Amber Waves Of History

Historically Influenced,


Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries industrialized human economy used machines of steel, powered by coal and oil, to chew into old growth forests, get all of the easiest coal and oil and iron and copper, tap the lakes of water under California to grow veggies in the desert, and to make tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers and battleships to destroy what was made, and the people who made it.
As a species, we are now a much older population, expecting comfortable retirements, but with fewer young workers to support us, and with all the depleted resources now costly to obtain and use. Our wealthy masters have also put IOUs in our retirement cookie jars, and taken all the cookies. 

Don't look!

If you feel like you have just been getting poorer your whole adult life, you're probably right, at least in a relative sense, but likely in absolute terms, too, and there are fees and charges everywhere... Charles Hugh Smith shows the peak year for wages as a percent of GDP was 1970. (The most egalitarian year for US paychecks was 1976.)
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay16/wages-GDP5-16.html
 

"Free Trade" vs actual free trade.
This is the regime of lies used to spread modern financial and military imperialism at home and abroad. Thanks Wigs. Lots of enlightening points here.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/05/05/free-trade-vs-actual-free-trade/
 

Is America's War on ISIS Illegal? (well, duh?)
This NYT piece from Cat is rather stuffy, and doesn't look at paying to secretly create enemies to attack in countries where there's oil and gas. It looks at constitutional law and the War Powers Act of 1973. There has been continuous undeclared war since the 1990s (pick your timeline) and Congress has not approved any war in a long time. An American Army Captain, sworn to defend the constitution, brings a case to investigate the constitutional legality of his orders, without disobeying them. This is a really strong case. Hope it moves up through the courts, but that would disrupt "vested interests".
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/opinion/is-americas-war-on-isis-illegal.html?emc=edit_th_20160505&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=63905770&_r=0
 

There is a lot going on between Europe and North Africa now, with the "deal" made by Turkish PM Davutoglu always in question, and now more in question, since he is resigning. Europe was supposed to accept all Turks without passports, and Turkey would surely ship out 5 million Kurdish-Turks on whatever pretext, who would claim asylum, and claim it justly. Turkey just can't abide by some of the human rights legalities that would really open this floodgate, which negates the whole deal.

Angela Merkel warns of a return to nationalism (that's all the barbed wire, folks) if the EU doesn't close it's external borders. (What can this mean, but Greece as vast human concentration-camp?)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/merkel-warns-return-nationalism-unless-eu-borders-protected-143545881.html
 

Almost a quarter of the 368,000 pediatric refugees who went to Europe last year, went without their parents, effectively orphans. A lot of them are teenage boys.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2016/may/05/quarter-of-child-refugees-eu-without-parents-unaccompanied
 

Elliot Coleman writes an essay about the wonderful scientific agriculture of the pre green-revolution era in the west. There was abundant wisdom and insight, the product of scientific analysis of eons of empiric farming practice of building and maintaining soils and growing-ecosystems, like the intensive market gardens of Paris.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-05-04/my-agricultural-grandparents

Ageing Gardener