A Preview of America's Future as Desired by the Oligarchs

image: street scene, Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- the future is now

On Saturday, Dave Cohen of Decline of the Empire blog posted about a new book called The Betrayal of the American Dream, in which authors Donald Bartlett and James Steele discuss the ongoing destruction of the American middle class. As Cohen rightly points out, what most Americans, raised in a maddeningly insular society in the midst of the post-World War Two economic boom, do not understand is that their very existence as non-elites enjoying any genuine prosperity is an historical anomaly. The fact that the predatory sociopaths who really run the country are in the process of taking back what they feel was "stolen" from them by the New Deal and Great Society programs is not nearly as astonishing as is the ease and speed by which the dumbed down and media benumbed citizenry is allowing them to do it.

So where is it all heading? Well, assuming that enough energy supplies remain to be exploited to allow the elites to maintain control, which given the all out exploitation of the world's remaining energy reserves that is currently going on seems likely to continue for many years yet, I think I know the answer to that question. In my own post from Saturday, I briefly mentioned that I have been reading the book Cambodia's Curse by journalist Joel Brinkley, a recently published history of that unfortunate country. Brinkley spent a couple of years travelling around Cambodia interviewing everyone from top officials to dirt poor farmers and the portrait he draws is both arresting and frightening in its implications. Whereas Brinkley is attempting to tell Cambodia's sad story to the outside world, I chose to see what he has written as a warning of what our own future potentially holds for us.

Because you see, modern Cambodia is actually Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's wet dream. Imagine a nation where the government's only real role in the lives of the citizenry is to provide for the national defense and to build roads and bridges in order to enable commerce. Imagine a country where other than a few select elite government officials like Paul Ryan, every civil servant is paid at most a few dollars a day with no health or retirement benefits whatsoever. Imagine a nation where every natural resource, including vast tracts of lush hardwood forests, is stripped down and illegally sold abroad to line the pockets of its kleptocrat rulers. Imagine, too, a country where workers have zero rights vis-a-vis their employers, who pay them as little as they can possibly get away with. If Ayn Rand were still alive, she would probably be having spontaneous orgasms just thinking about it while conveniently ignoring the fact that Cambodian dictator Prime Minister Hun Sen used to be a dirty rotten communist, though one could argue that Pol Pot was the ultimate real world John Galt.

So how much fun is it to be an ordinary citizen in such a country? Oh loads, as long as you don't mind giving your children a wad of Riel every morning so that they can bribe their teacher so he will agree to actually teach them that day even though he might only have a third grade education himself. Oh, and if your precious snowflake is particularly dense, you can give the teacher another bribe to ensure that she passes her final exams. This method of "education" then continues right on up the line and even into the universities and medical schools, with those who do have the means paying bribes to ensure they eventually earn their diplomas.

Speaking of medical schools, when you get sick or injured and have to go to the hospital, you'll need to pay a bribe to that doctor who bribed his way through school in order to get him to treat you at all. If you don't pay him, you'll be given long expired medications if any at all, and left in a bug infested ward on a straw mat to recover or not more or less on your own.

You could try to complain to the police about the doctor's request for a bribe, but unless you bribe them they won't investigate, and unless you bribe the prosector he won't bring a case and unless you bribe the judge you won't get a ruling in your favor anyway. And then on your way home from court, you might be stopped at a random police roadblock and have to pay another bribe so they will overlook the fact that your left tail light is out or your driving license is expired. Oh, so you say you want to renew that driving license? If so, you'll have to bribe the local government official who is in charge of issuing licenses--doesn't matter if you actually know how to drive or not.

Let's then say you become sick and tired of all this corruption and want to launch a public campaign against it. Great. Just be mindful that when you try to have a public rally to support your cause, some disguised government thug may throw a grenade in the midst of it and then the police will blame you for trying to score political points against the regime by killing and maiming your own supporters.

Yep, Cambodia is true worker's paradise. It's the type of place where your boss, a military officer, can order you to go by motorbike and pick up a rare endangered animal so that it can be illegally transported to China to be eaten. Just don't let that animal accidentally escape, or you'll have to face the wrath of your boss, who might just be so enraged that he will douse you with gasoline and set you on fire, and when you die your wife and child will be left destitute. Surely, you think, that if an employer tried such a thing the press would find out and make a big stink about it, right? Well, they would, except that the newspaper reporter went to the army officer and requested a bribe so that the story would never be published.

