Things Have Changed

SUBHEAD: Something old and played-out is limping offstage, and something new is stepping on.

By James Kunstler for Kunstler.com on 16 March 2020 -
(https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/things-have-changed/)


Image above: Painting by Mark Bryan in 2012  titled "The Causeway". From (https://www.artofmarkbryan.com/landscape/). Click to enlarge.

At least in wartime, the bars stay open. That’s how you know this is a different thing altogether from whatever else you’ve seen in your lifetime.

Even those of us who signed up for this trip — that is, who expected a long emergency — may be a little bit in cosmic awe at just how much shit is flying into the ol’ fan. I know I am. The gods must have glugged down a mighty draft of Dulcolax.

Did you get the feeling, as I did, watching the Sanders-Biden debate the other night — the inadequate versus the irrelevant — that the world they were blathering about possibly doesn’t exist anymore?

The world of institutions that actually function? Like, the ones that conjure up whatever sum of money you demand to keep all the wheels spinning? 

Remember that Hemingway line about the guy who went broke? Slowly, then all at once. That’s us.

Medicare for all now? Really? 

More like, a year from now every physician in America may be the equivalent of the old country doc toting a black bag around to home visits. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough horses left in America, and the few buggies we’ve got are all in the museum.

The mega financial bubble-of-bubbles is deflating with frightful velocity precisely because of the efforts since 2008 to artificially inflate it. The Federal Reserve gave it one final blast Sunday night — while everybody else was counting their rolls of toilet paper — and the effect was like blowing hot air into a shredded Zeppelin. Stock futures are “limit down” as I write, before the Wall Street open. 

Gold is getting pounded into the ground like a grape stake and silver is so low it looks like the hedge fund managers are down to pawning grandma’s table service. (Hint, the PMs will bounce back hard; the rest, probably not so much.)

Nobody really knows how deep and how harsh this gets (and perhaps the ones who have a clue ain’t sayin’). But the situation presents two salient questions: how much disorder is entailed in this ordeal? And what does the world look like when the convulsion phase of this thing is over?

Americans have never been through anything remotely like this. The disorders of the Civil War were sharp and horrendous military operations conducted mostly in cornfields, pastures, and woods (yes, and some small cities like Richmond, pop. 38,000, and Atlanta, pop. 10,000). When the smoke cleared, battered Dixieland emerged to numb civil order. 

Up in Yankeedom, the New York draft riots ran for a week around the small patch of Manhattan island, but everybody else went along with Mr. Lincoln’s program.

After all that, America got on quickly with the lively business of the 19th century: railroads, mines, factories, and all that. The world wars took place in foreign lands, and the home-front scene of the 1940s now looks nostalgically idyllic.

The stresses mounting on the national scene today reflect the extreme fragilities of the way-of-life we constructed since then, and an awful lot of bad choices we made in the process, like suburbanizing the nation and making everybody a hostage to happy motoring. 

I won’t belabor that point, except to ask how are those vast regions of the country going to manage daily life as the supply chains wobble? I’d say a shortage of toilet paper may only be the beginning of their problems.

The cities — at least, the few that didn’t already implode from the inside out — made assumptions about how big and tall they could grow which don’t jibe with the new circumstances chugging ferociously down the line.

Just think what a lockdown of the global economy will do to all those residential skyscraper projects lately hoisted up in New York, San Francisco and Boston? I’ll tell you: They are assets instantly converted into liabilities. 

And how will these cities even begin to pay for maintaining their complex infrastructures and services when the money for all that no longer exists and there’s no way to pretend that it will ever come back? Answer: They won’t be able to keep borrowing and they won’t manage. These cities will depopulate and there will be battles over who gets to live in the parts that still may have some value, like riverfronts.

I guess just about everybody can now see the idiocy of concentrating the nation’s commercial life in super-gigantic organisms like Big Box stores. It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many blunders in history, and now that time is over. 

Any ecology thrives on redundancy — a lot of players doing similar things at the appropriate scale — and America’s chain retail model for a commercial ecology was an obvious fiasco waiting to happen. 

The people who run that, and other people who run other things in our society, must be wondering whether those supply-chains from China will come back. It’s no different than the cargo cults of the Solomon Islanders circa 1947, after the military airplanes stopped landing with all their magical goodies: time to go back to fishing from the dugout canoe.

The foolish, idiotic identity politics ginned up by the Left and their racially-inflamed, sexually-disturbed scribes in the Thinking Class have successfully destroyed the last shred of an American common culture that held the country together through earlier vicissitudes. So, one concludes that we’ll be left stewing in poisonous tensions, and perhaps some violent conflicts, before those matters head toward some sort of resolution.

Where does this all lead? Eventually, to a land and a people who operate their society in a very different way at a much more modest scale. The task of reorganizing our national life is immense. (There will be plenty to do, so don’t worry about that.) 

