Australian climate change minister Penny Wong recently made a speech to a conference on "Coasts and Climate Change" (see Wong: Climate sceptics are all red herrings and quackery for the full text) where she made some remarks about climate skeptics and their frequent theorising that climate scientists are "part of a vast conspiracy to de-industrialise the Western world" - which is often just one facet of conspiracy theories involving the "New World Order".

While the climate scientists are no doubt innocent of these charges (and most likely correct when they point to global warming being a serious and growing problem) the idea that the West is being deindustrialised may not be as wacky as it appears at first glance, so I might spend some time exploring a few problematic trends affecting the western world in general and the United States in particular.

Given recent allegations you might be excused for thinking that climate change science has been completely discredited.

Remember the people who have been barrackers for policy failure at home and abroad are the same people who have been peddling misinformation and misleading information about the science of climate change.

There is, in fact, a certain similarity between debates about the impact carbon pollution is having on our planet, and earlier debates about the impact cigarette smoke has on our health.

It's not hard to imagine these barrackers for failure as the characters in the sequel to 'Thank you for smoking', which will be called: 'Thank you for polluting.'

Given how confused debates on the science have become, I think it is important to get some facts on the table.

And I don't just mean facts like that 2009 was the second hottest year on record in Australia and the fifth hottest globally, and that 2009 finished the hottest decade in recorded history.

I refer more to the series of breathless, scandalised claims implying that we have all been hoodwinked by climate scientists, who have manipulated evidence and published bare-faced lies as part of a vast conspiracy to de-industrialise the Western world.

Those hoodwinked would have to include the Pentagon and Margaret Thatcher.

Michael Lind recently had an interesting column in Salon (Mythological politics), exploring the beliefs of the populist right, in particular its recent manifestation via the "tea party" movement in the US (occasionally referred to as the "tea baggers" by their detractors), noting that they are ideological descendants of liberty loving Britons of the 17th century.

American political culture was British before it was American. During the English civil war of the 17th century, two themes crystallized — and have influenced American public discourse to this day. One was the idea of the Ancient Constitution. The other was the idea of the True Religion.

Many British opponents of the Stuart monarchs claimed that they were defending an ancient, unwritten English constitution against corruption in the service of tyranny. Sometimes this ancient constitution was identified with the laws of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, and contrasted with the "Norman yoke" imposed on freedom-loving English people by William the Conqueror and his despotic successors after the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. As history, this was nonsense, but as political mythology this narrative had enormous appeal. History was viewed as a gradual decline into tyranny, a long fall following a golden age of English liberty in the distant past.

This myth of primordial English liberty rhymed neatly with radical Protestantism. According to dissenting Protestants, the true church was the earliest church. Christianity had been corrupted over time, and Reformation required a restoration of the early, pure practices and beliefs of the apostles.

Put the myths of the ancient constitution and the early church together, and you have a view of history as decline from an original state of perfection, in politics and also in religion. Innovation is equated with tyranny in politics and heresy in religion. Virtue consists of defending what is left of the old, more perfect system and, if possible, restoring the original government or church. Progress is redefined as regress — movement away from the wicked present toward the pure and uncorrupted past. ...

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. "King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen" becomes "Barack Obama is promoting socialism" — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It's hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

While the narrative expounded by the populists is frequently based on myth rather than reality, their charge that the west is being deindustrialised is partially true (as a result of globalisation) and the people who support these groups are mostly the people directly impacted by this.

As an aside, a lot of conspiracy theorists - from both the right and the left - often quote influential Canadian Maurice Strong (viewed as a prototypical member of the "New World Order" in tinfoil circles) as saying "Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?", though apparently this was a fictional scenario being described rather than an actual plan he wanted implemented.

Stuart Staniford has an interesting post (Chinese Labor Costs, Tea Partiers as True Believers) exploring the impact of low cost Chinese manufacturing on workers in the US and how this is likely to create the conditions necessary for mass movements (of the right or left, but given the current state of the US left these are much more likely to form on the right) as large numbers of workers find themselves in long term unemployment, with few prospects.

