I'd like to know what Barack Obama thinks he's doing with the fiasco we call the US economy. He can't pump it back into the credit-fueled freak show it used to be, of course, but he could steer it in a practical new direction. Even people who have lost a lot, and stand to lose more, can be motivated to behave more self-beneficially. The president doesn't have very long before his economic problems become really awful political problems.
The current mass delusion that will go down in history as the "green shoots fugue" can't possibly bring the credit freak show back because the credit -- i.e. money borrowed from the American future -- was swindled away. Something like $14 trillion worth of nominal dollars is being sucked into a cosmic vortex never to be seen again. It was last seen in the spectral forms of so many collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, so-called structured investment vehicles and other now-obvious frauds. That giant sucking sound we hear means the process is still underway, and the "money" disappearing into yawning oblivion will out-pace any effort orchestrated by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to replace it with new "money" (or credit). Therefore there is no chance between heaven and hell that the pre-2008 suburban homesteading and shopping fiesta can ever come back. The American polity is tapped out in all sectors, personal, corporate, and public.
Notice the two words largely absent from whatever public discussion exists around these matters -- "swindle" and "fraud." The reason they're missing is because if they happened to enter the conversation, something would have to be done about them, namely investigations and prosecutions. The president is the person in the best position to set the terms of this public discussion, and by avoiding these two words he's blowing the chance to begin the process of correcting the tragic course we're on.
These swindles and frauds range from malfeasance at the highest levels to indecency in the lowliest cubicles -- i.e. the collusion of a revolving cast of cabinet-level officials with Wall Street executives to loot the US Treasury, the probable criminal dereliction at the mid-level of agencies like the Federal Reserve's oversight office and the SEC, to certain and outright street grifting in the traffic of securities known to be worthless at their creation. The current fiction that the public seems to be swallowing (for the moment) is along the lines of the old "mistakes were made" locution, which is an easy way to avoid holding individuals responsible for misdeeds.
The competence and hence the legitimacy of the US government is on the line here. The US economic situation is going to get a lot worse. Many more people are going to lose incomes and chattels and will suffer, and the moment will arrive when they will direct their anger outward. They need to be told two things: that the borrowed-against future is now here, requiring very different behavior; and that those who received lavish payment for looting the American future unlawfully will be subject to due process of law. So far, nobody has even been fired, let alone officially investigated.
Meanwhile, the nation is lumbering toward an epochal moment of truth when the non-viability of how we get by day-to-day is exposed for all to see, including those other nations who have been lending us colossal sums of their hard-earned money to keep our operations afloat. This will be the moment when the US renounces its debt -- or just proves unable to continue pretending to service it. This moment is liable to come sometime after the middle of this summer. It will be the moment when all the green shoots babytalk stops and the scope of onrushing hardship becomes self-evident. It will be the moment when all of America finds itself in something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the federal government proves comically impotent and the cold reality hits that we're now all on our own.
If it comes to that, I will be sorry to see Barack Obama in the goat-leader role formally occupied by George W. Bush. I voted for Mr. Obama mainly because I thought he had the capacity to tell the public the truth and inspire them to move forward out of childish indulgence into a more rigorous and challenging way of life consistent with the mandates of reality. I'm still not convinced that he'll fail at this, but time is growing awfully short.
The dreadful moment may arrive with the functional bankruptcy of California, which is on-schedule, as it happens, for July. Governor Schwarzenegger, who really seems to have tried introducing fiscal reality out there, and just plain failed, will surely come to the White House begging for a bail-out. It would be hard for President Obama to turn him down, but then forty-nine other governors will line up behind Arnold and everybody in the world will see what a farce our governance has turned into: a snake eating its own tail.
____________________________________
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers. I am at work on the sequel.
But Jim, California's money problems have been solved! Details are at thenothingstore.com
This is what Karl Deninger have been saying over at http://market-ticker.denninger.net Where are the indictments? There are none, because the majority of Congress is in on the fraud, they would all go to jail if convicted.
The public getting restless and worried. Why do you think it's hard to find 9mm ammo these days?
This is what Karl Deninger have been saying over at http://market-ticker.denninger.net Where are the indictments? There are none, because the majority of Congress is in on the fraud, they would all go to jail if convicted.
The public is getting restless and worried. Why do you think it's hard to find 9mm ammo these days?
Great post as usual Jim. Just this morning Goldman Sucks announces record bonuses for this quarter. Truly unbelievable. From the Guardian:
"Staff at Goldman Sachs can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms."
We are officially in the twilight zone.
Green shoots rhetoric seems to be working well where I'm at. In the past month alone four stay at home moms where at the school picking up their kids in brand new shiny surburbans. Not to mention the NJ "haves", are everywhere with there powerboats/jet skis trailered to their 3-ton SUV's.
Honestly, today's post has me scratching my head. After reading Mr Kunstler for several years now I have marveled at his astute powers of observation. How has he missed the fact that the democrats and republicans are fictitious reflections of the same power base? Obama, Berneke, Geinther, et al are the new thieves on the block. The events we're experiencing would be unfolding in the exact same manner following the exact script were it McCain/Palin. Obama knows about Peak OIl! He knows about the two words of fraud and swindle. Those trillions aren't going into a black hole. They're going into someone's pockets and we're financing our demise.
They are still building big four-lane highways around here! I was traveling on US-64 between Pulaski and Lawrenceburg this weekend and saw miles of new four-lane highway being built parallel to the old highway. The existing 2-lane road this big highway is "replacing" is perfectly viable for the forseeable future in my opinion considering the economic situation and the future of oil.
I wonder who they expect will be driving and filling up the lanes of that big highway 10 or 20 years from now, especially now that it is a fact the (affordable) oil is running out, auto companies are going bust and some states (California) can't even afford to "exist".
There is ZERO investment in light rail transport for the public around here. The same "money" could have been invested in a network of electrified light passenger rail between the towns that would have taken some "load" off of the highway - not that it had that much traffic to start with.
They're just building more highways and bridges - even though the existing highways and bridges are falling into a state of disrepair due to lack of funds.
Wow, how the priorities are misaligned!
Business as usual is gone and dead. I think for a few there is opportunity but for the majority of citizens the death spiral downward is tightening.
Hate to say it but the America I knew in the past is unrecognizable. What are we to do with these shifting sands we stand on? I personally am trying to position myself on every level for survival. The next 6 months will be a hell of a roller coaster ride.
"The president is the person in the best position to set the terms of this public discussion, and by avoiding these two words he's blowing the chance to begin the process of correcting the tragic course we're on." said Kunstler.
This goes to the heart of the Clusterfuck. Without leadership, there is no push back to the corrupting influence of the varied special interests that have shaped our current world.
Last week I wanted to note that it was the weakness of human nature, namely greed, and not ignorance or stupidity that guides, aborts or otherwise perverts the best laid plans of men smarter than either you or me.
Perhaps, in some way there is hope that a new peaceful ground swell of public attention can gain enough momentum by simply writing or emailing the White House as to why Obama refuses to discuss the realities of Wall Street's influence on financial sector legislation.
President Obama - why won't you admit you know that laws have been broken - and admit you are ignoring the facts about these crimes because of a larger purpose? And President Obama, why won't you tell the American people what this larger purpose is?
Mr President, what larger purpose is there than justice and the rule of law being applied uniformly to all people of the United States?
[I'll be waiting for my questions and answers to show up on 60 minutes or NBC nightly news....]
On the one hand one does see this life as usual going on around you, especially from the better off, but scratch just below the surface and another story emerges. Folks are nervous, they are playing their cards a little closer to the chest. The farther out on the limb one is (the more disconnected) the harder one will fall and there are a lot of folks out on the limb. When they fall it will make a thunderous noise.
Mr. Obama was installed in office to continue the agenda of the elites, just like his predecessor, and he's delivering - for them.
At least Goldman's bonuses are safe. Thank goodness. I was really worried about those poor bankers getting their bonuses. I wonder where (from whom) the money for those bonuses came from ...
Dave - Erstwhile Urban Wanderer
I thought Arnie already went to Obama for a bailout last week, and he indeed did turn Arnie down for exactly the reason you suggest.
As far as what else Obama is doing, I'm reminded of a time when I was just starting to rollerblade… I got rolling down a gentle slope, and found myself going uncomfortably fast, and saw a speed bump approaching. My braking skills were pretty weak at that time, so my choices were to deliberately crash before hitting the speed bump, hit the bump and crash anyway, or attempt to jump the damn thing and hope I landed it. I took my chance with jumping it, and (to my amazement) landed still upright on the other side.
The analogy should be obvious: things are out of control. If he "levels" with everyone, we crash before we hit the bump. If he just keeps going, we crash a little later. I think he's going to try jumping, but he can't jump until the last moment. Whether he's able to land it on the other side remains to be seen.
In the FAR Future, we've already landed. It was a little messy, but real life usually is. The Boy has returned home after his "post saving the universe victory tour."
The puppet masters no longer care if we see the strings.
Although the possible, perhaps probable dissolution of the Federal government might give some relief from the burden of supporting the military/industrial complex, I suspect that the wealthy will find it easier to corrupt state and local government bodies. And the MIC will not go quietly into this good night. War is coming to you. Staying means fighting. Can any form of local collective survive? I suspect that our future will resemble Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire. Too bad I only became aware of this after I had children.
Although I am too much spoiled, and have perhaps been crippled by the comforts of modern society, I suspect retiring to the wilderness will be one of the better options. I prefer to live or die by own labors and skill, or lack thereof, than by the hands of tyrants. The day to storm the castle walls has yet to come.
Sorry to be so gloomy. I fear the die has already been cast...
I voted for Barack even though I knew that he had already made his biggest mistake by selecting Geitner. Nothing will change as long as he keeps listening to the Wall Street butt-kissers in his staff. I fear that reality will sink in for Barack when it is too late to do anything about it.
Alex Jones has made the valid comment that the Powers That Be are hell bound to take over the entire system, because a 'rule of law' still existing, would pose an ultimate threat to them. Remember, these people have committed high treason, so they have to pull down the entire legal framework, or they eventually hang. If the system stays intact, they're dead men.
I don't think this is hyperbole, Where in history have thugs bankrupted a nation to the tune of 14 trillion in a few months. It's hard to imagine the suffering and yes, even deaths they have caused.
It is not only CA and NY feeling the severity of the pinch check out this local government press release from Harford County, MD where I lived from 87-02.
http://www.harfordcountymd.gov/Press/Press2801.pdf
Rumor has it the discharged county workers included a number of upper and mid level managers; who'd a thunk a mere 25% reduction in local taxes would have come to this? What will 50 or 75% down do?
I await with bated breath a groundswell to escalate into the roar of protest.
Time to tell the obscenely wealthy to cough up their ill gotten gains and pay off the obscene debts they have engineered and let whatever remains of the human population get started creating a worldwide civil society.
I would like to add that Ron Paul's 'Audit the Fed' bill is very important. A Depression is bad enough, but a Depression guided by criminals at the highest level, is one that you never can recover from.
So we reveal the thugs for what they are and perhaps deal with them, or we stay under their control for generations.
Most people I know think that tomorrow will be like today with slight changes. They do not expect paradigm shifts, certainly not negative ones. So where does the average Joe get his Weltanschauung? Mostly from TV. Look at the car ads on TV. Do any of those ads suggest that ANYTHING different is on the horizon? For that matter, are any of the commercials on TV speaking to new concerns, like frugality? TV will keep the fiction alive with a sky hooks. One day the sky hooks will fail - when they become obvious to all they are sky hooks. Then reality will set in and, for most, it will be brutal. The average Joe will discover that the life he had been cajoled into imagining for himself just ain't going to happen. You know, get rich, kick back and live the good life while other lesser beings wait on them. What was the quid pro quo that gets them this enviable life style? Not competence, not work, not anything associated with actual output. Rather their obsequious willingness to "buy into the system" without the slightest concern of its (the system) being an outright fraud. Essentially, the logic is that they show their solidarity (by not asking important questions) and in return they get goodies. This dynamic is why the average Joe is not such a victim as he might like to paint himself. But, no matter, it will all come crashing down. The sooner the better. At least then the sane among our kind can move on.
We just arrived in ECUADOR to take a look at the ecologically self-sustaining communities in the eastern rainforest. Janis, my wife, and I are anthropologists, and this is something we've been doing now for 25 years.
Here in Quito, however, the gerble-cheeked president, Rafael Correa, has imposed a 99% tax on foreign oil companies and defaulted on most of the country's debt. Yes, Hugo Chavez is happy to have an Ecuadorian acolyte. But oil production is falling -- fast -- and the country cannot induce foreign countries to extend credit.
The economic melt-down in this small Andean country may not be making headlines in Rochester, but take a look: what you find here may be coming to a street near you!
On the street, prices are climbing. Crime is getting worse. The only security is obtained by means of 20 foot property walls topped with broken glass and razor wire. Even mid-day walks to buy a paper at the local tienda are fraught with danger.
A vision of things to come -- even in Rochester?
For our part, we look forward to getting back to the rainforest jungles, where, fortunately, most of our Quechua-speaking friends never jumped on the bandwagon of the get-rich-quick crowd of Quito's petro-parvenus.
And we hope to learn a think or two that we can apply to the development of the UTAH VALLEY COMMONS, a cohousing ecovillage near Provo, UT.
Charles W. Nuckolls
UTAH VALLEY COMMONS
www.utahvalleycommons.com
Could anyone really expect Obama to a) tell the truth about this calamity, b) convince the more powerful segments of public opinion, and c) galvanize both the high and low elements of public opinion in order to punish the malefactors and restore the health of the republic?
There's a stunning degree of credulity in this thread. If Obama's power base were some college kids in Eugene and doomers in New England, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, his power base includes Wall Street, K Street, and all the stakeholders in the bankrupt economy of our forlorn nation.
I have no particular hope with Obama but I don't see the point of demonizing him either. He's attempting triage on a beached whale. It's not going to work. It's going to fail. We all know that.
And he has no other choice.
You nailed it for me, Walt. That's why I think it's a good time to get out of Dodge. I don't consider myself a doomer, but I think I can see which way the wind is blowing. Denial won't put food on the table, or a roof over my family's head. I'm just trying to find a corner of the s#%t sandwich that's more bread than not...
A global economy built upon lies, fraud and mass delusion isn't going to function should the President of the United States ever speak truthfully about its failure.
Collapse is inevitable if the President speaks harsh truths or maintains the delusions which have brought us to this place, but maintaining the delusions might preserve the economy longer than truth.
Sometimes lies are better than the truth. Ask the Peak Oil movement about that ... the oil industry's lies have served it well. Not so well that it could get John McCain elected president, though, thank God!
Instead of making unreasonable and impossible demands upon the President it is much better to relax and let Nature take its course.
The collapse of the United States of America must occur at its own pace. It will happen whenever it happens.
The collapse of technological civilization will happen whenever it happens. No need to worry about inevitable things.
While it is good to spend time warning people about what's coming everyone must realize that the vast majority of people live within the delusion and they aren't going to leave that delusion voluntarily because reality is harsh, unpleasant and very unfavorable to their future plans.
So I'll spend my time with the animals and flowers instead:
http://www.flickr.com/dmathew1
Humankind is a lost cause.
Well said, Walt. I could well be wrong about my "jumping the speed bump" analogy above, and even if I'm right it could end with a pretty painful crack-up anyway… but like you said, there are no other choices. Well, the other choice is to give up & let it happen.
And who knows? Like that 35-year-old version of me, he might get lucky and land it, or get the whale back in the water.
During last year's election campaign those of us who politely refrains from imbibing the O-Man's Kool-aid tried to draw the sheeple's attention to the fact that the Sainted "O" was not exactly known for his non-corruptablity when it came to sweetheart land deals with Chicago area power brokers.
We also tried, alas in vain, to focus voter attention on the fact that the glorious one was also not reknowned in the halls of the Illinois State Legislature for taking strong stands on issues or even bothering to vote "yea" or "nay" on many of them - preferring instead to straddle the fence and not offend the power brokers in Springfield.
So this caused to ask why....pray tell....are people like Mr. Kunstler and his legions of loyal followers running around like the Vichy French police inspector in Casablanca proclaiming that they are "Shocked! Shocked!" to find that the infallible O-Man (blessed be his name) is susceptible to being bought-off and/or manipulated by the Corporatist/Fascist, Wall Street bankster, neo-Robber Barons who obviously OWN HIM....(and the 2 major political parties for that matter)?
Obviously, P.T. Barnum's maxim about suckers is still as true today as it was a century ago.
During last year's election campaign those of us who politely refrained from imbibing the O-Man's Kool-aid tried to draw the sheeple's attention to the fact that the Sainted "O" was not exactly known for his non-corruptablity when it came to sweetheart land deals with Chicago area power brokers.
We also tried, alas in vain, to focus voter attention on the fact that the glorious one was also not reknowned in the halls of the Illinois State Legislature for taking strong stands on issues or even bothering to vote "yea" or "nay" on many of them - preferring instead to straddle the fence and not offend the power brokers in Springfield.
So this caused me to ask why....pray tell....are people like Mr. Kunstler and his legions of loyal followers running around like the Vichy French police inspector in Casablanca proclaiming that they are "Shocked! Shocked!" to find that the infallible O-Man (blessed be his name) is susceptible to being bought-off and/or manipulated by the Corporatist/Fascist, Wall Street bankster, neo-Robber Barons who obviously OWN HIM....(and the 2 major political parties for that matter)?
Obviously, P.T. Barnum's maxim about suckers is still as true today as it was a century ago.
Schwartzenegger attempt to introduce reality into the budget? Surely you jest. Or else you are being fed distorted stories. Didn't you pay attention to the circus of the special election (what's the going cost of a special election in a state the size of CA these days?) to try to get the populace of CA to pass a bunch of horseshit budget amendments. What the state needs is to amend the property tax code and raise taxes on the highest tax bracket. Those are unpopular choices, though, so the legislation continues to look for ways to shift the tax burden onto the backs of the lowest economic class, through exorbitant cigarette taxes (who smokes most?) and a regressive vehicle fee increase.
The Governator already went to the Prez for a handout and was slapped down. Talk about too big to fail. The story is that the state of CA will run out of money in less than 2 months. If that actually transpires, watch out. The repercussions of that crash will certainly resonate throughout the nation. But no worries, Texas and NY will take up the slack, I'm sure.
Yes, the stunning thing about Obama is that he was seemingly more willing to speak the truth during the campaign than he has been sense! He's actually moved to the Right since the election. It's an historic loss of opportunity. Coming into office on a wave of popularity, he was free, as few politicians ever are, to go directly to the American people and speak the truth about how we must change our attitudes and way of life. That would have solidified his bona fides as a true leader and the congress would have been under great pressure to overcome their servile corruption and partisanship to follow his lead. That opportunity is now past, as we see with current status of the health care initiative. Congress is back to business as usual, collecting lobbyist money and doing nothing. Obama sits in the White House, as ineffectual and compromised as Bill Clinton. I think this will be looked back on as one of the greatest failures of opportunity ever shown by a new President.
J...A...N...P
Just another Negro politician.
Mr. Obama has the incredible talent of convincing people that he is not just another corrupt politician from the South Side of Chicago. Which, of course, is exactly what he is. If he weren't weren't, he'd still be one more struggling community organizer. He wouldn't have been elevated to the presidency in such a short period of time.
Mr. Obama's ability to convince black people that he is black, coupled with his ability to convince white people that he is not black, resonated with the political-correctness zeitgeist of supposed African-American moral superiority and the excretory behavior of the previous presidency to rocket this man into the Oval Office. We need hope: we need serious change. Has there ever been a case where hope and change has ever come from a Constitutional Law professor? Law professors live comfortable lives playing word games with young people in a process to transform them from naïve students into sleazy corporate snakes. Why would anyone think that this guy would have been any different?
"Surprise! Surprise! Sgt. Carter", he's not.
At best, the Obama presidency is another incarnation of the Herbert Hoover presidency. Here is a basically decent guy, a competent technocrat, stunned by the awesomeness of being a person of his class and background actually being 'da president of da United States!'. And too stupefied to actually do anything necessarily strong and differently enough to justify the votes and hopes of the people who put him there.
By 2016, the Obama administration will have accomplished nothing more that it has done in its first five months. We need serious hope and serious change, but will not get it from someone who is not capable of imagining it actually happening.
Obama should dump his current vice president and select a serious upper-class firebrand as his next veep. Then after his re-election, he should resign, get out of the way, and live out his la-dee-da years as a university chancellor.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does reflect itself. Is history a wave or a particle?
Look, the bolt-hole escape plan is not going to work. Where are you going to run to? There is no place, certainly not in the U.S., where social chaos cannot or will not reach. If you are one of the few people to raise food on your own plot of land, then unless you have a strongman with a small army to protect you your food will be taken by the mob. If you go out into the "boonies"--a place, by the way, that hardly exists anymore--your isolation also makes you a good target for violence because you can't call on help.
