I have been a fan of Ted Trainer for many years. Somehow, I missed this essay first posted in 2008. In the body of the essay, Professor Trainer makes reference to his book which was published in 2007. Thanks to reader Dexter Graphic for sending me the link.

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Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society

Ted Trainer

In the last three decades considerable concern has emerged regarding limits to the future availability of energy in the quantities required by industrial-affluent societies. More recently Colin Campbell and others have argued that the energy source on which industrial societies are most dependent, petroleum, is more scarce than had previously been thought, and that supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2015. Some of these people argue that the world discovery rate is currently about 25% of the world use rate, and that non-conventional sources such as tar sands and shale oil will not make a significant difference to the situation. The USGS (2000) has recently arrived at a much higher estimate for ultimately recoverable petroleum, but this would only delay the peak by some 10 years.

If the discussion is expanded to take into account the energy likely to be required by the Third World, the situation becomes much more problematic. If the present world population were to consume energy at the rich-world per capita rate, world supply would have to be five times its present volume. World population is likely to reach 9.4 billion by 2070. If all these people were to consume fossil fuels at present rich-world per capita consumption rates, all probably recoverable conventional oil, gas, shale oil, uranium (through burner reactors), and coal (2000 billion tonnes assumed as potentially recoverable), would be totally exhausted in about 20 years.

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In effect we have to give up fossil fuels altogether.

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What is not well understood is the magnitude of the overshoot, the extent to which our present consumer society has exceeded sustainable levels of resource use and environmental impact. This is made clear by a glance at the greenhouse problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given a range of emission rates and the associated levels that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would rise to.

Perhaps the most quoted graph shows that if the concentration is to be stabilized at 550 ppm, twice the pre-industrial level, emissions must be cut to 2.5 gigatonnes per year (Gt/y) by 2040 and to 0.2 Gt/y by about 2200. The present level from fossil fuel burning (i.e., not including land clearing) is over 6 GT/y.

To keep the concentration below 450 ppm, emissions must be cut to about 1 + Gt/y by 2100, and to about 0.3 Gt/y by 2200. This target is much too high because the atmospheric concentration is now at about 380 ppm and many disturbing climatic effects are becoming apparent.

If world population reaches 9+ billion, a global carbon use budget of one Gt would provide us all with about 150 kg of fossil fuel per year, which is around 2–3% of our present rich-world per capita use of fossil fuels (in GHGe terms). Alternatively only about 170 million people, 2.5% of the world’s present population, could live on the present rich-world per capita fossil fuel use of over 6 tonnes of fossil fuel per year.

These figures define the enormous magnitude of the sustainability problem we confront. Consumer-capitalist society has overshot viable levels of production and consumption by a huge amount. In effect we have to give up fossil fuels altogether. That is, we have to live almost entirely on renewables. This book argues that these very high levels of production and consumption and therefore of energy use that we have in today’s consumer-capitalist society cannot be sustained by renewable sources of energy.

However, the foregoing numbers only define the magnitude of the present problem. This is nothing like the magnitude of the problem set when our commitment to growth is also taken into account. If 9.4 billion people are to have the “living standards” we in rich countries will have by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now.

The question of whether we can run our society on renewable energy is therefore not about whether it can meet present demand, and this book concludes that it cannot do that, it is about whether it can meet the vastly increased demand that will be set by the pursuit of limitless increase in production and consumption.

There is an overwhelmingly powerful, never questioned, assumption that all these problems can and will be solved by moving to renewable energy sources. That is, it is generally believed that sources such as the sun and the wind can replace fossil fuels, providing the quantities of energy that consumer society will need, in the forms and at the times that they are needed. Surprisingly, almost no literature has explored whether this is possible. Unfortunately in the task of assessing the validity of this dominant assumption we have not been helped by the people who know most about the field, the renewable energy experts. They have a strong interest in boosting the potential of their pet technology and in not drawing attention to its weaknesses, difficulties and limits. Exaggerated, misleading, questionable and demonstrably false claims are often encountered in the promotional literature. Minor technical advances which might or might not become significant in the long run are announced as miraculous solutions. Doubts regarding the potential of renewable technologies are rarely if ever heard from within these fields.

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…renewable energy experts…have a strong interest
in boosting the potential of their pet technology…

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This enthusiasm is understandable in view of’ the need to attract public support and research funding, but it means that contributions by those most familiar with these fields to the critical assessment of the potential and limits of renewables are quite rare. In developing the following review, considerable difficulty has been encountered from people hostile to having attention drawn to the weaknesses in their technologies and proposals (including threats of legal action if data they have provided in personal communications is used). Sources eager to provide information tend to dry up when they realize that limits are being explored. In addition some of the crucial information will not be made public by the private firms developing the new systems. For example it is almost impossible to get information on actual windmill output in relation to mean wind speeds at generating sites.

Unfortunately these difficulties have meant that at times it has not been possible to get access to information that would settle an issue and that must exist somewhere, and that at times one has to attempt an indirect estimation using whatever scraps of information one has been able to find. Ideally this study would have been carried out by someone more expert in renewable energy technology than I am, but it is understandable that the task has been left for an outsider to take up.

