Kevin Phillips, the author of American Theocracy, postulates that there are five political and policy endgames in play today.  The adherents of these visions for the world are shaping events as their agendas unfold.  To understand what is happening to us, we need to view those events through the prism of these game plans.
 
Depletion of resources and rising demand by other nations are of vital concern, and spawns the first endgame that the author deals with.  “The first was a rising preoccupation on the part of oil geologists and among some thinkers in Washington that not only had American oil production peaked but global oil production outside of OPEC might be within five to ten years of doing so.”  This scenario is foundational to the vision for the first endgame: Resource War.
 
This depletion of resources and competition for those resources maps into the second endgame. “Concerned over slackening new oil discoveries, the big companies feared that their futures depended on whether U.S. or foreign firms obtained access to the huge, barely tapped, and pivotal reserves of Iraq.  Huge profits were at stake.”
 
“The third set of jitters involved finance.  A handful of Americans, aware of the interplay of oil and currency flows, worried about OPEC’s potential threat to the dollar.  Their fear was that should the cartel decide to end the American currency’s virtual monopoly on oil pricing, the dollar would plummet, sending shudders through the U.S. economy and its overextended debt structure.  Indeed, Iraqi, Iranian, and Venezuelan currency maneuvers were already visible as the dollar sagged in late 2002.”
 
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!  “Climatologists pondered a fourth countdown… In 2002 the U.S. Defense Department’s internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, commissioned a dire-case evaluation, published a year later under the title ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for the United States National Security’.  Critical time frames as near as 2010-2020 were pondered; immediate crises planning was recommended.“
 
“The fifth clock-watch, very different, was a matter of Christian faith, not scientific calculus.  As the millennium itself came and went, 40 percent or more of American Christians … expected the biblical prophecies of Armageddon and the end times to come true … for true believers their imminent rapture and the subsequent second coming of Jesus Christ were the only endgame.   We can estimate that for 20 to 30 percent of Christians, this chronology superseded or muted other issues‘.  Amen, brother – amen!  We don’t need no stinking environment!  We’re going away to paradise.
 
The first three endgames are loosely related, and revolve around economic concerns.  The fourth may be the real sleeper issue, because we see the environmental issues through eyes blinded by accountants’ shades – the bottom liners are all consumed with profit – but Mother Nature doesn’t give a hoot about that.  And we’ve got her attention!  The last is the most frightening, because these true believers have gained the kind of leverage that I predicted and feared four or five decades ago.  They are a threat to the rest of us because their agenda is unconcern for the environment and promotion of doomsday Biblical Prophecy to validate their interpretations of scripture.  To the extent that they gain power, the rest of us become dispensable.
 
This is the structure on which Kevin Phillips seems to have hung his fine book, American Theocracy.  It is the framework that I intend to explore in subsequent articles.