Some of us are going to die no matter what we do. A few of us may live, though with suffering. A very few of us may live relatively without suffering, but the idea that you can manipulate things to avoid the one and ensure the other is delusional. We need to abandon "every man for himself" rhetoric and start figuring out how to make our local communities as strong as possible.
You want to get a good idea of how the environmental and financial issues are going to get us ultimately, just look at what is happening on the islands: Iceland, Australia...
I just read the latest National Geographic article on Australia and it's quite frigthening. It is exaclthy what Jared Diamond was predicting in Collapse.
The farmers are blaming government and fighting for the right for water, yet most don't seem to get the big picture. They don't seem to realize that many of their crops should not even exist in their type of environment.
It really looks like they have completely destroyed their ecosystem and now they are starting to fight for the scraps. Of course they will keep on supporting the biggest destroyers and polluters as well as the least productiuve crops in order to keep on getting their currency for their imports.
After reading this, I can now imagine exactly what happened on Easter Island.
There will be two sides when all of this comes crashing down: The Rich and the Poor. Which side does Obama, Bush, Geithner or any other human want to be on when that happens? Hmmm. The poor will become angry and of course they will be criminalized for that. With too many poor people in "the system" the rich will have no choice but to retreat to their guarded fortresses and protect their wealth "for the sake of their families." This is a basic biological function unlikely to be unrooted in human nature. There is plenty of money out there it just isn't going to fall into everyone's hands. The Consumer Nation will have to accept what is coming to it, but it won't be easy. There will be those that will keep this going at all cost and the ones that keep hope (thanks in part to TV) that they too will make million dollar bonuses, own private jets and be the envy of all their friends.
Of course all of this assumes we are running on a US government backed dollar. But what about a bartering system economy combined with a local currency? It promotes localism and can be guaranteed by good old fashioned hard work that built this country. Meaning - my money helps my neighbor put food on their table and vice-versa instead of another Million dollar Yacht for a Wall Street executive. By "rejecting" their "system" it is a stake to the heart of those blood-sucking vampires.
Your right - most people's idea of 'the boonies' won't work. Not much of the USA would work. I also don't relish the idea of a life of remote isolation. I think remote communities might be worth a try. Integrating with established 'locals' wouldn't be assured, I know. Perhaps consider this the least awful option. No good ones left.
There are still fairly wild places left on this earth. Hard living, but honest. Not a days drive away - more like weeks. There's nothing there that the greedheads care about.
I disagree with Jim that the US is going to default on it's debt. At least not in the sense the Argentina did.
The first, and most important reason why the US will not default on it's debt is because doing so would wreck the world economy. The resulting cataclysm would make the Great Depression look like prosperity. If you think Sept/Oct 2008 was scary (and it was truly terrifying), then multiply that by a thousand and you might start to get close to what a US gov't default would look like.
The current debt levels of about 60% of GDP are really not that large by historical standards (for example compared to post WWII). Things start to get dicey when you get up around 100% of GDP (the UK has gone as high as 200% of GDP). At those levels the central bank has to raise interest rates to attract capital and the gov't is forced to dramatically cut spending and raise taxes.
I think the more likely scenario for the US is that there will be a combination of modest tax increases and dramatically lower spending. The US has relative low levels of taxation, so there is lots of room to increase taxes. On the spending side, the big ticket items are social security at about 20% of the budget, health care at about 20%, and defence about 20%.
On defense, the US spends about 4% of GDP just for the DoD. That doesn't include defense related spending in other departments (e.g. DoE), nor does it include the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal. The US spends as much as the rest of the world COMBINED on defense. So there is TONS of room to cut. Unwinding the empire would cut back on blowback and ultimately make the US much safer.
Health care costs are another place where spending can be cut. Relative to the rest of the world, the US spends an inordinate amount of money on health care and gets less in return.
SS is a hard one to cut immediately; you really don't want to leave old people out in the cold, but it's such a huge program that even small percentage savings amount to large sums of money over time.
So the fiscal problems the US faces have solutions, and at least as far as public debt is concerned, the solutions are not mysterious.
The real problem is political, and I agree with Jim there. Obama et. al. really need to make it very clear to the electorate that tax rates will be going up and spending will be going down and that anyone who says otherwise (like the GOP) is lying, stupid, or crazy.
The sooner Obama starts driving home reality, the sooner the US can get past the childish tantrums the GOP and friends will throw when they are told that in the world of adults you can't increase spending and cut taxes forever.
Well Said Socrates, and funny too!
I must say I am surprised to hear you voted for the big O, Mr. Kunstler. I guess we all have our areas of sharp eyed sight, where we see something others don't see; and others see things we don't see.
So, I ain't gonna be too harsh on you; cause frankly, my views were that swopping Obama for GW, was madness. As someone recently said, most of the Repubs are thieves in suits, what you see is what you get; ain't a big mystery. Unlike with the O-Democrats, who are thieves in Armani suits, pretending to care for the poor; blah blah... with all their superficial, two faced vomit inducing moral self righteous saintliness!
I also don't for a moment think that the Obama Fed Reserve crowd 'don't know' what they are doing! They know very well what they are doing; they are intentionally (not sure if there is malice involved, but there is self preservation involved) creating the circumstances for the consequences of economic warfare: depopulation by inflation, etc...
What would you do, if you were the elite, and were of the opinion that, considering Peak Oil realities, the world needs to be depopulated by a couple of billion? You could create the circumstnaces for a massive world war.. but thats gonna use up a lot of oil and energy.. so not a good idea! You could create the circumstances by means of economic warfare.. starve the 'useless eaters' and 'savages on viagra' to death... by inflation....
If it appears the savages on viagra and useless eaters get a little too pissed off about the cost of food, lack of jobs etc... and start makign guilotine like rumbling noises.. then all you do, is immediately release that Swine Flu virus, this time for real.. and you got the 'reason' to quarantine millions... and give them force fed vaccinations, filled with Gulf War Syndrome or Aids like immune destroying viruses...
Or how would you go about it?
Or are you of the quaint opinion, the world is not overpopulated???
My worst fear is that it just drags on and on until we are in Hell. No one will ever convince me that this whole circus isn't about labor costs. With all this fancy financial talk, and geo-political talk, and NWO is the anti-christ bullcrap, with us trying to figure out motives, objectives, solutions....all it was ever about was cheap labor. Of course "they" know about pollution and peak oil and climate change, but here is the news: they don't care. It won't really effect anyone with an ass-load of money. What concern them is returns on investments, as it alway did. Why let China and Bangladesh, or anybody else have all the fun? Why not use North Americans and Europeans? What difference does it make ? I think that is all the NWO is-cheap labor. And it will work. See, we are blinded by our antique ideas about "Nation", "culture", "religion". The corperations are etheral, boundless, like a cloud of gas. They don't even recognize people as human beings, just as "workers" or/and "consumers". Whew! That was long-winded. See you in the food distribution camps! "Peace" out.
What laws have been broken? You mean laws like the FISA law, retroactively changed to protect the lawbreakers?
You mean like the laws against torture?
The laws against unprovoked assault on other countries?
Or the 3 strikes you're out laws, where a man was sentenced to 30 years for eating a slice of pizza at the pizza parlor where he worked? Because it was his third offence against society, you know.
He who has the gold makes the rules. We should all know that.
And Marx pointed out 150 years ago that when capitalists have too much profits to invest in productive capacity, they will gamble it.
The only difference now is that they have convinced most Americans that it is in the working class interest to gamble their pensions along with the ruling class.
A portion of the "wealth" that was "lost" belonged to ordinary American workers, through their 401Ks. Did any of the bailout go to replace that?
I agree with CDK. There is no individual solution to this problem. We need to band together and create solutions.
If we can feed and house and clothe each other with fake money or credit, we can do it without.
This past week, I had occasion to visit and frequent the Northern Virginia area outside our Nations Capitol. For those of you who know,
Loudoun County and Fairfax County Virginia.
Out in these parts, where many of the folks who do
all this government work, live and eat and carry on, the marvelous new economy continues unabated. There are huge strip malls still under construction. Gigantic 'townhome' suburbs going in as we speak. Brand spanking new homes filling up with new buyers just in the last few weeks. Road building continues unabated.
Loudoun County used to feed a lot of people, it's
being paved over at what appears to be an
increasing rate, not a decreasing rate.
I think you can scream at the critters who run
the US government all you want, but they are still
living and loving in shiny brand new suburbs. Still fighting some of the most heinous traffic in their porsche SUVs, trading traffic light races with cadillac suvs and audi all-roads and so on. The race to the bottom is moving ahead at full pace.
Don't kid yourselves.
I enjoy the writing of Mr. Kunstler, but his gifts are certain to be found mainly in the "fiction" category and not in prognostication. The talk of things unravelling to a great extent "middle of this summer" is worth remembering and returning to in, say, October. You will find that things are nearly the same as they are now; yes, the stock market may be down from where it is now; yes, the drums of war may be sounding loudly in North Korea; but still, you will not see a United States that is so very different. Collapses of true empires take time. One could argue this has been a long time coming, and while certain aspects of this are true, the fully-formed financial crisis is a recent occurence.
Look around you: are things so very different than last fall? I think not. "Patrick" makes many good points above regarding the headroom still in this economy. If the US Government absolutely had to, they could pull in the flaps, raise taxes to 50%, and run a surplus. This idea that the politicians in power would let their power slip away in some midnight collapse is laughable. They'll do whatever they have to do to maintain the power structure. If that means raising taxes, they'll do it in a heartbeat. If that means cutting funding, they'll do that too. So, the financial collapse angle is a dead end.
We could speak of other types of collapse, but they're all even further out in the tails of the probability distribution.
. It won't really effect anyone with an ass-load of money. What concern them is returns on investments, as it alway did
-----------
That's what Marie-Antoinette thought too!
To CDK re your comment: "Some of us are going to die no matter what we do. A few of us may live, though with suffering. A very few of us may live relatively without suffering, but the idea that you can manipulate things to avoid the one and ensure the other is delusional. We need to abandon "every man for himself" rhetoric and start figuring out how to make our local communities as strong as possible."
Just wanted to say thank you for adding this wisdom to the mix - I've come to this, many of us will die and I'll probably be one of them, getting up there in age and not as healthy as I used to be, but everyone dies one way or another. It's all about community until then.
Peace to all.
Schwartzenegger attempt to introduce reality into the budget? Surely you jest.
And, it's hardly just his recent five tax measures where he's totally failed to lead in implementing responsible fiscal policy. He began with a $5 billion bond issue immediately after he was elected, and it's been downhill ever since. Yes, our state legislature is every bit as bad as New York's, but Arnold had a chance to rise above it, and he blew it.
Blame the president for not going far enough to challenge the policies and situation he inherited, like TARP, TALF, etc. and for accepting the view that the financial system is the grease on the wheels of GDP. Blame Wall Street for taking absurd risks, motivated by an even more absurd incentive structure that rewards failure just as extravagantly as success.
But blame the election of Obama on a nefarious power structure of elites? Well, somewhere along the way people did vote.
Claim that California is a mess created by politicians? California's fiscal imbalance is considerably healthier than the United States as a whole, especially as a share of GDP. But the people of California, by passing absurd conservative-funded constitutional amendments that limit taxes while simultaneously clamoring for government activity, created their own problems.
Claim that the system will fail by mid-summer, Jim? Much more likely is that the economy will begin to recover by late in the year and into 2010, at which point oil prices will rise again and put pressure on marginal homeowners living in places where they have no choice but to drive to work, shop, etc, and the economy will stall again. The banks will again be faced with mortgage-backed securities problems (you know, the ones they already have but are ignoring in order to see if their 'assets' will regain value), and we'll be off on another dip down.
What we're facing right now is a big shakeout that many institutions and people are trying to ignore and ride out. It will be the first of many, and they all come from oil and a citizenry that rewards politicians who impose no hard choices.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
This is good, typical Kunstler, but he's still only considering the "economic collapse". Though it doesn't feel like it to folks here in the tent cities or who are suffering and dying due to lack of medical care, or elsewhere due to war and dislocation..... on and on. This is very very minor compared to the collapse of the 65M years of the Cenozoic Age. And, yes, as some have pointed out, each of us responds to our awareness of current danger, politicians, the “wealthy” elite, the suffering and impoverished, each of us, in whatever way appears to provide us the most safety at the present moment.
Only a vast change in how we Humans see our role in the unfolding of life on Earth and the Universe will make a difference. We can give up studying the dismal science and study the new story presented to us – our new understanding of the evolving Universe, how life has come forth, and how we must live within that miracle.
I guess we’ll only do that if we care enough about all people, all creatures, all living things to try to understand and change.
Barack Obama wasn't elected president for "Change". He was elected to take a failed system and cause further exploitation of it.
American citizens who are members of a mob cannot tell the difference between the way the mob operates and the U.S. government.
Obama is just nothing more than a Chicago mobster elevated to this nation's highest office in order to become a part of those who are using their elected office for their own benefit. The veneer of Saul Alinsky's radicalism they surround themselves in merely hides their true intentions.
The one thing Obama is a master of is distractions. He creates situations for us to focus on while in the meantime he continues the plan he was elected to carry out.
Are any of you paying attention these days to what Obama is really doing?
I don't see why all of you heap so much scorn on him. He is trying to introduce new regulations and regulatory bodies to oversee both Wall Street AND the Fed and Treasury. He did not author the $750 billion no-strings-attached bailout bill to the banks. That was the guy who came before him, whose final act was the looting of the treasury. As soon as Obama came into office, he attempted to introduce restrictions on how the bailout money was being used, including restrictions on bonuses, but the cat was already out of the bag.
Obama has a very tough job. The big players on Wall Street run the show and have for some time. At the same time that he is trying to reform Wall Street, he must bring them along, because that sector drives the economy. If he loses the confidence of the big money people, then the economy will tank even further. Some of you just want someone to blame for this massive crap storm. Well, heap your derision on Goldman Sachs and other financial firms, as the previous poster indicated, giving out record amounts of bonuses this year. Who do you think is paying for these banker's third and fourth homes? You are via your tax dollars, or, rather, you are on the hook for it.
Furthermore, I would like to make the point that America is still a democracy. You all seem to want Obama to behave like a tin pot dictator and ram through laws and regulations via the Executive branch without consulting anyone. But he doesn't work that way, because Obama understands democracy and the art of compromise. He is trying to use persuasion and the legislature, you know, how things are supposed to work in this country. You all have had too much of GW and think the president should be some kind of absolute ruler. I don't agree with that approach at all. The imperial presidency is a terrible idea.
I think Obama is doing a pretty decent job right now with the cards dealt him. No one is perfect, obviously, and he is wide open for criticism like any public official, but get your facts straight. He is trying to introduce financial reform, and trying very hard at that. Pardon the pun, but give credit where it is due.
As for Geithner, would you all prefer someone without any banking experience at all? ALL the main people at the Treasury Department have worked at one time or another in the financial industry. Geithner has been in the public sector for 10 years. I don't understand...you all want Obama to hire some incompetent ideologue with no real-world financial experience?
The real trouble is not that the Fed can't provide more money. It can, because America is able to fund its debts in its own currency, a luxury that many countries do not have. The problem is all those reserve dollars held by countries like Saudi Arabia and China. If they see long term weakness and instability in the dollar, then they will start to dump them for Euros or other more stable and well-regulated currencies. At that point, we could see a massive inflation as these dollars are repatriated. That scenario is my biggest fear, and similar scenarios have occurred before in other countries like Argentina.
Jim, why are you in such denial that Obama is just another politician? Goldman Sachs was Obama's second largest contributor, and other banksters were not far behind. Did you think they were supporting someone who was going to bust them?
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638
Recommissioned Army National Guard Transportation Battalions are going to be needed to backstop private enterprise efforts to rehab the US rail branchline network. Railroad Operating And Maintenance Battalions were functioning parts of US military logistics from Civil War thru the Vietnam War era, over 100 years. Military Rail Unit were useful to domestic activity, as disaster recovery resource and seedbed for rail savvy personnel, too. This was the military in role of Guarantor of Societal & Commercial Cohesion, codified in the July 10, 1838 US Congress "Post Roads Act".
DestiNY Mall closing invites comment to all mall users, and ex-users too: see where the nearest dormant rail footprint is, and feasibility of linking rail in event of gas/diesel rationing. Retired stockbrokers may find time to do this.
Get copy of local US Rail Map Atlas from spv.co.uk, and see where rail extended, or rehabbed will connect to warehousing, closed plants, malls living & dead, military bases, etc.
Armchair engineers can see book, Swan's "ELECTRIC WATER" for broader look at renewable linked local enrgy supply & railway planning. See ASPO Articles 374 & 1037. Engage in Parallel Bar Therapy for Oil Interregnum muscle tone.
How people can say they didn't see this coming is beyond me. If you listened to the Kingfish during the campaign, you damn sure knew this guy was beyond the pale. Promises, the new way, the new day, change, folks, change. Yeah, right. Instead, as this writer has stated often, big business and greenbacks run this country. When's the last time we had us a po' boy as President? I mean a real po' boy. Instead, we have a megalomaniac masquerading as a po' boy, and that won't cut it.
I heard that my home state of Connecticut is just behind California on the Richter scale of unbalanced budgets for the next 3 years and that spells big trouble for one of the richest per capita states in the union.
The phoneybaloney Victory Garden tipped me off on these folks. It's all about hype, not reality. Additionally, one of the tipoffs is "when is the last time the Presidential press secretary was a straight shooter"? Obama's presidency is about as transparent as your average tar baby. For all of you'se that voted for this guy, best of luck. You sure knew what you were doing.
"The first, and most important reason why the US will not default on it's debt is because doing so would wreck the world economy."
And it has never, and will never default on its debt because of its magical printing press. The Treasury Department, as ordered by the Federal Reserve, prints whatever money it wants to keep the Federal Government solvent.
It's been doing this for 90 years now. It is where inflation comes from. The Federal Reserve does not stop inflation, it is inflation.
Geithner and Bernanke call their money creation 'liquidity.' I call it counterfeiting.
Grand Theft Nation
BAHMI- I couldn't agree more. These politicos are just like lego pieces, just snap one in when needed or useful. BTW, I'm from CT as well. Pity us both.
Mr. Kunstler,
As someone who has been living in California for the past 5 years, I can tell you that Jesus Christ himself could not do anything for this state. It is ungovernable.
The citizens of California are in love with direct democracy via propositions. Unfortunately, all fiscal coherence is lost with this system, because people vote for billions of dollars in services and projects while rejecting all new tax increases. A normal state legislature would introduce new sources of funding such as taxes and fees to pay for new services, but the California Legislature cannot do this because new taxes require a 2/3 majority, something which the "no new taxes" Republican goons always reject. But they are perfectly happy to vote for new pet projects, new automobiles for themselves and other state workers, and other various gigantic boondoggles.
California has strictly capped property taxes via the (aptly named) Proposition 13. This means that the state is desperate for revenue, and hence has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation. That is why raising taxes is so difficult. Basically, all the citizens of California subsidize property owners who do not pay their fair share of taxes.
It isn't PC to say so, but the state is overrun with illegal immigrants. No one really knows how many or how much it costs, but estimates range from $6 billion per year and up. It also contributes to the state's high unemployment rate, supposedly 11%, but, in actuality, it is certainly much higher than this figure.
The state government and its workers are dominated by big unions, such as teachers, fire and police, and prison guards. These unions negotiated extremely generous contracts that included guaranteed yearly raises and high pay scales, comprehensive health care, over-the-top pensions, and lucrative overtime. This is bleeding the state dry, as no one wants to stand up to these groups and would have to violate contract law to do so, anyways.
And Arnie is definitely not a white knight or even particularly good at his job. He is an incompetent boob, a former actor, and a perfect illustration of the Peter Principle. Instead of laying off 10-15% of the state work force, which desperately needs to be done and would be the instantaneous response in private industry, he instead uses fear tactics like threatening to shut down all the state parks, remove most social services for the poor and elderly, etc. All the public transportation services are cutting service and raising fares.
Politically, California is a complete mess and unless major overhaul occurs, it is going down the tubes. Therefore, I dub it The Clusterfuck State.
The day of blaming W for everything wrong in the country is long gone. Obama brought in his crew of university leftists and has set sail with the future of this country. He's proven himself to be a classless blowhard, a megalomaniac and narcissist with a wife to match. Yet, the admiration for this guy is absurd. Listening to fellow pinkos in the media is also sickening. On one hand calling for the return of the Fairness Doctrine, while the other hand fails to remember that the press was ogling and fondling this guy before the election. Just bad memories or terminal Alzheimer's?
