Multiple Criteria Fermenting Decay

Multiple Criteria Fermenting Societies Decay and Brewing Revolutions, Stemming from Energy Suppression and Restricted Education

Education
The Unifying Principle supporting the majority of contemporary new energy claims evolved from the late 40's advanced energy/fuel/propulsion concepts which also brought subsequent advanced understanding of human nature, validating ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Wisdom. This Unifying Principle, the radius of curvature of all natural law quantified the radius to the energy differential of the speed of light, shedding insight to many of the MIS- INTERPRETATIONS of the Theory of Relativity, i.e., "nothing goes faster than the speed of light; as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC);" or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ . The Unifying Principle completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, permitting advances toward FTL (faster than light transportation), field dependent propulsion, polarization of gravity (anti-gravity), action at a distance, as well as "movement"/"transference", the appearance of motion, from one point to another without going through all points in between.

• In short, the quantity C is the measure of the radius of curvature of natural law. It is the factor which will enable us to determine precisely the degree of change in the curvature of one law which will be brought about by a specified change in the application of the others. It is the factor which will eventually tell us how to place our transport vehicles in either the positive or negative portion of the gravitational curve with respect to the earth or any other planet which we may choose to visit.
• When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point.
• As it is impossible to disconnect this scientific unifying principle for advanced fuel and propulsion systems from Human energy systems (same atoms/molecules/ comprised of energy) we find this scientific Unifying Principle begins to validate the roots of ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Principles. This poses a threat to the current Power Structure. However, suppression and denial of these fourth grade concepts overthrowing relativity delusions, found in StarSteps, does threaten all life in evolving, energy intensive and complex civilizations.
StarSteps
http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HED20090324&articleId=12880 .
Global Research, March 24, 2009
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.

MSN Search: Angry Americans
Whether you blame it on unemployment, lost homes, health care scares or other issues: America's psyche is showing signs of wear: Signs of the times: A key measure of people's confidence surprised experts by falling. And more Americans are calling these hotlines for help. The recession: It has led to increased violence worldwide, a study found. Some Americans, meanwhile, have become riled up over issues, including: Washington - *Gun rights: Sales have surged since President Barack Obama took office. (What's behind that?)
*The latest topic of debate: Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win. Health care *Town Halls: Meetings to discuss proposed health care reform turned hostile, with a bloody incident, out-of-control crowds and weapons.
*Congress: Rep. Joe Wilson's shout-out during President Barack Obama's speech incited a backlash, but his outburst had a silver lining. The economy *Housing: Foreclosures, triggered in part by the subprime mortgage crisis, turned homeowners into protesters. *Bailouts: Companies' billion-dollar bailouts, courtesy of the American taxpayer, also led to protests. Some executives took bonuses, earning them a public scolding.

NYT October 17, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/business/economy/17wall.html?em
Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
Even as the economy continues to struggle, much of Wall Street is minting money — and looking forward again to hefty bonuses.
Many Americans wonder how this can possibly be. How can some banks be prospering so soon after a financial collapse, even as legions of people worry about losing their jobs and their homes?
It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system — reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions’ debts — helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.
Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than in the ho-hum business of lending people money. They also are profiting by taking risks that weaker rivals are unable or unwilling to shoulder — a benefit of less competition after the failure of some investment firms last year.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/WireStory?id=8823837&page=2
U.N.: World Hunger Has Been Increasing for a Decade With 1B people undernourished, UN says declining aid has been increasing hunger for a decade
By ARIEL DAVID
The Associated Press

ROME
Even before the economic crisis pushed the ranks of the world's hungry to a record 1 billion, declining aid and investment in agriculture had been steadily increasing the number of undernourished people for more than a decade, a U.N. food agency said Wednesday.
Unless these trends are reversed, ambitious goals set by the international community to slash the number of hungry people by 2015 will not be met, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in a report.
After gains in the fight against hunger in the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of undernourished people started climbing in 1995, reaching 1.02 billion this year under the combined effect of high food prices and the global financial meltdown, the agency said. The figure topped the 1 billion mark in June, and was 963 million a year ago.
The blame for the long-term trend rests largely on the reduced share of aid and private investments earmarked for agriculture over recent years, the Rome-based agency said in its State of Food Insecurity report for 2009.

Impacts of Establishing a Breakthrough New Energy Economy

Another viewing point from Brian O’Leary, Author, Scientist, Former Astronaut, International Speaker. http://www.brianoleary.info/Impacts.html

“Considering the urgency of the global environmental crisis and the fact that black projects may be already addressing the questions of free energy and anti-gravity propulsion, we the people need to participate in the process of deciding our collective future instead of remaining in ignorance. Regardless of governmental policies, we believe it is likely that someone, somewhere will develop breakthrough clean energy technologies for public use. It would seem prudent for the public and the U.S. DOE to become educated about the true options that lie ahead. Do we have the courage to embrace a new energy future? Can we make the necessary political, economic and social adjustments to create a sustainable future for humankind?”

Freedom Times - The Unifying Principle supporting the majority of contemporary new energy claims evolved from the late 40's advanced energy/fuel/propulsion concepts which also brought subsequent advanced understanding of human nature, validating ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Wisdom. This Unifying Principle, the radius of curvature of all natural law quantified the radius to the energy differential of the speed of light, shedding insight to many of the MIS- INTERPRETATIONS of the Theory of Relativity, i.e., "nothing goes faster than the speed of light; as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC);" or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net . The Unifying Principle completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, permitting advances toward FTL (faster than light transportation), field dependent propulsion, polarization of gravity (anti-gravity), action at a distance, as well as "movement"/"transference", the appearance of motion, from one point to another without going through all points in between.

• In short, the quantity C is the measure of the radius of curvature of natural law. It is the factor which will enable us to determine precisely the degree of change in the curvature of one law which will be brought about by a specified change in the application of the others. It is the factor which will eventually tell us how to place our transport vehicles in either the positive or negative portion of the gravitational curve with respect to the earth or any other planet which we may choose to visit.
• When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point.
• As it is impossible to disconnect this scientific unifying principle for advanced fuel and propulsion systems from Human energy systems (same atoms/molecules/ comprised of energy) we find this scientific Unifying Principle begins to validate the roots of ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Principles. This poses a threat to the current Power Structure. However, suppression and denial of these fourth grade concepts overthrowing relativity delusions, found in StarSteps, does threaten all life in evolving, energy intensive and complex civilizations.
StarSteps
http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

Impacts of Establishing a Breakthrough New Energy Economy
Brian O’Leary and Wade Frazier, http://www.brianoleary.info/ and http://www.ahealedplanet.net/ ,
June 1, 2009, in reply to the U.S. DOE/DARPA-E New Energy Grant solicitation, control number 25A5231.

“The world is at a crossroads. We can no longer afford to ignore the human impact of climate change. This is a call to the negotiators to come to the most ambitious agreement ever negotiated or to continue to accept mass starvation, mass sickness and mass migration on an ever growing scale.”
--Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations,
Global Humanitarian Forum, May 29, 2009

“From now on, America’s top priority in the energy field must be to explore all potential components of this new energy future and move swiftly to develop those with the greatest promise.”
--Prof. Michael T. Klare, Foreign Policy in Focus, June 28, 2008

“The resistance to a new idea increases as the square of its importance.”
--Bertrand Russell

Abstract
There is evidence that breakthrough clean energy proofs-of-concepts could lead to a new energy economy that would provide a sustainable future for all of humanity and nature. Because this possibility has been ignored by mainstream science, due to limiting scientific assumptions, and suppressed by an energy industry vested in unsustainable practices, it has been difficult for the public to recognize the enormous potential of new energy sources or to understand how they could be researched, developed, and implemented in practical ways. We propose assembling an advisory group to the DOE to make recommendations about R&D programs and to suggest a realistic transition to a new energy economy. We also propose polling the public about their attitudes toward a future of breakthrough clean energy. This overall effort, including the activities of the advisory group, would be largely voluntary—in harmony with the nature of “free” energy.

