Nefarious Objectives

San Francisco CA

Description

Suppose you were one of the evil geniuses who run the global economy. Of course, you would want to continue running it in a stable, secure, profitable manner in spite of any problems that might crop up now and again. You would want to solve these problems swiftly and efficiently without drawing any undue attention to yourself and your evil ways. What, then, would you currently see as the major problems crying out for a swift, preemptive solution, and how should you address them? First, you’d note that there is a major problem developing with the world’s energy supply. This has been endlessly predicted since the mid-1990s, but various technological advancements and geopolitical maneuverings have pushed the final crisis off by two decades. But now the final crisis is getting closer and closer. New resource discoveries have fallen so far behind production that there is no hope of ever catching up. The last great hope for the US and the world, which was fracking, is now failing, having never made much of a profit. Most of the companies involved have either gone bankrupt or are about to. Renewables, in the form of electricity from wind and solar, have proven to be too expensive and disrutive for electric grids because of their intermittency coupled with the impracticality of storing large amounts of electricity. Geopolitical gambits, such as trying to topple Venezuela’s government and steal its oil, or to sanction Russia into behaving like a gas station with its economy in shreds, have all failed. Energy returned on energy invested—a difficult to calculate but ultimately decisive measure of the feasibility of any energy venture—is continuing to decline. Being an evil genius rather than just some ignorant amateur armchair pilot, you would be fully cognizant of the fact that failure to do something to balance fossil fuel energy supply against demand would cause global economic collapse. Since the advent of coal-based industrialization, economic growth has always been accompanied by a proportional increase in the use of fossil fuels. But further such increases now appear to be impossible. The existing global economy relies on credit to sustain production, and on continuous growth to remain creditworthy. In this scheme, the only alternative to continuous economic growth is economic collapse. And so you start looking for ways to rebalance the energy equation by shutting down parts of the global economy while allowing others to continue to grow. Since nobody is particularly eager to stampede toward the abattoir, your task is to find a way to mislead them into doing so voluntarily, supposedly for their own good. The next question to decide is which industrialized nations are ready for the meathook. You would observe that certain countries have been continuously living beyond their means. They have been endlessly borrowing money far in excess of their economic growth potential and their ability to ever repay the debts they are now taking on is precisely nil. Chief among them is the United States, which has been living on borrowed time for decades now and whose mammoth debt dwarfs all previous excesses combined. Coupled with the gradual loss of reserve currency status by the US dollar and the concomitant loss by the US of the exorbitant privilege of printing money as needed, this has placed the US at the epicenter of the inevitable financial collapse. You would interpret the REPO panic of August 2019, when interest on overnight loans that used US federal debt as collateral spiked to 10%, as a crack in the carefully mainained Potemkin village façade of the US financial system. Turning attention to the fiscal situation in the US, you’d notice that the US is no longer able to finance its ever-growing budget deficits by borrowing from abroad because foreigners who are now net sellers of US debt instruments. You are shocked to discover that the US government is now borrowing close to half of what it spends, accumulating short-term debt twice as fast as it could possibly hope to repay it, and nonchalantly planning to roll it over into more short-term debt while borrowing even more in the years to come. An image comes to you of a particularly bullheaded bull standing in the middle of railroad tracks and attempting to stare down an oncoming train. Being a financial genius, you know all there is to know about pyramid schemes, and you readily identify this state of affairs as a pure pyramid scheme. Since pyramid schemes all fail, and since they tend to do so more or less instantaneously, you start looking for a way to front-run its collapse in order to maintain control of the situation. Your main short-term objective would be to avoid a worldwide panic by placing the global economy into something like a medically induced coma, feeding it an intravenous drip of free money. This pause would give you an opportunity to make some necessary changes, some of them cosmetic, some quite dramatic. There isn’t going to be enough energy to keep the global industrial economy going; therefore, parts of it need to be shut down. Which parts? An ad hoc, à-la-carte approach is unlikely to be effective because what’s left of the global economy at the end of this process has to be intact, contiguous, stable, prosperous and quite large, encompassing, say, two or three billion souls out of an entirely superfluous total of more than 7.5 billion, half of whom are alredy said to subsist on less than a mythical dollar a day. The indigent global south is clearly not a problem with which you the evil genius running the world need to concern yourself. These people are muddling through somehow. They are really not part of the global economy. So, which parts of the global economy should you shut down? An excellent opportunity immediately presented by some artificially hyped pandemic scare is to kill off international tourism. This has been pretty much done; the hotel and airline industries are devastated, along with restaurants, spas and many other businesses that cater to international tourists. Cruise ships are being cut up for scrap metal. This has driven down petroleum distillate consumption. Unlike gasoline, which is useful for driving around aimlessly in little passenger vehicles and is largely a waste product created by oil refineries, petroleum distillates such as jet fuel, bunker fuel and diesel, are the precious lifeblood of the global economy. Using them to fly tourists to vacation spots is a huge, unaffordable waste. But if oil distillate use goes down, then so must gasoline use, since gasoline makes up roughly half of what every barrel of crude oil can be refined into. The solution is to stop commuters from commuting by having them work from home. It is pure waste to provide office workers with one place to sleep and recreate and another one to work; they can do it all from the same mattress and internet connection using the same laptop and cell phone. Once the need to commute is eliminated, the need to maintain