This is just a little taste of what it is like to live in a country that has been stripped of most of its resources and where the unaccountable elites feel no obligation to provide any kind of safety net for its citizens. This is exactly the kind of society our own predatory oligarchs are slowly establishing here in America. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how if providing for the less fortunate is an unalterable established political consensus several American public officeholders have within this last year publicly compared the food stamp program to "feeding wild animals?" Even five years ago, such utterances would have been unthinkable in the public arena. That's just one small example of how the public rhetoric, to eventually be followed by public policy, is evolving--or rather devolving--in America these days. Not incidentally, impoverishing the working and middle classes has the added benefit of stretching out the availability of the planet's increasingly scarce resources. That, as any Harvard educated MBA would tell you, is a classic example of a win-win.

The Betrayal of The American Dream is very good way of portraying what is happening in this country, though it really only tells half of the story. The sad fact is that the betrayal would not be happening without the active complicity of so many average Americans. Starting in earnest around 1980, a vast majority of this country's citizenry chose to shut off their brains and turn the "thinking" about America's future over to frauds and charlatans, starting with Ronald Reagan, who promised easy answers while initiating the betrayal. Thirty years later we are now collectively reaping our very just rewards for our failure to recognize who the real enemies are.


Bonus: "I have only committed this mistake...of believing in you, the Americans"

Games Governments Play

image: former 1960s hippie chick greets former Khmer Rouge practitioner of genocide

My recent visit to Cambodia rekindled my interest in beleaguered country (even if I did not personally get to witness much of its beleaguerment), and since I got home I've been reading a copy of Cambodia's Curse, a recently published history written by journalist Joel Brinkley. Through hundreds of interviews with Cambodian citizens and politicians as well as westerners who have recently worked in or served in country, Brinkley meticulously details how the Cambodia people have been repeatedly abused and sold out by their own corrupt government and venal national politicians even after the hideously evil Khmer Rouge movement passed into the dustbin of history.

The book's primary focus is on Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (pictured above with Hillary Clinton), a true Machiavellian dictator who has effectively run the country since 1985. Sen was originally an officer in the army of the genocidal Khmer Rouge who defected to Vietnam about a year before the invasion that drove his previous patrons out of power. Installed as a communist Vietnamese puppet in 1985, Sen has somehow managed to survive the withdrawal of the Vietnamese army, the fall of the communist bloc and intractable opposition from anti-communists in the U.S. government to remain in power for more than a quarter of a century. Like most strongmen in charge of the world's poorest countries, Sen and his cronies have dedicated themselves to stealing everything that isn't tied down, including pocketing vast amounts of foreign aid money along with the proceeds from the illegal clear cutting of the country's few remaining hardwood forests. All the while, the vast majority of Cambodians suffer from abject poverty, malnutrition and among the highest rates of infant mortality in the world.

There are a couple of anecdotes in the book that struck me as being particularly relevant to those of us living in the west who have watched as our own governments have become gradually more corrupt and unaccountable to the citizenry. One involves Sen's habit of routinely having his thugs toss live grenades into opposition rallies and then having his police blame the opposition for the attacks claiming that they benefitted politically. The other is Sen's repeated promises to foreign aid donors to pass anti-corruption laws, promises he then conveniently forgets as soon as the aid money comes rolling in, which it always does. Both of these tactics are so ham-handed and obvious that a fifth grader should be able to see through them. And yet Sen's regime continues to do them repeatedly because, guess what, they succeed in achieving his ends.

I wrote in yesterday's post that one of the big mistakes made by many in the peak oil community in the wake of the 2008 oil price spike and subsequent market crash is assuming that governments will not do literally everything they can do to avoid a fast collapse. And while Americans might be tempted to smugly believe that their own government is too "civilized" to ever stoop to tactics like grenading its own citizens in order to maintain power, I would merely ask whether there is any real moral difference between that action and the drone missile campaigns, the assassination of American citizens without trial or the maintenance of a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. What is particularly odd is that I was able to purchase my copy of Cambodia's Curse for $8 in a market stall in Siem Reap, despite the book's rigorous lambasting of Sen. That tells me that just like in America, the Cambodian government believes people who actually read and know what is really going in the world are such a tiny isolated minority as to no longer pose a threat worthy of the expense of suppressing them.

To date, most of the actions governments have needed to take in response to the world wide financial crisis have been in the financial arena. There is no reason to expect, however, that more forceful tactics will not be employed as the long emergency drags on. The abuse of Occupy protesters by police around the country serves as a mere hint of what is likely to come in the future. Many in the peak oil community thought that the market crash of 2008 was beginning of the end, whereas I would humbly assert that the response to it was in fact the opening salvo of a dirty war against reality that will be going on for a very long time.


Bonus: "But I found out only two years ago that we don't live in a democracy"

Holiday in Cambodia

image: might this be a preview of what New York City will resemble 1,000 years from now?