The two core problems

Renewable energy can meet various needs very well, or perfectly in many regions, such as heating and cooling space via simple “solar passive” designs whereby the structure captures and stores solar energy. However, renewables face formidable problems with respect to the two forms of energy which consumer society demands in enormous quantities, viz. electricity and liquid fuels. The fundamental issue in both cases has to do with the quantity of energy that can be delivered reliably, not dollar cost or “energy return.”

The situation is clearest with respect to liquid fuel (i.e., oil plus gas). There is no possibility of getting the quantity we take for granted, no matter what plausible assumptions are made regarding technical advances. There are only two possible sources of renewable liquid fuels, biomass and hydrogen. Even wild optimism about potential land and energy yields cannot provide the world’s future 9.4 billion people with more than perhaps 10% of’ the per capita liquid fuel consumption we now average in rich countries.

The situation concerning electricity is less clear cut. Some regions such as northeast Europe and the US will be able to derive a lot of electricity from the wind in winter (although the situation in summer is much more problematic). Yet even if the quantity of wind and solar electricity was not a problem, very difficult problems remain having to do with making these highly variable forms of energy available at the times when they are needed.

It is quite misleading to focus on the contribution a renewable source can make when it is merely augmenting supply largely derived from coal or nuclear sources. In that situation the significant problems set by the variability of renewables can be avoided. When the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing, a little more coal can be burned. However, the problem this book is concerned with is the development of systems in which almost all energy used comes from renewables, and that means we would have to provide for large fluctuations in energy production, and thus for the storage of large quantities of energy. At this point in time there is no satisfactory solution in sight for this problem, on the scale that would be required.

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Electricity is more or less impossible
to store in very large quantities…

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Electricity is more or less impossible to store in very large quantities, so it has to be transformed into something that can be stored, such as hydrogen or pumped water, then transformed back to electricity when it is needed. However, these processes involve significant difficulties and costs. The best option, using electricity to pump water into high dams and then using its power to generate electricity when there is insufficient wind, involves the problem of limited hydro-capacity. Less than 10% of world electricity is generated by hydroelectric generating power, so this source cannot carry anywhere near the full load when there is little wind or sun.

In other words the biggest difficulties for solar and wind energy are set by their variability, especially the occurrence of night time and winter for solar, and the fact that winds can be down for days at a time. Many sites with quite satisfactory summer PV or solar thermal performance are almost useless right through winter, especially in Europe. Winds tend to be low in summer and autumn. Even more problematic for wind are the large variations from day to day as gales and calms occur.

At present it seems that the variability of wind means that it probably cannot provide more than 25% of demand in the best wind regions, and perhaps no more than 10 to 15% in most good wind regions. Variability also seems to mean that if we build a lot of windmills we might also have to build almost as much coal or nuclear generating capacity to use when the winds are down.

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…the variability of wind means that it probably cannot provide
more than 25% of demand in the best wind regions…

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The belief that the world will soon run on a “hydrogen economy” is very common. The first challenge to this faith-based assumption is the question of a source for the huge quantities of hydrogen that will he required. We are not likely to get enough energy from solar or wind sources to meet electricity demand, let alone have any left over to convert into hydrogen. But even if we had a lot of hydrogen, there are coercive arguments as to why we still could not have a hydrogen economy These involve the difficulties posed by the physical nature of the very small and light hydrogen atom. Large volumes of hydrogen have to be pumped or stored before much energy arrives at the destination, and this consumes a lot of energy. In fact according to one estimate, pumping hydrogen from the Sahara to northern Europe would use up the equivalent of 65% of the energy pumped. Then there would be other losses and energy costs in moving the hydrogen into fuel tanks, and especially driving motors and generating electricity. Finally fuel cells are likely to deliver at most 50 to 60% of the energy that reaches them as hydrogen after all those pumping losses.

If the losses are combined, we find that to provide electricity or run vehicles from wind power via hydrogen would require 3 or 4 times as much wind-generated energy as there is in the petrol we are trying to replace. Similar losses would be involved in storing wind-generated power in hydrogen and using it to regenerate electricity later. The capital cost of such a generating system could be 12 to 15 times as much as that of the coal-fired generating system, not including the cost of the hydrogen production, pumping, storage and fuel cell systems.

This poses the question of what multiple of present electricity cost could be tolerated. Our economy might survive if electricity cost five times as much as it does now, but could it survive a 10-fold increase?

What about using solar energy in summer and autumn when the winds tend to be low, and wind in the winter when there’s little sun? This would mean constructing two very expensive systems in addition to the one we have now. We would have the wind system, the solar system and the coal-fired system for use when the other two are not working.

An unsustainable and unjust society

For forty years the argument has been accumulating that our resource consuming and environmentally expensive way of life is grossly unsustainable, for many reasons besides energy difficulties. The rich-world per capita “footprint” is about ten times that which could ever be extended to all people. In addition our way of life is built on a grotesquely unjust global economy. We in rich countries could not have such high “living standards” if we were not taking most of the world’s resource wealth and condemning the Third World to a form of “development” which benefits us and our corporations but not the mass of Third World people.