How do folks know this guy Obama is "a nice guy, like my next door neighbor, etc etc"? Just like Himmler was a nice guy, huh? So soft spoken, so wise....
Hey Jim, a small glimmer of light: the Energy Info Admin. of the DOE has come out and fessed up to Peak Oil. Check it out:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090629/klare
Finally! But the rat bastards in congress are trying harder than ever to help Big Ag Biz monopolize the nation's food supply by shutting down small producers, even farmers markets. Look at:
http://www.ftcldf.org/news/news-15june2009.htm
We are trying to learn to feed as many families as possible on a few acres using sustainable intensive mini-farming. Clean food, no E-Coli in our spinach. But this bill would kill us. Just when human-labor based farming needs to be encouraged, and fast. Go figure.
bahmi,
Obama has been in office for 6 months, and you're ready to blame all the country's economic woes on him. That's just pure silliness. Economic policies can take YEARS to have an impact, just like years of Republican misrule lead to the 2006-2008 economic crash.
Your opinion is just pure bile and fact free. I think you're just generally angry and need someone to blame for your problems, whatever those might be. Sounds like you have some psychological issues. Get some help, seriously.
No one is being prosecuted? Are you guys smoking the crack? Two big prosecutions that come to mind are Mattoff and Stanford, both of whom engineered billion-dollar frauds. Of course, Obama's administration is going after people. You're just not paying attention.
Obama is like Himmler?
Uh, ok, I can guess that we can all safety ignore whatever else you say in this post and not be in danger of missing any valuable information.
California has strictly capped property taxes via the (aptly named) Proposition 13. This means that the state is desperate for revenue, and hence has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
It does? I've lived here 10+ times longer, and I disagree. For example -
http://www.hjta.org/prop_13_stabilizes_tax_bases
From the Los Angeles Times of July 9, 2008: (Original link is broken)
Property tax funds rise as housing market falls
Proposition 13 is credited with stabilizing California counties' tax bases even though valuations are lowered on thousands of homes.
By Cara Mia DiMassa
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
For decades, Proposition 13 has been cast as the bane of cash-strapped local government, limiting property tax revenues even as California's housing market soared.
But this week, as county assessors reported rising tax bases despite the housing slump, they credited the 30-year-old law -- revealing it unexpected role as an economic stabilizer.
Counties across Southern California reported that their overall tax bases grew compared with last year's. [...]
For all of you that haven't been paying attention the last 8 and a half or so years, GW completely gutted the SEC commission and basically told them not to regulate, hence the explosion in creative debt financing, outright fraud, etc. That organization did not even have a leader for several years. You want to blame someone for Wall Street's shenanigans, GW is your man, for sure.
A LAND WITH NO BORDER
'It isn't PC to say so, but the state is overrun with illegal immigrants. '
Actually the US is overrun with illegals..
they murder 3000? people a year in the usa
yet in describing CHANDRA LEVYS presumed killer the ny/la times and wash post all describe him as a migrant not an illegal
so thats the crux of things
corporations that disinform citizens via the media
Billy,
Property tax receipts are slightly up in certain counties. That's just grand, but did you notice that the state has a $25 billion dollar yearly budget shortfall? Where do you think that came from?
After Prop 13 passed, the California schools went from being one of the best systems in the nation to being one of the worst. The state began to accumulate more and more debt to pay for its basic services. Unlike other states that fund their police, fire, and local municipal services out of local property taxes, which by and large remain at the local government, California takes the property taxes and redistributes them like a mini nation state. Additionally, it has to feed in money from other sources like the income tax.
Why does it do this? Because property taxes are not high enough here to pay for everything that people demand.
The effect of Prop 13 has been to push overall housing valuations up, because the property tax rate is so low. It is in the state government's best interest to have high housing prices so that those low rates are applied to a high housing value.
Just because Prop 13 has had a side effect of stabilization in a short period doesn't mean its long term effects aren't detrimental. They certainly have been, but if you own property here, of course you think it is the greatest thing in the world.
Other state's raise their property taxes when they have to in order to fund basic services. The California government is not allowed to do this by law, and that's why the income tax, gas tax, fees, etc. are some of the highest in the nation.
This is certainly part of the entitlement culture here, which demands a comprehensive set of services from the state, yet refuses to be realistic and pay for it. Kind of reminds me of this country, writ large.
Oh, and Prop 13 also included the 2/3 rule for authorizing new taxes, which is certainly causing huge problems here. You'd have to be blind to argue otherwise.
Property tax receipts are slightly up in certain counties. That's just grand, but did you notice that the state has a $25 billion dollar yearly budget shortfall? Where do you think that came from?
I think it's largely from spending money foolishly. The high speed railroad Jim Kunstler recently mentioned is but one of many, many examples. Court ordered medical care for prisoners is another. We don't need the new railroad, and we have far too many people jailed. Et cetera.
After Prop 13 passed, the California schools went from being one of the best systems in the nation to being one of the worst.
But, does it follow that Prop 13 was responsible?
http://www.thepolicyreport.net/2009/05/29/education-waste-is-easy-to-find/
Education Waste Is Easy To Find
By [California State] Senator George Runner
While there are many groups clamoring for a piece of the state's budget pie, one of the most persistent is the education bloc. Indeed, districts, unions, and faculty associations are constantly decrying cuts to education. For all their crowing, the budget cuts to education pale in comparison to the massive increases in education spending over the past decade - increases that took place despite a large decrease in student enrollment. In fact, education funding has increased by $15 billion over the last decade even though there were 74,000 fewer students over that same period.
What is most astonishing is that test scores remain abysmally low, dropout rates - especially among low-income minority groups - are unacceptably high, and schools suffer from disrepair. Surely this is not due to a lack of resources, not given the fact that roughly half of the state's budget is allocated to education. Policymakers (and taxpayers) should not be asking how much more to spend, but rather how our money is being spent. [...]
Billy Y, you sicko, how can you say Obama merely inherited problems when he's basically thrown out the baby with the bath water on many of his proposals, eagerly signed by wackjob Dems with their bloated ego driven majority? You are saying everything Obama does is a direct, honest, and superb answer to the W legislation? Do you see balance in the House and Senate, as the Kingfish intimated in his desire for transparency and bilateral decision making? Or, do you see the Pelosi-Reid Idiocracy running amok as many Americans do? No, Billy Y, you are one of the Obama fondlers, everything this cat does is blessed by you, isn't it? Give him some time? Then why does he want to get a zillion things done so fast anyway? Because he hears footsteps, Bill. He knows his brand of crap is selling less and less each day. Many of my gas customers from out of state tell me they greatly dislike the guy and what he's done, his phoniness, and, lo and behold, they voted for him!! Enough said, Bill. Thanks for the referral to a shrink. Too bad he couldn't straighten you out.
Hi, have you discussed the genetics industry on this blog much? I've noticed that we are pouring money into genetics research (and their commutes to work) - and there seems to be no limit. Genzyme gets 1.6B per year from two drugs alone, at $200,000 per patient, and they keep inventing more drugs that the public is then obligated to purchase. I don't know what the total take is by the genetic research industry, but it's huge and growing and untouchable! Remember Obama said Genetics Research was the one area where he'd need a "scalpel not a hatchet" to cut the budget, and he vowed this year to increase medical research funding. And this article shows three gleaming new biomedical centers built with Madoff money, I don't think it is a coincidence that the only "lost" money that can be found is tied up in biomedical research centers that can't be "given back" to the fraud victims. Between spending tax money, insurance premium money, pyramid scheme money, and foreign health care money, it's still not enough, they still want more and its all untouchable!
And its surely unsustainable, right? Transhumanism is not just a silly distraction for Trekkies, it is real funding hog soaking up effort and resources. It is apparently trying to finish the job before we run out of oil, as if it knows that if it doesn't achieve Singularity and Robot-God Superlativity very soon, it will hae lost its chance. And Obama seems to be in agreement. We need to wake the public up to this massive misallocation of energy and say we have Enough medical research, and a Genetic Engineered future of perfect babies is just not going to happen.
Why will California be the first to fall?
Because of the illegal immigrants. What is the
way forward for California and America as a whole?
Throw them out. That alone will save countless
billions in social services and solve unemploy-
ment at one stroke. Will this be sufficient to
prevent the Long Emergency? No, but it is neces-
sary. Ethnic solidarity is a must if we're going
to get through this-as Mr Kunstler alludes to in
his novel. To have said more would have offended
his readers.
On the same note, don't worry about Iceland.
They're sitting pretty. They destroyed their ec-
onomy before they destroyed their whole social
fabric through third world immigration. That's why
they were so outraged and felt so free to express
it-their own brothers screwed them over. They felt
free to attack the banks because they knew that
they wouldn't be shot or imprisoned for life-as
would happen here. White Americans know that the
Goverment loathes them and would crush them at
the first sign of real indignation. Real Nation,
Culture, and Religion, without the quotes, are not
the enemies, but in fact, the only thing that can
save us.
Billy,
Wow, no personal attacks against me? You must be from another forum. ;)
You state that Prop 13 has stabilized the tax base. However, state tax revenues are down over 25% from projections, according to a form email I got from the governor answering my concerns. Is that just income taxes? Nope, property taxes, too. So I don't buy the LA Times article you sited.
I never said Prop 13 was solely to blame for the budget crisis. You took one part of my post and ran with it. But it is certainly a part of the problem. Do you think that it is a coincidence California started to accumulate more and more debt after Prop 13 was introduced and its effects began to take hold? I really don't. The property tax base is too restricted. That's why all the other taxes in California are the highest in the country. This is why the business climate here is considered so unfriendly. Everyone else subsidizes property owners and their low property taxes.
High speed rail is actually a good idea here if you go by the standards of a country like France that knows about such things, but you're right, California has not the money to pay for it. It would be a good project for the Fed. Just can a few new bomber programs or something.
"Court ordered medical care for prisoners is another."
You can't be serious? This is causing a $25 billion deficit? NOT.
"I think it's largely from spending money foolishly."
I'm with you there, but a lot of this money was spent because the populace told the government to spend it by voting for various propositions that were "funded" by bonds. You can't blame the whole thing on "the government". People voted for a lot of this stuff.
Anyways, having lived here a while, I find your attitude that this is all due to government waste and overspending to be a little myopic. Many people in this state are incredibly wealthy, with several pieces of property, multiple expensive cars, high-paying jobs, recreational equipment like sailboats and motorbikes, etc. These people definitely could pay more in taxes without a big hit to their lifestyles and probably they should. Yet we are to believe that this same crowd just can't possibly pay more in property taxes or they will go broke? I don't buy it.
"No one is being prosecuted? Are you guys smoking the crack?"
The fact is it took thousands of fraudsters from mortgage brokers, your local Realtwhores, corrupt builders and investment bankers, complacent newspapers, and almost everyone in your Federal Capital Shill Mafia to come up and execute the greatest theft in modern history. And as far as I can tell only a few of the guilty have been prosecuted.
"Obama has been in office for 6 months, and you're ready to blame all the country's economic woes on him."
Obama was complacent in congress while serving on Capital Shill for the better part of this decade. He supported and defended ACORN, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FHA, and all the other garbage government programs intended to build an 'ownershit society' and what were at the center of the cause of the current financial train wreck.
Kunstler may exaggerate sometimes, but at least he can differentiate reality from fantasy which is more than can be said for much of my countrymen and women including Obama.
Bambi,
Deep breathe now. Maybe try drinking a glass of water or taking a short walk.
The poster's name goes ABOVE their post on this forum. I wrote the post refuting your ridiculous "Obama-Himmler" spew. Congratulations on hurling insults at entirely the wrong person just because they disagree with you.
I notice that you're not big on the facts, are you? Such as the fact that Obama IS attempting to introduce comprehensive reform in the areas of finance, medicine, and energy. These reforms must be passed by the legislature first. That's how it works in this country. Do you want the imperial presidency back? You want more "signing statements" and "executive orders". Sorry, we're doing things like adults now. The Bush era is over.
Let's turn this around. What do you want Obama to do that he isn't doing, Bambi? You want him to do less? You want him to do more? Which is it? You want him to telephone you for approval every time he has to take a dump?
There is no coherence to your stance; you're basically just ranting about "the liberals" without providing any facts to back up your position.
The economist Michael Hudson (for my money the only economist who has been worth his salt in the last thirty years) made a comment the other day regarding a recent economic conference between the countries; Russia, China, Korea and a few others, being a watershed event. In his view this is the first stroke in the battle to dethrone the dollar and US military hegemony. The major countries involved in seems, are tired of funding their encirclement by the U.S. Military and have decided to do something about it. The U.S. BTW, asked to attend, after not being invited...... and was rejected. To have an economic conference anytime in the last 60 years without the US involved would have been unthinkable. Not any more.
I agree with the idea of the dollar losing world reserve currency status, just cant say that it's going to happen this summer. I realize that the concensus outside of here, aside from Patrick and a few others thinks that a world without dollars and U.S. consumers will ceash the global economy. Guess what, it is already crashing. The non Anglo world particularly Asia is already taking steps to spur internal demand through economic stimulus. China, Russia and others ARE talking about replacing the dollar as the hard currency that international debts are settled with.
It is not if this happens but when. Most analysts expect that this cannot occur earlier than two years from now because of the amount of time to unwind all of the positions, but it eventually will occur. The end of dollar hegemony will affect every man, woman and child in the U.S. because U.S. excessive consumption rates are subsidized by foreign purchases of U.S. dollars and treasury bonds. The paradigm of U.S. dollar hegemony came about through the fundamentals of a) the U.S. was at the top of the list in practically every commodity exports including crude oil.
b) the U.S. was at the top of the list in manufacturing.
c)the U.S. military had just secured dramatic victories in world wars thus creating an aura of security for investors in dollars.
d)the U.S. topped the list as worlds leading creditor nation.
The paradigm of U.S. dollar hegemony is coming to an end because, a)the U.S. is the worlds leading importer of practically every commodity including crude oil.
b)the U.S. has gutted it's manufacturing base by moving it to China and elsewhere in Asia.
c)the U.S. military is bogged down in a quagmire in the middle east that is an unsustainable war of attrition.
d)the U.S. is at the very top of the list as the worlds leading debtor nation.
Simply raising taxes and cutting back services will not(as if the government would even consider shrinking) offset the the imbalances that exist with respect to the fundamentals of PO, growth in emerging countries such as China and Brazil and the excessive consumption, lack of production rates that exists in the U.S.
China has surpassed the U.S. as leading car producer/consumer with 36% of new cars sold there to individuals that have never owned a vehicle. Another example that I find compelling because of the way that Jim pokes fun at fried chicken shacks, is the fact that a new Kentucky Fried Chicken is opening in China every 23 hours.
One way or another, the mechanisms for the dollars demise have been set in motion and are irreversable. The U.S. deficit for '09 is already quadruple last years record setting deficit. There is only one way the U.S. can service it's debt, and that is through depreciating the dollar in an inflationary environment. What we have here is an appreciating dollar in a deflationary environment--not a good combination for a debtor nation.
There is a lot of talk about California (the only thing people in California think about more than California itself is California Real estate). Maybe it's the water (or lack of) but people love their children, but they love their property values more. Why else would they subsidize suburban housing and lay off teachers at the same time? All they've ever done is rip up farm land and put up more houses because it makes more money. Then you've got Mike Davis and Reyner Banham with their books on Los Angeles that are both over-intellectualized and useless. Academia's answers to urban problems is a white-knuckle death grip on over-analysis that is usually a little bit more than smug. What Los Angeles and other cities need is not more overly complicated diagnosis or solutions, but action. Action that will not arrive until it is too late unless our current course is drastically changed. Playing the blame game is a complete waste of time and energy.
DANM - A very astute synopsis of what is occuring in Australia. We too lack any politicians with the guts to tell the truth or do the right thing.
There is a conference on at the moment sponsored by the Australian Farmers Federation. They are concerned about world famine.
One of their ideas is to use bio-degradable polymer to keep the moisture in the soil - I kid you not. Peak Oil is not even on their horizon.
I left this comment:
Yes Vivienne, what we have here is a fantasy convention for those who still think nine billion people on planet earth represents an economic opportunity. How is it that all the dumb people end up in charge? Permaculture not agriculture.Localisation and renewable fuels. Learn to live differently or think up things to tell the lynch mobs made up of our children and grandchildren.
Posted by: Steve of Perth 11:57am Monday
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2009/06/22/87655_latest-news.html
Turkle,
I wouldn't call anything Obama has proposed, or certainly enacted up to this point, “comprehensive reform”. Throwing a few billion dollars at renewable energy, or proposing an as yet passed medical coverage bill that will still leave the vast majority of uninsured still uninsured, seems to me to be more of the gradualism or incrementalism that has plagued the Democratic Party for a generation. As for his economic reforms, we will see what actually gets passed when the sausage making is done. I'm extremely doubtful it will be anything more than a creampuff thrown in the direction of Wall Street.
It didn't have to be this way, he had a wonderful window of opportunity after his election to step forward with bold reforms and a new vision for the future. That sort of pressure would have made life very difficult for the corrupt Congress. He has chosen to cast himself more in the mold of Clinton, a leader without an agenda, or a set of firm beliefs. Hand it to W, he was an idiot and an asshole, but he at least knew how to use the power of the Presidency and critics by damned. Before you get all emotional and attack me as some sort of Judas or Pollyanna who expected to much, keep in mind I worked well over 100 hours for the guys campaign. I've been around politics a long time and I think I know what's possible. I earned a right to be disappointed, and I damn sure am.
Billy Y, you sicko, how can you say Obama merely...
I may be a sicko, but I'm a sicko knocking Arnold, not Obama.
Yet, anyway, heh...
"Such as the fact that Obama IS attempting to introduce comprehensive reform in the areas of finance, medicine, and energy."
He's trying but I don't know how much he'll be able to accomplish. Especially because no one in this country seems to want to sacrifice for a better health care system. We've conned ourselves into thinking we can have wars, gold plated medicine, and bail out the banks without an adjustment to our lifestyle.
Phaedrus,
What do you suggest people in California think about instead? Rhode Island? The Vatican City? ;)
I discuss the California budget situation because Jim mentioned it in his post, and I am familiar with it. If I was equally familiar with the budget problems of other states, I would discuss that, too.
I think you're wrong that people here are overly fixated on discussing the state of California. They generally don't pay enough attention to what their state government is really doing. That's part of the problem. The weather here is so nice and you can recreate to your heart's content, so why worry about all that budget crap? Only when TSHTF do people sit up and pay attention, but by that time it is too late to do much about it. The Terminator wants to close all the state parks. That jolts people out of their apathy. But a few billion dollars here or there...whatever, let's go to the beach.
You're right that everyone does discuss real estate here, probably because a small shack costs half a million or more. People want to get in on the game, but personally, it doesn't look like a great investment to me, especially now that property values have fallen (and continue to stagnate or decline). That's why I rent. The real estate market is too expensive for me (and while not rich I make what would be considered a lot of money for a single person in most other states). I wouldn't want to be stuck with a $300,000+ loan when the fundamentals are so shaky here (infrastructure, state budget, immigration, etc.).
I don't think that's correct that California is all about suburban sprawl. Not that much more than the rest of the nation (with the possible exception of LA but even then it has fairly high population density).
In fact, California has a huge number of state, local, and federal park lands and open spaces, and giant swaths of the state are nothing but wilderness. Many people here are very conscious of protecting the natural environment. The Sierra Club, basically the first environmental organization, was started here by John Muir. So it isn't all about McMansions and In and Out Burger.
Furthermore, while Obama may have missed his chance. It is also highly possible that the political system is just too badly broken to be fixed by anything other than the most dramatic of agendas and advocacy. Apparently, the guy just wasn't up to it.
You state that Prop 13 has stabilized the tax base. However, state tax revenues are down over 25% from projections, according to a form email I got from the governor answering my concerns. Is that just income taxes? Nope, property taxes, too. So I don't buy the LA Times article you sited.
The report is from last year, and it is true up to that point. Now. of course, the economy has completely caved in. But - is that Prop 13's fault?
Nope...
"Court ordered medical care for prisoners is another."
You can't be serious? This is causing a $25 billion deficit? NOT.
It does account for one-third of it. Really.
Anyways, having lived here a while, I find your attitude that this is all due to government waste and overspending to be a little myopic.
I suggest you spend some time with your favorite search engine, and look into the history, and actual results, of all this.
That said - can the rich afford to pay more in taxes? Of course they can. But, is there a lot of money to be saved by prudent management of what the state currently has to spend? Yes, that is just as true...
Truenorth's recipe for the Excited States:
1/ Call the army home and stop pushing people around in other countries. Mostly disband it, you can't afford it anymore anyways.