Tuesday evening, I was reading Don Peck's generally excellent cover piece, How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America in the March Atlantic. The piece lays out the social damage caused by extended unemployment. ... The entire thing is very well worth reading. I have intimate personal acquaintance with this issue - my Dad had an extended period of unemployment that began during the economic backwash from the 1973 oil shock, and I still bear a few psychic scars from that episode.

I was musing on this piece, and couldn't help thinking of the statistics in Chinese steel production I examined a few days ago. In particular, Peck's piece gives the example of "Errol", a young unemployed machinist ... US steel production has roughly halved since 2006, and so jobs for folks like Errol working with that steel are naturally going to be very hard to find. ...

Alright, so the federal government could continue to run a big deficit, fix a bunch of old infrastructure in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) and Errol might find a job in that effort for a while. But clearly, the US, with its strong political resistance to paying taxes, can only increase it's national debt up to a certain point, and so after a few years such a government program would have to cease (if indeed it were politically feasible even to start it). So that gets Errol to, say, his mid thirties as a much more experienced and capable machinist. Then what is he to do?

It seems to me that Errol has a much deeper problem: what is it that some US company can employ Errol to make that cannot be made much cheaper in China? And do not the data on Chinese steel production (above) and Chinese transportation and housing, make it clear that the Chinese have every intention of building industrial production capacity that completely dwarfs that of the US?

In search of data on comparative labor costs, I discovered the the US Bureau of Labor Statistics sent a couple of experienced labor statisticians to China to sort out the data situation there. The latest summary of their work is here, and the key graph is this one:



While Chinese wages are increasing, they clearly have an incredibly long way to go before they reach anything like Western levels. The current average for manufacturing wages in China is less than $1/hour. ...

But, and perhaps more importantly, I want to address a reaction I suspect many readers might have - "Oh, we've been dealing with Asian competition for decades now, yeah it's not good, yeah unemployment in Michigan is bad, but the sky hasn't fallen."

Indeed, this is true. However, I suggest that the problem with China is an order of magnitude larger than the earlier problem with Japan and Korea. Firstly, those countries have population of about 130 million (Japan) and 50 million (Korea). China has a population of 1.3 billion - ten times larger than Japan - and is determinedly trying to bring them all into the twentieth century. Secondly, as the labor cost graph higher up shows, Japanese manufacturing wages, for example, are about 80% of those in the US, while Chinese manufacturing wages are about 3%. It's going to take a very long while, or an unthinkably large correction in exchange rates, for Chinese wages to get anywhere close to those in the US.

You can see the effects of this in the data for US manufacturing employment. It peaked in 1980 and then gradually descended to the 2000 recession. But since then, as Chinese exports have ramped up, it's gone into a much more serious decline. It goes off a cliff in each recession, and it doesn't recover at all in between - in fact it continues to decline, only more slowly.

If we continue with our existing policies, it's very hard to see how this is going to change in the next decade or so (absent some internal collapse in China). As the Chinese figure out how to make cars, computers, furniture, etc, etc, to western quality standards, the entire industrial production capacity of the United States is going to get hollowed out. Manufacturing employment in the United States would appear to be headed towards zero, give or take some noise.

Let's not put too fine a point on this: guys like Errol are fucked.

In fact, the entire working class of the United States is fucked. Without manufacturing jobs, they are reduced to the small number of jobs installing and fixing the stuff that comes from China, and then low paying unskilled retail and service jobs. With large numbers of chronically unemployed, the folks who are employed will have no leverage whatsoever on pay and conditions. ...

It appears to me that the Tea Party movement, as disorganized and incoherent as it may currently be, places us on notice that conditions in the United States are now such as to support the beginnings of mass movements of the kind Hoffer is talking about. Such movements are not known for having good ideas for how to run society (note the failures and crimes of both Communism and Nazism when put into practice). In particular, they don't need to have ideas that make sense to the elite of the current society (such as abolishing the Federal Reserve). They just need to have ideas good enough to appeal to the unbearably disappointed and frustrated, the failed and the failing, and credibly promise to solve their emotional problems and give meaning to their lives.