You can forget about the grandiose techno-narcissistic visions of electrified motoring and a robotic nirvana of perpetual sex-crazed leisure. Everything we do has to be downscaled, from whatever manufacturing we can cobble back together to rebuilding commercial ecosystems at a finer grain from region to region — in other words, what we now call small business, geared locally.

Expect giant AgriBiz to founder on a shortage of capital, especially, and expect smaller farms to organize emergently, worked by more humans working together. That is, if we want to keep eating. Expect the small towns in the well-watered parts of the country to revive while the groaning metroplexes spiral down into entropic sclerosis.

Consider the value of our vast inland waterway system and the opportunities to move goods on them, when the trucking industry unravels. Consider lending a hand at rebuilding the railroad system in this country.

There will be economic roles and social roles for all those willing to step up to some responsibility. Young people may see tremendous opportunity replacing the wounded economic dinosaurs wobbling across the landscape. It’ll be all about going local and regional and making yourself useful in exchange for a livelihood and the esteem of others around you — aka, your community.

Government has been working tirelessly to make itself superfluous, if not completely ineffectual, impotent, and rather loathsome in the face of this crisis that has been slowly-but-visibly building for half a century.

Something old and played-out is limping offstage, and something new is stepping on. Aren’t you glad you watched all those debates?

IB Editor Juan Wilson's note: I have admired James Kunstler from around 2005 when I read his book 'The Long Emergency'.  The subtitle of the book was "Surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century". The book changed my life as if I had found myself standing on a trapdoor and then realized it was about to open wide. Jim had kn the delicacy and weakness of our civilization's dependence on fossil fuels. Back then my wife Linda and I were visiting upstate New York each summer. One year, around 2007, we visited Jim in Saratoga, NY, near his home. I found him sharp, amusing, and observant. Back then I was earning part of my living as a movie script consultant. After Jim wrote his fictional novel 'World Made By Hand' in 2008, I talked to him about trying to turn the book into a movie. He had some interest so I connected with his agent and followed through with treatment that included a opening segment that described the experience of his protagonist, Robert Earle, in the fast transformation of his suburban lifestyle as the Grid brakes down and he relocates to upstate New York  Jim and his agent turned it down. We have remained friendly acquaintances   Following his publication of 'Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology And The Fate Of The Nation' in 2012 Linda and I visited Jim in his new haunt in upstate Greenwich, New York. He had bought some acreage not accessed by a public road and built a deer proof eight foot high fence all around it. The place featured a large vegetable garden and extensive arbor of fruit trees. He was hunkering down for an end of times. Well folks, the take away from his latest post to his website indicates that the time is ripe for a major breakdown. I'm hoping that if we can avoid a nuclear war, or other substantial suicidal behavior humans may end up with a smaller population in a more stable environment with less pollution. One can only hope. But as Betty Davis says in the 1950's movie 'All About Eve' - "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night!"

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Made for Each Other

SUBHEAD: Red team and the Blue team are just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic.

By James Kunstler on 13 February 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/made-for-each-other/)


Image above: Illustration of the Red vs the Blue team. From (http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2015/02/red-vs-blue-which-should-you-choose/).

Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic. The ship is the techno-industrial economy. It’s going down because it has taken on too much water (debt), and the bilge pump (the oil industry) is losing its mojo.

Neither faction understands what is happening, though they each have an elaborate delusional narrative to spin in the absence of any credible plan for adapting the life of our nation to the precipitating realities.

The Blues and Reds are mirrors of each other’s illusions, and rage follows when illusions die, so watch out. Both factions are ready to blow up the country before they come to terms with what is coming down.

What’s coming down is the fruit of the gross mismanagement of our society since it became clear in the 1970s that we couldn’t keep living the way we do indefinitely — that is, in a 24/7 blue-light-special demolition derby.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with accounting fraud, but in the end it is an affront to reality, and reality has a way of dealing with punks like us. Reality has a magic trick of its own: it can make the mirage of false prosperity evaporate.

That’s exactly what’s going to happen and it will happen because finance is the least grounded, most abstract, of the many systems we depend on. It runs on the sheer faith that parties can trust each other to meet obligations.

When that conceit crumbles, and banks can’t trust other banks, credit relations seize up, money vanishes, and stuff stops working. You can’t get any cash out of the ATM. The trucker with a load of avocados won’t make delivery to the supermarket because he knows he won’t be paid.

The avocado grower will have to watch the rest of his crop rot. The supermarket shelves empty out. And you won’t have any guacamole.

There are too many fault lines in the mighty edifice of our accounting fraud for the global banking system to keep limping along, to keep pretending it can meet its obligations.

These fault lines run through the bond markets, the stock markets, the banks themselves at all levels, the government offices that pretend to regulate spending, the offices that affect to report economic data, the offices that neglect to regulate criminal misconduct, the corporate boards and C-suites, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the guarantors of mortgages, car loans, and college loans, and the ratings agencies.

The pervasive accounting fraud bleeds a criminal ethic into formerly legitimate enterprises like medicine and higher education, which become mere rackets, extracting maximum profits while skimping on delivery of the goods.

