http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/01/-a-lot-of-things.html
Swingtime
A lot of things started shaking loose last week, and not just in Haiti. The Scott Brown senate seat victory in Massachussetts shook loose a Democratic "super-majority" that only had to be constructed because the US Senate stupidly turned the filibuster into standard operating procedure where it once was a seldom-used procedural dodge employed strictly by villains seeking to paralyze the chamber. Thanks to the new system, the senate is now in a continual state of paralysis.
The election in Massachusetts prompted President Obama to understand that the voters were pissed off -- among other things -- about the special privileges of banks and bankers, after a year of force-feeding them taxpayer money like Strasbourg geese. So he outlined a bank discipline offensive that sounded an awful lot like the return of the Glass-Steagall Act -- which several of his top advisors (Summers, Rubin...) had a direct hand in repealing a decade ago -- only without proposing to reinstate Glass Steagall. Go figure. Note: for all the bluster, Mr. Obama did not mention activating the moribund Department of Justice, where Attorney General Eric Holder has been in a coma all year. Somebody ought to inform the president that he has an entire criminal investigation division there, and that a little brisk leadership could gin them up into action as they were following the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s (when Republicans were in power, by the way).
Now, one big question is how come the president waited until after the Massachusetts election debacle to man up with the banks? Did it only just come to him that they were looting the nation -- with government assistance? Pretty obviously nobody will believe that Mr. Obama is sincere about reining in fraud-ridden Wall Street until he issues pink slips to the Goldman Sachs alumni who have been running him like a radio-controlled monster truck: Summers, Geithner, Rubin, et al. There was a hint of that last week, when the president made his statement with "the big guy," Paul Volker, standing right behind him. Fed Chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner have both claimed more than once that they are "not regulators." That must partly explain the absence of meaningful regulation all year. My guess is that Geithner is about to be tossed overboard like a feculent weiner, and that the president is praying for the senate to vote against Bernanke's reconfirmation this week.
The underlying reality is that the financial sector of the economy has got to shrink. It ballooned from about five percent of the US economy to about 22 percent over the last two decades -- mainly as a way to compensate for our declining real productive activity as we off-shored and outsourced and disassembled US industrial capacity. Capitalism only works when it operates in the service of productive activity. Trading mere paper certificates (or digital simulacra of them) in ever more "innovative" (i.e. abstract and incomprehensible) ways is not a substitute for making goods. These practices reached such a grotesque level of unreality that they eventually poisoned what remained of our economic prospects. Now that their operations have been revealed as perfidious, these institutions have to be sliced and diced and, in some cases, punished, perhaps with extinction. It will happen anyway. The only question is whether civilian leadership can guide the process within the rule of law. In the meantime, the derivatives rackets that made up so much of the fraud -- especially the trillions of dollars vested in credit default swaps contracts -- are ticking out there like bombs placed by madmen, and may bring down the entire global money system before an orderly downsizing of finance can occur.
The larger underlying reality is that the United States as an entire, integral organism, has got to contract, downscale, and reorganize. The mandates of energy resource reality demand it. We can't maintain our way of life at its current scale and we have to severely rearrange and rebuild the infrastructure of it if we expect to continue being civilized. We have to get the hell out of suburbia, shrink our hypertrophic metroplexes, re-activate our small towns and small cities, reorganize the way we grow our food, phase out the big box retail (and phase in the rehabilitated Main Streets), start making some of our own household goods, and hook up the far-flung reaches of this continental nation with a public transit system probably in the form of railroads. By the way, there are plenty of "jobs" in this process, only not the kind of work we've been used to... sitting in cubicles or assigning tanning booths.
No amount of wishing for techno rescue remedies, or techno-triumphal fantasies, will overcome this basic reality. This is change you have to believe in whether you like it or not. Most of America doesn't like it and doesn't want to think about it and is doing everything possible to prop up the old arrangements. Bailing out the banks is just a lame attempt to keep banking oversized. Bailing out the automobile companies was just a way to avoid the recognition that Happy Motoring will soon be over. Bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was just a way to avoid understanding that suburbia is finished. The "green economy" that so many people idly blather about -- imagining that it will just mean running WalMart by other means than oil -- is actually an economy of awesome stringency. It's nothing like they imagine. It's a world made by hand.
We should be turning our efforts and our remaining resources toward the task of becoming that differently-organized, finer-scaled society.The money that went into propping up the automobile companies could have been used to rebuild the entire railroad system between Boston and the Great Lakes, and the capital squandered on AIG and its offshoot claimants could have rebuilt everything else the rest of the way to Seattle. Is it really so hard to imagine what history requires of you?
Apparently so. That's why movements like Naziism start. If there ever was another nation beautifully primed for an explosion of deadly irrational politics, it's us. And it looks to me as if that's exactly what we're going to get -- especially now that the Supreme Court has made it possible for corporations to buy elections lock, stock, and barrel. I hope our constitutional law professor president turns his attention to proposing a legislative act that will sharply reign in the putative "personhood" prerogatives of corporations. They are relatively new entities in legal history, and their supposed "rights," duties, obligations, and limits have been regularly subject to re-definition over the past hundred years. There's no reason to believe that the court's current ideas are definitive. In fact, they are completely crazy -- given the fact that the fundamental character of corporations is sociopathic, insofar as their only express allegiance is to their shareholders, meaning they are devoid of any sense of the public interest, meaning they are unfit to participate in electoral politics.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
SC100-12
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24478.htm
Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.