2/ Accept a dramatically lower standard of living. This will come through much lower wage rates. Chinese engineers work long hours for $6000 a year and you'll have to accept similar conditions. Accept dramatically higher taxation to pay down the debt incurred over decades.
3/ Bring manufacturing home. You have to begin making products that the rest of the world wants to buy. Oil at $200/barrel will help.
You glutton Americans can work your way out of this.
Greetings from Wale in the UK.
This week has been rather strange. Our entire political system has frozen and become totally introverted as the political class have finally woken up to the fact that most of the population now regards them as little better than corrupt filth. We are going to have yet another inquiry into the Iraq war which yet again will be held in secret and yet again the public will feel cheated as a result. Not bad being as it's a pointless exercise - we can hardly un-invade and raise Saddam from the dead. WE see the US is now starting to withdraw and so Iraq will finally slide into it's final chapter of blood-letting doubtless causing oil to rise as the markets get the jitters about instability in both Iraq and neighbouring Iran. Our Chancellor Alistair Darling (don't know what the US equivalent is) said in public this week that basically there will be no recovery if oil rises again.
So now we have a frozen banking system and a frozen political system.
Our near-neighbours the Irish continue to stagger along looking at budgetry cuts that are incomprehensible and further afield the Baltic states continue to melt down, but slightly more slowly now that the IMF has found a few million in the back of a cupboard somewhere.
Bye for now, catch you all next week.
A few things to cure “Californism”
- let all non-violent offender out of jail, give them ankle bracelets, they either go to work or stay home. Reduce the prison employee population accordingly.
- legalize marijuana and tax it
- raise gas taxes
- cancel all state retirement agreements and rewrite them to to be consistent with reality
- stop subsidizing development with tax money
- end the initiative ballot process and make the legislators start doing their job.
Not that big a deal, just takes the political will to get it done. If that takes a collapse of their paper market and an end to services temporarily to get it done. Then so be it.
dale,
This is too funny. You campaigned for Obama, and here I am the one defending him. I must make the embarrassing revelation that I didn't even VOTE in the election. Where is asoka when you need him?
Off the top of my head, here are some things that Obama has done that I agreed with.
He ordered all government departments to comply with FOIA act requests in a timely manner, reversing the Bush administration policy of ignoring them as a general policy. Open, transparent government is one of the basics of democracy.
He rescinded many Bush era executive orders, which were legislated by Congress. Three separate branches of government with distinct duties is part of our Constitution. The Executive Branch issuing these is an end run around Congress, which is supposed to be making the laws.
He increased by 8x the funding for alternative energy research. These numbers are only set to increase. That is not small potatoes.
He took a more balanced and conciliatory tone in dealing with the Middle East.
He has introduced legislation that will provide strong oversight of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. He has strengthened the FEC.
He had his defense secretary introduce defense cuts to trim back that department's bloated and outlandish budget, including tough decisions like cutting major weapons programs.
That's just off the top of my head.
Has Obama enacted all the reforms I would like to have seen? No, of course not. Specifically, I would have liked to have seen a much heavier hand in the financial sector. America desperately needs reform in that area. Unfortunately, Wall Street and the US government are practically one in the same, so I hardly expect major, sweeping reforms or prosecutions. Maybe I'm just jaded.
You say that George Bush's ability to push through his ideas was a positive. Hardly. It was precisely for this reason that his presidency faltered. Heading the US Executive Branch is about compromise. It is about setting a good example and working with people, even when they don't agree with you, even when they are rabidly and diametrically opposed to everything you stand for. That's what democracy is about, all parties coming to the table and working out solutions and using the arts of compromise and persuasion. Somewhere along the line, we lost that, and I'm glad to see the democratic attitude on the upswing. We need it. What we don't need is "You're either with us or against us".
Obama is doing a lot of things right. The tone of the country is very negative right now. All people want to do is criticize, especially on internet message boards. It is just a constant spew of rage. Give your own guy some props, for Christ's sake! He's doing fine, and he's just getting started.
Now, if you bought into all the big change rhetoric from the campaign, I'm sorry. I guess you were deeply embedded. Frankly, I didn't pay that much attention. Politicians on the stump are full of hot air, bar none.
I'm with David Matthews on this one. Except I tend to get my kicks from plants more than animals. Animals, especially those embedded in centuries-old growth paradigms, always seek to conquer and usurp resources from their neighbors. Now, the same could be said of plants in some cases, specifically weedy, aggressive, pioneer species, but plants are fascinating in their sessile nature. Because they can't move they tend to develop cooperative strategies instead. Deep roots, middle, shallow. Bloom sequence spread out to maximize the season. Chemical attractants for pollinating insects that co-evolved alongside them...
I could go on for a while.
An organic garden planted to mimic a natural system, highly biodiverse, (be sure to include mushrooms!), is an endless source of information and wonder. Please start planting your arable land at your earliest convenience (i.e. now is not too late)! Might just lead some of you to better ideas than the inane drivel I see spewed here week after week.
Like David said, this is going to happen, and there's not a damn thing anyone - red or yellow, black or white - can do to change that. But like another poster said, it's not a gloomy outlook at all; a contraction paradigm is where the good stuff begins. Money is just another facet of the dying greed-based world of cancerous growth. Forget about it.
But don't forget to breathe.
I'm looking forward to the day when the "power-brokers" look out the window over their piles of money and realize that everybody else is feasting and dancing and getting stoned...and not at all interested in them.
dale,
Yes, it must look crazy to be looking in from the outside, but the situation looks to me like a quandary, a problem without a clear solution.
Actually, all your proposed changes are politically non-starters.
"let all non-violent offender out of jail, give them ankle bracelets, they either go to work or stay home. Reduce the prison employee population accordingly."
Most of the non-violent offenders HAVE been released, or they never went to jail in the first place. Anyways, in our "law and order" society, do you think the general populace would go for this? Nope. Just think about your state. Would people accept this? I don't think so, and people aren't that different here.
Also, how much do you think it would cost to monitor these people? Do you think any of them have stable jobs or families to return to? Saying "just release prisoners" is easy to propose, but the consequences might end up costing MORE.
"legalize marijuana and tax it"
Can't be done. Marijuana is illegal by federal law. The current medical marijuana laws are a grey area that the federal government accepts (sometimes).
"raise gas taxes"
This is a political non-starter. California already has the highest gas taxes in the country, and any elected politician who suggests raising them further can kiss their seat goodbye.
"cancel all state retirement agreements and rewrite them to to be consistent with reality"
Yes, indeed, this should be done.
Unfortunately, no one is willing to take on simultaneously the unions of the teachers, the firefighters, the police, the prison guards, and state employees.
Also, voiding these contracts would actually be against contract law, AFAIK.
"stop subsidizing development with tax money"
That's silly. How else are you going to fund anything?
"end the initiative ballot process and make the legislators start doing their job"
Probably a good idea but California jumped the shark a long time ago. The proposition system isn't going anywhere. Maybe we should have one final proposition to end propositions?
"Not that big a deal"
Dale, you and I must have a different definition of "big deal". :)
Good post Jim.
I would like to add that the populace is still in the delusional fantasy state of opiated confusion, and has yet to grasp the enormity of what is currently enveloping this nation.
Each day, I rise with the sun, go to my job and "produce". Each day, I wonder if it will be the last day. Even as the Vice President of the firm, I can see the writing on the wall. The stimulus money is doing less than nothing for small business [we are less than 8 million a year], and is serving the usual players in grand fashion.
Our government has instituted deadlines for spending this money, and in true form, they are [the Federal side anyway] dumping this money on the streets in the form of Indefinite Quantity Indefinite Delivery contracts, which go largely to huge mega-businesses. The Multiple Award Task Order Contracts are the same vehicle, and the method of choice for cash disposal in the military industrial complex.
I am in the aerospace industry, and survive off of the scraps thrown to small business in the form of mandatory small business participation in contracting. The trouble is, that the large businesses have formed wholly owned subsidiaries of themselves. so they can eat the whole cake themselves, sharing little or nothing with the little guy.
I actually look forward to a collapse, and the new order to rise from the ashes like the phoenix. I am a citizen of a Republic, NOT a socialist order.
Turkle,
I can tell you are passionate about the Calif. budget problem and I commend you for being familiar with it. I welcome you to discuss it all you would like to. I just invite people to start to realize the DEPTH of the problem and it isn't just the weather...an astute but useless assumption Banham made with "Surfurbia" and is NOT really the problem. While you respond to Jim's post about California it isn't really the point. I believe Jim's point is that most of that which we have created thus far is unsustainable. I agree there are many wonderful things in Calif. and it is a huge and diverse state. I just allude to the idea that California's obsession over real-estate is like a 13 year old over a Paris Hilton hamburger commercial. John Muir, who I would call a inspiration to us all, has nothing to do with what is happening at the present time in American culture and he may in fact be rolling over in his grave. All we do is treat the symptoms and not the disease.
Off the top of my head, here are some things that Obama has done that I agreed with.
He ordered all government departments to comply with FOIA act requests in a timely manner, reversing the Bush administration policy of ignoring them as a general policy. Open, transparent government is one of the basics of democracy.
Yes, it certainly is. I saw Obama do this - it was one hell of a speech. I was thoroughly impressed, and completely blown away by it.
But, sadly, he is not practicing what he so eloquently preached.
Take the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Obama, after taking plenty of money from companies with an interest in it, declares it must be kept secret, for the sake of "national security." Well, yea, there would likely be riots if people found out what is in it. But, it's freely available to lobbyists and the companies who's IP it covers. And, according to what's leaked out of Canada, we're going to have a new copyright police force, answerable only to these very same companies.
This is hardly the only way Obama has failed to live up to his own words. Here are some others...
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/16/white-house-visitor-log/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/202875
scott: you misrepresent my point. I did not say anything about the dollar as a reserve currency. I was talking about a US gov't debt default similar to Argentina's default earlier this decade. They are distinct issues.
Think about it this way: Lehman had in the neighborhood of $600 billion of liabilities when its bankruptcy unleashed a cascading sequence of events that lead to the horrifying crash of the world economy that we saw in the fall of 2008. The US gov't has something like 11 or 12 TRILLION in debt. A default would effectively kill the world economy completely. Without hyperbole it would be orders of magnitude worse than the Great Depression.
There is NO plausible scenario, short of alien invasion or a global scale natural disaster centered in the US, under which the US will default. No doubt the US and the world faces many, many very severe problems, but a US gov't debt default is not one of them.
I would add that although I don't think there is any risk of a US gov't debt default, there is a very real risk that this certainty comes with the certainty of much higher taxes and much lower gov't spending. Higher taxes and lower gov't spending will choke-off an already badly damaged economy and make the current severe recession much worse, but it'd be preferable to destroying the world economy with a US gov't debt default.
I don't know patrick, I'm under the impression that global reserve currency status has allowed the U.S. unsustainable debts in the first place. I don't think it is a coincidence that the last round of deleveraging produced huge demand worldwide in U.S. dollars and U.S. treasuries for "flight to safety" coupled with a huge spike in concommitant U.S. debt. I expect another round of deleveraging except this time and times after that, there will be less and less demand for U.S. debt. The government is not going to shrink it's medicare/medicade/social security/military industrial complex either. I live in Maryland and work in MD.,Northern VA and Washington D.C. in different buildings every week mostly for the govt. and usually on military bases. The government is growing by leaps and bounds and all of their employees have pensions, healthcare, etc. while the private sector is contracting and shedding pensions, healthcare liabilities, outsourcing and insourcing cheap labor, etc.
I will never buy the argument that the government will contract by it's own volition--there is no precedent for it. I might buy the argument that the government would simply allow bond yields to rise, but that seems counter to policy for the past decade or so, and Bernanke, Geithner etal seem to prefer inflating our way out of debt. They know there will be no restraint on government spending and inflation/depreciation is the only option.
“The crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts,” writes Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times this week. “Those demands should be ignored. It’s much too soon to give up on policies that have…pulled us a few inches back from the abyss.”
http://dailyreckoning.com/the-financial-rear-view-mirror/
Obviously, the powers that be don't actually INTEND for this crisis to be "solved" by returning things to "normal." If that had been their goal, this crisis would already be over because the 7+Billion dollars would have been given to every taxpaying household instead of a handful of Robber Barons. Since everyone is too far into debt to resume spending, only a Jubilee of this sort can get things back on track just long enough to implement long terms solutions such as passenger rail, etc. Now this bailout boondoggle has just made their debt worse without increasing a single household's available spending money. The fact that they didn't arrange a Jubilee of this sort this means they don't intend for it to be done - their real goal is something else entirely.
A couple (OK, THREE) things:
First, loved the title this week. Perfect graphic metaphor for what's going on.
Second, only tangible sign of green shoots I've seen so far here.
Third, my totally hairbrained speculative idea about paying off the federal debt, which, after all, is OURS; turned out to be totally possible after all based on this WSJ link, which quotes latest Fed estimates of our national wealth at $50.38T. Assuming only the current total Federal debt of $13.1T (yes, that includes internal - unfinanced - debt, but it also ignores unfunded liabilities), a little simple math indicates that a mere 26% one time assessment on net worth would pay off the national debt in one fell swoop. An additional minimum assessment of, oh, I dunno, $200 ($100, $50) on anyone with zero or negative net wealth would ease the burden on the rich and make the whole thing a bit more pallatable. Not to say that any of this could or would ever actually happen, but this DOES say that it COULD at least be done, had we any national or character whatsoever.
A good bit of that 50.38 T is based on ahem... housing being calculated as net worth.
“Net worth for households and non-profit groups” is a nice, tidy $50.4 trillion, which seems like a lot of money, but which is actually the “lowest level since 2004,” and which was down from $51.7 trillion in the fourth quarter.
http://dailyreckoning.com/nightmarish-financial-numbers/
Krugman can't help it. He's a traditionally trained economist, who's straight-jacketed by the academic theories he's embraced. Although he's primarily a trade economics guy (and hence, a globalization apologist), he made his bones by criticizing W's many hypocrocies WAY back before it was cool to do so, including, most notably, W's obviously idiotic economic ideas, especially with regard to deficit spending. That's why I started listening to Krugman in the first place. Somewhat inexplicably now (to me at least), he sees only countercyclical fiscal and/or monetary policy, no matter that stimulative fiscal policy has been in use since 1980 now (with the debt to prove it), and the additional monetary policy just further indicating that the fiscal policy was impotent in the first place. Krugman is doubtlessly smarter than this entire board collectively, which only goes to show that smarts only take you so far.
Scott,
Good points both, which only EMPHASIZES my point all the more that the time to pay off the national debt is NOW, while what little imaginative "wealth" that we have remains.
Very shortly, the only choice will be debtor's prison. I know, I know, I'm FULLY aware that we're headed there anyway.
Patrick,
I agree with Scott. BOTH higher taxes and lower spending are unfeasible politically under a democratic system. Neither are gonna happen. THAT'S why we're in the straights we're in.
Hi folks, I'm writing from Dublin, Ireland. I'd just like to say a few words to those of you in the States facing serious difficulties.
You know, North America and Australia/New Zealand are unique in the Western world in that they have only even known expansion and increasing per capita energy consumption and 'standards of living' from the very beginning. Since the American Civil War, discontinuity and catastrophe have been 'over there', in Europe or on Brzezinski's 'World Island' (Eurasia).
Consider the psychologcial trauma and social fabric-ripping discontinuity of WW2 in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Russia (20 million murdered!). Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, the list goes on and on. Yet these countries live on - that's the amazing part. America HAS a future, but it will be a tumultuous journey.
The Slovenians in Ljubliana grow food in allotments everywhere in their cities, as do the Russians. My dear mother in Dublin has a fabulous vegetable garden, to taste her onions and rocket salad is to sample our destiny - food 5 yards from your back door. Lots of it, more than you'd think. She's not phased by Peak Oil. We talk about it. Her mother remembered the famine.
Decline and heat death of industrial life is a beautiful thing, if the transition is made in the right spirit. People have suffered in the past - this shit is old. Here we go again. Just get your mind and heart right.
No 'positive thinking' or 'can do attitude' is going to change the dynamics of energy depletion and the demise of energy intensive living arrangements and car-driven lifestyles. In 20 years everyone will be on the same page. How many will have to suffer ghastly debilitating nervous breakdowns first before they'll accept it? That's the big question. BTW I can't imagine a worse time to indulge in tantrum-thowing, but really that's all that stands between America and a decent future.
After all, you're population density is only 25/mi2. China has 636/mi2 while Holland has 395/mi2 and Japan has 337/mi2.
Sorry,
Have to add, the MEANS by which the US will default on its obligations is by first inflating the currency (already underway, and thus deflating the debt (hopefully gradually)), and then, very gradually and about the edges (once again, HOPEFULLY), begin to renege on its promises.
First to go will of course be the pensioners and those who are ill of health (often one and the same, AND who are products of an age when the US Gov was GOD). They're the easy ones.
Next to go will be the middle aged and those of the expensive long-term care. They will be EXCEEDINGLY hard, as they will be TREMENDOUSLY EXPENSIVE and have TREMENDOUS POLITICAL CLOUT as well.
After that? There will be no after that. IF we get that far in the first place.
Rob,
All due. America has this whole "exceptionalist" thing we've been carrying around for awhile now, which, none of the other countries you've quoted have. Not to bash America, which I've been known to do, but I think you're estimation of "where we are" vs "where we're going" is a tad bit optimistic.
I'm completely down with all your European and Asian quotes regarding prosperity and that in the recent past. In fact, I couldn't agree more, provided we're talking about 50-100 years ago or more. I guess I would only have to respond that THOSE LESSONS JUST DON'T APPLY to the current situation.
There are so many coincidences. The growth in the world oil supply has ended. The banking elite have punched a hole in their capital and came crying to Uncle Sugar to patch it up for them at our expense. The growth curve in world oil has been traded in on a new growth curve in interest on the public debt. It’s no longer possible grow the economy selling stupid oil based commodities to the bottled water swilling and cheese doodle munching hoards? No worry. Just get them and their progeny hopelessly entrapped in permanent debt. Mr. Obama’s administration is about change after all.
The talk of things unraveling to a great extent "middle of this summer" is worth remembering and returning to in, say, October.You will find that things are nearly the same as they are now.
Probably. Maybe. There has been, though, a troubling accumulation of doomsday chatter in the commons--scenes of ruin and decay are showing daily in a theatre near you, and other things like the unlikely success of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (soon to be a movie released in--yes--October) suggests to me that a long forgotten worm is turning in our collective unconscious: the possibility that anger and resentment could erupt into manifestly awful scenes of violence is probably greater now than it's been since the late 1930's. Jung said that he dreamt of a vast sea of blood drowning all of Europe--and soon after that, WWII. Today we dream with our eyes wide open, and the darkest parts of our psyche live and move before us in our media-saturated culture. It's all there, the violence, the decay, the falling empire of materialism and technology--to say that our imaginations are warning us of trouble ahead in the broad daylight of our ordinary lives is probably some kind of understatement. The signs are there: whether it happens two weeks, two months or two years from now, it is coming, like that mythic beast slouching toward bethlehem.
Jimini, the idea of inflating our way out of debt, which btw the Chinese expect judging from the laughter that ensued from Beijing U. students after Geithner said, "Your investments in U.S. debts are safe" is predicated on the notion that we will be repaying with depreciated dollars in an inflationary environment. This way the government debt is manageable if they can control the amount of inflation, which is unlikely.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/us-debt-sets-stage-for-inflation.aspx
Put inflation and a declining dollar into the equation, though, and things get better. At 3% inflation, that $160 billion in interest payments is really worth just $155 billion in constant dollars after a year. That's a savings of almost $5 billion in one year. The principal is worth 3% less in constant dollars every year as well. In 30 years, even if we didn't pay down a cent on that amount, the principal would be worth just $3.2 trillion in constant dollars.
Some savings, huh?
The savings are even greater if the United States is paying off some of its interest and debt in depreciating dollars. About 50% of U.S. public debt is held by overseas investors and governments. Assuming roughly the same ownership for the new $8 trillion in debt, a 3% annual depreciation of the dollar would save $2.5 billion in constant dollars in interest costs in the first year and would reduce the value of the 50% of the principal held overseas by about $2.5 trillion.
Scott,
I'm diggin it.
And just HOW LONG do you propose debt holders will be willing to put up with that?
There AINT'T NO MAGIC IN NUMBERS!
"And just HOW LONG do you propose debt holders will be willing to put up with that?"
I don't know Jimini, "the concensus" seems to think that the world has no other option but to support and continue buying dollars indefinitely. Of course "the concensus" is not factoring in PO either. If the world has reached capacity for growth due to energy constraints, then it's just a matter of time before the game of pretend our debt is money ends in tears.
scott et. al.
Higher taxes and lower spending are possible in a democracy. For example Canada (I am Canadian) did it in the '90's and it's one reason why it is currently in much better shape than just about everyone else in the world.