All this is going to overwhelm Trump soon, and he will flounder trying to deal with a gargantuan mess. It will surely derail his wish to make America great again — a la 1962, with factories humming, and highways yet to build, and adventures in outer space, and a comforting sense of superiority over all the sad old battered empires abroad.

I maintain it could get so bad so fast that Trump will be removed by a cadre of generals and intelligence officers who can’t stand to watch someone acting like Captain Queeg in the pilot house.

That itself might be salutary, since only some kind of extreme shock is likely to roust the Blue and Red factions from their trenches of dumb narrative. If the Democratic Party had put one-fiftieth of the effort it squanders on transgender bathroom privileges into policy for mitigating our tragic misinvestments in suburban sprawl, we might have gotten a head-start toward a plausible future.

Instead, the Democratic Party has turned into a brats-only nursery school, with the kiddies fighting over who gets to play with the Legos. The Republican Party is Norma Desmond’s house in Sunset Boulevard, starring Donald Trump as Max the Butler, working extra-hard to keep the illusions of yesteryear going.

All of this nonsense is a distraction from the task at hand: figuring out how to live in the post techno-industrial world.

That world is not going to operate the ways we’re used to. It will crush our assumptions and expectations. Lying about everything won’t be an option. We won’t have the extra resources to cover up our dishonesty.

Our money better be sound or it will be laughed at, and then you’ll starve or freeze to death. You’d better hope the rule of law endures and work on keeping it alive where you live. And nobody will get special brownie points for the glory of sexual confusion.

I look for the financial fireworks to start around March – April, as the irresolvable debt ceiling debate in congress grinds into a bitter stalemate, and it becomes obvious that there will be no voucher for the great infrastructure spending orgy that Trump’s MAGA is based on. Elections in France and the Netherlands have the potential to shake apart the European Union, and with that the footing of European banks.

Pretty soon, everybody in all parties and factions will be asking: “Where did the glittering promises of Modernity go…?” As we slip-side into the first stages of a world made by hand.

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Self Reliance Agenda Revisited

SUBHEAD: If you don’t save yourself, you won’t be able to help anybody else.

By Guy McPherson on 19 June 2010 in Nature Bats Last -  
(http://guymcpherson.com/2010/06/the-agenda-revisited

 
Image above: Painting by Herb Kane "Fishing at Night in Old Hawaii" by the light of kukui nut oil lamps. From (http://www.herbkanestudio.com/gallery/ancient_hawaii/night_fishing_in_old_hawaii.html).  

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." (Arthur Schopenhauer, one of my philosophical heroes)

Based on recent comments in this space, and also in my email in-box, I am compelled to provide an updated overview of my proposed agenda in light of the ongoing collapse of the world’s industrial economy.

There’s nothing new here, but plenty of people don’t have the time to read what I’ve written in the past so, in spasms of foolish ignorance, they keep asking me to stop driving my car (trust me, I’d love to … and I go for weeks at a time without doing so) or cease speaking and writing about economic collapse because it is not happening (and, in a related issue, there’s an invisible man in the sky who loves us and wants us to be happy).

The other primary topic of conversation, real and virtual, begins with “Okay, but what can I do?” As if I’ve ignored that particular question. “No, but I mean me. Here in Phoenix. With no money and no spare time.”

Sigh. If you’re unwilling to change, you’ll simply have to let change happen to you. And Bill Clinton was correct about this issue: People like change in general, but not in particular. Nobody who is unwilling to change is liable to appreciate the change headed their way.

If you’re willing to change, perhaps you’ll seek ideas and inspiration from sources other than me. Perhaps you’ll test your courage, creativity, and compassion. You’re going to need those attributes soon enough anyway, so you might as well drag them out now.

I think the ongoing economic collapse is driven by declining energy supply at the world level: We passed the world peak of conventional crude oil in 2005. Considering the primacy of oil to the industrial economy and therefore to our way of living, it’s no surprise the industrial economy is unraveling. Fortunately, it’s taking disaster capitalism with it, albeit far too slowly to suit me.

My hope, of course, is completion of the economic collapse in time to save the remaining fragments of the world’s biological diversity and perhaps even habitat for our own species. Call me a dreamer. Recognizing that it’s generally a waste of time to try to convince people we’re headed for economic disaster and therefore environmental nirvana, that, regardless, is my mission.

I have no interest in trying to save civilization, which is irredeemable and omnicidal. But I am interested in extending the lives of the relatively few people in the industrialized world willing to make substantive changes in their lives. Sadly, that leaves out nearly everybody with whom I converse or correspond.

Conservation is irrelevant at this point and, with respect to materials that are too cheap to meter, conservation probably has always been irrelevant. That’s the crux of Jevons’ paradox. Although Jevons’ paradox assumes free markets, and all markets are manipulated, it is not at all clear to me that relaxing the free-market assumption would have a significant influence on the global outcome of energy markets. Furthermore, if you’re really a believer in free markets and lack of governmental interference in those markets, then oil is the premier example of a global free market.