office space in large cities disappears as well and cities and suburbs can be depopulated. The population can just as easily telecommute from the countryside. The need to drive to the supermarket can be replaced by a weekly delivery truck, making it possible to shut down most retail as well. In a rural setting, people can eventually be taught to grow and catch their own food, heat with firewood they collect and eventually go semi-feral and fade from view. Once the need to commute and to drive to shops is obviated, it becomes possible to reduce the overall mobility of the population, further decreasing its energy use. This can be best accomplished by eliminating long-distance private transportation by the introduction of very high highway tolls while introducing stringent regulations that must be obeyed before allowing passengers to board public transit, trains or planes. Here, public health and safety measures can play a large role. A laudable side-effect of dispersing the population across the countryside while restricting its mobility is that political protest becomes futile. Once people are no longer allowed to gather and protest en masse, their protest movements become virtualized and confined to social media platforms which, being privately owned, can simply shut them down. Where authorities do have to get involved, they can easily monitor internet and phone traffic and restrict the physical movement of all those they consider suspicious. As a result, the costs of policing, dispersing demonstrations and quelling riots are greatly reduced. A helpful first step is to initially stop policing the larger cities, allowing criminals and looters a free reign, thus giving rise to a perfectly voluntary exodus from the cities to the countryside. A further laudable side-effect of allowing the larger cities to collapse under the weight of crime waves, protests and riots, is that the criminals, protesters and rioters can then be rounded up and used as slaves. Contemporary electronic surveillance, with cell phone tracking, video surveillance and AI-based facial recognition, makes the perpetrators easy to identify and locate. In the US in particular, where slavery is still legal provided a court passes a sentence for some crime (as enshrined in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution) and where masses of black and Latino slaves toil away in privatized prisons that are quite analogous to the plantations of antebellum South, this is a powerful technique for converting surplus population into free labor. A major source of energy expenditure is on what can broadly be defined as luxuries. In a free market economy consumer choice is sacrosanct and a huge number of business cater to ever need, from nail salons to dog grooming, bars, pubs, restaurants, catering services, massage and yoga studios, designer clothing and so on. None of these business are essential and can therefore be shut down provided some public safety-related excuse can be found for doing so. As a replacement for all of the above, a basket of essential consumer products can be delivered to one’s door, free of charge, on a regular basis, by teams of heavily armed community volunteers. Normally, one would expect the proposal to put the global economy in a medically induced coma to be met with considerable resistance. Your brilliant solution is to frighten everyone into submission by endlessly hyping a not particularly dangerous respiratory virus. According to the latest, probably still too high, estimates from the World Health Organization, the new SARS-CoV-2 has an infection fatality rate (IFR) of just 0.14%. This is significantly higher than the roughly 0.1% IFR of the last significant respiratory viral pandemic, the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, which killed somewhere between 1 and 4 million people globally and perhaps had a little something to do with the US GDP plummeting by 0.6% (although this was mainly caused by the end of Vietnam War spending). But since the infection rate of the new virus tends to be severely underestimated (it’s a tricky one because it does not cause any symptoms at all in most people) the final number for the IFR is likely to be significantly lower. As this is becoming known, some loss of face among the fearmongers becomes inevitable. But so far the fearmongering mission has been a great success. Dire predictions of fatality rates in the millions based on a bogus computer model concocted by a now disgraced former theoretical physicist Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College in England (whose predictions, for many years now, have been as wrong as the day is long), coupled with the normal media circus, hype and frenzy over the initial outbreak in China, caused governments all over the world to overreact, shutting down large parts of their economies. The more intelligent people have already gathered a great many facts that are highly detrimental to the hype: that attempting to stop the virus from spreading was a fool’s errand; that the damage from the emergency measures is much more severe that that caused by the virus itself; that this virus is a relatively safe and effective inoculant against itself, obviating the need for vaccines. But none of this matters: global economic coma has been induced as intended and only the more promising and stable nations and economies will ever emerge from it. This pause that refreshes will give you the evil genius in charge of the global economy a chance to solve some major problems, such as: • Longevity: fixing the overhang of retired people given that retirement funds will be empty and resources to devote to geriatric medicine will not be available • Automation: reducing the economy’s energy intensity by shifting back to manual labor while maintaining very tight control over the labor force • Intelligence: moving intellectual functions away from human brains and into internet servers running artificial intelligence algorithms while reforming public education systems away from intellectual development and limiting them to teaching manual skills, button-pushing and obedience. • The “monkeys with hand grenades” problem: ridding the formerly developed and industrialized but now collapsed nations of some very dangerous armaments, including nuclear ones, to prevent them from hurting themselves and each other • Reclustering: reconnecting the now permanently disrupted supply chains into new industrial clusters that only include countries and regions that will remain economically viable at least for the next few decades while permanently disconnecting the rest. We will tackle these problems in future articles. In the meantime, enjoy your medically induced economic coma, and should someone ask you why any of this is necessary, please tell them that it’s because of the horrible coronavirus and has nothing to do with such things as the US financial bubble getting ready to burst or the US fracking industry going bankrupt (which, by the way, they most certainly are).