Canadians have very close ties to the US and I think that we sometimes understand you better than you understand yourselves. One enduring truth about Americans is, as Churchill said, that you can always trust Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities. It was true in WWII (you guys where awful late to the party, and actually thought of showing-up for the other side), it's been true about universal health care (the US is the ONLY advanced country without it), it's true on the death penalty (you keep pretty dubious company on that one), it's true on gun control, it's true on global warming, etc ... As I see it, you're getting pretty close to the end of the list of "other possibilities" on a huge number of issues. You're in for one hell of an upheaval.
Once you get through it, I'll be the first to welcome to the ranks of civilized nations. It's not so bad, really. The taxes are higher but there are way fewer random shootings.
Patrick....some people just need shootin'....and most of them that do seem to live in America!
I dunno Patrick. I think you might have over estimated us. Thanks for the trust, nonetheless.
The Three "C"s...Cars...Cows....Coal...
Cars - we forget that the USA CAN curb oil needs through much stiffer cafe standards which they have recently pushed through an early phase-in. Are rural population areas at risk? Only of losing muscle cars....bio-diesel will replace much of the foreign oil need. Consumption of oil for auto transport is a problem much easier to solve, especially with the US Taxpayer as a major stakeholder.
COWS - Americans will really have to go on a diet...removing Urban Sprawl leaves a lot more room for free range beef, chickens, hogs, and buch more importantly, the chance to fill shelves with Bison, Elk, or other animal product that are much less Ag-Intensive. Methane from feed lots CAN be captured and utilized...but PETA will have a field day with the method to that madness. Now, commercial farming is a tougher problem to solve...I am "Pro-Aquaponic" myself...
COAL - Carbon tax is going to be a reality and I'm not so sure Wind is my idea of environmentally friedly when there is more energy in sunlight...Nuclear and Solar...why are we erecting these unsightly turbins? Because Ranchers LOVE the royalties! Well if that's not a good reason I don't know what is...
Greetings all:
Here in Rochester, the FBI and the US attorney busted many of our county employees stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars and pushing it towards Republican Party candidates. The Democrats control the city, and county government almost 95% of our towns.villages under Republican control. Essential work on county porjects was delayed, our 1 newspaper treaded very lightly not to offend or arouse the citizens. NO great outcries, more houses in my neighborhood are being left. A neighbor 2 houses down, told me today while kids waited for the bus he is running to join his family back out west. I feel bad for all us blue collar guys who don't have family in Maine or Canada, I guess my/our advantage the rain! But, everyone I speak to about emergency/disaster prep tells me not to worry, next year it will get better.
Jim,
President Obama isn't going to be the hoped for visionary leading fundamental, sustainable change for the better in regard to the U.S. economy. How could he possibly be, as long as he's staffing his economic team with the likes of the failed ex-regulators & Goldman Sachs retreads that are the very same people he'd have to prosecute & put behind bars as a first step?
I suspect that he is indeed smart enough to be aware of the "situation" and all that it implies, but even if he's a daily lurker at Clusterfuck Nation, Mish's, The Oil Drum & Casaubon's Book, the Powers That Be that allowed him to be elected, aren't about to let him really fiddle with the controls on their golden egg-laying goose. Re-read your own words: nobody's even been fired yet. What more do you need to know?
Snake eating its own tail ?? Does this ever really happen in nature?? So according to Mr. Kunstler, the "public" is the snake and the "facts" are the tail that we all swallow.... Thanks for calling everyone a snake Mr. Kunstler but, I don't think many people are swallowing the facts being put out there, especially this self consuming metaphor that can be applied to many many situations.
Jim,
Great post as usual.
Obama is, unfortunately, an 'empty suit'. I write that as a dispassionate analysis based upon the man's tepid actions in some areas, complete inaction in others, and a rhetoric which gives no sign that he understands what's happening around him.
His campaign rhetoric was vague even by the standards of campaign fluffery: 'Hope and Change', without ever specifying what he proposed to change, or for what we should hope.
Since taking office, Obama has managed to do nothing of consequence other than send a pointless, burdensome 'stimulus' package to Congress, breaking some of his own campaign promises in doing so, and exhibiting a woeful ignorance of basic economic principles into the bargain. On the national and international stages Obama has preached at the world, to no good effect. Over here (in the EU) national leaders look at him as either 'weak' or' untrustworthy' (the former view prevailing in France and Germany, the latter in Poland, eg). Our enemies are probing, and as Iran's latest riposte shows, hold Obama in complete contempt. Now of all times we need a dynamic, 'aware' leadership; it's no good saying 'my predecessor is responsible for all this'. Obama is in office now, and he's not offered any solutions, nay not even any faltering steps toward solutions. I care not what may or may not have been Mr. Bush's fault; Obama was elected, ostensibly, to 'change', for the better I would presume. Instead I see little real action whatever.
I'm of the opinion that this is not due to 'Obama finding his feet'; I'll go with Occam's Razor and conclude that he simply hasn't the faintest idea what to do. And Congress is little better: I've not seen such a shower of utter mediocrities gathered in one place, before. Formerly, the two parties would each have some relatively distinguished figures, alternately or at the same time. Now, however, I can't think of any truly imaginative man or woman in either chamber who can envisage the trainwreck for what it is, much less offer us a 'way forward'.
I'm deeply pessimistic.
One thing is for extra sure: if the REST OF THE WORLD decided to grealty enhance their BUS systems, they would gain trillions of dollars in wealth. This is because almost all the rest of the world lives in towns and cities, so they already have high density. Many towns worldwide, just look at BRAZIL or EUROPE or INDIA, etc. have an extension of only a few kilometers, with such a small area mass transit is a true no brainer. Also mass transit either public or private bewteen towns and cities in these countries is extremely energy efficient and saves the general population alot of money on cars and could save alot of absurd traffic jams. Problem is the model of wealth these countries have is the USA inspired model, which is completely and totally and ideologically against any form of mass transit.
The USA is a lost case in any form of mass transit, the towns - suburbs are so stretched out and so disconneted that any possible bus route or any train ruote, no matter how many will always miss out most of the population. Just to get out of a typical subdivison and on a major road by walking would require half an hour, aside from the fact that anybody who actually walks in the suburbs would be considered a alien, a thug, a danger.
The real problem is not to eliminate cars, cars are great and useful and fun and will always be with us. The real problem is to give people a choice, is to give people options on other ways of traveling. Create a varied system where you can use your car when and where you like but could often also use some form of mass transit and walking sidewalks for many other things. But in the USA this will never happen, the rest of the world should implement heavy BUS usage and systems, they have all to gain.
@Sfnate. I really liked what you said about the mass unconscious sensing blood before the fact. It is like that in England now - racist nationalism is coming back big time. Why? Because the chickens of Imperialist conditioning are coming home to roost for them, joe public still thinks England is number 1 so between the economy and peak oil he's freaking out. No doubt the US is in a similar tantrum-throwing phase. Rubbish in, rubbish out. If you think you're number 1 baby, you're going to have a fit of rage when you're disenfranchised.
Meanwhile, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Scandinavia - there's an eerie calm. That stewing unconsciousness isn't there. It's like 'OK, we're going down. Take a deep breath. Start growing food. Quick smoking. Go to the gym. Talk to your neighbour, get everybody on the same page. Get a 'bottom up' narrative going on with your neighbours and friends'.
Government? As JHK once wrote, as peak oil worsens 'they'll be lucky if they can answer the phones'.
Has anyone here read Douglas Rushkoff's book 'Life Inc.'?
In it he explores the history of the Chartered Monopoly Corporation which emerged in Venice and Florence in C15. Christopher Columbus was Chartered by the Spanish King to discover India. The Dutch and British East India Companies were given exclusive rights to shipping of all products from Asia to Europe. The Monarchs and Aristocrats preferred Monopoly Charters so they could be private investors and secure their position against the rising merchant class, who were getting ridiculously rich due to all the stuff being shipped into Europe from the rest of the world.
My point is that the Greatest Monopoly Chartered Corporations in the world today are the Privately Owned Central Banks. It all began in 1698 with the Bank of England. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act is essentially a mercantilist Act of Government not unlike the Charters given to the British East India Company and it's equivalents.
Geithner worked for the NY Fed. He might as well have been working for the British East India Company as far as having a monopoly on a traded item (legal tender fiat currency) is concerned. America has BECOME Old Europe. Big government, big Chartered Monopoly Corporations (too big to fail and all that).
So just absolutely, totally forget about change at the top 'trickling down' to the bottom. Collapse is coming first. Grow food near your homes. If you don't, your not serious enough yet.
Read this very acute legal criticism of the neglect of mass transit and sidewalks:
"Driving a car is not a right. It is licensed privilege, restricted to persons of certain ages, skills, health requirements, financial and legal statuses etc.
Freedom of movement is a basic human right. For all. The freedom to walk, is in my opinion, as basic human freedom, and not just the whim of a few crazies.
American suburban constructions laws infringe on the basic rights od pedestrians, by often prohibiting sidewalks, or make no requirements for them.
Constructing strip malls, public institutions and work places along highways and roads, on which pedestrian traffic is prohibited or suicidal, is a violation of any principal of free and equal access for all.
When the Supreme Court mandated making public institutions and mass transit wheel chair accessible, many protested about the cost of correcting the infrastructure. Yet this denial of access to vastly larger numbers passes quietly."
America is not the land of the free then, but of the dominating majority that forces a minority to not be able to move around.
Wasn't it in the former USSR that you weren't alowed to travel around ?
Hello everyone,
Long time reader, first time commentator.
I will begin by providing a little personal backround by way of an introduction.
I work for a large international engineering and design consultancy. I am an urban planning and design consultant. I call myself that because I completed my undergrad in Environmental Planning and my postgrad in Urban Design. I live in Central London (Bloomsbury) for I love the city and all it has to offer.
Being well aware of what is to come I have positioned myself so that I live a 5 minute walk from work where I spend time working on concept masterplans, renewable strategies etc. I am part of the army (possibly in vain) actively working to create workable solutions.
You will all be pleased to hear that at least in the UK people are starting to listen however I am convinced it is already too late.
I have a number of questions. What is a young man with my skill set to do? I know as the economy lurches downward carreer speacilisation will retract. Do I move into activism? Government? (usefully living 1 mile from the centre of British Power).Do I continue my hunt for workable urban permaculture? buy some wood workng tools?
What do you think folks?
Hello everyone,
Long time reader, first time commentator.
I will begin by providing a little personal backround by way of an introduction.
I work for a large international engineering and design consultancy. I am an urban planning and design consultant. I call myself that because I completed my undergrad in Environmental Planning and my postgrad in Urban Design. I live in Central London (Bloomsbury) for I love the city and all it has to offer.
Being well aware of what is to come I have positioned myself so that I live a 5 minute walk from work where I spend time working on concept masterplans, renewable strategies etc. I am part of the army (possibly in vain) actively working to create workable solutions.
You will all be pleased to hear that at least in the UK people are starting to listen however I am convinced it is already too late.
I have a number of questions. What is a young man with my skill set to do? I know as the economy lurches downward carreer speacilisation will retract. Do I move into activism? Government? (usefully living 1 mile from the centre of British Power).Do I continue my hunt for workable urban permaculture? buy some wood workng tools?
What do you think folks?
Geez, after reading through this last set of posts - there is little doubt - either "all hope is lost" - or somehow, someway the remarkable madness that permeates our current governmental systems will resolve enough issues to keep the world as we know it going.
Unfortunately, I doubt either of those scenarios. And what I'd really like to know- is how does the "influence" set price points in Washington?
We know now, that at a high enough "contribution" level, most statues having to do with "white collar" crime will not apply. I guess what I am getting at, does anyone know how the "influence markets" work - why does one outfit get screwed but the other players get screwed, or at least no help?
I know it's a complex topic, but to simplify - I imagine that one way to view Congress is as a group of "influence subscribers" - and depending on whose subscriptions they are subscribing - you can predict how a given industry will be regulated.
So if you want to see how industries or technologies will prosper, just try to track campaign donations with respect to market segment or industry. Pretty much like what the Seattle newspaper did with the infamous "earmark database."
In any event, the new reality is that the appearance "democratic" activity of our governments is a marketing gimmick. I just wonder how much more it can devolve.
Reading through these comments, I can't help but wonder why all of these voices are not being heard by The Powers That Be? There are many very good ideas here, from mass transit to local garden allotments. Our government has chosen to permit the plunder of our nation by those who caused the conflagration, over her inhabitants well being.
We are engaged in a war with ourselves, one that cannot possibly come to a good conclusion. The "money" being tossed around between "banks" and industry would have been sufficient to upgrade the entire rail system in the U.S., bringing us to the top of the heap in mass transit in the world, with plenty left over.
Six trillion dollars we have dumped into a bottomless pit, never to be seen again. Sheila Bair has warned us to prepare for a failure of a "large institution", one that until recently had been deemed "too big to fail". The fallout of a Citi sized company failing is going to be astronomical.
Our President is in the discovery process right now. He is finding out how things 'really work' on the hill, and I think he has been completely consumed by it. I truly believe he has no idea what to do.
I think we can expect a very interesting summer folks.
Time to buckle up and put on your big boy pants.
Reading through these comments, I can't help but wonder why all of these voices are not being heard by The Powers That Be? There are many very good ideas here, from mass transit to local garden allotments. Our government has chosen to permit the plunder of our nation by those who caused the conflagration, over her inhabitants well being.
We are engaged in a war with ourselves, one that cannot possibly come to a good conclusion. The "money" being tossed around between "banks" and industry would have been sufficient to upgrade the entire rail system in the U.S., bringing us to the top of the heap in mass transit in the world, with plenty left over.
Six trillion dollars we have dumped into a bottomless pit, never to be seen again. Sheila Bair has warned us to prepare for a failure of a "large institution", one that until recently had been deemed "too big to fail". The fallout of a Citi sized company failing is going to be astronomical.
Our President is in the discovery process right now. He is finding out how things 'really work' on the hill, and I think he has been completely consumed by it. I truly believe he has no idea what to do.
I think we can expect a very interesting summer folks.
Time to buckle up and put on your big boy pants.
Sfnate,
I like how you write, and as an aside, the beast is not mythical.
*********
To all who think the "boonies" do not exist any more, you really need to get out more often. The folks in rural Appalachia would fare just fine in a collapse; there are vast areas in the Northwest that would fare just fine; vast rural areas in the Midwest would be fine. First off, in a true collapse scenario these "starving hoardes" in the cities would never set off into the country to take food from the people living back in the hills. There are several reasons they wouldn't do this, the most obvious being gasoline and the shortage thereof. Even if they could drive out into the "boonies," just wandering around out in the country is a very conspicuous activity. If you ever lived out in the country, you know that you become familiar with the vehicles of your nearest neighbors, and other vehicles stand out. In a collapse scenario, strangers are likely to be met with drawn guns. In a shootout, I'll put my money on Billy Ray to shoot Stuart and Winston dead.
Do I think this is where we're headed? No. The government will give away food in the cities, and all of the city folk will stay in their concrete jungle. If they have no food to give, the masses will simply go nuts and loot stores and die off in whatever way seems best to them.
Anyway, everthing's going to be fine, so don't worry about it.
Reason has begun to seep into some of the comments on Clusterfuck Nation. The international takes on public transit and food growing were reasoned and added to an increased awareness that it is population, not money or oil, that is the real catastrophe.
Perhaps the mantra of the 22nd century will be "GARDENERS RULE".
I saw some of C-SPAN yesterday and Sen. Bennett (R-Utah) was on a Senate panel. The cost of a nuclear fuel rod reprocessing plant came up. It is something like $15-20 billion dollars: absurdly expensive! We had our chance; it's too late now to depend on nuclear power to "keep the world green." France and Japan got into the game early enough. Better got some chemical and mechanical engineers on the track to get a way of generating carbon or hydrocarbons out of the carbon dioxide in the air. It will take a lot of energy to do this, thus we better be looking at direct use of the sun's energy for this project. Getting "clean coal" is our best shot at getting enough electrical power and mitigate this "long emergency."
Someone tried to respond about being out in the boonies. I'm not so sure about Appalachia. What will happen in rural Kentucky when the oxycontin runs out? I kid you not: the addiction rates are among the highest in the country! The Coast Range in the Northwest way actually do OK: the rainfall is adequate, and some small farming is possible in the flats. But, it is far from everything and that will really show when it comes to health care (Where's the nearest hospital?). You can't do everything with herbs and prayers. Rural midwest may do fine (painful conversion from auto-dependent industrial to the more traditional farm-to-market economy) since the cities are small and close to good farm country. Findlay, Ohio could be looking good right now.
I'm waiting for the government to get serious about three things that will sustain an economic recovery: reversion of outer suburban land to truck farms, a resurgence of local textile manufacturing, and conversion of auto plants to rail transit plants (both for rails and for rolling stock.) These can all happen in spite of and, probably, as a consequence of $200 a barrel oil.
Calm or comatose? I appreciate the fact that President Obama is trying to prevent panic. But it's too late for me -- I've been there for awhile.
It appears that the dominant controlling corporations in this country will not allow any government assistance to help the people. The politicians are mostly corrupt and they do as the corporations say. We are expendable. The jobs have gone away and will not return. The money to be earned by the upper classes in the future will consist mostly of financial services which do not even require a physical presence in the country since it is mostly done electronically. The rest of us will work and live under ever worse conditions.
Who would have thought, just 30 years ago, that we would no longer have a living wage for our people, that most people would have to borrow every month just to survive, that shelter would cost 10-12 times the gross earnings of two workers, that healthcare would be denied to many, that our food would be controlled by agri-business which would fill it with poison and sugar to increase profits and deaths.
Anyway, I agree about the shoots. I just wrote a piece about the shoots, here: http://nabnyc.blogspot.com/2009/06/shoots-i-dont-see-no-stinkin-shoots.html
We will all have to change our way of living drastically. Out goes the car (tomorrow an 4 years old Audi A3 2.0 TDI DSG will be ousted) in comes the public transport and the bike. Out goes country living, in comes an appartment in Amsterdam as soon as I can afford it. Out goes the freelance position for 100.000 dollars a year, in comes the fixed position for 42.000 dollars. Out go the frequent flyer miles, in comes a holiday at home (using public trasport is a blast). Out goes bioengineered food, meat and other shit we eat. In comes organic farming and biological meat or no meat at all.
That's the way to stab ahead. And yes I live in Holland and count my blessings that we still have public transport in place.
Reed "The Transition Handbook" by Rob Hopkins (if Jim is smart he's doing the same). Sort of World Made By Hand but using the soft approach instead of the shock approach.
Greeting, Ed
Turkle,
What you are posting is all very much “conventional wisdom”, we are rapidly approaching a time when conventional wisdom will seem naive. In California's case, nothing short of a long overdue and radical rethinking of the dysfunctional political process will have any chance of addressing their problems. A suspension of many essential state services, which now appears inevitable, will make that obvious to everyone within a few months, if not weeks.
In terms of our country, I see it's problems as a slower, less acute version of the CA dilemma. We are in denial regarding current economics and more fundamentally we are in denial regarding our future prospects. Americans are accustomed to a number of beliefs which, like CA, will soon be shown to be hollow and overly optimistic. A significant decline in the standard of living will be the almost certain result irrespective of the possibility of “Peak Oil” or any of the other favorite doomer scenarios. If any of those scenarios play out then much worse is in order, even possible collapse.
I am not one of the “doomers” here, but I am a realist. I am old enough to remember a time when we were still prosperous, but not nearly as complacent or spoiled as we are now. I can remember when white, college bound kids still did construction work, or waited tables, in the summers or after school. I can remember when most families only had one car. I can remember when girls made their dresses for the prom. I can remember when, as a lower middle class kid, I went to school with the richest kids in town, and when the difference between the houses we lived in was not as dramatically different from theirs as that gap is now. I can remember when most kids, if they wanted to go somewhere, got on their bikes and rode there. I feel sorry for those kids who have grown up in the last few years because they will have to adjust their expectation down considerably, and it's not going to be fun going in that direction.
The doomers around here are right about one thing, nothing is sacrosanct, and that will become obvious to everyone in the US within, at the most, another few years, but more likely within another couple of years.
The thing is, the United States has no shared cultural narrative of hardship and decline. The frontier - the West or Outer Space - has always been about expansion.
The Elite have the numbers on the future of energy resources, underground water aquifers and the global population explosion, and they've figured out where we're heading. They've done their homework better than anyone on this blog, or at least as well, and given the bailouts, we now know they are thinking 'fuck feeding these pot-bellied brats, let's get ring side seats to watch them as we pull the rug from under them. What a bunch of cry-baby losers'.
