James Howard Kunstler: Obama, Dems, Pubs oblivious to the real problem

[rosco rathbone]

Good thread!

 

[rosco rathbone]

A whole generation has actually been ramping up, preparing for these changes.

There are quite a few of us minimalists out there.

 

[KingOrfeo]

A whole generation has actually been ramping up, preparing for these changes.

There are quite a few of us minimalists out there.

I'm afraid individual lifestyle choices ain't enough to deal with this kind of problem.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I'm afraid individual lifestyle choices ain't enough to deal with this kind of problem.

It's part of the solution, not the whole thing.

 

[paganangel]

I'm afraid individual lifestyle choices ain't enough to deal with this kind of problem.

truth. also, it appears you haven't seen mr. president's 'town hall meeting' today.

 

[KingOrfeo]

truth. also, it appears you haven't seen mr. president's 'town hall meeting' today.

No, but I'll bet he said not a word about light rail or high-speed rail or the urgent need to make our built environments more compact, mixed-use and walkable.

 

[richard_daily]

Proven success record? Seriously? That's why we're in such great shape now? Where is this portal to Bizarro World you just entered and how much does it cost to enter?

It was successful in ruining our economy... Maybe that's what he meant?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Our "fix" has a proven success record.

Not if you're talking about tax cuts, it doesn't.

 

[KingOrfeo]

From today's (2/23/09) "Clusterfuck Nation" entry:

Among the questions that disturb the sleep of many casual observers is how come Mr. O doesn't get that the conventional process of economic growth -- based, as it was, on industrial expansion via revolving credit in a cheap-energy-resource era -- is over, and why does he keep invoking it at the podium? Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. "Consumerism" is dead. Revolving credit is dead -- at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.

If contraction and downscaling are indeed the case, then the better question is: why don't we get started on it right away instead of flogging rescue plans to restart something that is DOA? Downscaling the price of over-priced houses would be a good place to start. This gets to the heart of Rick Santelli's crowd-stirring moment. Let the chumps and weasels who over-reached take their lumps and move into rentals. Let the bankers who parlayed these fraudulent mortgages into investment swindles lose their jobs, surrender their perqs, and maybe even go to jail (if attorney general Eric Holder can be induced to investigate their deeds). No good will come of propping up the false values of mis-priced things.

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over. The public may suspect as much, but they can't admit it to themselves, and political leadership has so far declined to speak the truth about it for them -- in short, to form a useful consensus that will allow us to move forward effectively. One of the sad paradoxes of politics is that democracies do not seem very good at disciplining their citizens' behavior. The wish to please voters and the influence of campaign money overwhelm even leaders with mature instincts. In America's case, this could lead to what I like to call corn-pone Naziism a few years down the road. Someone will design snazzy uniforms and get us all marching around to "God Bless America." At the point of a gun.

It's not too late for President Obama to start uttering these truths so that we can avoid a turn to fascism and get on with the real business of America's next phase of history -- living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age. I don't think it's necessarily our destiny to end up that way, but these days we're not doing much to avoid it.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Of course, neither "endless revolving credit" nor "trickle down theory 'n' tax cuts" has anything to do with the irreducibly material problems Kunstler is talking about and both parties are persistently and inexplicably ignoring.

The problem is people - too damn many of them and they are living too long. Unless a clean, cheap energy source is found, future wars will be fought over food and water.

 

[KingOrfeo]

This week's entry is interesting:

Swingtime

By James Howard Kunstler
on January 25, 2010 7:13 AM


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.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I've been reading him for a while now. Good stuff.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Ooh, man! This week's Clusterfuck Nation rant is choice!

We're Weimar

By James Howard Kunstler

on February 8, 2010 6:35 AM

Future historians who try to chart the unraveling of the USA's political tapestry might point to two events of the past week. The obvious first one was the Tea Party convention at Nashville. It was held not accidentally at the ridiculous Opryland Hotel and resort in the city's outer suburban asteroid belt, right next to the circumferential freeway, and next door to the defunct (1997) Opryland USA theme park, an attraction based on the cute idea that Tennessee rubes were too dumb to spell the word opera -- so the symbolism was perfect.