This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the sovereignty of “We the People”!
Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.
This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the sovereignty of “We the People”!
SC100-11
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17161
The Rule of Law Has Been Lost
What is the greatest human achievement? Many would answer in terms of some architectural or engineering feat: The Great Pyramids, skyscrapers, a bridge span, or sending men to the moon. Others might say the subduing of some deadly disease or Einstein's theory of relativity.
The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English-speaking peoples the most free in the world.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions" (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.
Government lawyers told President Bush that he did not have to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibits the government from spying on citizens without a warrant, thus destroying the right to privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the President did not have to obey U.S. law prohibiting torture or the Geneva Conventions. Habeas corpus protection, a Constitutional right, was stripped from U.S. citizens. Medieval dungeons, torture, and the windowless cells of Stalin's Lubyanka Prison reappeared under American government auspices.
The American people's elected representatives in Congress endorsed the executive branch's overthrow of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Law schools and bar associations were essentially silent in the face of this overthrow of mankind's greatest achievement. Some parts of the federal judiciary voted with the executive branch; other parts made a feeble resistance. Today in the name of "the war on terror," the executive branch does whatever it wants. There is no accountability.
The First Amendment has been abridged and may soon be criminalized. Protests against, and criticisms of, the U.S. government's illegal invasions of Muslim countries and war crimes against civilian populations have been construed by executive branch officials as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." As American citizens have been imprisoned for giving aid to Muslim charities that the executive branch has decreed, without proof in a court of law, to be under the control of "terrorists," any form of opposition to the government's wars and criminal actions can also be construed as aiding terrorists and be cause for arrest and indefinite detention.
One Obama appointee, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, advocates that the U.S. government create a cadre of covert agents to infiltrate anti-war groups and groups opposed to U.S. government policies in order to provoke them into actions or statements for which they can be discredited and even arrested.
Sunstein defines those who criticize the government's increasingly lawless behavior as "extremists," which, to the general public, sounds much like "terrorists." In essence, Sunstein wants to generalize the F.B.I.'s practice of infiltrating dissidents and organizing them around a "terrorist plot" in order to arrest them.
That this proposal comes from a Harvard Law School professor demonstrates the collapse of respect for law among American law professors themselves, ranging from John Yoo at Berkeley, the advocate of torture, to Sunstein at Harvard, a totalitarian who advocates war on the First Amendment.
The U.S. Department of State has taken up Sunstein's idea. Last month Eva Golinger reported in the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, that the State Department plans to organize youth in "Twitter Revolutions" to destabilize countries and bring about regime change in order to achieve more American puppet states, such as the ones in Egypt, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, Britain and Western and Eastern Europe.
The First Amendment is being closed down. Its place is being taken by propaganda in behalf of whatever government does. As Stratton and I wrote in the second edition of our book documenting the destruction of law in the United States:
"Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support 'energy in the executive.' An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice (sic) and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty."
The Rule of Law Has Been Lost
What is the greatest human achievement? Many would answer in terms of some architectural or engineering feat: The Great Pyramids, skyscrapers, a bridge span, or sending men to the moon. Others might say the subduing of some deadly disease or Einstein's theory of relativity.
The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English-speaking peoples the most free in the world.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions" (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.
Government lawyers told President Bush that he did not have to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibits the government from spying on citizens without a warrant, thus destroying the right to privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the President did not have to obey U.S. law prohibiting torture or the Geneva Conventions. Habeas corpus protection, a Constitutional right, was stripped from U.S. citizens. Medieval dungeons, torture, and the windowless cells of Stalin's Lubyanka Prison reappeared under American government auspices.
The American people's elected representatives in Congress endorsed the executive branch's overthrow of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Law schools and bar associations were essentially silent in the face of this overthrow of mankind's greatest achievement. Some parts of the federal judiciary voted with the executive branch; other parts made a feeble resistance. Today in the name of "the war on terror," the executive branch does whatever it wants. There is no accountability.
The First Amendment has been abridged and may soon be criminalized. Protests against, and criticisms of, the U.S. government's illegal invasions of Muslim countries and war crimes against civilian populations have been construed by executive branch officials as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." As American citizens have been imprisoned for giving aid to Muslim charities that the executive branch has decreed, without proof in a court of law, to be under the control of "terrorists," any form of opposition to the government's wars and criminal actions can also be construed as aiding terrorists and be cause for arrest and indefinite detention.
One Obama appointee, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, advocates that the U.S. government create a cadre of covert agents to infiltrate anti-war groups and groups opposed to U.S. government policies in order to provoke them into actions or statements for which they can be discredited and even arrested.
Sunstein defines those who criticize the government's increasingly lawless behavior as "extremists," which, to the general public, sounds much like "terrorists." In essence, Sunstein wants to generalize the F.B.I.'s practice of infiltrating dissidents and organizing them around a "terrorist plot" in order to arrest them.
That this proposal comes from a Harvard Law School professor demonstrates the collapse of respect for law among American law professors themselves, ranging from John Yoo at Berkeley, the advocate of torture, to Sunstein at Harvard, a totalitarian who advocates war on the First Amendment.