Most people assume that although some of our resource and ecological problems are very serious, they can be solved by strategies like greater recycling efforts and the development of better technology. This “tech-fix” position is quite mistaken because the overshoot is already far too big for this to be possible. Reductions possibly of the order of 90% are required in rich-world per capita resource use.

All our problems will rapidly become worse if we continue to be obsessed with constantly increasing production and consumption, living standards and the GDP. Yet these are the fierce and supreme commitments of just about all governments, economists and people, and we have an economic system that cannot work without them.

A global consumer-capitalist society cannot be made sustainable or just. We cannot solve the big global problems such a society generates unless we face up to transition to a very different kind of society. Salvation cannot be achieved by changes within consumer-capitalist society — there must be change from it to very different social, economic, geographical, political and cultural systems.

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The rich-world per capita “footprint” is about ten times
that which could ever be extended to all people.

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It should be stressed that this book is not an argument against the development of renewable energy sources. For some forty years I have argued that renewable energy sources are ideal, that we must move to them, and that we can live very well on them — but not at the level of energy use we take for granted today in consumer-capitalist society. Far from being hostile to them, I have always relied on renewable energy forms. Our homestead has a wood fire for space heating, for decades our cooking was by wood stove (not at present), we pump our water by windmills, and for thirty years have had PV panels on the roof and no grid connection. In several previous publications I have argued that in a sustainable world we must live on renewables and that we can live well on them, but only after radical transition from consumer-capitalist society to “The Simpler Way.”

Apologies to “Green” people

Obviously this book’s message is not a pleasant one for people in the Green Movement and I am acutely aware of the damage it would do the general environmental cause if it were taken seriously. Environmental activists have great difficulty getting the public in general to respond to environmental issues, even when they pose no significant challenges to the lifestyles and systems of consumer society.

Almost all environmental activists seem to be oblivious to the contradiction built into their thinking. They are in effect saying, “Please help us save the planet by calling for a switch to the use of renewable energy sources — which can sustain consumer society and will pose no threat to our obsession with affluent lifestyles and economic growth.” Even getting people to attend to such unthreatening messages is very difficult. So how much more difficult would it be to get people to listen to the claim that to save the environment we have to cut consumption by perhaps 90%, and give up fossil fuels — and renewables cannot substitute for them?

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Almost all environmental activists seem to be oblivious
to the contradiction built into their thinking.

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Given that I have been part of the Green Movement for decades, I realize that green goals could be significantly undermined if the theme of this book became widely discussed, let alone generally accepted. The most immediate effect would be a surge in support for nuclear energy.

The Green Movement in general is deeply flawed. It is for the most part only light green. Most environmental gurus and agencies never go beyond seeking reforms within consumer-capitalist society.

A sustainable and just society cannot be a consumer society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth at all. It must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and acquisitiveness. Whether or not we are likely to achieve such a transition is not crucial here (and I am quite pessimistic about achieving it). The point is that when our “limits to growth” situation is understood, a sustainable and just society cannot be conceived in any other terms. Discussion of these themes is of the utmost importance, but few if any green agencies ever even mention them.

The “tech-fix optimists” who are to be found in plague proportions in the renewable energy field are open to the same criticism. If the position underlying this book is valid, then despite the indisputably desirable technologies all these people are developing, they are working for the devil. If it is the case that a sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without transition from consumer society to a Simpler Way of some kind, then this transition is being thwarted by those who reinforce the faith that technical advances will eliminate any need to even think about such a transition.

The Simpler Way could easily have an extremely low per capita rate of energy consumption, and footprint, based on local resources — but only if we undertake vast and radical change in economic, political, geographical and cultural systems.

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Ted Trainer teaches at the University of New South Wales in Kensington, NSW, Australia.

Read his book: Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society

This Winter’s enormous snow falls in the United States has been hailed by the “climate change deniers” as proof positive of their “rightness” and Al Gore’s “wrongness.” They have missed no opportunity to ridicule the author of “An Inconvenient Truth.” This week the former Vice President answered back. … This morning’s essay is reposted from the February 27th, 2010, online issue of The New York Times.

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Doing What Is Required

Al Gore

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.
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Copyright 2010 by The New York Times

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Al Gore, was the Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.”

Two individuals that both go by single names are Ilargi and Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth.  They are the main writing talent for a consistently excellent website covering the decline and failure of Market. This morning, Stoneleigh shares her wisdom with us. This was originally posted on February 08, 2010.

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Corruption, Culpability and Short-Termism

Stoneleigh

People are increasingly collectively horrified at the extent of the fraud and corruption that lies at the heart of our financial and broader governance structures. They seem surprised, as if this were something new, when it has actually been growing in tandem with our credit hyper-expansion for decades. Corruption in complex systems never goes away, it merely waxes and wanes, and goes through phases where it is more or less visible.