Introduction
Over the past century, the world has witnessed hundreds of demonstrations of a variety of breakthrough clean energy concepts, whether it be energy from the vacuum (“zero-point”), cold fusion, or special hydrogen and water chemistries in the presence of catalysts. Any one of these concepts, if properly developed, promises a world of clean energy abundance. Yet mainstream scientists, corporations, governments and media have ignored and suppressed these proofs-of-concepts before they’ve been put to practical use. Most decision-makers and public spokespeople deny the very possibility that a breakthrough clean, cheap and decentralized energy culture could ever evolve, because this would appear to violate existing scientific principles. But we have witnessed many demonstrations of the viability of these possibilities. We believe that many of these concepts are viable if the required R&D and deployment were carried out under public sponsorship. If responsibly managed, the adoption of these concepts could lead civilization to a culture of abundance.

If we continue on the path of conventional energy sources, we face a dismal future with carbon and air pollution, Peak Oil and the dangers of nuclear power. Our analysis shows that no energy alternative from traditional categories (e.g., solar, wind and biofuels) could replace fossil fuels and nuclear power without enormous capital, materials, land and environmental consequences. We believe that only the new energy technologies can provide us with a sustainable future. Even though there is widespread skepticism about new energy at the present time, we believe that, sooner or later, these transformative technologies are likely to be developed, even though they will be disruptive to the existing energy industry.

A number of questions come to mind: should the DOE establish an R&D laboratory for all clean renewable energy concepts, leaving no stone unturned in its search? If a breakthrough in clean, cheap, decentralized energy were to find practical application, should these technologies be publicly or privately owned? How should their development and use be regulated? How can we ensure that the transition to a new energy culture will be as smooth as possible? How can the public be best served? We examine these questions in this concept paper and in the proposed work.

The Big Picture
It is difficult to overstate the enormous effect that abundantly available, pollution-free energy would have on humanity and the planet. The monetary economy does not reflect real costs of production, but largely only puts a price on human labor. In reality, energy powers the economy and always has, no matter what price the market may attach to various energy sources. Each of the epochal changes in the human journey, from the time that humanity’s ancestors left the tree and lost their opposable toes, has been due to exploiting new energy sources. Advances in stone tools and group hunting tactics allowed humans to become super-predators approximately 40,000 years ago, and allowed humanity’s range to eventually encompass all continents except Antarctica. Approximately 10,000 years ago, probably inspired by the gradual decrease in easily hunted meat, the Domestication Revolution involved the first locally stable energy sources–domesticated plants and animals–and civilization thereby developed. The next epochal revolution, the Industrial Revolution, exploited the energy of hydrocarbons extracted from below the earth’s surface. It is estimated that in today’s advanced industrial societies, more than 10 times the gross energy per capita is consumed than in the advanced agricultural societies, and at more than twice the efficiency of conversion into useful work, so that citizens in today’s advanced industrial economies benefit from nearly 30 times the energy output than their agricultural ancestors.

The dynamics arising from the energy paradigms for those societies have had profound, and not always obvious, features. Before the Domestication Revolution, the only possessions that people could enjoy were what they could carry in their arms or on their backs. With the local and stable energy sources that domesticating plants and animals provided, people began constructing robust shelters, professions began, and economic, political and social hierarchies developed. These hierarchies are an inevitable result when energy scarcity defines a society, including modern societies. Early civilization saw humanity’s first potentates and slaves, and the elites of virtually all civilizations have engaged in conspicuous consumption as a mark of their status. Slavery and other forced labor institutions flourished until the Industrial Revolution. With the rise of machines and the energy to run them, forced labor was no longer economically necessary or feasible, especially considering the innate desire in all humans for freedom. It is also no coincidence that women became liberated during the industrialized era. In very real terms, energy equals choice, which is another way of saying that energy equals freedom. In today’s world, societies that have the highest per-capita energy consumption generally have the greatest freedoms. If a society loses its energy sources, it will lose its freedoms. Conversely, if an abundant energy source becomes available for Americans and all humanity, an unprecedented epoch of the human journey will be possible.

Americans consume about 80 times the energy that goes into their diets. Only about a billion people on earth today live in industrialized civilizations that consume large amounts of energy. There is not enough hydrocarbon energy available on the planet to provide all of humanity an industrialized lifestyle, and it is clear that the hydrocarbon age is nearing its conclusion. Whether Peak Oil becomes a reality for humanity this year or in a hundred years is a relatively fine distinction in the broad perspective of the human journey. War, air pollution, and the steeply hierarchical economic, political and social systems of humanity are all, at their root, based on energy scarcity. If all humans had ready access to a thousand times their dietary calories, or ten thousand, and the production of this energy had no environmental impact, earth and humanity would be transformed in ways we can only imagine:

1. Almost all air pollution would immediately cease.
2. There would be no mining waste, because all elements are useful; it is primarily due to energy scarcity that mining produces waste.
3. All materials could be indefinitely recycled and made good as new, in cradle-to-cradle fashion (so mining would come to an end soon, anyway); all water pollution would also cease, and all of humanity would drink purified water.
4. Because wars are primarily based on disputes over control of resources, the motivation behind wars would largely disappear when abundant energy ensured abundant resources for everyone.
5. Food could be raised in indoor environments that would not impact natural environments, and the biosphere could begin to heal.
6. A great deal of effort in industrialized societies is involved in the exchange aspect of economics, which would be simplified in a free energy culture.
7. The steep economic, political and social stratification of society would be reduced.
8. The vacuum of space (sometimes called the ether) is full of potential energy that can be practically used not only to tap energy but to create novelty in the material world.

This list may seem utopian to some, but we are convinced that it is all quite feasible if humanity were to enjoy abundant, decentralized, non-polluting energy. Whether or not these potential changes are realistic, however, it is clear that there will be great benefits to society with free energy. The potential benefits are so great, and the dangers of relying on traditional energies sources are so overwhelming, that it is incumbent on us to proceed in the event the research does prove out a new energy science and the mainstream skeptics are wrong (as history has so often shown).

Proposal
We propose that (1) we study the public’s attitudes toward a new energy future for humankind, and (2) we establish a voluntary advisory group of independent and knowledgeable citizens to make recommendations about a DOE R&D program and devise scenarios for the transitions to and implementation of new energy. Included would be polls of attitudes toward the basic hypothetical question: if one or more breakthrough energy technologies were to prove to be viable, what safeguards do we need to implement to prevent the abuse of these technologies?

The two of us have thought through these questions for a long time in collaboration with numerous colleagues. We would convene an advisory group that would periodically report to the DOE with its recommendations.

Personnel
We each have had decades of experience in the new energy field in many capacities: faculty research and teaching at leading universities, advisory positions to the U.S. Government, business development, writing and experience in bringing alternative energy technologies to the marketplace. We have witnessed several demonstrations of proofs-of-concepts of breakthrough new energy sources in laboratories throughout the world. We have both written extensively about the cultural impact of various scenarios for creating a new energy future for humanity. The proposed study will be a continuation of those efforts.

Our request for only $1, in addition to travel expenses, reflects the principle that, in an abundance paradigm, humanity will begin to realize that some things should be our birthright: clean water, food, shelter, clothing, and energy. We cannot continue to pollute the biosphere with dirty energy as we have in the past. Several environmental tipping points are coming closer and may have already been exceeded. Central to our very survival must be a revolution in our approach to energy.