The U.S. Department of State has taken up Sunstein's idea. Last month Eva Golinger reported in the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, that the State Department plans to organize youth in "Twitter Revolutions" to destabilize countries and bring about regime change in order to achieve more American puppet states, such as the ones in Egypt, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, Britain and Western and Eastern Europe.
The First Amendment is being closed down. Its place is being taken by propaganda in behalf of whatever government does. As Stratton and I wrote in the second edition of our book documenting the destruction of law in the United States:
"Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support 'energy in the executive.' An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice (sic) and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty."
SC100-10
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17060
The Foundations of the U.S. Economy have been Destroyed
The vast majority of the talking heads on television are still speaking of the current economic collapse as if it is a temporary “recession” that will soon be over. So far, the vast majority of the American people seem to believe this as well, although for many Americans there is a very deep gnawing in the pit of their stomachs that is telling them that there is something very, very wrong this time around. The truth is that the foundations of the U.S. economy have been destroyed by an orgy of government, corporate and individual debt that has gone on for decades. It was the greatest party in the history of the world, but now the party is over.
The following are 11 signs from just this past month that show that the U.S. economy is headed into the toilet and will not be recovering….
#1) When even Wal-Mart is closing stores you know things are bad. Wal-Mart announced on Monday that it will close 10 money-losing Sam’s Club stores and will cut 1,500 jobs in order to reduce costs. So if even Wal-Mart has to shut down stores, what chance do other retailers have?
#2) Americans are going broke at a staggering pace. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#3) American workers are working harder than ever and yet making less. After adjusting for inflation, pay for production and non-supervisory workers (80 percent of the private workforce) is 9% lower than it was in 1973. But those Americans who do still have jobs are the fortunate ones.
#4) Unemployment is absolutely exploding all over the United States. Minority groups have been hit particularly hard. For example, unemployment on many U.S. Indian reservations is over 80 percent.
#5) Unfortunately the employment situation is showing no signs of turning around. December was actually the worst month for U.S. unemploymentsince the so-called ”Great Recession” began.
#6) So just how bad are things when compared to past recessions? During the 2001 recession, the U.S. economy lost 2% of its jobs and it took four years to get them back. This time the U.S. economy has lost more than 5% of its jobs and there is no sign that the bleeding of jobs will stop any time soon.
#7) Can you imagine trying to get your first job in this economic climate? Our young men and women either can’t get work or have given up on work altogether. The percentage of Americans 16 to 24 who have jobs is 13 percent lower than ten years ago.
#8) So where did all the jobs go? Over the past few decades we have allowed the corporate giants to ship mountains of American jobs overseas, and there are signs that this trend is only going to get worse. In fact, Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder estimates that 22% to 29% of all current U.S. jobs will be offshorable within two decades. So get ready for even more of our jobs to be shipped off to Mexico, China and India.
#9) All of these job losses are leading to defaults on mortgages. Over the past couple of years we have seen the American Dream in reverse. According to a report that was just released, delinquent home loans at government-controlled mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac surged 20 percent from July through September.
#10) But that is nothing compared to what is coming. A massive “second wave” of mortgage defaults is getting ready to hit the U.S. economy starting in 2010. In fact, this “second wave” is so frightening that even 60 Minutes is reporting on it.
#11) Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has announced that it made a record profit of $46.1 billion in 2009. Apparently during this economic crisis it is a very good time to be a bankster.
The Foundations of the U.S. Economy have been Destroyed
The vast majority of the talking heads on television are still speaking of the current economic collapse as if it is a temporary “recession” that will soon be over. So far, the vast majority of the American people seem to believe this as well, although for many Americans there is a very deep gnawing in the pit of their stomachs that is telling them that there is something very, very wrong this time around. The truth is that the foundations of the U.S. economy have been destroyed by an orgy of government, corporate and individual debt that has gone on for decades. It was the greatest party in the history of the world, but now the party is over.
The following are 11 signs from just this past month that show that the U.S. economy is headed into the toilet and will not be recovering….
#1) When even Wal-Mart is closing stores you know things are bad. Wal-Mart announced on Monday that it will close 10 money-losing Sam’s Club stores and will cut 1,500 jobs in order to reduce costs. So if even Wal-Mart has to shut down stores, what chance do other retailers have?
#2) Americans are going broke at a staggering pace. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#3) American workers are working harder than ever and yet making less. After adjusting for inflation, pay for production and non-supervisory workers (80 percent of the private workforce) is 9% lower than it was in 1973. But those Americans who do still have jobs are the fortunate ones.
#4) Unemployment is absolutely exploding all over the United States. Minority groups have been hit particularly hard. For example, unemployment on many U.S. Indian reservations is over 80 percent.
#5) Unfortunately the employment situation is showing no signs of turning around. December was actually the worst month for U.S. unemploymentsince the so-called ”Great Recession” began.
#6) So just how bad are things when compared to past recessions? During the 2001 recession, the U.S. economy lost 2% of its jobs and it took four years to get them back. This time the U.S. economy has lost more than 5% of its jobs and there is no sign that the bleeding of jobs will stop any time soon.