Somebody is going to have to grow food in your locale - yes, I'm talking about YOUR LOCALE - because if everyone cocks their nose in the air, everyone will starve. There will be no black or Mexican or Chinese (or any other kind of) slaves to do it for you.
There will, by contrast, be banking and energy Elites just 'failing' to deliver the techno-fix for the masses of 'consumers'. Those Elites will be laughing out loud thinking 'high-five that, you ever-optimistic suckers'.
You guys don't have the skills to work for Goldman Sacks! You wish you did! So, stop complaining about smart people being rewarded!!!!
In St Charles outside of St. Louis the stimulus is going strong. The high school in St. C is completely doing over its running track. Now that is really what is needed! There is also a new run around approaching #370 that is utterly useless.
BUT it is putting blue collar people to work. If they are working then things can't really be too bad, can they? So that will be the prevailing topic of conversation until it isn't.
Gulp.
In St Charles outside of St. Louis the stimulus is going strong. The high school in St. C is completely doing over its running track. Now that is really what is needed! There is also a new run around approaching #370 that is utterly useless.
BUT it is putting blue collar people to work. If they are working then things can't really be too bad, can they? So that will be the prevailing topic of conversation until it isn't.
Gulp.
Dancing Rabbit the eco intentional community north of Columbia MO is such a place. Check it out.
East Wind in Tecumseh MO is another one tho not avowedly eco it just might lean in that direction.
Yes we can choose what's coming instead of cringing, enduring and waiting. I think if you have put up a lot of food and other survival goodies in a rural area you are going to have to defend it with an army or get looted and/or killed for it.
Same with hoarding gold. Take one bar to the assay place before cashing it in and if you think ATM's are watched, think about this. Let's see if they are bringing one in they must have more. We'll follow and spec it out, huh.
Forage into the wild. Wherever you see weeds start seeing food. Dandelions, broadleaf, etc. No one is going to try to steal weeds from you so harvest when they are ready, eat, put up and continue on. You will be healthier too.
Right now I must go to court to stop my local stupid poor poor town from giving me a court order to cut it all down. That will let the saw grass come in and require frequent cutting instead of no cutting of red clover,etc. Not to mention fleas, ticks,chiggers, and no beautiful smell from the clover. Dunces all over. We are doomed.
My soil is getting great with huge worms (fishing anyone?)and I can grow almost anything I want now when 4 years ago it was rubble, clay soil, sort of like Iraq.
I have had to study law. I will get an injunction to keep them from cutting it down (they cut it last year)and I am going to file for damages from last year. I figure 300K will get their attention. I am reading selecting juries and making and meeting objections. My 14th amendment rights have been violated. I know how to do this now all the way to the SC if I have to.
Anyone else need help on this just email me. If you are doing it and not having fun, then you are not doing it right.
Yes we can choose what's coming instead of cringing, enduring and waiting. I think if you have put up a lot of food and other survival goodies in a rural area you are going to have to defend it with an army or get looted and/or killed for it.
Same with hoarding gold. Take one bar to the assay place before cashing it in and if you think ATM's are watched, think about this. Let's see if they are bringing one in they must have more. We'll follow and spec it out, huh.
Forage into the wild. Wherever you see weeds start seeing food. Dandelions, broadleaf, etc. No one is going to try to steal weeds from you so harvest when they are ready, eat, put up and continue on. You will be healthier too.
Right now I must go to court to stop my local stupid poor poor town from giving me a court order to cut it all down. That will let the saw grass come in and require frequent cutting instead of no cutting of red clover,etc. Not to mention fleas, ticks,chiggers, and no beautiful smell from the clover. Dunces all over. We are doomed.
My soil is getting great with huge worms (fishing anyone?)and I can grow almost anything I want now when 4 years ago it was rubble, clay soil, sort of like Iraq.
I have had to study law. I will get an injunction to keep them from cutting it down (they cut it last year)and I am going to file for damages from last year. I figure 300K will get their attention. I am reading selecting juries and making and meeting objections. My 14th amendment rights have been violated. I know how to do this now all the way to the SC if I have to.
Anyone else need help on this just email me. If you are doing it and not having fun, then you are not doing it right.
Well I suggest reading the great Toynbee and deciding while you read about the disintegration of civilizations. There are a variety of responses people choose in this situation. You can pick one.
A nation falls from within. Outside forces appear to be the cause but are not. We are a culture of know nothings with the exception of an elite few.
Yes all this was obvious and I knew it in the early 80's. My plans went awry, but life is what happens to you while you are carrying out your plans. Now I am in a small town of dunces. Opportunity is here but no solidarity. A good community organizer would help. There aren't any.
Bernard-Henri Levy and Houelebecq and Toynbee have been my guides for a few years now. Kuntsler is right in alignment with them.
mr kunstler's biblical turn of phrase sometimes leads to distortions of logic and proportion. at its heart, national debt is a boring concept, the stuff of hundred page spreadsheets. if blood is to run in the streets it won't be because asian bankers are forced to reschedule twelve digits.
as they say, god never gives you more than you can bear until he does and then you die. the likely consequence of american financial insolvency will be a gradual abandonment of expensive entitlements: for the poor and the old it will be essentially the end of the world. california should be a preview.
we of the middle and upper classes, we've the resources and social networks with wh to muddle through somehow. it's a plain fact that the higher you go on life's great socioeconomic scale, the more a citizen of the world you become. national fortune nets out on a global scale: it's not as if we need fear debt collectors from the moon.
LOST ANGELES property values:
are down over 50% in about 18 months...but if i were able to offer isolated data not including million dollar and up homes..well!!!
the million dollar babies are still selling i guess and that mucks up the collapse
thanks JHK for telling yr readers the realty bubble really is over
You people are all loony. Yes Obama is complicit with the Wall Street banksters. Geithner, Summers, Rubin - all bad news.
But really, "Some of us are going to die no matter what we do. A few of us may live, though with suffering. A very few of us may live relatively without suffering."
Not only is this hilariously overly melodramatic, it is insanity. The more of these blogs I read, the more they remind me of a bunch of old men sitting on a park bench complaining and kibbitzing like a bunch of lunatic cranks.
Gentlemen, take your meds.
The comments here are getting very much more interesting! You seem to be attracting a more diverse bunch, K.
People are getting more and more worried, as they should.
Mike
Blurtman, exaggeration is the staff of life on the net. Deal. Personally, I don't agree with the die-off or extinction crowds, but in the long run....
Having said that, I think it's safe to say that many people are likely to die sooner than they would/should have... By days or months rather than years in most cases.
""...A few of us may live, though with suffering. A very few of us may live relatively without suffering." ...Not only is this hilariously overly melodramatic, it is insanity."
Oh yeah?
Only delusional, arrogant americans (who believe that milk comes from plastic jugs, eggs from cardboard cartons, food from grocery stores, etc.) with their entitlement mentality could see themselves as somehow entirely different from the millions (billions?) of impoverished humans around the globe who are of no use to the Powers-That-Be. Once the Powers are through harvesting their profits from us gullible suckers through their financial fiascos that we've all bought into, they will abandon us to nature's course just like so many Africans and others.
The USA used to be the prime economic engine with all us worker bees generating taxable/skimmable profits through our hard work followed by our consumer spending and debt. Lotsa $$$ to be made by all our activities and suburban lifestyle. As we cease to be productive in this capacity, replaced by even hungrier worker bees in China, India, etc., the Powers will swat us away like the whining, annoying bugs we've become.
Why should they keep our furnaces burning, the lights on, the groceries stocked when there is no longer a good ROI in it? The could NOT care less about individual lives, just about numbers that produce $$$.
Learn to grow food, especially storable winter calories like roots and grains. Build a root cellar and get some chickens. Learn about all the good weeds that are very edible and nutritious. Fend for yourself and your communities, people, cuz THEY sure as hell aren't going to.
Many of us are headed for third-world status. And yes, many will die prematurely. Some very prematurely. Some by our own hands.
As somebody who started reading these posts only recently, I must say they are getting better, that is to say, branching out from a discourse on sprawl issues to the false economy that made it possible.
I used to wonder when I was a kid (in the 90's) how our debt continued to increase, and now I realize we were borrowing against a false promise.
Now the Democrats blame the free market and corporate greed. The GOP is struggling to form a cohesive argument that government intervention is the cause (I contend they are beginning to listen to Ron Paul, which I believe means they have reached the height of political desperation). Neither party nor anybody in the public discussion has a clue how to fix this thing.
It seems as though some of you think that there's a way out of the storm that's brewing and coming -every which way.
All of you are wasting your time.
Hell is coming and you are all invited to the welcoming festivities.
Prepare...
So Dale, may we take your recent post above, as a "realist", that the "doomer" POV that you have argued and fought so hard against here over the past 2+ years is basically correct, and you were wrong? That's what it sounds like.
Also, by continuing to deny that Peak Oil has occurred or has had any effect upon the present economic troubles, you inadvertently add another dimension to our apparent doom "when Peak Oil ever materializes". Ironically, the "realist" is adding more doom to the pile.
Keep reading and taking those meds Dale, they're being to have a positive effect.
garcon, I have no complaints about "smart people being rewarded", and neither do most people.
That is the beauty of true free market capitalism: if you are right, you win, and if you're wrong, you lose.
However, garcon, in a Free Market system, the losers are NOT rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. They are not bailed out of the consequences of their malfeasance and insanity.
If the boys at Goldman were so smart, we would not have had the debacle we are now muddling through. But the guys at Goldman are sure as hell smarter than the politicians who've they've bought.
Goldman does not "deserve" to be rewarded with my tax money, sorry, and neither do any of the other people, high and low, lenders, speculators, or dumb house borrowers, who helped create this situation.
"Learn to grow food, especially storable winter calories like roots and grains. Build a root cellar and get some chickens. Learn about all the good weeds that are very edible and nutritious. Fend for yourself and your communities, people, cuz THEY sure as hell aren't going to."
Cut back on that wacky weed, Colorado. And get out more often. I hope you really don't believe this utter nonsense.
"Learn to grow food, especially storable winter calories like roots and grains. Build a root cellar and get some chickens. Learn about all the good weeds that are very edible and nutritious. Fend for yourself and your communities, people, cuz THEY sure as hell aren't going to."
Cut back on that wacky weed, Colorado. And get out more often. I hope you really don't believe this utter nonsense.
It is time to admit that Obama is merely a stooge, in much the same way Bush II was a stooge.
Look at what he did during the election with regard to the domestic spying and, "retroactive immunity", issue. He said he was against domestic spying and retroactive immunity. This allowed him to steal the, "liberal", base from Hillary, along with his faux anti-Iraq war status. After he had the nomination locked up, he voted in support of retroactive immunity of the telecoms who violated the Bill Of Rights and accepted the nomination at the AT&T sponsored convention and convention center.
That he shuns law enforcement is no surprise. Perhaps when people stop voting for liars and hucksters, at first sign of lying and huckstering, they'll stop being surprised when the lying and huckstering continue. His foreign policy was more honest, but imperial and disastrous. His fools errands out in the graveyard of empires and into Pakistan come as no surprise.
I found on YouTube some interesting anecdotes embedded in coverage of the T. Boone Pickens plan. It had to do with a meeting Obama and McCain had with Pickens early in '08. What it pointed out is that Obama and all the candidates aren't very well informed, and merely walk around getting votes by advocating pie-in-the-sky fantasies like, "A million electric vehicles on the road by 2016. We can solve our dependence of foreign oil."
Pickens claims that Obama didn't even know that the entire US auto fleet is 280 million vehicles, and worse, that the most critical part of the fleet, trucks that haul our food and merchandise, can't be powered by electric motors effectively. Pickens claims that Obama hadn't thought through that a million cars would scarcely make a dent in the problem. It is likely the production cost of the fleet electrification would outweigh the benefit.
Obama is just another stooge in the oval office. He will say anything to get elected. I feel quite confident that most of the discussion taking place in Washington and in state capitals have to do with getting elected again, not doing the best thing for the electorate.
If he cared about change and making the world a better place, he would still be volunteering on the south side of Chicago without concern for when the cameras were flashing. As it stands, he wanted the highest office in the land. His appointments indicate that he thanked the party machinery for their help in electing him. They all maintain or even further entrench the imperial status quo.
It won't be long and he will regret having taken the highest office in a crumbling empire. He may already. The scary thought, is that he benefits from perpetuating ignorance. It is that same ignorance may result in a super movement of militaristic red state fascism. Its demagogues, far scarier than Limbaugh and Gingrich, could come and blame him and all black people for the downfall of the nation.
We are collectively infantile enough to grovel on hands and knees in Hope and Fear. I fear next the class will rise taking the next illogical leap in the kindergarden American psyche - Hate. They are all varying sides of the same coin.
Right now the only person on the political scene that I am aware of who is proposing sacrifice, penance, and that we uphold the rule of law is Ron Paul.
Most of my, "liberal", friends will never seriously consider him though. They are to immured in the fantasy that we must rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan with our benevolent military and get universal health care - neither of which we can afford.
The president of the US is supposed to be a feckled beaurocrat. We are supposed to exert electoral pressure on our representatives in legislative bodies in order to change policy. It is clear that our culture has changed to the point where we want an imperial dictator to save us.
Bush was the daddy who kept, "them", off the lawn. For now, Obama is the daddy who will pick up milk on the way home, help with your homework and occasionally snarl at a neighbor to feign toughness. You can't have one daddy without the other.
Until we grow up and demand something of ourselves and our representatives, we'll be stuck with increasingly dysfunctional daddies and mommies.
If you want political change, your electoral behavior will have to change to meet the reality that it can only come about by reforming congress and the state and local legislatures.
Anything else merely enables some teleprompter reading charleton to continue his meager attempts to rule by press release. It is, in short, a fantasy enabling a fantasy.
A beautiful man:
First of all, fuck you and anyone employed at Goldman. They might as well be lepers. When Paulson and the other four "investment" banks, two of which have disappeared, went to the SEC and gave William Donaldson seperate handjobs so he and his fellow sycophants would gladly approve the criminal increase in leverage ratios in 2004, Goldman Sachs became the de facto leader of the destructive looting of not only America, but the world. Smart people? I think vicious is a better description. Hank Paulson the bald, Chinese loving traitor now miraculously at the helm of the U.S.Treasury, called Butt Buddy LLoyd Blankfein and told him that overnight GS will magically be transformed from an investment bank to a bank holding company. Presto! GS will then be "eligible" to take billions in taxpayer money while dumping its worthless, wreckless debt on the American people. Don't worry about the billions in credit default swaps AIG sold to you. I'll funnel billions more taxpayer money to AIG so they can cover the swaps. NO PROBLEM, no one will ever know. Besides, while GS was telling their customers to invest long on XYZ, they were shorting XYZ in the secret back room. If the public does find out, we'll tell them to fuck off and we'll go on vacation until they forget what assholes we are.. Un beau garcon,you must have profited from the hysterical frauds and blatant scams that Goldman Sachs has perpetrated on anyone stupid and greedy enough to believe money can be made out of thin air.Paulson, Blankfein, Geithner and the rest of the former Sachs criminals who have been spread throughout every gov't and regulatory agency like cancer have succeeded in greasing the necessary wheels to bring their greedy and fraudulent scams to fruition. We are fucked and Goldman Sachs played the major role in our demise. Goldman Sachs will be remembered with the most despicable, corrupt and evil denizens of history when this nightmare has played out. So beautiful man, enjoy your delusional opinions of Goldman Sachs. My advice to you would be to stop defending the indefensible actions of these scum. But then again, you just might be a GS employee. Sucks to be you. Eventually they will all pay. Bank on that.
Hey man, you got that shit right. You forgot to mention that goldman sucks are a bunch of Lutherans from flyover land. The midwest of full of thieving son-of-a-bitches.
Hey man, you got that shit right. You forgot to mention that goldman sucks are a bunch of Lutherans from Flyover Land. The midwest is full of thieving sons a bitches.
I Don't understnd why everyone in the Western world is so crazy and irrational ? A few very simple measures would greatly improve everyting, but there is this absurd idea that you have gain on investment, make a profit, that drives everything into total chaos:
1) Bring in cheap rents, make the prices of homes get back to where they naturally and rationally belong, that is about 80,000 to 120,000 dollars or a rent/mortgage of 200 to at most 500 dollars a month for a 2 bedroom, one bath, kitchen and living room, 80 square meter home in all three markets, in all locations and cities of the United States, European Union, JAPAN and some others Canada, Australia, South Korea, etc.
2) Greatly enhance all mass transit, both public and private, mostly through BUSES which are cheap and can be quickly deployed in US, EU, JAPAN. It can be done, with all kinds of solutions, all kinds of ideas, if it is wanted. Results in trillions of dollars saved on gasoline e worldwide.
3) The USA has to create a universal, very basic health care for everyone. This idea of making profit over somebody getting sick is so wrong, so idiotic on all accounts, I can't believe it! Does anyone in the USA have a brain ? Make universal health care, basic and cheap. Then those who want better treatment and have the money can spend as much as they want on their private better health care. Is that so hard to conceive ? Is that so complicated ? Everyone gets what they want, the poor get at least the basics, the richer get anything they want by paying more. Is that not clear ? Is the USA so stupid as to not understand something so simple as this ?
There is this ideology that it is either all or nothing, there is no longer any choice, there is no longer any in between. There is this idea that things either have to be very hard or very easy, either you have health care because you happen to be fortunate to work in a company that "pays" for it, or you don't and you are hosed. Either you work 12 hours a day under stress to make the money to buy your McMansion and other crap or you are on food stamps and considered a loser, either you rent at 1,200 dollars a month or buy at 1,000 dollars a month, no choice, nothing in the middle, no middle ground anymore. Either you have a car or you can't get anywhere unless you are willing to walk for hours and take crappy public transit where it exists. No sidewalks, no BUSES here, either you have a car or you can simply drop dead, what a great "FREE MARKET", what a great result, what great "competition" improving things.
Everything is either one or the other, either you are top notch superstar college material like those that ran the banks that have been bailed out, or you are a dump, piece of crap, not worthy of anything. This right wing ideology is destroying any hope for the Western future. The idea is to make things hard, make them as hard as possible, you have to deserve to live, but with billions of people on the planet and so many unemployed and so many differences in wages from the worldwide standard of about 100 dollars/month (Indonesia) to 500 (Brazil) to 1,000 - 2,500 (USA - EU - JAPAN) this is a recipe for WAR, all out WAR, violence and HATE.
eightm:
You have good ideas but the implemetation is quasi impossible...
1.Bring in cheap rents, make the prices of homes get back to where they naturally and rationally
If home prices get back to affordable prices, that means even more losses on bonds and even more governement bailouts.
Either we're going to see more affordable prices or government will print so much money that inflation will take off before prices really go down. Who knows? The only certainty is that there are a lot of forces in place to stop that drop.
2. Greatly enhance all mass transit, both public and private, mostly through BUSES which are cheap and can be quickly deployed in US, EU, JAPAN
The car infrastructure is HUGE and a sunk cost. Think of all the fallouts from a dwindling car industry. Here again the forces in place will do everything to keep the status quo. It won't work but they'll still try.
3. The USA has to create a universal, very basic health care for everyone
The problem is that for some reason health care is seen as a cost. Computer/technology is essentially a cost for companies but a source of revenue in GDP. Health care is the same thing but for some sort of ideological reason, it is seen only as a cost.
The problem with public health care is the pricing. Let's face it, you could spend your entire GDP in health care and people are still going to die. So what's the cutoff? What diseases will get treated and which ones won't?
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We've built ourselves a very complex world. Most jobs exist because of our money exchange system. If we were still bartering, most jobs would not exist. Our world would be much simpler with much less technological advances.
Since our current method of injecting money into the system is based on debt creation, the future does not look rosy now that we are suffering from a major debt indigestion.
The deleveraging will be incredibly destabilizing. And considering that sophisticated research is a product of our monetary system, it's hard to believe that many technological advancements will occur is we keep on deleveraging or worse, go back to bartering.
Why do you the Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages in the first place?
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe government spending taking over consumer spending will stimulate research and improve our future well-being.
There is this ideology that it is either all or nothing, there is no longer any choice
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One thing I noticed over the last 1 or 2 decades is the impossibility for most people to discern a positive net worth from a debt based life.
Ask people what living within your means really entails and each one will give you a different answer. Most will tell you that it's meeting costs on a monthly cash flow when for me it's making sure I will make enough money over my entire life to cover the costs of living over my entire life span and maybe leaving a little for posterity.
But that was always so. It used to be that people lived from paycheck to paycheck and if they did not save for retirement they just went to the poorhouse. Today people who can't calculate net future values or net present value can borrow. They don't realize that they won't have the money to totally pay off their debts over the long term but they don't care because they assume they will just sell their assets at a gain sometime down the future. Or they just don't think at all.