During long manic periods, all manner of abuses occur, but no one notices while the party continues, because no one wants to notice. As long as people generally have access to easy credit and the illusory wealth effect it brings, they don’t ask hard questions and are largely oblivious to risk. Even if they lied on their own mortgage application, in order to qualify for a larger loan than they could really afford, and know others who did the same, they cannot seem to imagine what the consequences might one day be, both for themselves and for the financial system as a whole. To paraphrase one journalist who commented on the national pyramid bubble in Albania in the mid 1990s, when people feel they are operating within the bounds of properly structured criminality, they feel no personal responsibility and do not fear consequences.

Both the predators and the prey are complicit in the development of a mania. Predators lent money into existence without regard to risk, since they were selling that on to Wall Street investors through securitization. Just like those they preyed upon by actively enticing people into loans they could not afford, they turned a blind eye to the blatant lies on mortgage applications, inflated assessments and other fraudulent aspects of the developing bubble. They made their money through fees anyway, but did not contemplate the creation of systemic risk which would ultimately bring them down as well.

Both sides had an interest in the party continuing because it benefited them personally in the short term. The prey were insisting on being handed the empty bag, which is all that’s left at the height of a bubble, while the predators were only too pleased to oblige. Of the two, the predators were certainly in a better position to assess the situation and must be regarded as the more culpable party, but without the greed of the prey, the exploitation would not have been possible.

When times have been both relatively good and stable for a long time, people’s time horizons lengthen, and they feel they have the luxury of the longer term view. Economists would say that their discount rates (the extent to which they value the present over the future) have declined. Humans are never collectively very good at taking a long term view, but in stable times, where they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, they are at their best in this regard. It is in times like this that environmental movements arise and humans start collectively valuing other forms of life (many individuals do this anyway, but for it to become a collective movement requires a human herding element that is only present at certain times).

The height of a mania is a very unusual time that combines the best of good times for a majority of people, illusory though it may be, with a rapid rate of change. People begin to manifest mixed messages, for instance environmentalism tinged with fear. As discount rates steepen, people make more and more short-term decisions and ignore the longer term risks. They throw caution to the wind, with predictable consequences, first through euphoria and then in desperate denial. That is how we became the authors of our own present debt predicament.

Eventually, as the mania comes to an end, the rapid rate of change mostly to the upside will be replaced with a rapid rate of change to the downside, combined with a significant contraction in material wealth, as excess claims to it are extinguished. The confluence of circumstances that had led to a longer-term view will reverse sharply. Unfortunately, the result will be a state of crisis management, just when cool heads and rationality would matter most. We who have had the luxury of the long term will find out what it is like to worry about where our next meal is coming from, and just how short our time horizons will become under those circumstances.

In many parts of the world, instability has been a chronic condition for decades. There are huge disparities between haves and have nots, and one’s position of fortune or misfortune is often determined in relation to personal connections with those in power, when power itself can be a very ephemeral thing. These are conditions that promote very high discount rates, not just among the have nots who have to worry about feeding themselves, but also among the haves whose benefactors could be out of power tomorrow, ending their privileged position. Under these circumstances, governance is often appalling, because those in or near power have a direct incentive to loot the public coffers while they have the chance. Where power structures are clan-based, the incentive is even stronger, as losing power could easily lead to persecution by the incoming group, and the consequent need to escape with portable wealth.

What this engenders is a culture of endemic corruption, which we would do well to study, as it is likely where we will find ourselves for much of this century. We think we live with corruption now, as we hear about fraud, ponzi schemes, bailouts combined with epic bonuses and a revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the US Treasury. As self-evidently corrupt as this is, it is nothing in terms of the impact on daily life compared with the top-to-bottom corruption other peoples have to live with. We have not had to pay off every public official for the performance of his own job, pay bribes to secure contracts, pay to have legal standards waived, pay protection money to the police or pay a high enough political ‘roof’ to prevent our property from being claimed by the better connected. We have not had to live where life is cheap, authority figures at all levels are completely unaccountable, abuse of arbitrary power is rampant, the legal system actively undermines the rule of law and casual violence abounds. This is what happens when people feel that they have no long term.

Our media, when it focuses on unluckier parts of the world at all in our infotainment bubble, tends to do so with an air of superiority, as if we were somehow innately better than those who live under corrupt regimes. They fail to note that our position at the centre of a globalized world has allowed us to cream off the surpluses of the periphery, giving us the stability required for the luxury of the long term while actively depriving others of the same. Our boom has been an aggravating factor in the culture of corruption that has taken root in so many places, but our coming bust will see these same tendencies develop in our own countries.

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Visit The Automatic Earth.

Reposted from OpEdNews.

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Battle of the Titans

Ellen Brown

We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Rubin/Geithner). The bodies strewn on the battleground could include your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm’s reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin, came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury “Goldman Sachs South.”

Goldman’s superpower status comes from something more than just access to the money spigots of the banking system. It actually has the ability to manipulate markets. Formerly just an investment bank, in 2008 Goldman magically transformed into a bank holding company. That gave it access to the Federal Reserve’s lending window; but at the same time it remained an investment bank, aggressively speculating in the markets. The upshot was that it can now borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest, and it can use this money not only to speculate for its own account but to bend markets to its will.