#7) Can you imagine trying to get your first job in this economic climate? Our young men and women either can’t get work or have given up on work altogether. The percentage of Americans 16 to 24 who have jobs is 13 percent lower than ten years ago.
#8) So where did all the jobs go? Over the past few decades we have allowed the corporate giants to ship mountains of American jobs overseas, and there are signs that this trend is only going to get worse. In fact, Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder estimates that 22% to 29% of all current U.S. jobs will be offshorable within two decades. So get ready for even more of our jobs to be shipped off to Mexico, China and India.
#9) All of these job losses are leading to defaults on mortgages. Over the past couple of years we have seen the American Dream in reverse. According to a report that was just released, delinquent home loans at government-controlled mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac surged 20 percent from July through September.
#10) But that is nothing compared to what is coming. A massive “second wave” of mortgage defaults is getting ready to hit the U.S. economy starting in 2010. In fact, this “second wave” is so frightening that even 60 Minutes is reporting on it.
#11) Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has announced that it made a record profit of $46.1 billion in 2009. Apparently during this economic crisis it is a very good time to be a bankster.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
SC100-9
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/1476/1/
IF IT SUDDENLY ENDED TOMORROW, COULD YOU SOMEHOW ADJUST TO THE FALL
We’ve all played the “what if” game, and specifically the one with a timeline. What if I had six months to live? Would I live differently? Would I see somebody, or some place? How would I “make my peace” with the world and those I love?
Let’s kick it up a notch. It’s not one of us with six months to live, it’s the industrial economy. Now whatcha gonna do?
Kunstler’s been wrong before, particularly with respect to timing. Me, too, for that matter. So we might be wrong again. But in this case Kunstler is synthesizing quite an impressive litany of thinkers with economic tendencies. And there is little doubt that the industrial age is nearing its end. If it’s not six months, it’s not much longer. So what if it’s five years? The same rules apply, as far as this game is concerned.
And even if the financial bandages applied by the world’s life-hating politicians manage to hold together the omnicidal industrial economy for a few more years, this is one of those cases in which it’s better safe than sorry. Getting on board a few minutes before the ship brings up the anchor is so much more comforting that striding onto the dock just in time to see the ship hit the open sea.
So, then, when do you call your children home? Or the ailing parents?
There is plenty to be done. For starters, nobody wants to be the last person into a community in disarray. Nobody wants to come skating in, unknown by the neighbors, when the food and water are running low. Nobody wants to be known at the new kid in town, regardless of her age. So there’s the central issue of building community in the community. As if that’s not difficult enough, in a culture anathema to community, there’s more.
It’s not just the human neighbors you’ll want to know. It’s the other, more indigenous, ones. Can you name ten edible plants native to your neighborhood? Can you grow them, or any others? What are the needs of the local animals? Where does the water come from? Does it require industrial treatment prior to human consumption? Is there an alternative source? Do you know how to treat the water so you, and other members of your community, can survive?
On the other hand, you can always take the Hemingway out. Many of the people I know, enamored with lives of comfort and unwilling to face the reality of the real world, claim to have selected this option. I suspect many of them will change their minds when the issue is forced upon them. Evolution — and its resulting absence of free will — is quirky that way.
One swing through the high price of oil took us directly to the Great Depression 2.0. What will the next swing bring? And when?
Time to start thinking. Time to start planning. The time to dig a well is not when you’re thirsty.
IF IT SUDDENLY ENDED TOMORROW, COULD YOU SOMEHOW ADJUST TO THE FALL
We’ve all played the “what if” game, and specifically the one with a timeline. What if I had six months to live? Would I live differently? Would I see somebody, or some place? How would I “make my peace” with the world and those I love?
Let’s kick it up a notch. It’s not one of us with six months to live, it’s the industrial economy. Now whatcha gonna do?
Kunstler’s been wrong before, particularly with respect to timing. Me, too, for that matter. So we might be wrong again. But in this case Kunstler is synthesizing quite an impressive litany of thinkers with economic tendencies. And there is little doubt that the industrial age is nearing its end. If it’s not six months, it’s not much longer. So what if it’s five years? The same rules apply, as far as this game is concerned.
And even if the financial bandages applied by the world’s life-hating politicians manage to hold together the omnicidal industrial economy for a few more years, this is one of those cases in which it’s better safe than sorry. Getting on board a few minutes before the ship brings up the anchor is so much more comforting that striding onto the dock just in time to see the ship hit the open sea.
So, then, when do you call your children home? Or the ailing parents?
There is plenty to be done. For starters, nobody wants to be the last person into a community in disarray. Nobody wants to come skating in, unknown by the neighbors, when the food and water are running low. Nobody wants to be known at the new kid in town, regardless of her age. So there’s the central issue of building community in the community. As if that’s not difficult enough, in a culture anathema to community, there’s more.
It’s not just the human neighbors you’ll want to know. It’s the other, more indigenous, ones. Can you name ten edible plants native to your neighborhood? Can you grow them, or any others? What are the needs of the local animals? Where does the water come from? Does it require industrial treatment prior to human consumption? Is there an alternative source? Do you know how to treat the water so you, and other members of your community, can survive?
On the other hand, you can always take the Hemingway out. Many of the people I know, enamored with lives of comfort and unwilling to face the reality of the real world, claim to have selected this option. I suspect many of them will change their minds when the issue is forced upon them. Evolution — and its resulting absence of free will — is quirky that way.