Hey, all, I have finally returned to the U.S. after a refreshing (if exhausting) two weeks abroad. It sure is nice to get completely away from the American media machine for awhile and visit places where life is, if not better, at least different from our soul-deadening suburban nightmare.

On this trip I got about as far away from DC as it is possible to go, visiting Indochina for the first time in my life. Among the stops on the itinerary was a couple of days in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the famous ruins of Angkor. At first, the idea of vacationing in Cambodia was a little surreal. Growing up in the 1970s, I had vivid memories of the Killing Fields--both the news stories and the subsequent movie. So I mentally prepared myself ahead of time for the kind of hassle that usually accompanies visiting the world's poorest countries where the crumbling or non-existent infrastructure coupled with nightmarishly inefficient or corrupt bureaucracy can make travel quite arduous.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Despite the fact that Cambodia is still among the world's worst places, with a dirt poor population and a venal and vicious government that does virtually nothing for the country but pocket foreign aid money, that same government is so dependent upon the hard currency that flows in from booming Angkor tourism industry that Siem Reap has been turned into a tiny bubble of unreal prosperity floating on a sea of abject destitution. As such, both the ruins of Angkor and the modern city of Siem Reap provide interesting lessons for those of us westerners who constitute what I call the "reality based community."

First of all, a few words about the ruins of Angkor--they are, quite simply, an amazing site to behold. I'll admit that I knew little about them before I started preparing for this trip, and I was quite astonished to learn that they are actually the remains of what was circa the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the largest city on the planet, with over a million residents spread out in an area roughly the size of Los Angeles. The city and its many temples were built by powerful kings during Cambodia's glory days, when the Khmer Empire controlled much of what is modern day Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.

The ruins themselves are quite spectacular, with the photo above providing only one tiny glimpse of an area that takes several days to see, even travelling in an automobile with a local tour guide. The highlight is Angkor Wat, the huge Buddhist temple that lies at the center of it all and has been called the largest single religious monument in the world. Despite having been abandoned, stripped of everything of value and allowed to be overrun by the jungle for nearly half a millennia, its former grandeur and ostentation is still quite evident. Standing atop the huge stone edifice, you can still feel the power wielded by the Khmer kings, who at the empire's height were among the world's most powerful monarchs.

And yet, here is the rub. Despite literally being a combination of New York City (commercial hub), Washington D.C. and the Vatican, after the downfall of the empire in the early 15th century Angkor was not only abandoned, but forgotten so thoroughly that it was all but completely unknown to the world at the time the French "discovered" it in the 1850s. The photo shows the gigantic trees that literally grow out of the stone walls any place where they have not actually been removed. At one time, the entire site looked like this. We westerners who sit smugly in our own modern temples confident that we have built a civilization representing "the end of history," as Francis Fukuyama so ridiculously phrased it, should pay close attention to what the ruins of Angkor portend for us when the fossil fuels on which we have so foolishly built our societies to be totally dependent upon do finally run out.

It was sobering enough to consider the ruins of Angkor, but I actually found the nearby modern city of Siem Reap to be just as enlightening in its own way. The World Bank's most recent data (2011) lists Cambodia's GDP per capita at a paltry $900 per year, ranking it 159th in the world and barely above such notoriously poor countries as Haiti, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. And yet it is likely that few of the approximately three million tourists who now visit Angkor ever year are at all aware of the abject poverty the prevails in most of the country.

The Siem Reap airport, where we flew in from Bangkok, is small but the facilities are probably more modern than most American airports. Not only is there a huge selection of duty free shops selling such unnecessary luxuries as Gucci and Coach that represent six months' salary for the average Cambodian, but the terminal also features a Dairy Queen franchise where you can soothe your sweet tooth without risking eating one of those weird jungle fruits they sell in the market stalls throughout Southeast Asia. When we arrived on our propeller-driven puddle jumper, there were more officers at the immigration counter than passengers on our plane--all the better to get the tourists through the terminal and out spending money in the local economy as quickly as possible.

The tourist hotels range from Holiday Inn quality (where we stayed) to full fledge resorts for those who have to travel in style no matter where they go. There were plenty of decent restaurants that few locals could ever afford to patronize, including a buffet place we went to that was overrun with hundreds of Vietnamese there on package bus tours to the country their government invaded and overran to drive out the notorious Khmer Rouge in 1979. Looking at all those prosperous middle class denizens of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City really brought home the utter futility of America's last big colonial war of the previous century.