It appears to me that with a working class that is now fundamentally and massively uncompetitive with China, a country with four times the population and wages a tiny fraction of ours, the United States is ripe for a lot more of this kind of thing. What ails us is not just the aftermath of a financial crisis, to be solved with a stimulus. Instead, if present trends continue, we face a national crisis of the first order which will play out over decades. What should our entire working class do now that will give their lives meaning? No quick fix is apparent.

While its arguable that lower wages will mean all manufacturing shifts to China (Germany and Japan have had some success at retaining manufacturing industries in spite of high local wages by concentrating on high quality products, for example), given present trends it does seem that the manufacturing base for the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries, along with much of western Europe, is in long term decline.

The US has had some success in shifting to a services and intellectual property based economy, however financial services have proved to be a not entirely reliable pillar of the economy and intellectual property is hard to protect and extract revenue from offshore (as Cory Doctorow noted in an interesting speech a few years ago).

As Stuart points out, the working class in these countries have little to gain from globalisation - while it may eventually result in a higher standard of living for everyone, it will take decades before labour costs equalise globally and the "rising tide raises all boats" effect could kick in. In the meantime elites seem to be prospering from the trend, so there will likely be a continuing increase in inequality and the resentment this causes.

We've seen populist movements have some limited political success in the past as a result of this. For example, the One Nation party which arose in Australia in the 1990's following the liberalisation of the economy by the Hawke and Keating governments - interestingly there has been some speculation ex-One Nation leader Pauline Hanson will become involved with the BNP in the UK (a right wing group that has shown an interest in using peak oil as a campaigning tool) now she has decided to leave Australia.

The US seems to be most at risk of seeing a revival of a populist mass movement (there seems less chance of a sudden revival of socialism there as a result of rising levels of joblessness, given the political left remains largely moribund outside of Latin America), with the last decade seeing revenge fantasies like the "Left Behind" series being lapped up by those in the working class who are being left behind and the tea partier / bagger movement being the latest sign that populism is on the rise.

Unemployment caused by globalisation and cheap Chinese labour is one reason, but there are a number of others :

1. The US is slowly losing the geopolitical dominance it has enjoyed since the end of the second world war. As George Kennan famously put it half a century ago:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. All of the Asiatic peoples are faced with the necessity for evolving new forms of life to conform to the impact of modern technology. This process of adaptation will also be long and violent. It is not only possible, but probable, that in the course of this process many peoples will fall, for varying periods, under the influence of Moscow, whose ideology has a greater lure for such peoples, and probably greater reality, than anything we could oppose to it. All this, too, is probably unavoidable; and we could not hope to combat it without the diversion of a far greater portion of our national effort than our people would ever willingly concede to such a purpose.

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and -- for the Far East -- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

2. This geopolitical dominance had enabled the US to exert a large degree of control over much of the world's oil supply (viewing the middle east as ‘the most strategically important area of the world’ and ‘…one of the greatest material prizes in world history’) and to become by far the largest consumer of it.



3. US control of oil is steadily slipping. While the Iraq war was viewed by many as a grab for the country's oil reserves, control has remained elusive, with the Iraqi government handing over rights to exploit a lot of large fields to oil companies from other countries (with the Asia Times putting it like this - "After at least US$2 trillion spent by Washington and arguably more than a million dead Iraqis, it has come to this: a pipe dream definitely buried this past weekend in Baghdad with round two of bids to exploit a number of vast and immensely profitable oil fields.")

4. As US economic pre-eminence fades, US consumers are going to find that they no longer get to consume the lions share of the oil that is being produced and their per capita consumption will steadily decline towards the global mean (meaning a huge shift in relative consumption in the graph shown earlier).

5. As oil becomes harder to extract and we reach a peak of production, consumers will be competing for supplies that are static or falling in volume and there is further pressure for average per capita oil consumption to shrink.