One swing through the high price of oil took us directly to the Great Depression 2.0. What will the next swing bring? And when?
Time to start thinking. Time to start planning. The time to dig a well is not when you’re thirsty.
Monday, January 18, 2010
SC100-8
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/01/disasters-far-and-near.html
Disasters Far and Near
As the disaster in Haiti moves into its "Katrina" phase of a organizational chaos, relief effort failure, and public health calamity, the world will get another lesson in the dangers of techno-triumphalist posturing. American authority pretends to be in flawless control of a situation that by the minute crumbles into anarchy and death as the generals strut their stuff and the CNN crews broadcast yet another feel-good segment about adopted orphans. At this point, one rainstorm is all it will take to kill what is left of the Haitian social order.
It's a tragedy for the ages, and tragedy is a fulcrum of the human condition that techno-triumphalism pretends to have vanquished. All the meals-ready-to-eat on God's green earth won't add up to a happy ending for everybody. Haiti was a disaster waiting to happen every bit as much as the Federal Reserve is for us. For decades, the USA's policy (and the UN's too) was just to stuff more food aid onto an island already so far beyond its carrying capacity for human existence that every new birth certificate was a death warrant in disguise. But free people are free to do what they will do, and in Haiti there was not much more to do than make more people.
Now the USA will also pretend that there is a Haitian government in charge -- as in the pathetic grandstanding of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the other day -- though the Haitian government was a fiction for decades before the earthquake struck. The recent blatherings of Bill Clinton would have us believe that Haiti is poised to become an exemplar of economic development for the Caribbean once things are tidied up there. What planet are these people living on? (Answer: Planet Limousine.) Rather Haiti is the example of what life may become in nations bethinking themselves developed further along in The Long Emergency. If the figures on world crop failures for 2009 are relevant, even places like the USA may get a taste of this before the end of 2010.
On the home front we have President Obama's announcement last week of a tax on banks that received bailouts of one kind or another. This tax, he said, would amount to $90 billion over ten years. That's pretty funny, since there is no shortage of opinion to the effect that ten years from now $90 billion might buy you a box of Little Debbie Snack Cakes -- if the means of production are even there to make the darn things. Here's an idea: if the USA is going to backstop companies that are not allowed to fail, then maybe these companies should fork over hefty premiums for what is, in effect, an insurance policy. For instance, those billions now slated to be paid in in bonuses to the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan / Chase, Citibank, et cetera ad nauseum. Let them just pony up these bonuses to the taxpayers every year as long as they enjoy backstop insurance. (They'll still have very hefty salaries.) And, by the way, those bundles of money don't even cover these bank's off-balance-sheet liabilities.
I raise these indelicate points to argue that the stories we are telling ourselves these days do not reflect the real circumstances we find ourselves in, and will not help us to get through the difficult times ahead. In fact, they amount to an invitation for more tragedy. The more the USA imagines itself to be too big to fail -- and immune to the mandates of reality -- the more likely we are to fail massively. The more we indulge in techno-triumphalism and organizational grandiosity, the more chaos we invite. The signal failure for the moment is the Obama regime's unwillingness to imagine that the old economy is dead and that no amount of financial mortician's wax and rouge will bring it back to life. Stunts such as so-called Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee (the $90 billion tax over ten years) will only corrode what is left of Mr. Obama's authority as its meaninglessness reveals itself.
In the meantime, no one with any real authority has asked figures like Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and Tim Geithner under oath exactly how Goldman Sachs managed to get paid 100-cents on the dollar for derivatives bets from the foundering AIG; and how come in the first place Goldman Sachs was short-selling the fraud-riddled derivative securities it was packaging for sale as AAA-rated paper to credulous investors; and many other pertinent questions of the day that ultimately must be answered and settled within the rule of law. Funny, too, that our constitutional law professor president hasn't demanded this from his own Department of Justice. I maintain that it's crucial to settle these matters if we don't expect to become an entirely lawless nation. It's necessary to break up the TBTF banks. It's necessary to investigate their officers, and prosecute them if the facts warrant it. It's necessary to open up the dark vaults of off-balance-sheet liabilities and dispose of them at their true value.
It's necessary to start telling ourselves a different story about where we are going. We're destined to become a different kind of society and economy. If that future economy is not based on real productive activity conducted at a scale consistent with resource realities, then we will starve to death, or watch our infrastructures of daily life crumble away to nothing, or hack each other to pieces as the the people in Haiti may do before the end of this week. Goldman Sachs and its cohorts are not necessary for the future economy of the USA. In fact, they're already dead. The real zombies of this world stalk the sidewalks of Wall Street, not the swamps of Port-au-Prince.
Disasters Far and Near
As the disaster in Haiti moves into its "Katrina" phase of a organizational chaos, relief effort failure, and public health calamity, the world will get another lesson in the dangers of techno-triumphalist posturing. American authority pretends to be in flawless control of a situation that by the minute crumbles into anarchy and death as the generals strut their stuff and the CNN crews broadcast yet another feel-good segment about adopted orphans. At this point, one rainstorm is all it will take to kill what is left of the Haitian social order.
