors that the mountain of unpayable debt weighing on the global economy is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

Just how bad that problem will become is anybody’s guess. Stock markets worldwide are down steeply but, at least as of this writing, not yet in freefall, and massive government intervention in the credit markets has staved off a liquidity crunch. Over the longer term, though, investments supposedly worth trillions of dollars are going to have to be written off, and companies that padded their balance sheets with those investments are now facing a scramble for survival that many will fail. An entire economy built around the exchange of exotic IOUs is coming apart at the seams, and the economic structures that will replace it are not yet in sight.

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While Punditman plays hockey, Peacenik will sneak in this post from the Archdruid Report. Peacenik loves counter-intuitive points-of-view, and in this article Greer points out some of the possible benefits that might result from a depression. Peacenik doesn't think there will be a depression, but it is time to start looking creatively at how the present financial chaos could be harnessed for some postive outcomes.

Shoulder Season

by Jim Kunstler

America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it's out in the cool grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home. Larry Kudlow of CNBC was practically drooling into his cufflinks on screen when the dollar popped against the Euro, and crude oil slumped, and the equity markets climbed up a flagpole.

This sort of euphoria is actually an alarming pre-crash symptom, in this case of a patient (the US) entering the terminal phase of sclerosis. Our society and all its playerz -- especially the appointed communicators -- just can't fathom the reality of the threats we face, which are 1) the loss of primary energy resources, 2) the loss of technological potency, and 3) the loss of a comfortable standard of living.

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In a follow-up to Punditman's ATM adventure, which hints at a bleak economic future, Peacenik offers up Jim Kunstler's Monday morning essay, Shoulder Season. Kunstler is the authour of The Long Emergency and his essays are worth reading for the entertaining writing alone. In this brief essay he contemplates the disconnect between the reality of imminent collapse and the cluelessness of the public, which is about to experience the collapse. If you're concerned about the banking system, Wall Street, oil shortages, hurricanes, etc., this modest doom and gloom essay is a great read to start the week with.