But Goldman Sachs has been caught in this blatant market manipulation so often that the JPMorgan faction of the banking empire has finally had enough. The voters too have evidently had enough, as demonstrated in the recent upset in Massachusetts that threw the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s Democratic seat to a Republican. That pivotal loss gave Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an opportunity to step up to the plate with some proposals for serious banking reform. Unlike the string of Treasury Secretaries who came to the position through the revolving door of Goldman Sachs, former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker came up through Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was vice president before joining the Treasury. On January 27, market commentator Bob Chapman wrote in his weekly investment newsletter The International Forecaster:

“A split has occurred between the paper forces of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Mr. Volcker represents Morgan interests. Both sides are Illuminists, but the Morgan side is tired of Goldman’s greed and arrogance. . . . Not that JP Morgan Chase was blameless, they did their looting and damage to the system as well, but not in the high handed arrogant way the others did. The recall of Volcker is an attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible. That means the influence of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, et al will be put on the back shelf at least for now, as will be the Goldman influence. It will be slowly and subtly phased out. . . . Washington needs a new face on Wall Street, not that of a criminal syndicate.”

Goldman’s crimes, says Chapman, were that it “got caught stealing. First in naked shorts, then front-running the market, both of which they are still doing, as the SEC looks the other way, and then selling MBS-CDOs to their best clients and simultaneously shorting them.”

Volcker’s proposal would rein in these abuses, either by ending the risky “proprietary trading” (trading for their own accounts) engaged in by the too-big-to-fail banks, or by forcing them to downsize by selling off those portions of their businesses engaging in it. Until recently, President Obama has declined to support Volcker’s plan, but on January 21 he finally endorsed it.

The immediate reaction of the market was to drop and drop, day after day. At least, that appeared to be the reaction of “the market.” Financial analyst Max Keiser suggests a more sinister possibility. Goldman, which has the power to manipulate markets with its high-speed program trades, may be engaging in a Mexican standoff. The veiled threat is, “Back off on the banking reforms, or stand by and watch us continue to crash your markets.” The same manipulations were evident in the bank bailout forced on Congress by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in September 2008.

In Keiser’s January 23 broadcast with co-host Stacy Herbert, he explains how Goldman’s manipulations are done. Keiser is a fast talker, so this transcription is not verbatim, but it is close. He says:

“High frequency trading accounts for 70% of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor, and a specialist determines the price of a trade that would satisfy buyer and seller, and that’s the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price. High frequency trading as conducted by Goldman means that before the specialist buys and sells and makes that market, Goldman will electronically flood the specialist with thousands and thousands of trades to totally disrupt that process and essentially commandeer that process, for the benefit of siphoning off nickels and dimes for themselves. Not only are they siphoning cash from the New York Stock Exchange but they are also manipulating prices. What I see as a possibility is that next week, if the bankers on Wall Street decide they don’t want to be reformed in any way, they simply set the high frequency trading algorithm to sell, creating a huge negative bias for the direction of stocks. And they’ll basically crash the market, and it will be a standoff. The market was down three days in a row, which it hasn’t been since last summer. It’s a game of chicken, till Obama says, “Okay, maybe we need to rethink this.’”

But the President hasn’t knuckled under yet. In his State of the Union address on January 27, he did not dwell long on the issue of bank reform, but he held to his position. He said:

“We can’t allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy. The House has already passed financial reform with many of these changes. And the lobbyists are already trying to kill it. Well, we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back.”

What this “real reform” would look like was left to conjecture, but Bob Chapman fills in some blanks and suggests what might be needed for an effective overhaul:

“The attempt will be to bring the financial system back to brass tacks. . . . That would include little or no MBS and CDOs, the regulation of derivatives and hedge funds and the end of massive market manipulation, both by Treasury, Fed and Wall Street players. Congress has to end the “President’s Working Group on Financial Markets,’ or at least limit its use to real emergencies. . . . The Glass-Steagall Act should be reintroduced into the system and lobbying and campaign contributions should end. . . . No more politics in lending and banks should be limited to a lending ratio of 10 to 1. . . . It is bad enough they have the leverage that they have. State banks such as North Dakota’s are a better idea.”

On January 28, the predictable reaction of “the market” was to fall for the seventh straight day. The battle of the Titans was on.

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Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are http://www.webofdebt.com and http://www.ellenbrown.com.

American President Barack Obama has been heavily criticized for not solving many of America’s current problems. His popularity with American voters seems in freefall. … On another note, his speech delivered one week ago on January 17th honoring Martin Luther King gives us another basis to understanding how this American President thinks.

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The Challenge of a New Age

Barack Obama

Good morning.  Praise be to God.  Let me begin by thanking the entire Vermont Avenue Baptist Church family for welcoming our family here today.  It feels like a family.  Thank you for making us feel that way.  (Applause.)  To Pastor Wheeler, first lady Wheeler, thank you so much for welcoming us here today.  Congratulations on Jordan Denice — aka Cornelia.  (Laughter.)