Many people are concerned we’ll respond to Jevons’ paradox with hedonism. As if we’re not already there.

If you think individual conservation efforts scale up to society, consider an incomplete but still stunning overview of the statistics on energy use. For example, the energy in a million barrels of crude oil — the amount gushing in the Gulf of Mexico every ten days or so — will supply your house with power for the next 81,000 years or so but will keep cars on U.S. highways for about four hours. So, at some level we’re all BP (those of you cheering for the industrial economy have company from J.P. Morgan Chase on the BP issue — the spill and cleanup apparently will enhance GDP, at least in the short run). More pragmatically, though, we each bear about as much responsibility for BP’s incompetence and recklessness as we bear for causing planetary ice to melt, the financial success of Wal-Mart, and the microfauna in belly of the nearest polar bear. As much as the media and politicians would like you to feel responsible and guilty, you should feel neither.

I regularly promote the idea of hastening economic collapse. If you’re not on board with that idea, but you still see the huge neon signs pointing us in that direction, perhaps you can be convinced to pursue a modicum of self reliance.

The notion of self reliance, long discarded in a nation where we enslave others to do our drudgery, is about to make a profound comeback. When the new Dark Age gets under way, people who are willing to do useful things with their hands and minds will be welcome additions in any community. The contemporary idea of American-style independence is, in Orwellian fashion, the exact opposite of independence. To secure our food, water, and body temperature, we have become wholly dependent on a large-scale system (the industrial economy). This is the diametric opposite of self reliance, and it’s long past time to focus on self reliance within the context of the interdependence of people in communities. We need each other, but we do not need the industrial economy.

How do you provide service to your community? What preparations should you make to thrive during the post-carbon era, and to help your community thrive, too?

I have written at length about the preparations I’ve made, with a focus on water, food, body temperature, human community, and living a life of service (in this case, four out of five gets you the equivalent of a cake with no flour). Securing these elements has been done by humans for about two million years in the absence of the industrial economy. Only recently have we become dependent on a system that is making us crazy and killing us. I suggest we get out of this system.

If that cannot be done in your specific location — and I’m thinking about places such as Tucson, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Los Angeles, California — I strongly suggest changing locations. The other obvious alternative is to re-arrange the deck chairs as the cruise ship of empire takes on even more water. There are many approaches to be pursued on this front, including recycling, joining a CSA, riding the bus, and volunteering in the local literacy movement. These are noble causes, but they won’t save you or your community. And if you don’t save yourself, you won’t be able to help anybody else.

People often ask me how they can make the kinds of changes I’ve made, without actually making those changes themselves. That is, how can they turn their lives upside-down without actually changing a thing? They blame lack of finances (which, as I’ve pointed out with my own example, can be overcome by joining others in a community-based effort). They blame an unwillingness to leave the apex of empire, the large city they occupy (i.e., they do not agree with my view that industrial economy is inherently immoral). They blame the marauding hordes certain to find them if they get out of the city (i.e., they use any and every excuse to avoid taking action).

Comfortable with the immorality of their lives, unwilling to forgo empire in exchange for the difficulty of self reliance, brainwashed by culture to keep pursuing this particular version of culture, they are hopelessly trapped in a hapless situation. Although I recognize the power of culture and the lack of free will for human animals, I’m beginning to lose sympathy.

Empires don’t break up, they break down. And American Empire is obviously breaking down, with abundant evidence to be found in the striking absence of any appeal to the common good from governments at any level. There has been no semblance of morality emanating from the fascists running the corporations, and therefore the country, since at least 1980. I don’t expect a vast outpouring of empathy and compassion any time soon. Faux compassion, of course. But the real deal? I hardly think so.

Although some insist a slow descent is likely, I have yet to understand how that can possibly work. Feel free to fill me in. Do we dim the lights one percent annually so that, in one hundred years, the electricity goes out without our noticing? Do we reduce our extraction of finite materials a few percent each year, even as the human population grows by more than 200,000 people daily, until we simply, peacefully, stop using everything needed to maintain the industrial economy? Do we slowly, painlessly, with no suffering at all, reduce the human population to a viable number? What is that number? A billion? Fewer?

All these outcomes seem quite unlikely to me. I think we’re so committed to unlimited, exponential growth on a finite planet that we’ll do whatever it takes to delude ourselves into believing that impossibility. If that means we have to destroy everybody and everything so we can have ice cream and cookies every night, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’re an industrialized world of overfed clowns and we think others are laughing with us instead of at us. In short, I need somebody to show me another way. I’m eager to learn how we can prevent unimaginable suffering and catastrophic die-off on a finite planet. Sans miracles, of course.