Further Obstacles and Opportunities
Not only is the scientific credibility of new energy questioned by many traditional scientists. Also, the prospect of taking such a quantum leap is likely to disrupt the way we do business in the world. We believe that these energy technologies have been suppressed in part because of the perception that existing economic and power structures would be devastated by a new energy economy. In fact, there are many credible, extant testimonies by insiders and others that such disruptive technologies have already been extensively developed by covert interests, both governmental and private, and have been kept from public awareness because of their threat to the world’s power structure.

Considering the urgency of the global environmental crisis and the fact that black projects may be already addressing the questions of free energy and anti-gravity propulsion, we the people need to participate in the process of deciding our collective future instead of remaining in ignorance. Regardless of governmental policies, we believe it is likely that someone, somewhere will develop breakthrough clean energy technologies for public use. It would seem prudent for the public and the U.S. DoE to become educated about the true options that lie ahead. Do we have the courage to embrace a new energy future? Can we make the necessary political, economic and social adjustments to create a sustainable future for humankind?

Conclusion
In the final analysis, we are going to have to learn how to live in balance with nature. We are poised on the brink of our next evolutionary step. Key to understanding all this is our choice about what kind of energy culture could benefit us most. For our own survival, now is the time to have that discussion. If we do not take this step, and learn to live in harmony with nature, we face extinction. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to examine all candidate energy sources that could fulfill the mandate for a sustainable civilization.


Earlier in 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) solicited concept papers for funding innovative energy technology research and development. Some of us who have followed free energy developments were cautiously optimistic about these developments, because, up until now, the DoE has been in denial about anything beyond solar and wind, and even spends a pittance on the traditional renewables compared to the untold hundreds of billions of dollars they spend on research on fossil fuel technologies (hydrocarbons) and nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

So my colleague Wade Frazier (www.ahealedplanet.net) and I decided to draft a concept paper to the DoE. Our idea was really quite simple: (1) poll the American public about their attitudes toward the POSSIBILITY of a breakthrough decentralized clean energy economy and making the transition from our current polluting multitrillion dollar energy mix as painless as possible; and (2) advising the DoE about the most promising R&D options, and safe implementation and transition strategies, free of vested interests. Part of our philosophy in designing this task was that, by its very nature, if our future energy were to be truly "free," then our own effort should be of minimal cost for the taxpayer. We therefore asked for $1 (plus occasional travel, as needed) to support our proposed task.

Needless to say, the proposal was turned down, but we can only hope that some technologies will be supported by the DoE under this program. Or is this effort just another attempt to cover up the most promising technologies? Time will tell.

Common Sense & Global Emergency: Act Now

Preamble
WHEREAS the global economic crisis; worldwide climate change; on-going wars, terrorism and nuclear brinksmanship; peaking or exhaustion of non-renewable natural resources; approaching water crisis; annual net increase in world population by approximately 80 million; increase in world poverty, homelessness and famine in absolute numbers; growing gap between wealthy and poor both within and between nations; and other interrelated macro-trends, provides growing and indisputable evidence that the world today is fundamentally unsustainable and that humanity is rapidly moving to the breakdown of currently operative societal and ecological systems.
AND WHEREAS notwithstanding the global-scale crises facing the human community, the thinking and actions of the majority of political and business leaders remain fixed - on the short-term rather than the long-term; on national rather than global priorities; on self- interest rather than community interest; on confrontation and militarization rather than cooperation and dialogue; on the values and consciousness of the 19th century rather than the 21st century; on maintaining the status quo of 'business as usual' rather than shifting to urgently needed new economic, energy and societal systems - locally, nationally and internationally.
THEREFORE in awareness of the growing global crises and the on-going lack of needed national and world leadership in the mainstream of politics and business, we hereby issue this urgent call for action, as a “State of Global Emergency Declaration", on behalf of and for the benefit of all the People of the World.

The horrors a suppressed, broken science will bring are unimaginable: For the greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking to write (2007) “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion”, (or delusion), regarding the original, infantile interpretation of E=MC2 still believed today, spells umbrellas for the earth, a global warming solution, and corn for Energy Innovation. When the parameters of freedom and survival disappear, so do people and life. ..........repeating from blog "Traveling at Warp Speed" http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-travel-at-warp-speed.html - how could any intelligent species sit for 100 years upon such delusional concepts of: "as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC)," or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ This concept completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, opening the doors to the unified field theory.

http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/declaration/link.html

State of Global Emergency
Declaration (Draft)
Prepared by Ervin Laszlo and David Woolfson for the Club of Budapest