It's a tragedy for the ages, and tragedy is a fulcrum of the human condition that techno-triumphalism pretends to have vanquished. All the meals-ready-to-eat on God's green earth won't add up to a happy ending for everybody. Haiti was a disaster waiting to happen every bit as much as the Federal Reserve is for us. For decades, the USA's policy (and the UN's too) was just to stuff more food aid onto an island already so far beyond its carrying capacity for human existence that every new birth certificate was a death warrant in disguise. But free people are free to do what they will do, and in Haiti there was not much more to do than make more people.
Now the USA will also pretend that there is a Haitian government in charge -- as in the pathetic grandstanding of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the other day -- though the Haitian government was a fiction for decades before the earthquake struck. The recent blatherings of Bill Clinton would have us believe that Haiti is poised to become an exemplar of economic development for the Caribbean once things are tidied up there. What planet are these people living on? (Answer: Planet Limousine.) Rather Haiti is the example of what life may become in nations bethinking themselves developed further along in The Long Emergency. If the figures on world crop failures for 2009 are relevant, even places like the USA may get a taste of this before the end of 2010.
On the home front we have President Obama's announcement last week of a tax on banks that received bailouts of one kind or another. This tax, he said, would amount to $90 billion over ten years. That's pretty funny, since there is no shortage of opinion to the effect that ten years from now $90 billion might buy you a box of Little Debbie Snack Cakes -- if the means of production are even there to make the darn things. Here's an idea: if the USA is going to backstop companies that are not allowed to fail, then maybe these companies should fork over hefty premiums for what is, in effect, an insurance policy. For instance, those billions now slated to be paid in in bonuses to the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan / Chase, Citibank, et cetera ad nauseum. Let them just pony up these bonuses to the taxpayers every year as long as they enjoy backstop insurance. (They'll still have very hefty salaries.) And, by the way, those bundles of money don't even cover these bank's off-balance-sheet liabilities.
I raise these indelicate points to argue that the stories we are telling ourselves these days do not reflect the real circumstances we find ourselves in, and will not help us to get through the difficult times ahead. In fact, they amount to an invitation for more tragedy. The more the USA imagines itself to be too big to fail -- and immune to the mandates of reality -- the more likely we are to fail massively. The more we indulge in techno-triumphalism and organizational grandiosity, the more chaos we invite. The signal failure for the moment is the Obama regime's unwillingness to imagine that the old economy is dead and that no amount of financial mortician's wax and rouge will bring it back to life. Stunts such as so-called Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee (the $90 billion tax over ten years) will only corrode what is left of Mr. Obama's authority as its meaninglessness reveals itself.
In the meantime, no one with any real authority has asked figures like Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and Tim Geithner under oath exactly how Goldman Sachs managed to get paid 100-cents on the dollar for derivatives bets from the foundering AIG; and how come in the first place Goldman Sachs was short-selling the fraud-riddled derivative securities it was packaging for sale as AAA-rated paper to credulous investors; and many other pertinent questions of the day that ultimately must be answered and settled within the rule of law. Funny, too, that our constitutional law professor president hasn't demanded this from his own Department of Justice. I maintain that it's crucial to settle these matters if we don't expect to become an entirely lawless nation. It's necessary to break up the TBTF banks. It's necessary to investigate their officers, and prosecute them if the facts warrant it. It's necessary to open up the dark vaults of off-balance-sheet liabilities and dispose of them at their true value.
It's necessary to start telling ourselves a different story about where we are going. We're destined to become a different kind of society and economy. If that future economy is not based on real productive activity conducted at a scale consistent with resource realities, then we will starve to death, or watch our infrastructures of daily life crumble away to nothing, or hack each other to pieces as the the people in Haiti may do before the end of this week. Goldman Sachs and its cohorts are not necessary for the future economy of the USA. In fact, they're already dead. The real zombies of this world stalk the sidewalks of Wall Street, not the swamps of Port-au-Prince.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
SC100-7
http://postcarbon.webvanta.com/article/54564-the-meaning-of-copenhagen
The Meaning of Copenhagen
.........Because petroleum has been the driver of most economic expansion during the past few decades and there is no ready substitute for it, peak oil basically means the end of economic growth as we have known it. And without economic growth, our entire financial system comes apart. Indeed, that's exactly what we've been seeing over the past 18 months in the failure of trillions of dollars' worth of bets on future economic expansion. (For a discussion of the role of peak oil in the financial crisis, see "Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?".
No politician can ignore the worldwide economic crisis, yet its significance for the climate talks is rarely discussed. Now that people can't afford to drive as much, or even heat their homes in many cases, global carbon emissions have declined during the past year. That means that if the economy is in only a temporary state of "recovery" and resumes its swoon (as many financial analysts anticipate), and if global oil production has indeed peaked, then global carbon emissions have probably already peaked too. In which case, the world has achieved its first major goal in mitigating climate catastrophe.
Economic crisis makes climate change much harder to solve in the way everyone wants to see—i.e., with lots of green-tech growth. But it makes almost inevitable a "solution" that nobody wants: dramatic economic contraction leading to sharply declining energy demand. This is similar to famine "solving" overpopulation.
Responsible officials can discuss none of this in public lest investors lose their nerve and head for the exits. But a conversation that excludes such essential realities is delusional.