Looking back, and relying on a plethora of economic metrics, it’s evident we’ve experienced a lost decade. So we can trace the economic decay to 2000 or so. It’s easy enough to go back further, tracing the imperial decline to 1979 with the Carter doctrine. Or 1956 with the Interstate Highway System. Or the late 1940s with the federal government’s promotion of suburbia. Or 1789 with the unrelenting thirst for empire at all costs exhibited by the founding fathers. With respect to any of these temporal benchmarks, the decay clearly has accelerated in recent years and months.

From the day I predicted the new Dark Age would begin by the end of 2012, the criticism has been continuous. Most critics, citing no evidence and no understanding of Peak Oil and its economic consequences, claim we’ll surely adjust and adapt and generally demonstrate our big-brained brilliance with a long descent into peace, prosperity, and infinite good times.

Adding balance in a mainstream media kind of way, the occasional critic optimistically — without recognizing the optimism — claims the Dark Age will begin well before 2012. We should be so lucky.
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Militarization of American Life

SUBHEAD: Will we have to have a military coup to the save the nation?

By Kurt Cobb on 2 May 2010 in Resource Insights -  
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2010/05/oil-spills-crime-waves-and-increasing.html) 


 
Image above: In 1968 uniformed and armed National Guard troops guard intersections in Wilmington, Delaware, during a summer for national unrest and urban rioting in America. From (http://www.oldwilmington.net/oldwilmington/photos_old.htm).  

Three recent developments are just the latest examples of the increasing militarization of American life:

1) The National Guard will now assist in the cleanup of the oil spill created in the aftermath of the explosion and subsequent sinking of a deepwater drilling platform off the Louisiana coast.

 2) Several members of Congress are asking for a deployment of the National Guard along the U.S.-Mexican border.

3) Two Chicago area state legislators are now calling for the Illinois National Guard to assist Chicago police to quell a supposed wave of violent crime. At first blush readers might accept that these problems are all worthy of military intervention and perhaps beyond the capability of civil authorities to handle on their own.

The response to the growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico now includes U. S. Coast Guard vessels and equipment and two cargo planes provided by the U. S. Department of Defense. British Petroleum (BP), the oil giant that operated the rig, seems overwhelmed. The damage to Gulf Coast habitat, fisheries and tourism seems potentially catastrophic.

And, the accident itself raises serious questions about the safety of offshore oil exploration, especially in deep waters. No wonder Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared the spill to be of "national significance." The spill seems a natural candidate for military intervention. And, after all, the military has personnel and equipment that no other entity, public or private, has. As for border security, there have been periodic calls for a National Guard presence at the Mexican border.

Few people will deny that the borders of the United States are very easy to cross and therefore an invitation to those wishing to come into the country. Whether the National Guard could be effective in doing anything about this is an open question. A guardsman commenting on the most recent call doubts it. (See Havoc29 from Kansas).

Nevertheless, policing the borders is essentially a federal responsibility, so why not involve soldiers? Less clear cut is the case for involving National Guard units in the policing of the nation's communities.

The Illinois state legislators who are calling for National Guard intervention on the streets of Chicago failed to mention that deaths from violent crime this year are running only slightly ahead of last year. And yet, with municipalities facing increasing budget pressures, it seems inevitable that police officers and patrols will be cut, perhaps significantly in the coming years.

 I'm skeptical that we are now in a sustained economic recovery, and fully expect a second leg down that will leave the world economy in perhaps a decade-long funk. If I'm right, that would mean continuing cuts at all levels of government leading to further problems which will then lead to increasing calls for military assistance for a variety of tasks including those related to public safety and infrastructure repair.

Along the border the National Guard has, in fact, been providing support for a long time as the Guard proudly declares on its website: "The National Guard has provided engineering, counterdrug and other support to [U. S. Customs and Border Patrol] for more than 20 years and will continue to do so."

The military's Joint Task Force North founded in 1989 has been helping to interdict drugs and fight terrorism as well. The Army Corps of Engineers has long been party to many projects that are clearly civilian in nature. Abroad, the U. S. military has often performed tasks not directly related to combat such as humanitarian and peacekeeping missions.

The involvement of the military in many of these missions seems in some ways logical. But that is just the problem.

We are shaping public policies and priorities so that the resources to perform these tasks are increasingly unavailable to the civilian federal agencies or to the state and municipal governments responsible for those tasks. Starved of tax revenue or congressional appropriations, these entities have turned to the military for help. In part, this is because the country's politicians have convinced the public that much of government is wasteful and even useless with one very important exception: the military.

The lavish funding heaped on the military is not, however, a reflection of the return American society is getting from that funding. Rather it is a consequence of the powerful military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned the country against in 1960.

The dangers of this mission creep were evident as far back as 1992 when a prescient U. S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., wrote an essay entitled, "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" (PDF). Dunlap foretold that U. S. military involvement in the kinds of activities discussed above would expand with deleterious effects on the ability of the military to fight effectively.

 The involvement of military personnel in civilian activities, he warned, would also lead to their increasing politicization. Military officers are not used to taking orders from seemingly inefficient, democratically elected bodies which are often slow to act to address even urgent problems.