Siem Reap did have a more traditional large open air market area, but it didn't take long for me to realize how unnaturally orderly it was compared to similar markets I walked through in Bangkok. Clearly, the place was being tightly controlled and patrolled by the tourist police (yes, that's what they are actually called) to ensure that none of the big spenders who pass through are robbed or unduly hassled by the ever-present children hawking postcards, tour books and cheap trinkets.

Being a newbie to the country, I made the rookie mistake of exchanging $40 at the airport for Cambodian Riel in order to have some walking around money. Incredibly, the exchange rate was about 3800 to 1. As it turned out, I shouldn't have bothered and had a hard time spending even that small amount of cash. As I quickly learned, every local who works in the Siem Reap area desperately wants dollars rather than their own virtually worthless currency. The prices in all the shops and restaurants were usually listed exclusively in dollars and people would actually get annoyed when I tried to pay them with Riel. One shopkeeper my wife and I bought some sodas and bottled water from actually had to pull out his calculator to figure out what the price of his own merchandise was in his own nation's currency. It rendered pretty laughable the idea that the U.S. dollar is going to collapse any time soon. Someone should send a memo to all the gold bugs and Ron Paul supporters out there.

The real unexpected kicker was the billboards around town advertising the local golf resort. Yes, it's true, you can go play the links on a finely manicured lawn placed smack dab in the middle of a the same nation where there are weekly casualties from all the landmines that are still laying about the countryside. Personally, I think the golf course would have been far more interesting had they gone ahead and left land mines in the sand traps, but then again I've always hated that boring ass, elitist sport.

I was still trying to comprehend who exactly would travel to one of the world's most unfortunate countries just to get in 18 holes when it hit me what it was that I was really witnessing. Siem Reap today represents the vision of what the whole non-first world would look like if the neoliberal economists, neoconservative strategists and rampant globalizers were to get their way and peak oil and resource depletion were not a factor.

Imagine a world where every former hostile government has become complacent and bought off so that every spot on the globe that a wealthy tourist might want to visit features facilities brought up to first world standards that the locals could never afford to enjoy themselves. Imagine a world where the spending of these wealthy tourists is one of the prime sources of income for the quisling governments who keep troublemakers, such as anyone who might agitate for social justice, in line--by force if necessary. Imagine a world so homogenized that you can kick back with a daiquiri by the pool after a rousing round of golf in the very same city where a couple of generations ago Brother Number One forcibly hauled all of the educated professionals out to countryside to be slaughtered en masse in the name of building a nightmare dystopia so horrible as to be beyond even the darkest visons of our best science fiction writers.

Because you see, that's what the bastards really want. And if you are one of the lucky few who can afford (and are of a mindset) to buy that Coach handbag as you are waiting at Siem Reap airport to board the plane that will whisk you to your next exotic destination, it must seem like paradise. But for those poor subsistance level farmers doing the backbreaking work in the debilitating heat and humidity of the nearby rice paddies, or for the slum dwellers of Phnom Penh who sell their barely pubescent teenaged daughters into service in the many brothels of Bankgok, it is a dismal nightmare and one from which they will never awaken.

One last observation, and this has to do with the power of denial. Shortly before we departed Siem Reap, we visited the local war museum, which is run by the Government of Cambodia. A survivor of the wars against the Khmer Rouge who had lost one leg and whose body was full of shrapnel was happy to show us the gallery of old Russian and Chinese tanks, artillery pieces, mortars and other weaponry on display and relay for us tales of the horrible things that happened to his country during that awful decade of the 1970s when Pol Pot was the world's most successful if least acknowledged practitioner of mass genocide.

But there was one peculiar aspect of the presentation. All the displays indicated that the weapons had been captured or used in battles during the final 1979 conflict that drove the Khmer Rouge from power. We were lectured on the evils of communism and the bad perpetrated by China and Russia in supporting the Khmer Rouge, which might have been expected from a survivor of that brutal period. However, there was not one mention in the displays or by our guide that it was the communist government of Vietnam which ultimately rescued its beleaguered neighbor from that hideous evil.

It's not that I would have expected fawning gratitude--after all the Vietnamese were motivated to act for the usual reasons of realpolitik rather than out of any humanitarian concerns--but it is quite obviously an inconvenient truth for the Government of Cambodia and its lust for western tourism dollars and foreign aid. Better to let those visitors to the museum who are ignorant of Cambodia's recent history think that the Cambodian peasants spontaneously rose up out of the killing fields to overthrow their Khmer Rouge oppressors. After all, as the old cliche has it, the truth is the first casualty of any war, especially when the terms of the peace are being dictated half-a-world away by a declining empire which in its hubris foolishly believes that it will never go the way of Angkor.


Bonus: "So you been to school...for a year or two...and you know you've seen it all...in daddy's car...thinkin' you'll go far"