How might that pivotal Friday night negotiation in the Bella Center have gone if it had been grounded in reality?
President Obama might have said something like this: "Colleagues, global oil production has peaked and we have witnessed the resulting carnage in the global economy. We have likely seen the last of economic growth, in an overall sense. We are in an entirely new era. Adopting strict carbon emissions caps will help us end our dependence on fossil fuels—which we must do both to mitigate climate change and also to reduce the economic impacts of fuel scarcity. While giving up fossil fuels means reducing opportunities for growth, continuing to use them is no longer an option. We must adapt to this new reality."
The Chinese delegate would have objected: "But our nation needs to continue using coal in ever-increasing amounts. If we don't continue to grow our economy at 8 percent annually, the people will revolt. We're doing all we can to develop renewable energy, but only coal can give us the growth we need." To which Obama might have replied: "Your coal production will be peaking during the next few years anyway, and you won't be able to import enough from Australia and Indonesia to maintain growth in total energy production. Your economy is about to stall in any case—it is heavily dependent on exports, and Americans just aren't going to be buying a lot more Chinese goods. Your only hope, as ours, is to build renewable energy infrastructure at top speed, provide as much of a basic safety net for citizens as we can, try to enlist them in the overall energy transition, and hope for the best. Meanwhile, a strong climate agreement can at least help us change direction toward reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are obligated to produce such an agreement anyway for the sake of the planet and future generations. Let's get this done."
But that's evidently not what transpired. Instead, all accounts suggest the negotiations amounted to a theatrical set piece in which each player stayed rigidly on script.
If governments are having a difficult time addressing climate change in any serious fashion, they're not doing much better with regard to any of the other problems mentioned. Key nations are going about "solving" their financial crises by shoveling money by the billions and trillions at bankers who were largely responsible for creating the mess to begin with. Peak oil is regarded by heads of state as a subject unworthy of mention. The crisis of fresh water scarcity is being dealt with by pumping ancient aquifers until they're dry. Topsoil erosion has slowed in a few places, but overall continues at a staggering pace.
These problems, which will shape our destiny over the next few years and decades, are for the most part discussed only by experts in relevant fields. Meanwhile citizens are subjected to a steady stream of "infotainment" and political rhetoric utterly divorced from crumbling physical reality. This is easy to illustrate with ludicrously disinforming statements from industry-backed climate-change deniers. But responsible advocates of a strong climate policy are often nearly as soaked in delusion.
Here's just one example. Professor Mark Maslin, Director of the Environment Institute at University College London, was recently quoted as saying: "The science tells us that we must drastically cut the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic climate change. But we must also protect the moral and ethical right of countries to develop and achieve the same standard of living as we have in the west." This is a completely unremarkable statement with which nearly everyone at the climate talks in Copenhagen would probably have agreed—at least publicly. But think about it: what does this "development" consist of? The assumption is that poor countries can and should use more fossil fuels while rich ones wean themselves. But there just aren't enough fossil fuels available to enable that to happen. Poor countries will never achieve "the same standard of living as we have in the west." Rather, in the decades ahead, as nonrenewable resources deplete, people in the west will involuntarily give up their material standard of living until their way of life is supported only by renewable resources and the recycling of non-renewables. That means economic contraction, big time. We have a very long downward ramp to negotiate until that sustainable baseline is achieved..........
........To summarize: three factors—the need for resilience, the lack of effective policy at national and global levels, and the tendency of the best responses to emerge regionally and at a small scale—argue for dealing with the crushing crises of the new century locally, even though there is still undeniable need for larger-scale, global solutions.
Does this mean we should give up even trying to work at the national and global levels? Each person will have to make up her or his own mind on that one. To my thinking, Copenhagen is something of a last straw. I have no interest in trying to discourage anyone from undertaking national or global activism. Indeed, there is a danger in taking attention away from national and international affairs: policy could get hijacked not just by parties even less competent than those currently in command, but by ones that are just plain evil. Nevertheless, this writer is finally convinced that, with whatever energies for positive change may be available to us, we are likely to accomplish the most by working locally and on a small scale, while sharing information about successes and failures as widely as possible.
A final note: As 2010 begins we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century. Historians often remark that the character of a new century doesn't make itself apparent until its second decade (think World War I). Perhaps peak oil, the global financial crash, and the failure of Copenhagen are the signal events that will propel us into the Century of Decline. If these events are indeed indicative, it will be a century of economic contraction rather than growth; a century less about warnings of environmental constraints and consequences than about the fulfillment of past warnings; and a century of local action rather than grand global schemes.
I suspect that things are going to be noticeably different from now on.
The Meaning of Copenhagen
.........Because petroleum has been the driver of most economic expansion during the past few decades and there is no ready substitute for it, peak oil basically means the end of economic growth as we have known it. And without economic growth, our entire financial system comes apart. Indeed, that's exactly what we've been seeing over the past 18 months in the failure of trillions of dollars' worth of bets on future economic expansion. (For a discussion of the role of peak oil in the financial crisis, see "Temporary Recession or the End of Growth?".