Those officers may seek to circumvent such bodies when they appear to be impeding action on challenges that seem to call out for quick responses. Dunlap even predicted a second, but this time disastrous engagement in the Middle East, the result of a military scattered in its focus and mission. He guessed the confrontation would be with Iran rather than Iraq, but results are roughly what I think he foresaw.

With the dangers to the world economy increasing yearly from oil depletion, climate change, mountainous public and private debt and myriad other challenges, it seems likely the United States (and the world) will face continuing economic difficulties including declining or stagnant revenues for government at all levels.

With economic difficulties ongoing and the needs of public intensifying, it will be all too tempting to ask the institution likely to suffer the least from funding cuts, namely, the U. S. military, to step in and address problems that overwhelmed local, state and federal governments and agencies cannot. This is why Dunlap imagined that there will ultimately be little opposition to a military coup if it arrives.

After all, by then the military will be performing so many tasks in civilian life that taking direct command of government may well seem the next logical and necessary step to the save the nation.

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Benefits of Collapse

SUBHEAD: The powers-that-be have propped up a morally corrupt, venal, destructive and impossible system.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 15 March 2010 in Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar10/benefits-of-collapse03-10.html)
 
 
Image above: In 1962 subterranean mine fire in Centralia, PA spread out of control and by 1992 the town had to be abandoned. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02/3094647378)

 [IB Publisher's note: We have removed the capitalization of "When Things Fall Apart" from this article so as not to confuse it with the book of the same name.]

The saying "never waste a crisis" was bandied about the body politic last year as if it actually had meaning; alas, the crises were all squandered to prop up a doomed status quo. I am not being cavalier when I say that things falling apart is the first necessary step for renewal, growth and wisdom. The collapse of a business, career, marriage, government, project or dream offers a unique opportunity to free oneself of an impossible status quo or an impossible double-bind.

Up until the moment of acceptance of complete and utter bankruptcy (the insolvency of the enterprise, home purchase, project, marriage, etc.), the participants flay themselves to keep trying to save what cannot be saved and propping up what has become an impossible burden.

The acceptance of bankruptcy/insolvency is a moment of loss and liberation. We mourn the loss of all that work, all that hope and all those dreams, and then we look on the world with fresh eyes, sadder, wiser yet also more realistically hopeful.

If we have any stomach for self-reflection, then we can in hindsight see the critical errors of judgment, the flawed assumptions, the mission creep, the fatal over-reach, the unresolved conflicts, the inherent inadequacies of talent, experience and capital, the tight, desperate clinging of those with the most to lose to the status quo even as it collapses under its own weight.

Those who contributed little but gained the most complain most bitterly, chastizing those who carried the burdens for falling down; those who carried most of the burden find a freedom they had forgotten existed.

All that seemed essential has been lost - the marriage, the corner office, the fancy vehicle, the identity as a go-getter entrepreneur, the comaraderie of the office, the home of one's own, the sense of mission and purpose, the small affections one feels for the familiar be it factory, desk, colleagues, tools and even the pathway to the front door.

And yet there is one gift left in the ruin and rubble--a new understanding of oneself and of one's limitations, weaknesses and strengths. Yes, strengths. The flaws and weaknesses are always painfully visible, but in a fair appraisal of when things fall apart , we come to see the strengths which were present but overwhelmed or misapplied to an impossible situation.

"Hope springs eternal" has two meanings when things fall apart. Those struggling to save what cannot be saved keep trying, even as they know deep inside that the battle is lost and it is futile to continue; they are spurred on by guilt, obligation, duty, and a keenly desperate hope that miracles will arise and save the status quo from a collapse which was ontological (inherent) to its nature and structure.

The real miracle is the collapse. After the status quo has finally given way to the fiscal and political realities, then real hope begins. Not the false impossible hope for miracles, but the real miracles of self-knowledge, an integrated understanding of the inherent unsustainability of the status quo, and the learning which only springs from failure.

Failure is how we learn. What did you learn when every jump shot dropped (basketball analogy) and you won effortlessly? What did you learn when everyone seemed to want to gather round you while you basked in the limelight? What did you learn when your business took off from the very start? Very little.

Conversely, what did you learn when something fell apart? Isn't that when you really learned about over-reach, mission creep, internally unresolvable conflicts, dependence, self-delusion, convenient fantasies, the limits of experience, fighting the last war, lies, greed, avarice, and a hundred other insights and understandings?

We as a nation have completely and utterly squandered the inherently inevitable collapse of our failed, rotten-to-the-core financial system. At great expense to ourselves and future generations, the Powers That Be, of both parties, have propped up a morally corrupt, venal, destructive and impossible-to-sustain financial system.

Nothing has been learned, and those bearing the burden (we the taxpayers) have not been freed of our burdens--we have been enslaved with even greater burdens.

What should have been done - close the insolvent institutions of whatever size, repudiate their bad debts and liquidate their assets - was not done. Excuses were made, failure was hastily covered up and the public shouldered the fatal losses engineered by private greed, corruption and fraud.