Behind the incoherent cargo of conflicting complaints that makes up Tea Party doctrine -- like "keeping the government's hands off our medicare!" -- stands the more basic dissolution of the Sunbelt's miracle economy, along with the pain and bewilderment of the southern peckerwood political nexus that rose out of the dust after World War Two to build the suburban nirvana of universal air-conditioning, happy motoring, Jesus tub-thumping, over-eating, and Friday night football that defined Sunbelt culture. They sense now that history is about to thrust them back into the okra patch, with the hookworms and the chiggers, as the economy whirls down the drain, and the car dealerships close up, and the idle production homebuilders succumb to methedrine addiction, and the price of Reba McEntire tickets exceeds their dwindling resources, and they are none too happy about any of that.

Of course this Sunbelt political culture has tentacles and outposts all over the USA, wherever a few generations of laboring folk enjoyed debt-fueled parabolic rises in living standards during the cheap oil decades, and now find themselves in foreclosure hell, indentured to the very WalMarts that they welcomed with open arms (and allowed to destroy their local businesses) -- and, of course, it's yet another paradox that these are the same folk who will still defend the big box masters to their deaths. The America they stand for is a weird contradictory mish-mash of Confederate nostalgia, hyper-individualism that really owes allegiance to nothing, racial enmity, religious paranoia, and potemkin patriotism -- especially involving anything in the constitution that allows them to wriggle out of obligations to the public interest at the same time that they get to push other groups of people around.

The Tea Party people are the corn-pone Nazis I have been warning you about. They are gathering strength in numbers as President Obama and congress fritter away their remaining legitimacy in a manner of governance that more and more resembles an endless Chinese Fire Drill. The delusional craziness of the Tea Partyists exists in direct proportion to the wimpy deceit of the government, especially in matters of money and statistics reporting. Our political leaders are resorting to wholesale deceit because the truth of our situation -- comprehensive bankruptcy -- is too painful to dwell on and for the most part they are too chicken too state it.

This brings me to the second telling event of last week when President Obama said, kind of off-hand, apropos of the US economic situation, "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (of Nevada) was all over Mr. Obama like a cheap suit for that. I'm sorry that the President didn't slam back the craven Mr. Reid and pull his upper lip over the top of his head. Fuck Las Vegas and fuck Nevada, and fuck all the casino operators in every pulsating gambling venue around this country. The last thing we need is to continue believing that it is possible to get something for nothing, or an industry based on that false principle. I'd go a lot further and shut down legalized gambling all over the USA, send it back to the margins, to the alleys, to the berm between the WalMart and the Target Store, to the basement boiler rooms, to the public bathrooms, to wherever it will be identified as indecent, shameful, and not healthy.

Notice, by the way, that the Tea Party people have never made an issue about the disgusting gambling "industry" -- not even the Jesus thumpers among them, for all their pretense about decency and propriety. I suppose this is precisely because a cardinal article of Tea Party faith is that it should be possible to get something for nothing. You should be entitled to collect social security even while you inveigh against the intrusion of big government into your life and the horrible prospect that it will get its mitts on your Medicare! And when Jeezus comes to take you home, that place will be just like Opryland USA was in its heyday, with Dolly Parton in every suite and all the pulled pork sandwiches under heaven's dome....
As the contest heats up this year between Tea Partydom and the Weimar-like remnant of the party in power expect to see a political vortex form that will suck the little remaining coherence out of American life. Personally, I'd like to see Mr. Obama have a little fun with his adversaries, even if it seals his fate as a one-term president. I'd like to see him start by using the just-proposed national forum on health care reform as a rope-a-dope moment to expose opponents to reform as the bought-and-sold errand boys they are.

In the meantime, it appears that nothing will stop the epochal forces underway in global finance from spinning out of control. Illusions are getting hammered hard now and nations are lining up for the long trip home out of modernity to something that will look more like the seventeenth century, if they're lucky.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Powertone]

We can stop building new suburbs. We can revitalize downtown areas of our cities.

I'm cool with that as long as incoming residents receive FREE 9mm pistols to defend themselves against the urban thugs who've settled there for generations

 

[firespin]

You believe too much of what you read.

Go check out Malthus, or The Population Bomb, to see that dire predictions about the future have a way of turning out laughably wrong.

If automotive fuel gets to be too expensive, people will make other choices of place to live. As it stands now, it costs more to live in equivalent housing near mass transit, which means that eliminating cars would hurt the poor first. Is that what you were going for?

 

[rosco rathbone]

That's the kind of outstanding rant that gives me hope for the soul of this nation. "Something for nothing" cheap gambler's prayer finally properly identified with the "conservative" idea matrix it belongs to.