No politician can ignore the worldwide economic crisis, yet its significance for the climate talks is rarely discussed. Now that people can't afford to drive as much, or even heat their homes in many cases, global carbon emissions have declined during the past year. That means that if the economy is in only a temporary state of "recovery" and resumes its swoon (as many financial analysts anticipate), and if global oil production has indeed peaked, then global carbon emissions have probably already peaked too. In which case, the world has achieved its first major goal in mitigating climate catastrophe.
Economic crisis makes climate change much harder to solve in the way everyone wants to see—i.e., with lots of green-tech growth. But it makes almost inevitable a "solution" that nobody wants: dramatic economic contraction leading to sharply declining energy demand. This is similar to famine "solving" overpopulation.
Responsible officials can discuss none of this in public lest investors lose their nerve and head for the exits. But a conversation that excludes such essential realities is delusional.
How might that pivotal Friday night negotiation in the Bella Center have gone if it had been grounded in reality?
President Obama might have said something like this: "Colleagues, global oil production has peaked and we have witnessed the resulting carnage in the global economy. We have likely seen the last of economic growth, in an overall sense. We are in an entirely new era. Adopting strict carbon emissions caps will help us end our dependence on fossil fuels—which we must do both to mitigate climate change and also to reduce the economic impacts of fuel scarcity. While giving up fossil fuels means reducing opportunities for growth, continuing to use them is no longer an option. We must adapt to this new reality."
The Chinese delegate would have objected: "But our nation needs to continue using coal in ever-increasing amounts. If we don't continue to grow our economy at 8 percent annually, the people will revolt. We're doing all we can to develop renewable energy, but only coal can give us the growth we need." To which Obama might have replied: "Your coal production will be peaking during the next few years anyway, and you won't be able to import enough from Australia and Indonesia to maintain growth in total energy production. Your economy is about to stall in any case—it is heavily dependent on exports, and Americans just aren't going to be buying a lot more Chinese goods. Your only hope, as ours, is to build renewable energy infrastructure at top speed, provide as much of a basic safety net for citizens as we can, try to enlist them in the overall energy transition, and hope for the best. Meanwhile, a strong climate agreement can at least help us change direction toward reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are obligated to produce such an agreement anyway for the sake of the planet and future generations. Let's get this done."
But that's evidently not what transpired. Instead, all accounts suggest the negotiations amounted to a theatrical set piece in which each player stayed rigidly on script.
If governments are having a difficult time addressing climate change in any serious fashion, they're not doing much better with regard to any of the other problems mentioned. Key nations are going about "solving" their financial crises by shoveling money by the billions and trillions at bankers who were largely responsible for creating the mess to begin with. Peak oil is regarded by heads of state as a subject unworthy of mention. The crisis of fresh water scarcity is being dealt with by pumping ancient aquifers until they're dry. Topsoil erosion has slowed in a few places, but overall continues at a staggering pace.
These problems, which will shape our destiny over the next few years and decades, are for the most part discussed only by experts in relevant fields. Meanwhile citizens are subjected to a steady stream of "infotainment" and political rhetoric utterly divorced from crumbling physical reality. This is easy to illustrate with ludicrously disinforming statements from industry-backed climate-change deniers. But responsible advocates of a strong climate policy are often nearly as soaked in delusion.
Here's just one example. Professor Mark Maslin, Director of the Environment Institute at University College London, was recently quoted as saying: "The science tells us that we must drastically cut the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic climate change. But we must also protect the moral and ethical right of countries to develop and achieve the same standard of living as we have in the west." This is a completely unremarkable statement with which nearly everyone at the climate talks in Copenhagen would probably have agreed—at least publicly. But think about it: what does this "development" consist of? The assumption is that poor countries can and should use more fossil fuels while rich ones wean themselves. But there just aren't enough fossil fuels available to enable that to happen. Poor countries will never achieve "the same standard of living as we have in the west." Rather, in the decades ahead, as nonrenewable resources deplete, people in the west will involuntarily give up their material standard of living until their way of life is supported only by renewable resources and the recycling of non-renewables. That means economic contraction, big time. We have a very long downward ramp to negotiate until that sustainable baseline is achieved..........
........To summarize: three factors—the need for resilience, the lack of effective policy at national and global levels, and the tendency of the best responses to emerge regionally and at a small scale—argue for dealing with the crushing crises of the new century locally, even though there is still undeniable need for larger-scale, global solutions.
Does this mean we should give up even trying to work at the national and global levels? Each person will have to make up her or his own mind on that one. To my thinking, Copenhagen is something of a last straw. I have no interest in trying to discourage anyone from undertaking national or global activism. Indeed, there is a danger in taking attention away from national and international affairs: policy could get hijacked not just by parties even less competent than those currently in command, but by ones that are just plain evil. Nevertheless, this writer is finally convinced that, with whatever energies for positive change may be available to us, we are likely to accomplish the most by working locally and on a small scale, while sharing information about successes and failures as widely as possible.
A final note: As 2010 begins we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century. Historians often remark that the character of a new century doesn't make itself apparent until its second decade (think World War I). Perhaps peak oil, the global financial crash, and the failure of Copenhagen are the signal events that will propel us into the Century of Decline. If these events are indeed indicative, it will be a century of economic contraction rather than growth; a century less about warnings of environmental constraints and consequences than about the fulfillment of past warnings; and a century of local action rather than grand global schemes.
I suspect that things are going to be noticeably different from now on.
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