6. As the global population continues to rise towards the 9 billion mark there is again further pressure for average per capita oil consumption to shrink.

7. The US has a large population of war veterans who are likely traumatised by their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and facing a weak economy and poor employment prospects when they return home (especially those who are less skilled).

The combination of these factors means the average US consumer is going to find maintaining the lifestyle they are used to (particularly regarding effectively unlimited use of motor vehicle based transportation) impossible over the next decade or two, unless there is a large and sudden shift to electric transport and clean energy sources.

The stress that this transition will cause seems likely to amplify the appeal of populist politicians offering "simple" solutions (involving further military adventures abroad or draconian policies at home).

What can be done about this (to ensure a prosperous and peaceful future for all) remains an unanswered question, but Jeremy Rifkin has some interesting ideas in a recent article in New Scientist ("The third industrial revolution "), involving the "democratisation of energy".

What is the premise of The Empathic Civilization?

My sense is that we're nearing an endgame for the modern age. I think we had two singular events in the last 18 months that signal the end. First, in July 2008 the price of oil hit $147/barrel. Food riots broke out in 30 countries, the price of basic items shot up and purchasing power plummeted. That was the earthquake; the market crash 60 days later was the aftershock. It signaled the beginning of the endgame of a great industrial era based on fossil fuels. The second event, in December 2009, was the breakdown in Copenhagen, when world leaders tried to deal with our entropy problem and failed.

That's the context of the book. Why couldn't our world leaders anticipate or respond to the global meltdown of the industrial revolution? And why can't they deal with climate change when scientists have been telling us that it may be the greatest threat our species has ever faced? ...

In the book you argue that we can break the paradox by shifting from geopolitical consciousness to biosphere consciousness.

We need to implement reglobalization from the bottom-up in order to achieve a more sustainable global economy. Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That's why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren't thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation's self-interest.

What we need to do is attempt biosphere politics. Governing units are going to change--I think there's going to be a shift toward continentalization. The EU is a first attempt at organizing a new frame of reference across continents, but it's a transitional governing form. The Asian Union, African Union and South American Union are in their early stages. ...

What will the Third Industrial Revolution look like? When will it happen?

I think we're on the verge. I had the privilege to help design the European Union's Third Industrial Revolution economic stability game plan, which was endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007. What we noticed is that in the last 10 or 15 years we've had a very powerful communication revolution with the internet, and the key word is that it's distributed. What's beginning to happen now is that the distributed ICT [information and communication technologies] revolution is beginning to converge with a new energy regime: distributed renewable energy. When they do converge, it's likely to change consciousness once again.

Distributed ICT will organize distributed energies. Renewables like wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are found in some proportion everywhere, in people's backyards. As people begin to harvest these renewable energies they can share electricity peer-to-peer across an internet-like smart energy grid that extends across nations and even continents. We see buildings as the new power plants. Buildings are the number one source of C02 emmissions, but they might also be the solution if they can harness renewables to produce their own energy on site. People will also need new energy storage technologies like hydrogen. The EU has committed 8 billion Euros to hydrogen storage technologies. Those technologies will give us dependable distributed energy.

I founded the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, which is comprised of 100 leading companies from renewable energy to utilities to architectural firms. We're starting to lay out plans. ...

You said that people hear "empathy" and think "socialism". How does capitalism survive an empathic society?

Market capitalism will be transformed into "distributed capitalism". Just as the internet led to the democratization of information, the Third Industrial Revolution will lead to the democratization of energy. The required changes to infrastructure are going to create massive amounts of jobs and a whole new economy. But when you have peer-to-peer sharing of energy across an intelligent grid system, you no longer have the top-down, centralized economic system. Distributed energy requires distributed capitalism, and that relies on the opposite view of human nature than that of market capitalism. But the politics isn't right or left--its centralized, top-down versus collaborative commons. You don't hear people say, I'm going onto a social networking space because I'm a socialist--it's just a different frame of reference.