 

[Ham Murabi]

And we can build streetcar and light-rail and regional-rail and long-distance high-speed rail networks to make everybody less auto-dependent, therefore less petroleum-dependent (trains can be run on electricity, which can be generated in nuclear power plants, which we need a lot more of; the technology is much safer now than it was in the 1970s).

The idea is a multi-tiered system -- see here.

And we can put the government in charge to make sure it's all done as efficiently as possible.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And we can put the government in charge to make sure it's all done as efficiently as possible.

No, we can put government in charge to make sure it gets done at all. Ya think the private sector is gonna step up here?! In the real world, Ham, lots of things need to be done, that nobody can make a profit by doing, and then there's only one place to turn.

 

[KingOrfeo]

You believe too much of what you read.

Go check out Malthus, or The Population Bomb, to see that dire predictions about the future have a way of turning out laughably wrong.

I hope Kunstler's predictions do turn out to be laughably wrong, and so, I suspect, does he. But I'm starting to wonder if Paul Ehrlich was not wrong, but merely premature. He never figured on the "green revolution" and other technological innovations that would make it possible to feed a much larger population from the same amount of land; but his detractors never figure on the fact that technological progress has limits, and those limits are in the laws of physics and chemistry. Some things are impossible, and not all your piety or wit will change that. If the survival of industrial civilization depended on the invention of a perpetual-motion engine or a faster-than-light drive, then industrial civilization would collapse, no matter how much money were funneled to how many brilliant minds to do R&D.

From Kunstler's The City in Mind, chapter on Atlanta, pp. 73-75:

A current popular belief in America is that "alternative fuels" could replace gasoline in the vehicles we use and that the system could merrily roll along without petroleum as if nothing had happened. This a dangerous delusion. The truth is that no known "alternative technology," including hydrogen, fuel cell, electricity, nuclear, or alcohol from biomass, can take the place of gasoline in the way we have organized our lives, especially where cars and trucks are concerned. None of the touted alternative fuels is as versatile as gasoline, or can be produced for anything close to the cheap price of gas we've been accustomed to, or can be stored or transported as easily. The electric car is not going to save Atlanta.

* * * * *

I believe the world is entering a long era of chronic instability in oil markets that no amount of wishing or pretending will hold back. By the time this book is published -- a year from now -- I shall be surprised if we are not experiencing the initial effects. The two oil-producing regions that allowed America to postpone this reckoning for twenty-five years, the Alaskan North Slope fields, and the North Sea fields (belonging to Britain and Norway), are scheduled to pass their production peaks this year, and after that, most of the oil in the world will be controlled by people who don't like us, or contained in regions too chaotic to engage in the complex business of oil extraction. The Middle East regions containing the greatest reserves will be the last to peak, but long before they do, the oil markets will destabilize. In the current American mood of narcotized inattention, the point can't be emphasized enough that it is not necessary for oil reserves to run out before world oil markets are severely destabilized. And when that occurs, industrial economies will be painfully compromised.

We Americans cherish a set of delusions to minimize or deflect the seriousness of this. As already touched on, we believe that we can run a drive-in civilization on some fuel other than petroleum. The actual prospects for this are dim, but we base our belief (a wish, really) on the spectacular cavalcade of technological achievements that occurred in the previous century, one astonishing novelty after another: airplanes, movies, radio, TV, antibiotics, Teflon, computers, automobiles themselves. (The lingering "victory disease" from our great triumph in World War Two still stokes our delusions of invincibility.) Alternative energy sources such as natural gas, biomass, coal, nuclear power, solar power, fuel cells, and so forth, will fall far short of compensating for disrupted oil markets. It will be a hard lesson. The world's fleet of eleven thousand jet airplanes will not run on coal or plutonium. Massive disruptions to transportation and business will occur. The "global economy" as touted in recent years -- meaning the long-range transport of enormous quantities of cheap goods virtually everywhere -- will join mercantile imperialism in the history books. Food production, which depends heavily on oil-based fertilizers, will be affected by oil market disturbances. The Caesar salad that travels twenty-five hundred miles from California to somebody's table in Atlanta will become an object of nostalgia. Farming will have to become much more labor-intensive, will have to be practiced on a far smaller scale, and done much closer to market. Half a million other products, from medicine, asphalt, paint and detergent to plastic trash bags, are also derived from oil. As the oil markets destabilize, shortages and fluctuating prices in oil will hinder industry from even addressing the problem of converting societies to other forms of energy.

That book was published in 2001 and industrial civilization appears still to be ticking along just fine -- but that does not make his predictions irrelevant. I think the exploitation of previously untapped oilfields in Iraq* might buy us some time, but only some.