Michelle and I have been blessed with a new nephew this year as well — Austin Lucas Robinson.  (Applause.)  So maybe at the appropriate time we can make introductions.  (Laughter.)  Now, if Jordan’s father is like me, then that will be in about 30 years. (Laughter.)  That is a great blessing.

Michelle and Malia and Sasha and I are thrilled to be here today.  And I know that sometimes you have to go through a little fuss to have me as a guest speaker.  (Laughter.)  So let me apologize in advance for all the fuss.

We gather here, on a Sabbath, during a time of profound difficulty for our nation and for our world.  In such a time, it soothes the soul to seek out the Divine in a spirit of prayer; to seek solace among a community of believers.  But we are not here just to ask the Lord for His blessing.  We aren’t here just to interpret His Scripture.  We’re also here to call on the memory of one of His noble servants, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, it’s fitting that we do so here, within the four walls of Vermont Avenue Baptist Church — here, in a church that rose like the phoenix from the ashes of the civil war; here in a church formed by freed slaves, whose founding pastor had worn the union blue; here in a church from whose pews congregants set out for marches and from whom choir anthems of freedom were heard; from whose sanctuary King himself would sermonize from time to time.

One of those times was Thursday, December 6, 1956.  Pastor, you said you were a little older than me, so were you around at that point?  (Laughter.)  You were three years old — okay.  (Laughter.)  I wasn’t born yet.  (Laughter.)

On Thursday, December 6, 1956.  And before Dr. King had pointed us to the mountaintop, before he told us about his dream in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King came here, as a 27-year-old preacher, to speak on what he called “The Challenge of a New Age.”  “The Challenge of a New Age.”  It was a period of triumph, but also uncertainty, for Dr. King and his followers — because just weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses, a hard-wrought, hard-fought victory that would put an end to the 381-day historic boycott down in Montgomery, Alabama.

And yet, as Dr. King rose to take that pulpit, the future still seemed daunting.  It wasn’t clear what would come next for the movement that Dr. King led.  It wasn’t clear how we were going to reach the Promised Land.  Because segregation was still rife; lynchings still a fact.  Yes, the Supreme Court had ruled not only on the Montgomery buses, but also on Brown v. Board of Education.  And yet that ruling was defied throughout the South  — by schools and by states; they ignored it with impunity.  And here in the nation’s capital, the federal government had yet to fully align itself with the laws on its books and the ideals of its founding.

So it’s not hard for us, then, to imagine that moment.  We can imagine folks coming to this church, happy about the boycott being over.  We can also imagine them, though, coming here concerned about their future, sometimes second-guessing strategy, maybe fighting off some creeping doubts, perhaps despairing about whether the movement in which they had placed so many of their hopes — a movement in which they believed so deeply — could actually deliver on its promise.

So here we are, more than half a century later, once again facing the challenges of a new age.  Here we are, once more marching toward an unknown future, what I call the Joshua generation to their Moses generation — the great inheritors of progress paid for with sweat and blood, and sometimes life itself.

We’ve inherited the progress of unjust laws that are now overturned.  We take for granted the progress of a ballot being available to anybody who wants to take the time to actually vote. We enjoy the fruits of prejudice and bigotry being lifted — slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but irrevocably — from human hearts.  It’s that progress that made it possible for me to be here today; for the good people of this country to elect an African American the 44th President of the United States of America.

Reverend Wheeler mentioned the inauguration, last year’s election.  You know, on the heels of that victory over a year ago, there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post-racial America, all those problems would be solved.  There were those who argued that because I had spoke of a need for unity in this country that our nation was somehow entering into a period of post-partisanship.  That didn’t work out so well.  There was a hope shared by many that life would be better from the moment that I swore that oath.

Of course, as we meet here today, one year later, we know the promise of that moment has not yet been fully fulfilled.  Because of an era of greed and irresponsibility that sowed the seeds of its own demise, because of persistent economic troubles unaddressed through the generations, because of a banking crisis that brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe, we are being tested — in our own lives and as a nation — as few have been tested before.

Unemployment is at its highest level in more than a quarter of a century.  Nowhere is it higher than the African American community.  Poverty is on the rise.  Home ownership is slipping. Beyond our shores, our sons and daughters are fighting two wars. Closer to home, our Haitian brothers and sisters are in desperate need.  Bruised, battered, many people are legitimately feeling doubt, even despair, about the future.  Like those who came to this church on that Thursday in 1956, folks are wondering, where do we go from here?

I understand those feelings.  I understand the frustration and sometimes anger that so many folks feel as they struggle to stay afloat.  I get letters from folks around the country every day; I read 10 a night out of the 40,000 that we receive.  And there are stories of hardship and desperation, in some cases, pleading for help:  I need a job.  I’m about to lose my home.  I don’t have health care — it’s about to cause my family to be bankrupt.  Sometimes you get letters from children:  My mama or my daddy have lost their jobs, is there something you can do to help?  Ten letters like that a day we read.