It all works fine as along as the population is growing but what most have not considered is the population pyramid. For the first time since the great depression, the group of households to upsize will be decreasing as boomers get older and the baby bust moves in.
And this is happening at the exact same time everyone is suffering from an major debt overdose.
I work in finance. I've analyzed every sector of the economy and I know what different jobs pay. So I generally know what people are worth. My husband and I make good money and have always lived on the smallest salary. The second one is for savings and unknowns. And we still don't think we are saving enough since we are Gen-X and are convinced the government will have nothing left for us.
People with our income are living like kings compared to us. And the people living like us should be living way lower!
The gentrification has been caused by debt.
Take away the debt and you'll start to see some stratification.
For the first time since the great depression, the group of households to upsize will be decreasing as boomers get older and the baby bust moves in
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Correction. If not decreasing, will be low vs. the increasing number of downsizers.
Outstanding Matt Taibi piece on Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone over on Zero Hedge...
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html
The Top 10 Signs You Are Living in a Banana Republic and My Favorite $100 Billion Omelet
http://thebarricadeblog.com/2009/04/11/the-top-10-signs-you-are-living-in-a-banana-republic-and-my-favorite-100-billion-omelet/
April 11, 2009
As the Republic’s eyes continue their glossy stare at the trillions (with a T) being poured into the financial bailout by this thing they mention on TV called “the FED,” we at the barricade, with a copyright- fair-use tip-of-the-hat to David Letterman submit a TOP TEN LIST: Top Ten Signs You Are Living in a Banana Republic.
Why only ten? While there are certainly countless other signs that our country is a banana republic worthy of comparison to other ignominious, run-down, despotic regimes where the plutocracy plunders the treasury for its own interest, the American audience has an attention span of less than 30 seconds, is addicted to Ritalin and Adderall, and therefore has a penchant for lazy summaries and cliff notes. Have we lost you yet? Without further adieu:
10. Zimbabwe–the archetypal banana republic and the home of the $100 Billion omelet–praises recent US FED action. So the FED–which likely 90% or more of Americans have no idea of what it really is, its role, who controls it, or how it is accountable to taxpayers–prints over $1.2 trillion (with a T), and Zimbabwe declares, “Banks, including those in the USA and the UK, are now not just talking of, but also actually implementing flexible and pragmatic central bank support programmes where these are deemed necessary in their national interests. That is precisely the path that we began over 4 years ago in pursuit of our own national interest and we have not wavered on that critical path despite the untold misunderstanding, vilification and demonization we have endured from across the political divide.” Not the kind of endorsement we desire to restore confidence in our financial system.
9. The Department of Energy was run by a dentist and never by anyone who has ever worked in the energy industry. Ever you wonder why we don’t have a national energy policy? Jimmy Carter named James Schlesinger—an apparatchik with no history in the energy sector—as the nation’s first Energy secretary. Ronald Reagan claimed he was going to dismantle the Department of Energy. His pick for Energy secretary was James B. Edwards, a man who understood drilling—he was a dentist. GHWB named former chief of naval operations Admiral James David Watkins as his energy secretary. Bill Clinton’s choices for the top Energy spot were: Hazel O’Leary, a lawyer; Federico Pena, another lawyer; and finally Bill Richardson, a politico and diplomat. George W. Bush’s choices to head the Department of Energy included Spencer Abraham, a lawyer who’d just lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, and Samuel Bodman, an engineer whose professional career was in investments and chemical production. Finally, Obama’s secretary of energy is Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu has experience in energy-related issues, including his job as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but he’s never been in the energy business. “It’s the mythology of the Beltway,” one Houston energy analyst told me recently. “You are hopelessly compromised if you are anywhere close to the oil industry.”
8. The Treasury Department is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street mega-firms that are too big (or too connected) to fail. No explanation needed here. This is obvious to even the dopiest of Americans which leads us to …
7. The complicit failure of the national media to call out the Treasury Department’s clear conflicts of interest when it comes defrauding the Treasury at the expense of the US Taxpayer. Rachel Madow, Keith Olbermann, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Fox News, anyone? Is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me. This is easy and it makes the KBR/Haliburton/Iraqi war connection look complicated by comparison. When KBR was a wholly owned subsidiary of Haliburton (people had a hard time making that second jump) and Cheney was the former CEO of Haliburton, we were confused with KBR/Haliburton relationship and Cheney’s ties (not sure how we were confused but we were). This one is so simple even my almost two year old niece understands it: Sec. of Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson has funneled billions to his old firm and his friends via DIRECT CHECKS and checks to AIG which is run by a former director of Goldman Sachs Edward Liddy. The money spent “bailing out” AIG will be shuffled over mostly to the CDS counterparites, GS et al. Liddy is only taking $1 of salary because he is such a public service saint. He has an acute financial stake in one of AIG’s counterparties—namely, his $3.2 million personal investment in Goldman Sachs stock. Mainstream Media, please call me and I will help you connect the dots…finance is not that complicated, just ask my adorable niece.
6. Only 53% of Americans feel capitalism is better than socialism. There are two main points to note here: (1) We have never had free market capitalism in this country, because our government has always encouraged obfuscation and lack of transparency, by selective disclosure and favoritism; and (2) failure of large institutions is not allowed (even though it is an essential part of capitalism). So, we don’t have failure in America. Failure would be upsetting. We are all living in one big Lake Wobegon - where all of our businesses are above average. I didn’t get a chance to vote in this poll, but if I had to choose I would prefer the Scandinavian Socialist model over the Latin American version that we seem to be veering falling into. Instead, the U.S. gets the worst of both worlds - no public education or health care, high taxes, privatized gains shared by plutocrats and socialized losses shared by taxpayers. If that is your definition of American capitalism - I am amazed the polling numbers were as close as they were.
5. The bankruptcy process has become a political process. If this is the worst economy since the great depression, why aren’t there more bankruptcies? When did bondholders–which own a risky asset class called, ahem, “bonds”–become a guaranteed non risk asset class? It is obvious that my college professors were mistaken in teaching that the only RISK FREE asset class was US GOVERNMENT DEBT SECURITIES. They are going to have to rewrite a ton of economics and corporate finance textbooks to include Bear Stearns bondholders and preferred stock holders, Fannie and Freddie bondholders, any bond or preferred instrument held by Bill Gross/PIMCO (the official fourth branch of the US govt.) and any bonds or preferred stocks of the too-politically-connected-to-fail group of financials including AIG, GS, MS, WFC, C, JPM, et al as part of the risk-free asset classes in 21st century American capitalism. And, maybe they should hold off publishing until June because GM and Chrysler debt and preferred holders may be on that list as well. At least all that rewriting of the books on financial institutions, markets, and money will stimulate the publishing industry. Which leads us directly to…
4. Both politcal parties are beholden to the financial oligarchs–And yes, that includes the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, the party of FDR, Kennedy, LBJ, Carter and Obama, the party of the little people, the common man, the disadvantaged, the party of farmers, laborers, labor unions, and religious and ethnic minorities continues the same misguided policies and cronisim of the former Republican regime in BAILING OUT BANKERS and INDENTURING GENERATIONS for what will end up being tens of trillions (with a T). We are either in bizzaro world or a banana republic or both. “The Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the big benefactors to the financial community,” said Kevin Phillips, author of “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.” Philips writes, “The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you’ve got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don’t think you’re going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things.” So, let’s get this straight: none of the big banks and financial companies’ bondholders are taking any hit, and they refuse to go into bankruptcy or receivership, however GM and Chrysler may go into the not so delicate arms of bankruptcy. Is Obama more loyal to his wall street friends in the Democratic monopolies in the Northeast and California, or to his hard working lower/middle class constituents in the midwest which is usually a coin flip in terms of party loyalty–see, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana? To quote John Lennon, strange days indeed, most peculiar momma. That or we are living in a banana republic. Which is easy to accept.
3. William Black, the former Chief Fraud Investigator at the Federal Home Lending Bank and Office of Thrift Supervision during the Savings and Loan scandal, calls the current bank stress tests ” A COMPLETE SHAM.” The FHLB is a very big institution, with $1.3 trillion (with a T) in loans, and its Chief Fraud Investigator during the S&L scandal, says a pillar of Federal banking reform policy is “a complete sham.” A complete sham. In addition to comparing the stress tests of our nations’ financial system to a counterfeit, fraud, flimflam, ruse (is that emphatic enough for you America, or do I need naked women shooting you with lasers to make you pay attention? I know, I do. Can we get some graphics of naked ladies in here, please?) Mr. Black also called the stress test “a Potemkin model. Built to fool people.” Like many others, Black believes the “worst case scenario” used in the stress test don’t go far enough. Black also said, “There is no real purpose [of the stress test] other than to fool us. To make us chumps,” Black says. Noting policymakers have long stated the problem is a lack of confidence, Black says Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now essentially saying: “’If we lie and they believe us, all will be well.’ It’s Orwellian.” “The fact bank stocks have been rising since Geithner unveiled his plan is “bad news for taxpayers,” he says. “It’s the subsidy of all history.”
2.William Black the former Chief Fraud Investigator and Federal Regulator during the S&L scandal uses the following words to describe the STRESS TEST of capital ratios for our NATIONS’ LARGEST BANKS:
(A)“A COMPLETE SHAM”
(b) “POTEMKIN MODEL” - fancy Russian word for SHAM
(c)“Reason for STRESS TESTS is to FOOL US and to make US CHUMPS”
(d) “’If we lie and they believe us, all will be well.’ It’s Orwellian.”
(e) the Geithner debt plan is “bad news for taxpayers”
If confidence is all we need to restore the financial system, then we should just nominate Tony Robbins as Secretary of Treasury.
OBTW, William Black’s book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, is a must read about financial fraud and regulatory capture and for the glossy eyed it has a catchy and cool title. Paul Volker wrote this about the book, “Bill Black has detailed an alarming story about financial - and political - corruption. The specifics go back twenty years, but the lessons are as fresh as the morning newspaper. One of those lessons really sticks out: one brave man with a conscience could stand up for us all.” Robert Kuttner of Business Week proclaimed, “Black’s book is partly the definitive history of the savings-and-loan industry scandals of the early 1980s. More important, it is a general theory of how dishonest CEOs, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time — enough to create massive damage.”
Now, drum roll…
1. The People Don’t Know and Don’t Care to Know. The American people are quite aware of Malawian Adoption Law, can cite the California statutes on artificial insemination, and know Octomom’s middle name, but can’t or won’t listen to ONE WORD about all who controls their institutions, nor can they find William Black on any media outlet other than the Web or Bill Moyers. We have the former Chief Fraud Investigator screaming SHAM, SWINDLE, HEIST and we just sit there glassy-eyed, wondering if the blind guy was given a fair shot on Idol. No hour slot on Larry King, no lead story on 60 minutes, not even 5 minutes on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show which is arguably the best financial and investigative journalist show on television.
My friends and dear readers, this is your representative republic. This is the product of your popular soverignty. This is your AMERICA.
Holy Shit.
(OBTW, the link doesn't seem to work...)
(OBTW, the link doesn't seem to work...)
Try this...
http://www.thebarricadeblog.com/?p=630
Those pesky Lutherans, just can't trust 'em. Why they will run off with the Sunday services collection plate if you don't keep an eye on them.
well folks,we have to start somewhere.
Give the 20 million or so not welcome 2 weeks notice to get back to Mexico or where ever they came from.If Eisenhower could do,why can't we?
Sorry Elite,you have to hire an American to clean up your mess or watch your precious brats.
Immediately abolish the obsolete CONgress,since they are not representing the people,there is no need to have them around any more,eating up our hard earned tax dollars.
The wall street casino needs to be shut down for a complete overhaul,and possibly reopened with iron clad regulations and severe penalties for breaking the rules,ditto for the banksters.
The first 2000 or so responsible for this thievery
and greedfest need to be hanged(and tortured,since they condoned it) for causing so much misery upon America and the world.
The cash cow of privatized prisons,have to go at once.Prisoners belong in tents,working 10 hours a day to repair our rails,that the corporate criminals of railroad barons left us with,naturally without proper management or oversight.
Prison are there for punishment not recreation centers.
The so called federal reserve of international Gangsters run by the likes of warmongering Rothchild needs to be scrapped at once.
The list is simply too long to go on,one word to mr.O,what is taking you so long to reverse all the executive orders that last moron signed into law?
well folks,we have to start somewhere.
Give the 20 million or so not welcome 2 weeks notice to get back to Mexico or where ever they came from.If Eisenhower could do,why can't we?
Sorry Elite,you have to hire an American to clean up your mess or watch your precious brats.
Immediately abolish the obsolete CONgress,since they are not representing the people,there is no need to have them around any more,eating up our hard earned tax dollars.
The wall street casino needs to be shut down for a complete overhaul,and possibly reopened with iron clad regulations and severe penalties for breaking the rules,ditto for the banksters.
The first 2000 or so responsible for this thievery
and greedfest need to be hanged(and tortured,since they condoned it) for causing so much misery upon America and the world.
The cash cow of privatized prisons,have to go at once.Prisoners belong in tents,working 10 hours a day to repair our rails,that the corporate criminals of railroad barons left us with,naturally without proper management or oversight.
Prison are there for punishment not recreation centers.
The so called federal reserve of international Gangsters run by the likes of warmongering Rothchild needs to be scrapped at once.
The list is simply too long to go on,one word to mr.O,what is taking you so long to reverse all the executive orders that last moron signed into law?
Jim -
In response to your "Daily Grunt," all I can say is, thank you!
Jackson was a freak, and to see ALL the media, from the local radio station DJs to the New York Times descend into this endless, worthless blather about him is insane. This is what "culture" amounts to in the US of A these days...
There's a snarky take on the whole "roadside memorial" idiocy, here...
http://mytabloids.wordpress.com/
The biggest crime in history has been in progress since more than 20 years.
Read below and you will get a picture, which will be extremely hard to swallow, and very painful to digest: “Collateral Damage” by E. P Heidner, part I and II.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner
The two documents have just recently been published and are very well researched and referenced (over 400 footnotes). The articles are lengthy, some parts not easy to follow and and they need to be read with an open mind. Some things seem so terrible that we resist facts,logic and analysis. But they are well worth the effort. They provide the most distressing information (some reads like a thriller).
The implications will challenge how we look at politics, economy, history, finance, war and terrorism. Many persons in the documents are well known; many are right now in pivotal positions of politics and finance. These people do shape OUR life and that of our children right now. The details are stunning. The consequences are BEYOND BELIEF.
funzel said: "well folks,we have to start somewhere.
Give the 20 million or so not welcome 2 weeks notice to get back to Mexico or where ever they came from."
Here is a Native American version:
"well folks,we have to start somewhere.
Give the 300 million or so not welcome whites 2 weeks notice to get back to England or Europe or where ever they came from."
The United States was founded by white immigrants, built by non-white immigrants, and benefits culturally and economically from all immigrants. Immigrants are net contributors.
The USA is a country of, by, and for immigrants (legal or "illegal"). The southwest USA should be given back to Mexico because it was taken by force. Now it is being taken back through massive immigration. The more the merrier. I welcome all Mexican immigrants. ¡Qué vengan más y más! ¡Bienvenidos, hermanos!
If you send back all the Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants who came here and murdered the original inhabitants, then the Native Americans could make a go of what's left of the land... after so much mismanagement by the stupid white immigrants.
But that is not going to happen, any more than the 20 million "illegal" immigrants will be going anywhere. Thank God. Gracias a Dios.
This is a BRILLIANT comment!
Please publish this list on http://www.commondreams.org/ (views) and Alternet.
Asoka! How the heck are you?
You have to remember, the Eurpies kicked out a lot of our ancestors in the first place… I don't think they'd exactly be happy to take back 200 million or howmany-ever of us there are.
Something else that won't happen, but would have more positive results than deporting undocumented immigrants, would be for everyone to turn off the TV and go walk around outside. I've said for a while now, the rioting won't start as long as the soaps are on.
Far, I am fine... reveling in the good news that the House of Representatives Friday evening passed the most sweeping climate change policy ever considered in the history of the United States Congress.
Obama's leadership is paying off with change we can believe in with the House passing the AMERICAN CLEAN ENERGY AND SECURITY ACT of 2009.
@Asoka
Johnny Rico here.
Hey! What's up? I say we hook up. We got a lot of reason to get along. Not much reason to fight. I was totally right about about Obama. Water under the bridge.
I unilaterally call truce. You wanna join, that's cool.
No. Seriously. I'm ready to sign the papers. I'm done fighting (for this decade).
Like my sisters always say -
when the shiz go down, you better be ready.
They all studied with Kurtz and I haven't seen them since they went into the jungle with him.
My brother is a different story.
Doom will correct me, humiliate me, and tell me where I should move forward. And he'll be right. That's why I listen to him. He actually paid attention to Rommel.
The rest of you, including Goebbels, and Heydrich - are cunts. Yeah! you heard me. CUNTS!
Doom will correct me, humiliate me, and tell me where I should move forward. And he'll be right. That's why I listen to him. He actually paid attention to Rommel.
The rest of you, including Goebbels, and Heydrich - are cunts. Yeah! you heard me. CUNTS!
Worldwide Real Esate Mafia
At what point did minimum rents become greater than minimum wages ? Why didn't anyone notice ? when did rents become more than 700 to 800 dollars a month while wages stagnated at exactly the same price as minimum rent ? who designed this ? And you can notice that it was designed from an international mafia - thugs - criminals who decided to rob most avergage to poor workers in the name of a home. When was it decided that having shelter was no longer a basic right ? when was it considerd a luxury ? Is water or food a luxury ?
This system of creating high rents to force people to buy and brainwashing people that the more their homes go up in price the "richer" they are is the biggest international scam ever. It is incredible that in so many countries and economies you see the same scam over and over again. In JAPAN they are not allowed to make multilevel apartments in the middle of Tokyo to keep prices up and houses of limited availabilty, they tear them down every 30 years, they have insane prices, and yet the japanese, with all their scientists and great "research" can't see this monopolistic robbing of their people right in fron of their eyes ? They don't notice ?
The same systems apply to the USA and EU, the details may change somewhat but the goal is to keep prices of buying or renting as high as possible, to give money to a bunch of parasites that don't work or do anything "productive", but simply rob the money from average workers in the form of huge rents/mortgages.
Prices in the USA, the EU and JAPAN have to get down to no more than 20% of minimum wage, that is no more than 200 to 300 dollars a month rent for an average home in all markets. That is what is needed to keep the economy going and "growing"! The only thing that grows is the price of rents and mortgages, this robbing has to end!
Now the G8 international economy forum starts, and they will continue with the old crap of the need to downsize companies, offshore, outshore, cut costs which always means cutting the wages of workers, always, etc. It is always the workers fault, they have to always learn "new" skills, always "training" for "new activities", always downsize, always layoff, etc. etc. This then is supposed to give the workers and their "families" the confidence to keep running the "consumer" economy. Are they nuts ? With all these cuts and all these "optimizations" which means less and less money for workers, no one in their right mind would do anything but save.
"This moment is liable to come sometime after the middle of this summer. It will be the moment when all the green shoots babytalk stops and the scope of onrushing hardship becomes self-evident"
This might not be unreasonable, this is the third such mention of "something" happening in the near future.
I found one of these warnings, still looking for the other one that I read: from: GlobalResearch.ca
Bankster “Holiday” Planned for September? http://tiny.cc/kMNEm
"Bob Chapman’s influential International Forecaster is reporting on the possibility of a so-called “bank holiday” planned for late August or early September. According to Chapman’s sources, U.S. embassies around the world are selling dollars and stockpiling money from respective countries where they operate.
FDR imposed a "bank holiday" soon after taking office. It resulted in the government stealing gold from the American people and giving them useless fiat paper money in return.
“Some US embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies,” writes Harry Schultz, “enough to last them a year.” Schultz publishes the Harry Schultz Letter, an international investment, financial, economic, and geopolitical newsletter named as “Newsletter of the Year” by Peter Brimelow of Market Watch in 2005 and 2008."
"...Mr. Schultz believes a “bank holiday” would suit the burning desires of the international bankster elite. It will lead to “nationalization,” which is a polite word for brazen thievery. It will allow the government — owned lock, stock and barrel by the global elite and run by their corrupt whores and cronies — to rape secured creditors and bondholders. Nationalization is the unfettered process of grabbing up of insurance companies, mortgage companies, banks, medical care, and car companies and handing them over to the monopoly men.
During the FDR “bank holiday,” Schulz notes, “thousands of banks never reopened; it was a face-saving way of shutting them down. I would guess the same would occur today; thousands have little or no net value, loaded with debt, bad mortgages.”