It is the mission of the Club of Budapest to catalyze effective and timely change by calling attention to the dangers as well as the opportunities that confront the human community. It now issues an urgent call for action in view of the state of global emergency that arose on this planet. This is a global crisis, and it harbors both grave dangers and unique opportunities. We must recognize it and take action. A purely perceived crisis is dangerous: it triggers precipitate action in the face of a situation that does not call for it. But an unrecognized crisis is just as or even more dangerous, for it fails to catalyze effective action in a situation that does call for it. With The Declaration on the State of Global Emergency, to be adopted in the framework of a Global Emergency Consultation in 2009, The Club of Budapest calls attention to the reality of the crisis, and invites all responsible people and organizations to endorse the present draft, so a critical mass in the human community would muster the consciousness, the creativity, and the will to take action to cope with it.
Preamble
WHEREAS the global economic crisis; worldwide climate change; on-going wars, terrorism and nuclear brinksmanship; peaking or exhaustion of non-renewable natural resources; approaching water crisis; annual net increase in world population by approximately 80 million; increase in world poverty, homelessness and famine in absolute numbers; growing gap between wealthy and poor both within and between nations; and other interrelated macro-trends, provides growing and indisputable evidence that the world today is fundamentally unsustainable and that humanity is rapidly moving to the breakdown of currently operative societal and ecological systems.
AND WHEREAS notwithstanding the global-scale crises facing the human community, the thinking and actions of the majority of political and business leaders remain fixed - on the short-term rather than the long-term; on national rather than global priorities; on self- interest rather than community interest; on confrontation and militarization rather than cooperation and dialogue; on the values and consciousness of the 19th century rather than the 21st century; on maintaining the status quo of 'business as usual' rather than shifting to urgently needed new economic, energy and societal systems - locally, nationally and internationally.
THEREFORE in awareness of the growing global crises and the on-going lack of needed national and world leadership in the mainstream of politics and business, we hereby issue this urgent call for action, as a “State of Global Emergency Declaration", on behalf of and for the benefit of all the People of the World.
The Global Situation
The numerous global crises before humanity today affect every person and society. If we continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner, however, due to runaway global warming or other ecocatastrophes, and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious, ethnic or geopolitical conflicts or access to diminishing natural resources.
The macro-trends driving these global threats and challenges have been apparent for decades and are now building toward a threshold of irreversibility. The scientific modeling of complex systems shows that when systems reach a state of critical instability, they either break down to their components or break through to a higher order of integral functioning. At these “points of no return” maintaining the status quo, or returning to a previous mode of organization and functioning, are not a feasible option.
Time-estimates of when the “point of no return” will be reached for the global system of humanity have shrunk from the end of the century to mid-century, then to the next twenty years, and recently to the next five to twenty years. For example, it was predicted that the Earth’s average temperarure will increase by about 3° Celsius by the year 2100, then it was said that this level of increase will come about by the middle of the century, and lately that it could possibly occur within a decade. The figure for overall warming has been increased from 3° C to 6° C or higher. Global warming of 3° C would cause serious disruptions to human activity, while a 6° C rise would be a ‘global breakdown’ making most of the planet unsuitable for human life.
Such predictions, however, take only one trend into consideration: global warming; water availability; food production; poverty; population pressure; air pollution, etc. This approach fails to consider the impacts of the interconnection of the macro-trends as well as the feedback loops within them. When one trend reaches a critical point its impact on other trends can be very significant. For example, if global warming creates prolonged drought in some areas and coastal flooding in others, starving and homeless masses will flood less hard-hit regions and create social and economic upheavals there with critical food and water shortages.
The acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts among them indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for pulling out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a more peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no more than four to five years from the end of 2008. This is close in time to the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world.
The period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the end of the known world, although the more optimistic intepretations speak of a new world taking the place of the old.
While the majority of the world’s people have yet to recognize the possibility of a total global-scale breakdown, millions of forward-thinking groups and individuals have been actively addressing these collective threats and challenges for many years. This “waking up” is a positive sign of the vitality of the human spirit and its ability to respond to the dangers that face humanity with flexibility and creativity. This response must be furthered and facilitated in all appropriate ways as the scale and urgency of the required transformation is far greater than the scope of current efforts. It will be a case of ‘too little, too late’ unless the human community as a whole moves quickly to address the threatening macro-trends before they become irreversible.
This is now the top planetary priority. Failure to implement a worldwide shift in the window of time available to us will almost certainly lead to the breakdown of our civilization and possibly to the demise of our species. We acknowledge the real possibility that a child born today could witness the final chapter of modern man’s 200,000 year existence on this planet.
The Way Forward
If humanity is not to perish, as other species have that failed to respond to changing conditions, we must face and cope with the unintended consequences of the narrow short-term thinking that has led to today’s unsustainable global situation. No ‘quick fix’ or ‘miracle technology’ will save us from the consequences of the erroneous values and actions of the past. Only by engaging the human spirit in all its creativity and potential wisdom can we give birth to the necessary new thinking and actions.
The currently dominant mode of thinking cannot be maintained any longer. We must overcome the societal inertia generated by the powerful self-destructive remnants of bygone eras in order to prepare in each community, region and nation for systemic disruptions and possible collapses. We must radically reconsider our view of the world and re-structure its principal operative systems: energy, economics, governance, transportation, food, resource use and distribution, among others. We must act to extend the time available to us before it becomes too late to avoid breakdown on a global scale.
Every crisis harbors within it the opportunity for change and transformation. The ideas and designs for the needed new systems, structures and technologies already exist. Today we are rediscovering essential elements of the wisdom inherent in the world’s great cultural traditions and making important scientific discoveries regarding the nature of reality, our connections to each other and to nature. At the same time we are developing alternative energy sources, sustainable technologies, global communications and information flows, biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other technologies capable of paving the way toward global sustainability for human communities and the environment.
Our new thinking and new tools can accelerate the emergence of a sustainable world in sufficient time to avoid the ‘worst case’ scenarios - if we act now. Time is short and the task unprecedented. Effective and feasible solutions to the present global emergency must be brought to the attention of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to motivate urgent and effective action by all aware and responsible global citizens. Widespread communication and collaboration amongst people, nations, cultures, religions, societal sectors, professions, associations, networks, organizations, and other groups, is essential to ensure humanity’s survival on this planet.
The new Club of Budapest report WORLDSHIFT 2012: The Handbook of Timely Change advances a feasible whole-systems concept for the urgently needed epochal shift. The concept is ‘Worldshift - a worldwide shift from a path of unsustainability, conflict and confrontation to a path toward global sustainability, wellbeing and peace.’ The Report’s proposals for achieving this Worldshift, together with the proposals of the Declaration’s signatories, form an integral part of this document.
ACCORDINGLY, WE HEREBY ISSUE THIS URGENT CALL to all the People and Peoples of the World to declare their awareness of the state of global emergency and their firm commitment to join together to carry out real and meaningful change in all sectors of society (education, governance, economy, media, culture, technology) and at all levels (local, national, and global) for the common good of all people, all societies, and all life on Earth.
Key recommendations of the Worldshift 2012 report are listed in Annex 1 below.
WE HEREBY ISSUE AN URGENT CALL to all the People and Peoples of the World to declare their awareness of the state of global emergency and their firm commitment to join together to carry out real and meaningful change in all sectors of society (education, governance, economy, media, culture, technology) and at all levels (local, national, and global) for the common good of all people and all societies, and all life on Earth.
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The Age of Stupid

The world in which the Archivist lives is the clearly visible destination of present - 'business as usual' (BAU) - policies regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Whether we get there in 2055 or 2075, we don't need to do anything different from what we are doing today to arrive in the terrifying future shown in our film.

THE AGE OF STUPID

THE AGE OF STUPID

THE AGE OF STUPID

http://www.ageofstupid.net/the_film
The Age Of Stupid - The film

Freedom Times Priority addon:The horrors a suppressed, broken science will bring are unimaginable: For the greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking to write (2007) “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion”, (or delusion), regarding the original, infantile interpretation of E=MC2 still believed today, spells umbrellas for the earth, a global warming solution, and corn for Energy Innovation. When the parameters of freedom and survival disappear, so do people and life. ..........repeating from blog "Traveling at Warp Speed" http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-travel-at-warp-speed.html - how could any intelligent species sit for 100 years upon such delusional concepts of: "as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC)," or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/This concept completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, opening the doors to the unified field theory.

http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/declaration/link.html

Preamble
WHEREAS the global economic crisis; worldwide climate change; on-going wars, terrorism and nuclear brinksmanship; peaking or exhaustion of non-renewable natural resources; approaching water crisis; annual net increase in world population by approximately 80 million; increase in world poverty, homelessness and famine in absolute numbers; growing gap between wealthy and poor both within and between nations; and other interrelated macro-trends, provides growing and indisputable evidence that the world today is fundamentally unsustainable and that humanity is rapidly moving to the breakdown of currently operative societal and ecological systems.
AND WHEREAS notwithstanding the global-scale crises facing the human community, the thinking and actions of the majority of political and business leaders remain fixed - on the short-term rather than the long-term; on national rather than global priorities; on self- interest rather than community interest; on confrontation and militarization rather than cooperation and dialogue; on the values and consciousness of the 19th century rather than the 21st century; on maintaining the status quo of 'business as usual' rather than shifting to urgently needed new economic, energy and societal systems - locally, nationally and internationally.
THEREFORE in awareness of the growing global crises and the on-going lack of needed national and world leadership in the mainstream of politics and business, we hereby issue this urgent call for action, as a “State of Global Emergency Declaration", on behalf of and for the benefit of all the People of the World.
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The Age Of Stupid