As a result, nothing has been learned and all the heavily-hyped hope is false. We as a nation remain delusional and unenlightened. The status quo has been propped up at great cost in treasure and wisdom, and an honest hope for renewal and real progress has been lost.

The collapse of the status quo has just been pushed forward, and the speed and ferocity of that coming collapse have been dialed up to maximum. When things really fall apart it will not just be the financial status quo which implodes, but the status quo of housing, commercial real estate, healthcare and Defense.

We as a society have squandered a miraculous opportunity to learn, and our "leaders" have squandered the opportunity to lead in their craven surrender to the power elites and protected fiefdoms which have the most to lose from the inevitable collapse.

The Powers-That-Be have tacked a few years onto the life of the status quo, at the cost of a greater collapse to come. Because of their lies, pervarications, propaganda, embezzlement, fraud and corruption, the chickens will come home to roost in the 2011-2016 timeframe. The bag of accounting tricks, cover-ups and bail-outs is almost empty, but there may be enough "hope" and delusion left to sustain one more election cycle.

We as a nation will learn one thing: our "leadership" has failed, completely and utterly, and we will have to lead ourselves.

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Rehearsals for a Civil War

SUBHEAD: The progressives are doing everything possible to deny the deep tectonic changes thundering through our economic arrangements. Image above: Upscale iPodders flip-off angry teabaggers in mock iPod ad. From (http://s292.photobucket.com/albums/mm36/zulch/?action=view&current=ipod-teabag.jpg) By James Kunstler on 22 February 2010 on Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/02/rehearsals-for-a-civil-war.html) Amid the general incoherence of the Tea Party rebels and the failure of progressives to recognize the structural changes underway in a peak oil world, lies a deadly swamp of paradox where all parties may drown in the quicksand of their own muddled intentions.

The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perqs and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad at the government and hot for "liberty." But how do they propose to maintain the hyper-complexities of suburban life without taxes to pay for fixing the countless roads their lives depend on or to run the gold-plated central school districts that seem to exist solely to provide Friday night football? As for liberty, a handful of despotic corporations from McDonalds to WalMart have been granted the liberty to destroy the Tea-bagger's bodies and the economic fabric of their communities -- and they seem to want more of that kind of liberty, based on the recent decision of a "conservative" majority on the Supreme Court allowing corporations to buy elections. The Tea-baggers also apparently crave the liberty to push other people around, especially on questions of abortion and religion. That's an interesting kind of freedom.

As more and more of them lose jobs and incomes, will they resent their government-issued extended unemployment benefits? I doubt that you'll see them burning their own checks in big public demonstrations the way the Vietnam War protesters burned their draft cards. And of course this also goes for the retiree Tea-baggers who show up at their Tea Parties to inveigh against the government -- except the agency that prints their social security checks, or the other one that pays for their liver transplants (while 40-million unretired, un-insured Americans under sixty-five get slammed with extortionary hospital bills for twenty-thousand dollar routine appendectomies that end up bankrupting them).

Meanwhile, the progressives led by President Obama are doing everything possible to deny the deep tectonic changes thundering through our economic arrangements. They have embarked on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable that will only aggravate and accelerate the more destructive effects of the historic changes underway. For instance, the financial crisis is nature's way of telling us that banking occupies too much space in our economy -- especially the "creative" kind of banking which thrives on innovations in fraud and swindles. Yet the progressives are shoveling the nation's accumulated savings (and way beyond that to earnings-not-yet-saved) into a handful of gigantic banks whose employees live in a separate universe of luxury, and the bail-outs only guarantee more financial mischief based on efforts to get something-for-nothing -- in the absence of an economy that turns capital investment into things of value.

Faced with the multiple threats of peak oil, the progressives are pounding billions into the automobile makers and shoveling tons of stimulus money into highway improvement projects, while the railroads we will desperately need in the future continue to be starved to death, and no effort is made to promote walkable communities -- including a federally-led reform of our insane zoning laws which mandate a suburban development outcome in every corner of the country.

Faced with the hangover of a housing bubble, the president's team has insidiously nationalized the racket and is doing everything possible to keep housing prices unrealistically inflated, so that nobody still lucky enough to have a median income can afford the median price of a house. Meanwhile, the agencies used to facilitate this accounting shell game -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc. -- are choking on worthless mortgage contracts and generating ever more new toxic mortgage paper.

Then, there is the question of our military adventures half a world away in Afghanistan and Iraq, where both parties are unwilling to face the basic conundrum of what happens when our troops leave those places. Even if we stamp out the current Taliban leadership there are countless avid up-and-comers burning to take their places, and numberless mountain valleys for them to hide in. Al Qaeda, of course, exists mainly as an international computer network. Good luck stamping that out. And if it's oil we're after in Iraq, there are three main possibilities after the last US soldier packs out: one is the unlikely possibility that a competent Iraqi national oil company decides to dole out drilling licenses to "preferred" companies (don't hold your breath Exxon-Mobil); another is that Iraq cracks up into smaller ethnic units lacking the capital or coherence to get their oil out of the ground; and a third is that neighboring Iran comes to control the major oil-producing region around Basra. So, what's it all about, Alfie? -- besides squandering a trillion dollars we don't really have.