*Untapped because of policies, dating from shortly after WWI, of the international oil companies and OPEC, to prevent Iraq from producing much, as discussed in Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast -- who is, be it noted, a peak-oil skeptic, blaming the whole peak-oil theory on corporations with interests in nuclear power, using it make the idea more politically viable. If so, then, judging from Obama's SOTU address, they've had some success there.

If automotive fuel gets to be too expensive, people will make other choices of place to live.

You really think it's that simple? Somebody has to build those places to live first, or rehab them -- and in many cases post-WWII zoning codes make that illegal. Another topic on which Kunstler has written.

As it stands now, it costs more to live in equivalent housing near mass transit, which means that eliminating cars would hurt the poor first. Is that what you were going for?

Actually, there is a lot of dirt-cheap housing in transit-accessible areas, which are, after all, mostly in the rotting hearts of major cities (high population density makes mass transit much more practicable). Much of that is public housing projects. Some thinkers have imagined a future America in which all that changes: All the inner cities get gentrified, in the process pushing the poor out into cheapened and ghettoized 'burbs, where they will be even worse off than now because, in addition to all their other problems, they will have the cost of owning and maintaining their own cars if they even want to go to the big-box shopping plaza to spend their food stamps.

Moral: It sucks to be poor.

 

[trysail]

No, we can put government in charge to make sure it gets done at all. Ya think the private sector is gonna step up here?! In the real world, Ham, lots of things need to be done, that nobody can make a profit by doing, and then there's only one place to turn.

Free market economies are adaptive. The pricing system provides signals and efficiently allocate scarce resources such as capital. If there's an unsatisfied demand it will be identified by relatively high prices and there's no solution more efficient at filling demand than enterprise trying to make a profit.


"The solution to high prices is...

high prices."​

Free markets are democratic economics: consumers ( quite literally ) vote with their dollars.

The very last thing that's needed ( and the least efficient ) is central planning. Not only is it inefficient, it requires totalitarianism and dictatorship. I have no interest, whatsoever, in Kunstler or you or anybody else imposing your values or aesthetics or preferences on the rest of us.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Free market economies are adaptive. The pricing system provides signals and efficiently allocate scarce resources such as capital. If there's an unsatisfied demand it will be identified by relatively high prices and there's no solution more efficient at filling demand than enterprise trying to make a profit.

All true, and all completely irrelevant to what I said: In the real world, lots of things need to be done, that nobody can make a profit by doing.

 

[trysail]

All true, and all completely irrelevant to what I said: In the real world, lots of things need to be done, that nobody can make a profit by doing.

Not only is it spot-on, it has the added benefit of relieving you of your job of world-saving.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Here's one for you EuroSkeptics:

Euroland, the Horror Movie

By James Howard Kunstler

on February 15, 2010 7:03 AM

An Olympian game of musical chairs in global finance heads for a climax in the days ahead as so many eyes are diverted to alternate festivities in British Columbia, where grown men compete for gold by riding things that look like cafeteria trays down icy mountainsides -- is this the moment that comes every four years when you wonder why you didn't get your kid a luge for Christmas?

The advertisers must be lovin' it, but six thousand miles away a whole lot of European bankers are wondering how to get their fannies in a dwindling number of seats at the money trough. Greece is going bust. History is great prankster this way. Just when you're wondering how America will make Afghanistan safe for democracy, or whether Venezuela will blow itself up along with the oil markets, along comes kindly, picturesque, inoffensive old Uncle Greece -- land of antiquities and pizza entrepreneurs -- to fuck things up.

Those who run Europe have three choices: to bail out Greece, to let Greece sink (into a desperate economic depression), or to pretend to bail out Greece. The sad truth of the situation is that there is not enough productive activity in Europe to really support all the members of the European Union in the style they're accustomed to. (Which also happens to be true of the USA and its constituent states, but you probably know that already.)

Europe is a sad case, really poignant, because it became such a darn nice corner of the world after the convulsions of the mid 20th century. Who, for instance, can spend two weeks walking the lovely ancient streets of Bruges or Orvieto, or Lisbon and not fall to their knees in overwhelming despair on return to the slum of Kennedy Airport? Europe rebuilt itself so beautifully after the war while America became a utopia of overfed clowns riding in clown cars around the plasticized cartoon outskirts of our ruined cities. Europe had wonderful public transit while America let its railroads rot away. European men went about their business in grown-up clothing while Americans men dressed like five-year-olds and got flames tattooed on their necks as though contemplating a barbarian invasion of Akron, Ohio.