I'll close with a quote from Bucky Fuller, who foresaw many of these problems a long time ago and advocated a revolutionary approach to solving them. I should have the (long delayed) next installment of my series on Bucky ready in the near future.

We are in for the greatest revolution in history. If it's to pull the top down and it's bloody, all lose. If it is a design science revolution to elevate the bottom and all others as well to unprecedentedly new heights, all will live to dare spontaneously to speak and live and love the truth, strange though it often may seem.

Wired has an interesting tale about the "Georgia Guidestones", a mysterious artifact created in 1980 by an unknown group - American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse. With a bit more of an ominous spin this would have been good fodder for something like Rigorous Intuition in its heyday, with rumours that it was created by some Rosicrucian style group intent on reducing the human population and creating a New World Order. While there are some deep green groups (such as the Sea Shepherd crew) who, as the stones recommend, advocate cutting the population down to 500 million, I'm hoping that (if there really is a Rosicrucian conspiracy out there) Stewart Brand's view that 1970's style population fears were overblown (which I talk about in The Fat Man, The Population Bomb And The Green Revolution) prevails - and Brand strikes me as someone who would be a pretty good chance of being part of any reason based conspiracy if one did exist.

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like "Death to the new world order." This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones' history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don't understand at least as much as what they do.

The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet. ...

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun's yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (let these be guidestones to an age of reason) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

By early 1980, a bulldozer was scraping the Double 7 hilltop to bedrock, where five granite slabs serving as a foundation were laid out in a paddle-wheel design. A 100-foot-tall crane was used to lift the stones into place. Each of the outer rocks was 16 feet 4 inches high, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. The center column was the same (except only half the width), and the capstone measured 9 feet 8 inches long, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Covered with sheets of black plastic in preparation for an unveiling on the vernal equinox, the Guidestones towered over the cattle that continued to graze beneath it at the approach of winter's end. ...

But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature. ...

The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators" of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations.

Among them is an activist named Mark Dice, author of a book called The Resistance Manifesto. In 2005, Dice (who was using a pseudonym of his own—"John Conner"—appropriated from the Terminator franchise's main character) began to demand that the Guidestones be "smashed into a million pieces." He claims that the monument has "a deep Satanic origin," a stance that has earned him plenty of coverage, both in print and on the Web. According to Dice, Christian was a high-ranking member of "a Luciferian secret society" at the forefront of the New World Order. "The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process," Dice says, "and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves. The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it." ...

Dice, of course, is far from the only person with a theory about the Guidestones. Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature.

Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a "planetary chaos," Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. "They want to get the population down," Weidner says, "and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors."

The SMH has an article from the economics editor of The Guardian, calling for a green new deal / new world order - G20 must seize the opportunity for a Green New Deal. I don't think linking these two phrases is helpful.

The security clampdown will be the same. The press will gather in droves. The spin doctors will be in full flow, claiming victory for their respective governments. But in every other way the meeting that Gordon Brown will host on April 2 will be different from the last gathering of world leaders hosted by a British prime minister - Tony Blair's 2005 Gleneagles summit.

The world has changed irrevocably since the financial crisis began in 2007, grew last year and will probably result in 2009 being the first year the global economy has contracted since World War II. In Brown's view the era of laissez-faire is over. Although they disagree about the means, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel agree.

A new world order is not going to be shaped in one day, but next week's meeting can help chart the right course, creating the framework for reform at a national level. Here are the five big areas that the Group of 20 should be concentrating on:

One: It's time for a new economics. The financial crisis and the environmental crisis are one and the same: crises of excess. There will be no lasting recovery without recognising that the world needs to slow down. For central banks it means a wider range of instruments so they can lean against the wind. More generally, it involves adopting the precautionary principle of elevating the local above the global - and having the humility to accept that the G20 does not have all the answers.

Two: A Green New Deal. If Roosevelt's big idea for the Great Depression was public works, then it makes sense to use this crisis to start the long, hard process of making economies more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels. A combination of low interest rates and fiscal expansion is ideal - provided the investment is used productively rather than for speculation. That will involve two concepts that have been anathema during the heyday of laissez-faire: industrial policy and credit controls.