In order soften the nation up for the coming pillage, the Obama administration has proposed a plan to give the privately-owned and unaccountable Federal Reserve complete regulatory oversight across the entire U.S. economy. The new rules would see the Fed given the authority to “regulate” any company whose activity it believes could threaten the economy and the markets — that is to say if it “threatens” the monopolistic interests of the bankers.
“Obama’s regulatory ‘reform’ plan is nothing less than a green light for the complete and total takeover of the United States by a private banking cartel that will usurp the power of existing regulatory bodies, who are now being blamed for the financial crisis in order that their status can be abolished and their roles handed over to the all-powerful Fed,” write Paul Joseph and Steve Watson. “The government is ready to hand over everything to a monolithic private corporation and a gaggle of bastard banker offspring, that have gobbled up an amount close to the entire GDP of the country in taxpayers’ money and figuratively stuck the middle finger up regarding questions over where that money has gone.”
A “bank holiday” would work wonders for any “regulation” the Fed and the bankers have in mind. It would compliment the criminal consolidation now underway. It would allow them to finally and formally devalue the dollar and usher in a global “super currency” of control and enslavement..."
I live in the shadow of Detroit in another country that was almost ravaged by the insanity of greed by US bankers and the duplicity of the US government. Living in a dying community that once built US cars and buying into all the blather of the American Dream, no more, no longer!
If I was the Prime Minister of Canada, I would be looking to get into the ground floor of BRIC, realizing that our other abutting neighbour is Russia! The idea of the SPP and an integrated North American economy scares the hell out of me and should be stopped ASAP!
Keep writing James some of us are reading and listening!
We don't need "high paying jobs", but LOW COSTING HOMES. The idea that you have to get a high paying job to even simply rent a house is fundamentally an idea of blaming the victim: you can't afford the rent (especially in the urban areas where all the JOBS are) because you are not capable of geting the high paying job. It is not the homes that cost, but you that make too little. But this is all crap, BS, the truth is homes should cost WAY, WAY less, they just serve the purpose of financial speculation and bringing the profits to the landlords.
It is also contrary to the interests of all the other economic sectors, by sinking so much money into real estate, many other sectors find themselves without any money being spent anymore. You rent a home but can't buy the furniture or have to buy very cheap furniture, etc.
Aside from the fact that high paying jobs are gone for good. How many of these jobs can possibly be created ? How many are really justified ? Totally outside of reality ! Get rents down real fast, REALLY FAST if you want anything to be left of the world economy, IDIOTS!
Asoka,
You wrote "The United States was founded by white immigrants, built by non-white immigrants, and benefits culturally and economically from all immigrants. Immigrants are net contributors."
While it is true non-white immigrants built the USA, white immigrants also built the USA. Are you saying we have an obligation to allow foreigners the right to enter the country? Why?
Do you have any data to suggest that all immigration helps the country? I'd disagree. I see illegal, mass immigration hurting the country. Wages are depressed, housing costs, education costs, subsidized medical costs are increased. Resources are depleted. From the view point of a wealthy American, I can see why immigration is liked. The Ponzi scheme that is America always needs new people. Growth from immigration does enlarge the economy, but at a cost to living standards. If you want cheap labor, immigration is good for you.
"The USA is a country of, by, and for immigrants (legal or "illegal")." Says who? Most historical immigration has been legal immigration. Haven't you heard of the medical exams at Ellis Island where the diseased were sent back? There was a legal process involved in immigration.
" I welcome all Mexican immigrants. ¡Qué vengan más y más! ¡Bienvenidos, hermanos!"
Y porque quieres mas population?
"If you send back all the Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants who came here and murdered the original inhabitants,..."
The genocidal immigrants to which to refer are all dead of old age.
Funzel, Asoka & other immigrants:
I have to laugh when people suggest all immigrants go home, leaving Native Americans.
If all immigrants (and descendants) went home, then Native Americans would end up back in Asia.
So-called "native" americans are not native to America, having migrated from Asia across the Bering land bridge to Alaska, starting about 16,000 years ago, then gradually moved south into the present US (and some say all the way into South America).
They may have arrived first, but they were immigrants too.
Puzzler,
Good point! But telling the Native Americans to go back to where they came from is about as rational as telling white immigrants to go back to Europe or Mexican immigrants to go back to Mexico.
Ain't gonna happen. We are all Native to the planet Earth, which, as NASA has proven, does not have the lines painted on it which we call "borders"... One earth, one people, no borders!
"Earth, which, as NASA has proven, does not have the lines painted on it which we call "borders"... One earth, one people, no borders!"
That's not what the ICE official said to be at the border.
Would you recommend we send buses and free plane tickets to other countries and offer free rides to all that want to come here? Why not?
And why don't you answer my previous questions? I'll answer any question you ask me...
asoka,you apparently do not know the difference between immigrants and 20 million strong breeding hordes of gringos pouring across our borders ,like locusts eating up our resources faster than we can produce them.
These liabilities have no interest of assimilating,learning english or fitting into our society.They are only here to be exploited by the upper classes and take away jobs of our 6 million unemployed,and don't give me that shit,they only take jobs Americans don't want.
eightm,
I think you've really hit on the crux of the problem. Indeed, we DON't need higher cost homes, NOR do we need higher paying jobs to pay for them (or anything else). The exponential debt equation strikes again, in that people have already bought into the illusion (once again!) that the economy is essentially an escalator, and that if the escalator can just rise fast enough, we can all escape the flood of debt that it produces.
One word restores sanity. PONZI. As in scheme. Last in, first fucked. That's really ALL you need to know.
Regardless of what opinions people have, or what racist tendencies they have that cause them to believe immigrants are "a problem", the facts are otherwise.
More than 500 economists and social scientists of varying political perspectives signed a letter in June 2006 to President Bush and members of Congress expressing their concern that, in the current debate over immigration, “some of the fundamental economics of immigration are too often obscured by misguided commentary.”
The prominent signatories, which included five Nobel Prize winners, reiterated that immigration is a positive force on the U.S. economy and a net gain to U.S. citizens.
>>I disagree with Jim that the US is going to default on it's debt. At least not in the sense the Argentina did.
The first, and most important reason why the US will not default on it's debt is because doing so would wreck the world economy. The resulting cataclysm would make the Great Depression look like prosperity. If you think Sept/Oct 2008 was scary (and it was truly terrifying), then multiply that by a thousand and you might start to get close to what a US gov't default would look like.
The current debt levels of about 60% of GDP are really not that large by historical standards (for example compared to post WWII). Things start to get dicey when you get up around 100% of GDP (the UK has gone as high as 200% of GDP). At those levels the central bank has to raise interest rates to attract capital and the gov't is forced to dramatically cut spending and raise taxes.
I think the more likely scenario for the US is that there will be a combination of modest tax increases and dramatically lower spending. The US has relative low levels of taxation, so there is lots of room to increase taxes. On the spending side, the big ticket items are social security at about 20% of the budget, health care at about 20%, and defence about 20%.
On defense, the US spends about 4% of GDP just for the DoD. That doesn't include defense related spending in other departments (e.g. DoE), nor does it include the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal. The US spends as much as the rest of the world COMBINED on defense. So there is TONS of room to cut. Unwinding the empire would cut back on blowback and ultimately make the US much safer.
Health care costs are another place where spending can be cut. Relative to the rest of the world, the US spends an inordinate amount of money on health care and gets less in return.
SS is a hard one to cut immediately; you really don't want to leave old people out in the cold, but it's such a huge program that even small percentage savings amount to large sums of money over time.
So the fiscal problems the US faces have solutions, and at least as far as public debt is concerned, the solutions are not mysterious.
The real problem is political, and I agree with Jim there. Obama et. al. really need to make it very clear to the electorate that tax rates will be going up and spending will be going down and that anyone who says otherwise (like the GOP) is lying, stupid, or crazy.
The sooner Obama starts driving home reality, the sooner the US can get past the childish tantrums the GOP and friends will throw when they are told that in the world of adults you can't increase spending and cut taxes forever.
Patrick,
Thanks for this. No offense, but hope you don't mind if I quote you in the near future (as I won't
if you return the favor). Your "business as usual with adjustments" prescription is EXACTLY what anyone can read in the MSM for the price of am internet connection.
First, it WON'T turn out that way for all the political reasons stated above.
Second, it's ENTIRELY arguable whether or not such a prescription would fix our current fix, should it ever come to pass.
Third, it's likewise arguable that any attempt at fiscal austerity could last, should it ever be attempted in the short term in the first place.
YEP! I'm a died-in-the-wool CYNIC, and THANK GOD for people with a frame of mind like me!
Asoka,
Agreed. What's the problem? White people have "history." We're working on it.
Have to add,
Those arguing the merits of immigration/border control in an era of globalization have SURELY missed the forest for the trees. Are YOU PEOPLE BLIND?
Jobs here, jobs there, government taxes which may or may not be collected, and government benefits which may or may not be paid anyway.
Leads me more and more to believe that immigration is JUST ANOTHER RACIAL issue.
As I said, Asoka, if you want cheap labor, inflated housing prices, etc., mass immigration is good for the economy.
Appeal to authority to support a position is a fallacy. It is not surprising that a bunch of economists would say immigration is a net positive. Are these the same Nobel winners that founded the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, or the other economists that forgot to include the possibilty of house prices declining in their risk models, the proximate cause of the current bump in the road.
Tell me why Ceasar Chavez was a racist when he protested illegal immigration from Mexico.
Explain to the black lady from Watts why replacing her job, at $12.00/hr with latinas at $8.00/hr in the hotels downtown is a good thing.
You wont answer, because you can't. You are actually racist, because all your tiny mind can conceive as reasons to exclude immigrants are racist reasons, not economic or environmemtal reasons.
"The USA is a country of, by, and for immigrants (legal or "illegal"). The southwest USA should be given back to Mexico because it was taken by force. Now it is being taken back through massive immigration. The more the merrier. I welcome all Mexican immigrants. ¡Qué vengan más y más! ¡Bienvenidos, hermanos!"
And why should the southwest be given back to Mexico? Mexico, itself was, in turn, taken by force from Spain, through a revolution, who had early taken it by force from the Aztecs, Toltecs, Maya, et al. As you know, Mexico is little different from the U.S. in that it was largely founded and has been ruled by the elite class from Europe. What a stupid suggestion and lame logic on your part.
"If you send back all the Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants who came here and murdered the original inhabitants, then the Native Americans could make a go of what's left of the land... after so much mismanagement by the stupid white immigrants."
Well, if you send back all of the descendants (as was earlier pointed out, sending the actual immigrants responsible for those murders isn't really very possible at this point) who would the descendants of the original inhabitants sucker into their casinos, those which they have become dependent upon for their livelihood?
"More than 500 economists and social scientists of varying political perspectives signed a letter in June 2006 to President Bush and members of Congress expressing their concern that, in the current debate over immigration...
...The prominent signatories, which included five Nobel Prize winners, reiterated that immigration is a positive force on the U.S. economy and a net gain to U.S. citizens."
Of course they all would. They've bought in to the ponzi scheme that is the current economic paradigm of endless growth, unsustainable as it is. Sorry Asoka, Cthulhu (Holmes/Bunn-Bunn?) has got it right, and you are talking out of your ass. Absolutely.
Asoka is widely known as an "ass talker." Nobel Prize winners? Kissinger got one of those for helping to kill 58,000 Americans in Veitnam.
It is fine to reject the appeal to authority argument, but why the ad hominem attack?
The economists and social scientists didn't make up the numbers. They just pointed out that immigrants are a net positive contribution.
The undocumented workers who have social security deducted by their employers are paying for citizens who are receiving social security.
The undocumented are paying in, but they cannot receive the benefits because they are not "legal".
to : ASOKA..whoever and where ever you may be!
I am part ' native american'....perhaps to guilt ridden whites I have more right to this land or an opinion about the USA...
from what i read for every immigrant that gets to the usa 11 acres of forest is destroyed to grow crops for that 1 person
from 1989 to 2009 the usa population grew by 50 million....and that influx of immigrants,,,many illegal is ruining and will continue to ruin the usa.......
and 50 million is more than all the blacks and euros brought in in 450 years of euro imigration to the usa
in order to put a happy face on it wall st journal insists immigrants will ' save ' social security
AND NEWSWEK HAD A COVER STORY...
AMEXICA THE MAKING OF A NEW NATION
ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT
to : ASOKA..whoever and where ever you may be!
I am part ' native american'....perhaps to guilt ridden whites I have more right to this land or an opinion about the USA...
from what i read for every immigrant that gets to the usa 11 acres of forest is destroyed to grow crops for that 1 person
from 1989 to 2009 the usa population grew by 50 million....and that influx of immigrants,,,many illegal is ruining and will continue to ruin the usa.......
and 50 million is more than all the blacks and euros brought in in 450 years of euro imigration to the usa
in order to put a happy face on it wall st journal insists immigrants will ' save ' social security
AND NEWSWEK HAD A COVER STORY...
AMEXICA THE MAKING OF A NEW NATION
ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT
to : ASOKA..whoever and where ever you may be!
I am part ' native american'....perhaps to guilt ridden whites I have more right to this land or an opinion about the USA...
from what i read for every immigrant that gets to the usa 11 acres of forest is destroyed to grow crops for that 1 person
from 1989 to 2009 the usa population grew by 50 million....and that influx of immigrants,,,many illegal is ruining and will continue to ruin the usa.......
and 50 million is more than all the blacks and euros brought in in 450 years of euro imigration to the usa
in order to put a happy face on it wall st journal insists immigrants will ' save ' social security
AND NEWSWEK HAD A COVER STORY...
AMEXICA THE MAKING OF A NEW NATION
ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT
to : ASOKA..whoever and where ever you may be!
I am part ' native american'....perhaps to guilt ridden whites I have more right to this land or an opinion about the USA...
from what i read for every immigrant that gets to the usa 11 acres of forest is destroyed to grow crops for that 1 person
from 1989 to 2009 the usa population grew by 50 million....and that influx of immigrants,,,many illegal is ruining and will continue to ruin the usa.......
and 50 million is more than all the blacks and euros brought in in 450 years of euro imigration to the usa
in order to put a happy face on it wall st journal insists immigrants will ' save ' social security
AND NEWSWEK HAD A COVER STORY...
AMEXICA THE MAKING OF A NEW NATION
ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT
PERMACULTURE MEETINGS IN USA
They show films about Cuba and have games that remind me of nursery school!
Leader says ' tell me yr name and move around[kiddies]'
90% of usa topsoil is gone!
as far as this post goes THANKS AUSSIE!
RE : what is occuring in Australia. We too lack any politicians with the guts to tell the truth or do the right thing.
One of their ideas is to use bio-degradable polymer to keep the moisture in the soil - I kid you not. Peak Oil is not even on their horizon.
I left this comment:
Yes Vivienne, what we have here is a fantasy convention for those who still think nine billion people on planet earth represents an economic opportunity. How is it that all the dumb people end up in charge?
"ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT"--k gleason
Bingo! Therefore, asoka is a fool. Regard him appropriately.
Asoka wrote:"It is fine to reject the appeal to authority argument, but why the ad hominem attack?"
-because you are narrow-minded, and refuse to engage; meaning you do not answer questions posed to you. You rely upon your pre-conceived viewpoints, and willfully remain ignorant. That's why. Since you asked. Just sayin'.
Thanks for explaining. I guess my being "ignorant" explains everything. You need not pay any attention to my posts, much less spend time conjuring up insults.
Ho hum. More ad hominem.
k gleason said: "ONLY A FOOL COULD BUY THIS S*IT"
Fortunately, in this country there is no shortage of buyers. Land of the free and the brave and the generous:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Immigration is a many headed problem. People are demanding health care and with loads of immigrants that becomes almost impossible to finance. Australia, Canada and New Zealand have it and it is difficult to immigrate there. They want you to have lots of assets and skills (not to interfere with jobs of locals)so as not to coast on the liberal social services network.
You can't have both it seems to me.
I guess you don't get it yet. Rome is burning and Nero is fiddling. Now isn't that simple to understand?
And what makes people think China is holding on toour dollars? They are buying properties and assets all over the world and paying for them in dollars. They now have real things instead of paper. They are not fools.
So Asoka, you can find the time to write multiple replies, whining about ad hominem attacks, but don't have the guts to honestly answer a few questions that may elucidate your opinions.
You can accurately say I'm insulting you if you are not as I claim you are, otherwise, I'm merely stating the facts; just because your ego is bruised, doesn't mean I am not correct. I don't mind ignorance, its your willful ignorance, and refusal to support your opinions, or engage in a conversation that annoys me.
"I don't mind ignorance, its your willful ignorance, and refusal to support your opinions, or engage in a conversation that annoys me."
I feel your pain.
Well, the view from here (S.E. Asia) is pretty disturbing. While I have been watching the disintegration of the west for the last 7 years, led by America; I feel very fortunate to be in an emerging third world country fully covered by health insurance through my wife, for no charge (the healthcare is excellent and universally available). With very few exceptions there is some form of cheap public transportation to go almost anywhere one could want. Why, for gods sake doesn't America (worlds biggest economy) even have health insurance for everybody? There has been a massive effort to switch busses, taxis, trucks and autos to LPG. Gasohol and biodiesel are commonly available as well. I take no joy in what's happening over there but, one would have to deaf, dumb, and blind as well as dead to not know one has been the victim of a massive theft, so; instead of blah, blah, blah, why isn't something being done about it? Is Bernie the only one whose going to jail? Oh, and how long will you allow the crooks to run the prison? If one is really that powerless; isin't it time to leave? The snake has reached it's own neck.
Jaego,
I agree California will be the first to fall although I'd lay the blame on out-of-control spending in general, not just the burden of providing social services to the wetback hordes. But you're right that if Cali were serious about fiscal sanity, then cutting off services to non-citizens should be the first thing they do. Having said that, I just don't think it matters at this point. Cali isn't serious about saving itself; they still think somebody else is going to step in at the last moment and save the day for them.
So what happens when the money finally runs out? We'll all know soon enough. As of yesterday, the State of California began paying it's creditors with IOUs. That will buy them a few months with their private creditors but I don't think the public employees unions are going to be as easy to bully. Dealing with disgruntled civil servants however will be easy compared to keeping order in the cities. Huge numbers of people in the inner cities depend on the dole. When their checks don't arrive, they're going to go into the streets. Picture the LA Riots statewide...
Only two weeks ago, there was rioting in LA after the Lakers won a basketball game. A few hundred fans were worked up so on their way home they set fires, looted stores, and threw rocks at the riot squad. Imagining what a few hundred-thousand of these people are going to do when they're actually hungry is like contemplating Infinity...
Simple wealth redistribution.
It seems there is a trend in the U.S. for heavily populated areas (N.Y./N.E. - California/S.W.) to utilize derivative-backed ponzi style financial vehicles to create bubble wealth and then call upon the rest of the taxpayers to "bail them out". This is prima facie evidence of forced wealth redistribution via heavy lobbying efforts and taxpayer funded "bailouts".
Everyone, keep a very close eye on the next derivative vehicle coming out of California/N.Y./etc. - the CMO or collateralized mortgage obligation. Folks are jumping on this bandwagon at an alarming rate to secure capital with a promise to pay "next year". Large sums of money are being borrowed against via this instrument ... and it is gaining a tremendous amount of momentum.
Simple wealth redistribution.
It seems there is a trend in the U.S. for heavily populated areas (N.Y./N.E. - California/S.W.) to utilize derivative-backed ponzi style financial vehicles to create bubble wealth and then call upon the rest of the taxpayers to "bail them out". This is prima facie evidence of forced wealth redistribution via heavy lobbying efforts and taxpayer funded "bailouts".
Everyone, keep a very close eye on the next derivative vehicle coming out of California/N.Y./etc. - the CMO or collateralized mortgage obligation. Folks are jumping on this bandwagon at an alarming rate to secure capital with a promise to pay "next year". Large sums of money are being borrowed against via this instrument ... and it is gaining a tremendous amount of momentum.
Simple wealth redistribution.
It seems there is a trend in the U.S. for heavily populated areas (N.Y./N.E. - California/S.W.) to utilize derivative-backed ponzi style financial vehicles to create bubble wealth and then call upon the rest of the taxpayers to "bail them out". This is prima facie evidence of forced wealth redistribution via heavy lobbying efforts and taxpayer funded "bailouts".
Everyone, keep a very close eye on the next derivative vehicle coming out of California/N.Y./etc. - the CMO or collateralized mortgage obligation. Folks are jumping on this bandwagon at an alarming rate to secure capital with a promise to pay "next year". Large sums of money are being borrowed against via this instrument ... and it is gaining a tremendous amount of momentum.
I guess you don't get it yet. Rome is burning and Nero is fiddling. Now isn't that simple to understand?\
maybe it was MJ was fiddling!!!!!!
did he die from food posioning?...eating a 10 year old weiner
Thyis one works?