"The climate science in The Age Of Stupid is based on that of the international climate research community including the Met Office Hadley Centre, as assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and accepted by the world's governments.
While some scenarios depicted are at the extreme end of the range of possibilities within the timeframe of the movie, they are nevertheless physically plausible and illustrate the real risks posed by unmitigated climate change.
The science of the Met Office Hadley Centre supports the view that rapid and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions must begin within the next few years if there is to be a reasonable chance of avoiding a 2-degree rise in global temperature."
Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts, Met Office Hadley Centre
The frightening vision of the near future depicted in The Age of Stupid is not science fiction.
The world in which the Archivist lives is the clearly visible destination of present - 'business as usual' (BAU) - policies regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Whether we get there in 2055 or 2075, we don't need to do anything different from what we are doing today to arrive in the terrifying future shown in our film.
We worked closely with respected climate expert Mark Lynas to ensure that all of the scenarios shown in Stupid represent a credible view of the future which is drawn from mainstream peer-reviewed climate science.
The following text is Mark's brief explanation of the scientific basis for the central thesis of the film. (You can download the Met Office's full response to the science of Stupid at the bottom of this page, if you want a totally objective view).
The scientific basis of "The Age of Stupid"
10th March 2009
By Mark Lynas
- Author of "High Tide" and "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet", both published by Harper Collins and translated into more than a dozen languages
- Winner of the 2008 Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book ("Six Degrees")
- Climate change supervisor on the film's production, 2002->2008
_____________________________________________________________________
The opening text card of Spanner Films' new film, The Age of Stupid, makes the claim that the film is based on "mainstream science predictions". This is more than just a rhetorical device to make the film seem realistic: we mean it. This is not The Day After Tomorrow 2, a cinema spectacular featuring climatic events which are so unrealistic that they contravene the laws of physics. All the science in the film is based on peer-reviewed papers, together with the latest predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the world's biggest-ever consortium of scientists.
The bottom line is that the mainstream scientific predictions about what will happen in the next few decades are so frightening that we didn't need to exaggerate for dramatic effect. Just this week (11 March), scientists meeting at a climate change congress in Copenhagen revealed that sea level rise is still accelerating, that a temperature rise of two degrees is now very difficult to avoid, and that the seas are already more acidic than for half a million years due to carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. How much more warning do we need?
The film is set in 2055, a little less than half a century on from today. Pete Postlethwaite plays a man living alone in a devastated future, looking back at our world of today and asking why we didn't save ourselves when we still had time. His character is not the last survivor, as is often misquoted: groups of individuals are seen in the devastated scenes preceding Pete's introduction and the camera pans past a large, populated refugee camp. Many people are left alive, but there has clearly been a collapse in both the human population and the structures of civilization we know today.
In the world depicted in the film, the inhabitants are suffering the results of all the cumulative emissions that we have already put into the atmosphere (between the start of the industrial revolution in1850 and today, 2009), plus additional emissions which will have been added over the future decades - during which, according to the conceit of the film, humanity continued with its business-as-usual fossil fuel use and did not make dramatic emission reductions. This conceit is, again, not a work of our scriptwriters’ feverish imaginations, but is currently considered the most likely scenario: according to the International Energy Agency's standard forecast, emissions will be 45% higher than today as early as 2030[1]. (In the language of the IPCC SRES scenarios, for the policy wonks and modellers out there, we're talking about somewhere between A1FI and A2[2].)
Over the last decade or so, the rate of emissions increase has nearly tripled. We are currently on, or a little above, (depending on whose figures you use) the IPCC's worst-case emissions scenario - here, today, in the real world[3]. The film is pessimistic in the sense that it examines in imaginary hindsight from the vantage point of 2055 why humanity failed to reduce its emissions - but, more than fifteen years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed, we should already be asking this question. From a policy-as-usual perspective, it is a reasonable supposition that we will probably keep on failing. (This is not to suggest fatalism or denial: the film is a clear cautionary tale, and one which is already backed up by a campaigning effort aimed at inspiring its viewers to become climate activists: 'Not Stupid', www.notstupid.org)
So taking this high-emissions future trajectory, what do climate models suggest? We took a temperature estimate of just over 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2055, well within the standard range of the IPCC models[4]. (Note that today’s temperature is already 0.8°C above the pre-industrial ‘natural’ climate[5].) The picture is complicated because we are talking about transient climate change here, not a steady state: a world experiencing more than two degrees of warming by mid-century may well be on course for four or more degrees by 2100[6].
Given that the temperature change is realistic, how realistic are the impacts portrayed resulting from it? The opening sequence may raise some eyebrows: London is flooded and silent, the Sydney Opera House is shown against a backdrop of raging flames, the Matterhorn in Switzerland is denuded of snow, and Las Vegas is buried in shifting desert sands. Surely these are all exaggerations? Sorry, they're not.
1. London flooded: As is clearly stated in the film by one of our future newsreaders (in the sequence of dates counting up from 2007 to 2055), "London is underwater again as last night's 30 foot storm surge overcame the Thames Barrier...". So we are not suggesting sea level rise of over a metre by mid-century: that would indeed be unrealistic. (The latest science suggests that anything above 2 metres by 2100 is physically implausible given the likely response times of ice sheets to additional climate forcing[7].) London has been hit by a double-whammy of a storm surge, which has overwhelmed its defences, - on top of 40cm or so of additional sea level rise. While most of the capital remains above water, the areas seen - low-lying and close to the Thames (Westminster, the City, Canary Wharf) - are indeed vulnerable.
2. Alps melted. It is certainly realistic to expect even the highest Alpine peaks to be largely denuded of snow and ice by the 2055 date[8].
3. Australia on fire. Sadly, these images are not as shocking as when we made them eight months ago, because of the terrible fires which have recently destroyed thousands of acres and killed over 200 people in south Australia. Similarly, when today’s Australia is already facing severe drought and water shortages - and where forest fires already threaten major cities in bad years - an out-of-control blaze could well be laying waste to Sydney half a century in the future[9].
4. Las Vegas abandoned. Water shortage problems will also realistically affect the arid US west, where the Colorado river (which provides much of Las Vegas's water supply) is already over-stretched, and will lose much of its seasonal flow as rising temperatures reduce snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains[10].
5, 6. India overheated, Arctic melted. But what about the Arctic refugee camps? The vultures pecking at bodies outside the Taj Mahal? Will human civilisation really collapse so easily? Who knows. As the banking meltdown is proving, everything seems hunky-dory until it starts to go wrong - and then apparently resilient human social systems can collapse with alarming speed. The ecological impacts underlying the film's end-of-the-world scenario are really just the underlying drivers of social collapse - and how these things will really unfold is always largely unpredictable. It is much easier to predict physical planetary change than the human social response to it - which is why climate models have largely been proven right by history, whilst economic models have almost always been proven wrong.
Suffice to say that the social collapse scenario is realistic enough to be being taken seriously by the military in both America and other countries[11]. One of the reasons why Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was in acknowledgement of the fact that if efforts to reduce climate-changing emissions fail, global warming will be one of the main drivers of human conflict in decades ahead as resources dwindle and competition increases. The Age of Stupid looks at precisely this world - where efforts to reduce emissions have failed, temperatures are soaring, and humans are battling it out for the scraps of civilisation.
We should not take this analysis too far, however. The Age of Stupid is a creative, artistic work, presenting an imaginary future. It is not a filmed version of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. We expect scientists and everyone else who watches it to have different reactions. Some may love it, and be moved by it; others may hate it and refuse to accept its lessons. All we ask is that you do not dismiss it - and thereby deny your own responsibility to act - on the basis that it is 'alarmist' or unscientific. I'm afraid that is simply not true.
(Those who are interested in a degree-by-degree exposition of climate impacts could refer to my book Six Degrees. Using hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, the book shows that climate change above two degrees is likely to take the planet past 'tipping points' - such as the burning down of the Amazon rainforest, and the release of billions of tonnes of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost - which could drive the warming process essentially beyond human control[12].)
1. IEA, World Energy Outlook 2008, Executive Summary: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2008/WEO2008_es_english.pdf
2. Nakicenovic, N. et al, 2000: IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, Figure SPM-2
3. Raupach, M. et al, 2007: ‘Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions’, PNAS, 104, 24, 10288-10293
4. Compare for example with the recent Institute of Mechanical Engineers report, which used the Hadley Centre models to generate 2C of warming by the 2040s for an A2 IPCC scenario: http://www.imeche.org/NR/rdonlyres/D72D38FF-FECF-480F-BBDB-6720130C1AAF/...
5. See 2008 NASA GISS data for global temperature trends: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
6. As everyone knows, the textbook IPCC projections produce an upper limit, for the entire ‘envelope’ of emissions scenarios, of 5.8C in the 2001 Third Assessment Report, and 6.4C in the Fourth Assessment Report, issued in 2007.
7. Pfeffer, W. et al, 2008: ‘Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21-st Century Sea-Level Rise’, Science, 321, 1340-1343
8. One 2006 study suggested an 80% loss of glacier cover for a 3C summertime regional Alpine warming (which approximately matches a 2C global average rise). See Zemp, M. et al, 2006: ‘Alpine glaciers to disappear within decades?’, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L13504
9. Anyone who doubts this need only refer to recent news reports of blazes in South Australia, which killed more than 200 people. Projections of summer temperatures of 4-5C higher than now in South Australia with a high emissions scenario are made in the 2007 Climate Change in Australia report pubished by CSIRO and the Australia Bureau of Meteorology.
10. The Obama Administration’s Energy Secretary Stephen Chu spoke of a “scenario where there’s no more agriculture” in February 2009, adding that “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either. For scientific backup, see for example: Hayhoe, K. et al, 2004: ‘Emissions pathways, climate change and impacts on California’, PNAS, 101, 34, 12422-12427
11. Campbell, K et al 2007: The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, Centre for Strategic and International Studies
12. Lynas, M, 2007: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Harper Perennial
Attachment Size
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A climate scientists view of 2055.pdf
94.44 KB
Age of Stupid science document Mark Lynas.pdf
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What Part of Simple Arithmetic Do You not Understand?