So, yes, we’re passing through a hard winter.  It’s the hardest in some time.  But let’s always remember that, as a people, the American people, we’ve weathered some hard winters before.  This country was founded during some harsh winters.  The fishermen, the laborers, the craftsmen who made camp at Valley Forge — they weathered a hard winter.  The slaves and the freedmen who rode an underground railroad, seeking the light of justice under the cover of night — they weathered a hard winter. The seamstress whose feet were tired, the pastor whose voice echoes through the ages — they weathered some hard winters.  It was for them, as it is for us, difficult, in the dead of winter, to sometimes see spring coming.  They, too, sometimes felt their hopes deflate.  And yet, each season, the frost melts, the cold recedes, the sun reappears.  So it was for earlier generations and so it will be for us.

What we need to do is to just ask what lessons we can learn from those earlier generations about how they sustained themselves during those hard winters, how they persevered and prevailed.  Let us in this Joshua generation learn how that Moses generation overcame.

Let me offer a few thoughts on this.  First and foremost, they did so by remaining firm in their resolve.  Despite being threatened by sniper fire or planted bombs, by shoving and punching and spitting and angry stares, they adhered to that sweet spirit of resistance, the principles of nonviolence that had accounted for their success.

Second, they understood that as much as our government and our political parties had betrayed them in the past — as much as our nation itself had betrayed its own ideals — government, if aligned with the interests of its people, can be — and must be  — a force for good.  So they stayed on the Justice Department.  They went into the courts.  They pressured Congress, they pressured their President.  They didn’t give up on this country. They didn’t give up on government.  They didn’t somehow say government was the problem; they said, we’re going to change government, we’re going to make it better.  Imperfect as it was, they continued to believe in the promise of democracy; in America’s constant ability to remake itself, to perfect this union.

Third, our predecessors were never so consumed with theoretical debates that they couldn’t see progress when it came. Sometimes I get a little frustrated when folks just don’t want to see that even if we don’t get everything, we’re getting something.  (Applause.)  King understood that the desegregation of the Armed Forces didn’t end the civil rights movement, because black and white soldiers still couldn’t sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home.  But he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the Armed Forces.  That was a good first step — even as he called for more.  He didn’t suggest that somehow by the signing of the Civil Rights that somehow all discrimination would end.  But he also didn’t think that we shouldn’t sign the Civil Rights Act because it hasn’t solved every problem.  Let’s take a victory, he said, and then keep on marching.  Forward steps, large and small, were recognized for what they were — which was progress.

Fourth, at the core of King’s success was an appeal to conscience that touched hearts and opened minds, a commitment to universal ideals — of freedom, of justice, of equality — that spoke to all people, not just some people.  For King understood that without broad support, any movement for civil rights could not be sustained.  That’s why he marched with the white auto worker in Detroit.  That’s why he linked arm with the Mexican farm worker in California, and united people of all colors in the noble quest for freedom.

Of course, King overcame in other ways as well.  He remained strategically focused on gaining ground — his eyes on the prize constantly — understanding that change would not be easy, understand that change wouldn’t come overnight, understanding that there would be setbacks and false starts along the way, but understanding, as he said in 1956, that “we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.”

And it’s because the Moses generation overcame that the trials we face today are very different from the ones that tested us in previous generations.  Even after the worst recession in generations, life in America is not even close to being as brutal as it was back then for so many.  That’s the legacy of Dr. King and his movement.  That’s our inheritance.  Having said that, let there be no doubt the challenges of our new age are serious in their own right, and we must face them as squarely as they faced the challenges they saw.

I know it’s been a hard road we’ve traveled this year to rescue the economy, but the economy is growing again.  The job losses have finally slowed, and around the country, there’s signs that businesses and families are beginning to rebound.  We are making progress.

I know it’s been a hard road that we’ve traveled to reach this point on health reform.  I promise you I know.  (Laughter.) But under the legislation I will sign into law, insurance companies won’t be able to drop you when you get sick, and more than 30 million people — (applause) — our fellow Americans will finally have insurance.  More than 30 million men and women and children, mothers and fathers, won’t be worried about what might happen to them if they get sick.  This will be a victory not for Democrats; this will be a victory for dignity and decency, for our common humanity.  This will be a victory for the United States of America.

Let’s work to change the political system, as imperfect as it is.  I know people can feel down about the way things are going sometimes here in Washington.  I know it’s tempting to give up on the political process.  But we’ve put in place tougher rules on lobbying and ethics and transparency — tougher rules than any administration in history.  It’s not enough, but it’s progress.  Progress is possible.  Don’t give up on voting.  Don’t give up on advocacy.  Don’t give up on activism.  There are too many needs to be met, too much work to be done.  Like Dr. King said, “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.”

Let us broaden our coalition, building a confederation not of liberals or conservatives, not of red states or blue states, but of all Americans who are hurting today, and searching for a better tomorrow.  The urgency of the hour demands that we make common cause with all of America’s workers — white, black, brown — all of whom are being hammered by this recession, all of whom are yearning for that spring to come.  It demands that we reach out to those who’ve been left out in the cold even when the economy is good, even when we’re not in recession — the youth in the inner cities, the youth here in Washington, D.C., people in rural communities who haven’t seen prosperity reach them for a very long time.  It demands that we fight discrimination, whatever form it may come.  That means we fight discrimination  against gays and lesbians, and we make common cause to reform our immigration system.