A Green New Deal is vital for the world. The US has only 4 per cent of the world's population, but is responsible for 25 per cent of global CO2 emissions. The problems of the big three car makers provide Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to send the gas guzzler to the scrapheap. Rebalancing the global economy means countries such as China must increase domestic demand; one way to do that would be through investment in greener energy.

Three: Reform the International Monetary Fund. One reason the big Asian creditor nations built up huge surpluses before the crash of 2007 was that they were badly scarred by the financial crisis a decade earlier and were determined never again to be at the mercy of the IMF. Its response - as it has always been since 1944 - was that countries seeing capital flight should be subject to austerity programs.

So, reforms must overhaul the fund - not just to beef up its surveillance role but to make it less dominated by developed nations (especially the US) and less driven by the dogmatic belief that free movement of capital is always a force for good. The fund's big shareholders should go back to Keynes's blueprint and accept that the burden of adjustment in crises should fall on both creditors and debtors.

It is a concern that IMF reform appears to be low on the G20 agenda, particularly as the weakening grip of the US over the global economy makes change easier. The era of the unipolar world dancing to the tune of the Washington consensus lasted a scant two decades between the collapse of communism and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Four: Make the global financial system more progressive. The humbling of Wall Street and the City of London has made them dependent on support from the taxpayer and opened up the prospect for reform. The most pressing need is for action against tax havens, not just because the money lost to national exchequers could be better used but because the big financial institutions can move offshore if threatened with tougher regulation. There seems to be greater G20 unanimity on tax havens than on any other issue, and the summit should insist on tax havens providing information to any government that asks for it. The G20 should also back a currency transaction tax - set low initially - that would provide the money to hit the United Nations millennium development goals.

Five: Tougher global regulation. Brown should forge ahead with his plans for an international college of supervisors to provide cross-border oversight of multinational banks. The G20 should start work on an international agreement to split retail and investment banks - an updated form of the Glass-Steagall reform in the US in the 1930s. The capital adequacy regime for banks should be toughened up; credit-rating agencies should be made statutorily independent of the companies they monitor; the more exotic forms of derivatives products should be subject to the same sort of licensing regime as new drugs.

We will know governments are really serious about reform when they link the pay of regulators to the pay of bankers.

Ummm - if you link the pay of regulators to that of bankers you have just incentivised the regulators to allow bubbles to be inflated in the same way the bankers are tempted to do so (in their case via bonuses and stock options).

Its really not a good idea (unless you are a regulator who wants to get rich quick).

While I'm doing off-topic maps, there is a great maps site called "Strange Maps" I check out from time to time. I liked this fake Nazi map of South America, mostly because of the FDR quote mentioning the New World Order. I never realised he was a tinfoil fan (though clearly the conspiracy theories were flowing thick and fast back then).

“Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it,” revealed US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Navy Day address to the nation, broadcast on 27 October 1941.

The map, however, was a fake. World War II revisionists (not to put too fine a point on it: those who would have preferred the Nazis to win) claim this proves that FDR was a war-mongerer, prepared to lie shamelessly in order to drag the US into war. But in this case, FDR might have been more mongered against than mongering – the map most probably was a British forgery, not an American one.

While FDR indeed was a steadfast advocate for a more active US role in the unfolding conflict, he was up against formidable internal resistance to entry into war. It was the British who had more to gain from American involvement, because they had everything to lose. In this phase of the conflict, Britain stood virtually alone, Nazi Germany controlling most of the European continent and kicking Soviet butt in the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The US would only be dragged into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, later that same year, on December 7.

For Britain, desperate times called for desperate measures, one of which would have been the forgery of this map, the point of which was to instill in the Americans the notion that the Nazis, if victorious in Europe, would not leave the American continent alone, thus challenging the Monroe Doctrine. The story behind the map, as (probably, but not provably) produced by the British intelligence services, went like this ...