What Part of Simple Arithmetic, Destroying This Country and it’s People, Do You not Understand? (buyout firms profited as a company's debt soared)
An uninformed/misinformed public in energy science and economics is incapable of creating the survival parameters for a sustainable and prosperous future. Since the late 40's when advanced energy concepts for the world's fuel base and advanced understanding of human nature became available, how many billions of women and children have died of starvation, malnutrition, disease, lack of education, and poverty? (one clue: methods for obtaining exclusive licensing rights to a country's resources in return for mile long tin ovens without windows where women & children work 12 hour days producing our goods - methods using bribery, corruption, installing dictators, supplying arms .......will the real terrorists stand up?) The horrors a suppressed, broken science will bring are unimaginable: For the greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking to write (2007) “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion”, (or delusion), regarding the original, infantile interpretation of E=MC2 still believed today, spells umbrellas for the earth, a global warming solution, and corn for Energy Innovation. When the parameters of freedom and survival disappear, so do people and life. ..........repeating from blog "Traveling at Warp Speed" http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-travel-at-warp-speed.html - how could any intelligent species sit for 100 years upon such delusional concepts of: "as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC)," or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ This concept completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, opening the doors to the unified field theory.

October 5, 2009
Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared
By JULIE CRESWELL

For most of the 133 years since its founding in a small city in Wisconsin, the Simmons Bedding Company enjoyed an illustrious history.
Presidents have slumbered on its mattresses aboard Air Force One. Dignitaries have slept on them in the Lincoln Bedroom. Its advertisements have featured Henry Ford and H. G. Wells. Eleanor Roosevelt extolled the virtues of the Simmons Beautyrest mattress, and the brand was immortalized on Broadway in Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes.”
Its recent history has been notable, too, but for a different reason.
Simmons says it will soon file for bankruptcy protection, as part of an agreement by its current owners to sell the company — the seventh time it has been sold in a little more than two decades — all after being owned for short periods by a parade of different investment groups, known as private equity firms, which try to buy undervalued companies, mostly with borrowed money.
For many of the company’s investors, the sale will be a disaster. Its bondholders alone stand to lose more than $575 million. The company’s downfall has also devastated employees like Noble Rogers, who worked for 22 years at Simmons, most of that time at a factory outside Atlanta. He is one of 1,000 employees — more than one-quarter of the work force — laid off last year.
But Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston has not only escaped unscathed, it has made a profit. The investment firm, which bought Simmons in 2003, has pocketed around $77 million in profit, even as the company’s fortunes have declined. THL collected hundreds of millions of dollars from the company in the form of special dividends. It also paid itself millions more in fees, first for buying the company, then for helping run it. Last year, the firm even gave itself a small raise.
Wall Street investment banks also cashed in. They collected millions for helping to arrange the takeovers and for selling the bonds that made those deals possible. All told, the various private equity owners have made around $750 million in profits from Simmons over the years.
How so many people could make so much money on a company that has been driven into bankruptcy is a tale of these financial times and an example of a growing phenomenon in corporate America.
Every step along the way, the buyers put Simmons deeper into debt. The financiers borrowed more and more money to pay ever higher prices for the company, enabling each previous owner to cash out profitably.
But the load weighed down an otherwise healthy company. Today, Simmons owes $1.3 billion, compared with just $164 million in 1991, when it began to become a Wall Street version of “Flip This House.”
In many ways, what private equity firms did at Simmons, and scores of other companies like it, mimicked the subprime mortgage boom. Fueled by easy money, not only from banks but also endowments and pension funds, buyout kings like THL upended the old order on Wall Street. It was, they said, the Golden Age of private equity — nothing less than a new era of capitalism.
These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company’s assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.
Twice after buying Simmons, THL borrowed more. It used $375 million of that money to pay itself a dividend, thus recouping all of the cash it put down, and then some.
A result: THL was guaranteed a profit regardless of how Simmons performed. It did not matter that the company was left owing far more than it was worth, just as many people profited from the mortgage business while many homeowners found themselves underwater.
Investors who bought that debt are getting virtually nothing in the new deal.
“From my experience, none of the private equity firms were building a brand for the future,” said Robert Hellyer, Simmons’s former president, who worked for several of the private equity buyers before being asked to leave the company in 2005. “Plus, the mind-set was, since the money was practically free, why not leverage the company to the maximum?”
Just as with the housing market, the good times ended when the economy fell into recession and the credit markets froze. Simmons is now groaning under a huge amount of debt at a time when its sales are slowing. And this time there is no escaping by finding yet another buyer willing to shoulder its entire burden.
Simmons is one of hundreds of companies swept up by private equity firms in the early part of this decade, during the greatest burst of corporate takeovers the world has ever seen. Many of these deals, cut in good times, left little or no margin for error — let alone for the Great Recession.
A disproportionate number of the companies that were acquired during that frenzy are now struggling with the enormous debts. More than half the roughly 220 companies that have defaulted on their debt in some form this year were either owned at one time or are still controlled by private equity firms, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. Among them are household names like Harrah’s Entertainment and Six Flags, the theme park operator.
Executives at THL counter that Simmons was the victim of hard economic times, not mismanagement or too much debt. As proof, executives point to Simmons’s 40 percent growth in sales and its 26 percent climb in operating income from 2003 through 2007 as well as its 13 consecutive quarters of market share gains against competitors through March 2009.
Simmons’s woes, said Scott A. Schoen, a co-president of the firm who sat on Simmons’s board, are entirely caused by the “unprecedented and unforeseeable” downturn that has shaken the entire bedding industry.
“We think the work we had done had positioned the company for us to reap the financial rewards that this economic cycle has taken away,” said Mr. Schoen, gazing across a conference table at THL’s headquarters overlooking Boston Harbor.
Still, he acknowledged, “We are clearly disappointed in the outcome of this investment. Make no bones about it.”
Built Over Generations
Like other emerging industrialists of the 19th century, Zalmon G. Simmons, of Kenosha, Wis., had his hand in numerous businesses — the local bank, a telegraph company, a railroad and a cheese-box factory. He was even, for a time, the mayor of Kenosha.
Around 1876, Mr. Simmons came across a new machine that could mass-produce woven wire mattresses. The Simmons bedding company was born.
From its humble beginnings on the banks of Lake Michigan, Simmons grew to become one of the country’s largest manufacturers of mattresses. Along the way, it even sprinkled a little Hollywood pixie dust on the ho-hum mattress business, hiring Dorothy Lamour and Maureen O’Hara to plug its products.
Until the 1970s, Simmons largely prospered. Then the troubles started, and the company was soon buried deep inside two enormous conglomerates, Gulf & Western and the Wickes Corporation, for a number of years.
But in the mid-1980s, Simmons caught the attention of a new type of investor. The businesses that stormed corporate America in recent years under the banner of private equity were not always called private equity firms. In the 1980s, they were known as leveraged buyout shops. Their strategy is essentially unchanged, however: they try to buy undervalued companies, using mostly borrowed money, fix them up and sell them for a fast profit.
Because they pile debt onto the companies they buy, the firms free up their own cash, allowing them to make additional investments and increase their potential profits.
Simmons’s first trip through the revolving door of private equity came in 1986. Like the latest trip, it was not a pleasant one for employees, but the buyers did just fine.
William E. Simon, a private equity pioneer and a Treasury secretary under President Richard M. Nixon, was the man with the golden touch. In 1986, his investment firm, Wesray Capital, and a handful of Simmons’s top managers acquired the company for $120 million, the bulk of which was borrowed. After selling several businesses to pay back some of the money it had borrowed, Wesray cashed out in 1989. It sold Simmons to the company’s employee stock ownership plan for $241 million — twice what it paid just three years earlier.
The deal was a fiasco for the employees. As part of the buyout, Simmons stopped contributing to its pension plan, since the stock ownership plan shares were meant to pay for the employees’ retirements. But then the bottom fell out of the housing market and Simmons, with its large debt, stumbled. Its pensions crumbled as the value of the stock plan shares plunged.