And finally, we have to recognize, as Dr. King did, that progress can’t just come from without — it also has to come from within.  And over the past year, for example, we’ve made meaningful improvements in the field of education.  I’ve got a terrific Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  He’s been working hard with states and working hard with the D.C. school district, and we’ve insisted on reform, and we’ve insisted on accountability.  We we’re putting in more money and we’ve provided more Pell Grants and more tuition tax credits and simpler financial aid forms.  We’ve done all that, but parents still need to parent.  (Applause.)  Kids still need to own up to their responsibilities.  We still have to set high expectations for our young people.  Folks can’t simply look to government for all the answers without also looking inside themselves, inside their own homes, for some of the answers.

Progress will only come if we’re willing to promote that ethic of hard work, a sense of responsibility, in our own lives. I’m not talking, by the way, just to the African American community.  Sometimes when I say these things people assme, well, he’s just talking to black people about working hard.  No, no, no, no.  I’m talking to the American community.  Because somewhere along the way, we, as a nation, began to lose touch with some of our core values.  You know what I’m talking about.  We became enraptured with the false prophets who prophesized an easy path to success, paved with credit cards and home equity loans and get-rich-quick schemes, and the most important thing was to be a celebrity; it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you get on TV.  That’s everybody.

We forgot what made the bus boycott a success; what made the civil rights movement a success; what made the United States of America a success — that, in this country, there’s no substitute for hard work, no substitute for a job well done, no substitute for being responsible stewards of God’s blessings.

What we’re called to do, then, is rebuild America from its foundation on up.  To reinvest in the essentials that we’ve neglected for too long — like health care, like education, like a better energy policy, like basic infrastructure, like scientific research.  Our generation is called to buckle down and get back to basics.

We must do so not only for ourselves, but also for our children, and their children.  For Jordan and for Austin.  That’s a sacrifice that falls on us to make.  It’s a much smaller sacrifice than the Moses generation had to make, but it’s still a sacrifice.

Yes, it’s hard to transition to a clean energy economy.  Sometimes it may be inconvenient, but it’s a sacrifice that we have to make.  It’s hard to be fiscally responsible when we have all these human needs, and we’re inheriting enormous deficits and debt, but that’s a sacrifice that we’re going to have to make.  You know, it’s easy, after a hard day’s work, to just put your kid in front of the TV set — you’re tired, don’t want to fuss with them — instead of reading to them, but that’s a sacrifice we must joyfully accept.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a good father and good mother. Sometimes it’s hard to be a good neighbor, or a good citizen, to give up time in service of others, to give something of ourselves to a cause that’s greater than ourselves — as Michelle and I are urging folks to do tomorrow to honor and celebrate Dr. King.  But these are sacrifices that we are called to make.  These are sacrifices that our faith calls us to make.  Our faith in the future.  Our faith in America.  Our faith in God.

And on his sermon all those years ago, Dr. King quoted a poet’s verse:
Truth forever on the scaffold Wrong forever on the throne… And behind the dim unknown stands God Within the shadows keeping watch above his own.

Even as Dr. King stood in this church, a victory in the past and uncertainty in the future, he trusted God.  He trusted that God would make a way.  A way for prayers to be answered.  A way for our union to be perfected.  A way for the arc of the moral universe, no matter how long, to slowly bend towards truth and bend towards freedom, to bend towards justice.  He had faith that God would make a way out of no way.

You know, folks ask me sometimes why I look so calm.  (Laughter.)  They say, all this stuff coming at you, how come you just seem calm?  And I have a confession to make here.  There are times where I’m not so calm.  (Laughter.)  Reggie Love knows.  My wife knows.  There are times when progress seems too slow.  There are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt.  There are times when the barbs sting.  There are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught, and change is so painfully slow in coming, and I have to confront my own doubts.

But let me tell you — during those times it’s faith that keeps me calm.  (Applause.)  It’s faith that gives me peace.  The same faith that leads a single mother to work two jobs to put a roof over her head when she has doubts.  The same faith that keeps an unemployed father to keep on submitting job applications even after he’s been rejected a hundred times.  The same faith that says to a teacher even if the first nine children she’s teaching she can’t reach, that that 10th one she’s going to be able to reach.  The same faith that breaks the silence of an earthquake’s wake with the sound of prayers and hymns sung by a Haitian community.  A faith in things not seen, in better days ahead, in Him who holds the future in the hollow of His hand.  A faith that lets us mount up on wings like eagles; lets us run and not be weary; lets us walk and not faint.

So let us hold fast to that faith, as Joshua held fast to the faith of his fathers, and together, we shall overcome the challenges of a new age.  (Applause.)  Together, we shall seize the promise of this moment.  Together, we shall make a way through winter, and we’re going to welcome the spring.  Through God all things are possible.  (Applause.)

May the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King continue to inspire us and ennoble our world and all who inhabit it.  And may God bless the United States of America.  Thank you very much, everybody.  God bless you.  (Applause.)

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Watch a video of the speech.