But history, that prankster, in the awful melodrama of industrial capital's demise, now seems to have backed lovely, reformed Europe into a corner as an early object-lesson in the agonies of de-complexifying and re-localization. The monetary union seemed like a great idea as long as the members appeared to play straight in the revolving credit racket. Europe had never been so peaceful and happy for so long. But the financial crisis has opened a yawning black hole in the operating system, and into it has been sucked all the elaborately constructed abstract markers of wealth -- in the form of credit-gone-bad -- and now the sad truth is that there really isn't enough wealth to go around. Places like Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland have to return to their previous condition as narcoleptic economic backwaters. Either that or Germans and Frenchmen have to work an extra seventeen hours a week to prop these places up, and somehow that seems unlikely to happen.

Europe has plenty of other things to worry about in the bigger picture. For one, where are they supposing to get the oil and natural gas they need to keep things running? Who's got any? Well, The UK once had quite bit but they pissed it away building freeways and suburbs. Norway, with around one-twelfth the UK's population, still has a bit of oil and gas left, but not enough to keep the rest of the gang in Europe humming. Romania has, like, a tablespoon of oil left, maybe. For the moment, Europe is getting its fossil fuels from Russia and the usual suspects in the oil export world. Bottom line: Europe can become Russia's energy bitch (and only for a little while because Russia is getting tapped out too), or it can compete with China, Japan, India, and the USA for whatever comes out of the Middle East, Africa, and Venezuela. Meanwhile, all the exporters see their own exports dwindling as their populations grow and grow and they pour more bunker oil into the new electric power stations, and evermore new cars leave the showrooms in Riyadh, and Hugo Chavez keeps pumping 35-cent gasoline for "el gente."

My guess is that the current situation in Euroland is unfixable. The "contagion" of Greece has already spread and it's only a matter of months before the Iberian peninsula goes under too. Did I leave out the UK's financial troubles (acknowledging that they are not within the Euro currency system)? Not to put too fine a point on it, Old Blighty is pretty well nigh fucked. It's on the express line back to the fifteenth century, and doesn't know it yet. Break out the leathern helmets and the wooden ploughshares. The UK is out of oil, out of banking cred (which is all it had the last forty years), and out of time. The one thing they have a lot of is bad paper hiding in their bank vaults -- enough to blow that black hole of capital even wider.

A larger question is what happens to the vaunted peacefulness of contemporary Europe now that the narcotic of universal prosperity is wearing off. Maybe it will be too shellshocked for a while to do anything. More likely, though, old and new animosities will burble out of those lovely old streets. Nations that seemed to be populated by effete cafe layabouts will be transformed back into warrior societies. Never under-estimate the sheer power of testosterone in idle, unemployed young men.

For another thing, I expect Europe to join the global contest for the world's remaining oil resources. Germany and France, at least, won't enjoy the luxury anymore of kicking back while the US Military desperately tries to keep a western "police" presence in the deserts down there. Germany and France will also not have the luxury to drink espresso and watch Iran become a mad dog nuclear power, with missiles capable of striking Frankfort and Lyon. Won't that be interesting?

As all this plays out, of course, the USA will be struggling with very similar problems of capital and economy, and as our states fall into bankruptcy one can easily imagine all kinds of political mischief here that would parallel the unravelings of Europe. Our financial arrangements are intermingled anyway, so the collapse of a major bank, or of a country, over there is going to blow more holes through our foundering institutions as well. Things are changing fast. We're all werewolves now.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

The notion that suburban sprawl is unsustainable does not bother me at all. I dislike suburbs. I like cities. In his book American Theocracy Kevin Phillips pointed out that there is a correlation between gasoline consumption and support for the Republican Party. I like the thought of Republicans being punished at the pump.

I want to raise the tax on gasoline by two dollars a gallon, and spend the money exclusively on non automotive means of transportation.

I hate to differ on this but two things get me here.

One, when the Republicans get punished at the pump, so does everyone else who needs to use gasoline to get to work. It's less punishing when you live in the city within 10 minutes of your job, of course, but it does make life more expensive for everyone, except those of us who have hybrids and electric SUV's.

Second, being in a large city typically means you're closer to the crime hotspots; plus there's the pollution, and the ease by which a suitcase nuke could wipe out everyone. That, and a city is the LAST place you want to be when the Zombie Apocalypse happens.