A succession of private equity buyers came and went. Merrill Lynch Capital Partners bought Simmons in 1991 for $32 million for a 60 percent stake in the company and the assumption of its debt. Merrill sold it to Investcorp, an investment group based in Bahrain, for $265 million in 1996. Two years later, Investcorp sold the company to Fenway Partners for $513 million.
During Fenway’s tenure, Simmons released one of the industry’s biggest innovations: the no-flip mattress. Profits soared. But after five years, Fenway executives decided to cash out. By the fall of 2003, Simmons was back on the block.
Teddy Bear at the Gate
A longtime figure in investment circles, Thomas H. Lee vaulted into the big leagues of private equity with what is regarded as one of the legendary deals of all time. After founding Thomas H. Lee Partners in 1974, he grabbed headlines in 1994 when he sold Snapple, the iced tea maker, for $1.7 billion to Quaker Oats. He bought the company two years earlier for around $130 million.
But while other captains of the buyout craze — like Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts — chased giant companies in hostile deals, Mr. Lee focused largely on midsize companies and steered clear of deals where he was not welcome. The research firm Hoover’s describes Thomas H. Lee Partners as “the teddy bear at the gate.”
Mr. Lee, scion of the family that founded the Shoe Corporation of America, left his namesake firm in 2006 to start another investment company. During his 30-year tenure at THL, his firm invested in a series of big names: Ghirardelli Chocolate, Petco Animal Supplies and General Nutrition Companies, among others. And by 2003, as the buyout boom began to build, his firm had Simmons in its cross hairs.
The Deal
The fall of 2003 was little more than a blur of meetings and presentations for Robert Hellyer, the former Simmons president who is among the fourth generation of his family involved in the mattress industry. In eight weeks, the company was shown to 20 private equity suitors in the corporate version of speed dating.
The list of potential buyers was quickly whittled to three and finally to THL, whose $1.1 billion bid for the company consisted of $327 million in new equity from the firm and more than $745 million in bonds and bank loans that had to be raised from investors.
“They were good guys; very smart guys,” Mr. Hellyer said. “Their thesis was to buy a good business with good management and let them get better.”
What THL wanted from the deal was a return of two to three times its initial investment.
From the get-go, the lofty price the firm paid for Simmons and the amount of debt raised red flags on Wall Street.
The “higher debt burden will limit the company’s ability to respond to unexpected negative business developments, including economic or competitive threats or internal missteps,” analysts at Moody’s Investors Service warned at the time.
But nobody, it seems, was listening. Six months after acquiring Simmons, THL set in motion plans to take the company public. And by December 2004, THL found a way to get part of its initial investment back. Simmons issued debt that required the company to pay a hefty 10 percent annual interest rate. The proceeds were used to pay THL a dividend of $137 million. With the company’s debt climbing, Simmons executives had to aim high with new products — and pray they were right.
In late 2004, Simmons unveiled the HealthSmart mattress in a blitz of marketing.
It gave away 250 beds to the audience of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” It began a $15 million advertising campaign. It put coupons for free HealthSmart beds in celebrity souvenir bags during New York’s Fashion Week.
A mattress line aimed at combating dust mites, mold and germs, the HealthSmart featured a zip-off top that could be washed or dry cleaned. But in the rush to get the product to market, Simmons did not go through its normal research and testings, Mr. Hellyer says.
HealthSmart was a flop. Consumers did not like the mattress — they thought the zip-on cover was troublesome. Sales at the company slid nearly 8 percent in the first quarter from the previous year.
“Panic ensued. Thomas H. Lee came in and pulled the national advertising right away,” said a former Simmons employee involved with HealthSmart who declined to be named because he is still involved with the mattress industry.
THL shelved its plans to take Simmons public, and the company shook up its sales division. By the third quarter of 2005, Simmons had “one of the best quarters in the company’s entire history up to that point,” a spokesman for THL said in an e-mail message. The numbers tell a slightly different story: Net sales declined 4.8 percent in that quarter from a year earlier, and operating income fell to $25.1 million, from $25.5 million in the third quarter of 2004. Later, spokesmen for THL and Simmons clarified the statement by saying that after excluding a one-time reorganization expense, an adjusted earnings figure for the quarter was the 10th best in the company’s history.
Executives at THL say they moved quickly to put Simmons back on track.
“More than a dozen THL professionals have devoted literally thousands of man-hours to Simmons, including making over 115 visits to company headquarters and site facilities around the country,” the firm said in a statement.
The results, it argued, speak for themselves. In the following years, Simmons’s sales and profits climbed, and the company introduced several new products, including the successful premium-price Beautyrest Black line of mattresses.
By early 2007, at the very top of the credit market bubble, THL took a bit more out of Simmons. It created a holding company that it used to issue $300 million more in debt, which paid an additional $238 million dividend to the private equity firm. With that, THL had recouped its entire $327 million equity investment in Simmons and booked a profit of around $48 million. (It made an additional $28.5 million in various fees over the years.)
THL was hardly alone in undertaking this sort of financial engineering, known as a dividend recapitalization. From 2003 to 2007, 188 companies controlled by private equity firms issued more than $75 billion in debt that was used to pay dividends to the buyout firms.
Asked whether the 2007 dividend was too much for Simmons, Mr. Schoen of THL defended the deal.
“That debt financing, which clearly spelled out to the market the use of the proceeds, was extremely well received. The securities were heavily oversubscribed,” Mr. Schoen said. “Not only did we think it was appropriate, but the market did as well,” he added.
As the economy soured in late 2007, so did Simmons’s sales. The company slashed costs and cut jobs throughout 2008. But last fall, unable to meet the terms of its bank loans and debt dating back to the 2003 acquisition itself, Simmons stopped making interest payments to its bondholders. THL began talking to the banks and bondholders about how to lighten Simmons’s debt load, and put the company up for sale.
The Impact on Employees
From the start, Noble Rogers loved working at Simmons.
“There were picnics, March of Dimes walks, Christmas parties, and we always had Halloween parties. It was a really family-oriented company,” Mr. Rogers, 50, recalled. “I told my wife that this was a great place for me to work. A great place for me to retire, to make a living at.”
For a long time, it was. For 22 years, Mr. Rogers worked at Simmons, the bulk of those years at a factory in Mableton, outside Atlanta. After operating the coiler machine for the company’s Beautyrest mattress, he moved into maintenance and kept all of the plant’s machinery humming.
Over the years, as Simmons passed from one private equity firm to another, and as Mr. Rogers became president of the local union at the plant, he saw little difference on the plant floor. Then, in the spring of 2008, when the slowing economy had begun to hurt sales, Simmons laid off the night shift at the Mableton plant. And on Sept. 18 that year, it gathered employees in the cafeteria to say that the plant was closing.
“So many people were hurt because they thought this was a great company to work for and they planned on spending the rest of their lives here. Their families were here. They bought houses and cars here,” Mr. Rogers recalled. “After this happened, people were really struggling.”
Between the closings and other cuts, Simmons let go of more than a quarter of its work force last year, said its chief financial officer, William S. Creekmuir.
Mr. Rogers, who received his union-negotiated severance package of two months’ pay, said he and other union representatives had tried to get a little more for workers, particularly those who would have been eligible for retirement. Simmons had a long history of giving retiring employees a bonus of $20 for each year worked and a free mattress set, Mr. Rogers said.
“They wouldn’t give us anything,” he said.
In the months after he lost his job, Mr. Rogers nearly lost his home to foreclosure and struggled to pay his family’s bills. Mr. Rogers, who eventually landed a job at an air filter company and picked up part-time work doing maintenance at an apartment complex, said Simmons bore little resemblance to the company he once loved.
“They stopped the picnics. They stopped the Christmas parties. They stopped the retirement parties,” he recalled. “That showed you the type of people I was working for. I just didn’t realize it until the hard times came like they did.”
For now, the Golden Age of private equity is over, the financiers say. In a speech to an industry gathering last spring. Mr. Schoen said that bankers and bondholders were reluctant to lend more money to the buyout kings.
“We’re in a brave new world,” he said. “We can’t go back to where we were, at least not in this investment cycle, and probably not in my career.”
But some private equity investors are searching for profits in the detritus of the buyout bust. Simmons hopes to emerge from bankruptcy in the hands of two new private equity firms. One is Ares Management, which owns the mattress giant Serta. Under the plan, Simmons’s debt would be more than halved, to $450 million, in part reflecting the losses suffered by its existing bondholders.
Simmons and its remaining employees face an uncertain future. Some in the industry predict Ares will eventually merge at least part of Simmons with Serta, jeopardizing more jobs.
“Simmons has been a cash cow. It’s made a lot of people a lot of money,” said David Perry, executive editor of Furniture/Today. “But there’s a growing question in the industry of how many more times can this be repeated. How much more juice can be squeezed out of the orange?”

So Much Food. So Much Hunger

An uninformed/misinformed public in energy science and economics is incapable of creating the survival parameters for a sustainable and prosperous future. Since the late 40's when advanced energy concepts for the world's fuel base and advanced understanding of human nature became available, how many billions of women and children have died of starvation, malnutrition, disease, lack of education, and poverty? (one clue: methods for obtaining exclusive licensing rights to a country's resources in return for mile long tin ovens without windows where women & children work 12 hour days producing our goods - methods using bribery, corruption, installing dictators, supplying arms .......will the real terrorists stand up?) The horrors a suppressed, broken science will bring are unimaginable: For the greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking to write (2007) “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion”, (or delusion), regarding the original, infantile interpretation of E=MC2 still believed today, spells umbrellas for the earth, a global warming solution, and corn for Energy Innovation. When the parameters of freedom and survival disappear, so do people and life. ..........repeating from blog "Traveling at Warp Speed" http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-travel-at-warp-speed.html - how could any intelligent species sit for 100 years upon such delusional concepts of: "as an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC)," or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite." The obvious subsequent realization of such a short sighted error swiftly corrects to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ This concept completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, opening the doors to the unified field theory.

September 20, 2009 - NYT
So Much Food. So Much Hunger.
By ANDREW MARTIN
This past week the world celebrated the life and achievements of Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born plant scientist who created high-yielding wheat varieties to stave off famine.
Dr. Borlaug, who died at age 95 on Sept. 12, led the so-called Green Revolution that created bumper crops in once impoverished countries like Mexico, India and Pakistan. In lauding Dr. Borlaug’s achievements, the United Nations’ World Food Program said he had saved more lives than any man in history.
But the eulogies for Dr. Borlaug often neglected an important and perplexing fact. Despite his accomplishments, more people are hungry today than ever and that total should exceed one billion people this year for the first time, according to the United Nations.
How can so many people be hungry when farmers produce enough food, at least in theory, to feed every person on the planet?
The answers are complex and involve everything from American farm politics and African corruption to war, poverty, climate change and drought, which is now the single most common cause of food shortages on the planet.
But David Beckmann, president of the antihunger group Bread for the World, boiled the causes down into one unifying theme — “a lack of give a damn.”
“It’s mainly neglect,” he said. “Political neglect.”
The yield gains of the last half-century, both in the developed and developing world, led to grain surpluses and low prices, creating a sense of complacency about agriculture and hunger.
“There was an attitude following the Green Revolution that the problem was solved,” said Gary H. Toenniessen of the Rockefeller Foundation.
So much grain was being produced so cheaply that Western leaders encouraged poor nations to buy grain on the world market rather than grow it themselves. Surplus was shipped to poor countries as food aid. But that aid system has often been ineffective in alleviating hunger in a timely way and in addressing broader agriculture problems facing impoverished countries. Support for agricultural research in developing countries was also cut back for other priorities. The result? While the food supply grew faster than the world’s population from 1970 to 1990, as the Green Revolution’s gains took hold, the situation has now reversed itself. Productivity gains in agriculture have slowed, and since 1990, the growth rate of food production has fallen below population growth.
The consequences have been particularly dire in sub-Saharan Africa, where the gains of the Green Revolution have been difficult to replicate. Among other problems, irrigation — which was key to the Green Revolution — is relatively scarce in Africa.
Few paid attention to these problems until last year, when a confluence of events caused food prices to spike to record levels. Riots erupted in many nations, and even American consumers felt pinched as prices soared.
Prices have come down in the United States, but the situation in Africa remains dismal due to an exploding population and now, a severe drought that threatens millions. The World Food Program says it is critically short of funds.
At a July summit meeting, President Obama and other leaders of industrialized nations pledged $20 billion for agricultural development in poor countries.
Activists say that some of the tools for success are within reach provided the financing and political will persist: those tools include seeds fine-tuned to local conditions, fertilizer and better roads and other infrastructure improvements.
The more difficult problems may lie within our borders. Farm programs are among the most entrenched entitlements in Washington. But crop subsidies and America’s habit of shipping grain to the poor tends to undermine robust markets in developing countries.
Dr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, understood well the limitations of the Green Revolution’s success. After receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, he noted that the “battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”
“World peace will not be built on empty stomachs or human misery,” he said. “It is within America’s technical and financial power to help end this human tragedy and injustice, if we set our hearts and minds to the task.”