Homeland security? Neither party is serious about defending the borders or limiting immigration, and anyway there are "soft" targets beyond counting all over the USA and small arms galore available to get the job done. Three guys with automatic rifles set loose in the Mall of America would be enough to push the retail sector over the edge into oblivion, taking with it the commercial real estate market and all the banks involved in financing it -- in short, destroying the tattered remains of the so-called "consumer economy."

My own guess about where this all leads is in the direction of more anger and incoherence by all parties involved -- which will itself generate yet more anger in a spiraling centrifugal feedback loop that could eventually tear this nation apart. It will be instructive to see how some of these forces play out in the Health Care Reform "summit" that President Obama has called for this week. The Republicans will be rope-a-doped into the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they have no ideas whatsoever about fixing the hopelessly cruel and unjust medical system that everybody except government employees suffers under. The Democrats will be juked into the equally unhappy position of explaining how a bankrupt US Treasury pays for a more equitable system -- and the insurance companies will sit smirkingly on the sidelines watching both parties fail to address the necessary severe disciplining of the insurance racket.

In the background of even these momentous deliberations, the foundations of capital creak and shatter, the stock market infarcts and the bond market fibrillates, and all the accounting tricks ever dreamed of in the fantasies of Harvard MBAs and MIT math PhDs, and all the newly-evolved species of grifters and shysters who pull the levers of the system will not avail to hold back our inexorable journey into new circumstances that will really determine the outcome of these predicaments.

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What is "Collapse", anyway?

SUBHEAD: Collapse, as we actually use the term for most societies doesn't usually involve any cannibalism at all.

By Sharon Astyk on 16 February 2010 in Casaubons Book -  
(http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/02/what_does_collapse_mean_and_wh.php)


 
Image above: House is abandoned after river bank collapse in Phnom Penn, Cambodia. From (http://khmernewstoday.blogspot.com/2009/04/living-on-edge_22.html)  

With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time.

Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by what they are learning, annoyed by you or dismissive. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they look in and look out. Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.

That's been an issue for me lately - I've now been at science blogs a couple of months, and so there's been an influx of people new to me. Obviously, this is a good thing, but it means a balancing act - how much background do I give? How much do I go back and cover things that many of my readers may take as a given, for those that don't?

PalMD, in a perfectly reasonable fit of crankiness, just exposed one of the places where I'm clearly not doing a good enough job of articulating for new or casual readers what my underlying assumptions are, and I'm sincerely appreciative of that. He writes,

Finally, I love love Sharon Astyk over at Casaubon's Book---I really do, but I don't really get it, on a fundamental level. I love her IRL experiment in (illusory) sustainable living, but her type of sustainable living seems really anti-social to me. It's about surviving some sort of society-disrupting disaster alone. Today's post is about getting your family on board with creating your absolutely necessary food reserve, and the day before was about how to get your family to eat all the rotten food you preserved. It's all very interesting, but hardly seems relevant in the real world where when The End comes, some white supremecist militia is just gonna kill you for your pickled kale before they resort to eating each other.

I'm clearly not doing something right - and one of those things is assuming that people know why they would want to store food, or eat locally year round. PalMD's assumption is that food storage is for the apocalypse, and it is private, rather than communal. And in some measure, that's a fair assumption - I write about collapse a lot. It is a term that comes with a fair amount of "zombies, white supremacists and killing each other for kale" baggage on it.

I'm actually going to riff for a bit on PalMD's point, which is kind of annoying of me, and I wouldn't blame him if he then found me to be a bigger pain in the ass than he does up to this point. I know it is irritating when you write a funny toss-off piece and someone writes a long, terribly serious analysis in response, and I do apologize for doing it. For me, it was just this was what made the lightbulb go off over my head, and I really do appreciate him giving me an excuse to stop the book review I was writing and go to something more interesting!

In fact, "collapse," as we actually use the term for most societies doesn't usually involve any cannibalism at all - odds are pretty much against the baby-on-a-spit model. The taboos against cannibalism are so strong in our society that for the most part, human beings will die in huge numbers and endure total starvation rather than violate them, as we know from societies with large famine rates - it almost never happens - see Margaret Visser's book "The Rituals of Dinner" for why cannibalism is almost never undertaken as a response to hunger, but almost always as a highly ritualized and carefully structured practice, often associated with formal warfare.

Nor does it necessarily look like Mad Max. I've already written about some of this in my response to Zuska on precisely this subject, but I thought this time I'd take a more pragmatic approach - in this century, when societies have collapsed, what actually happened? How bad is it? Are there ways of reducing the badness? While historic events can't give a totally accurate picture of the future, they can at least give us some ground to stand on.

When looked at this way, "collapse" is actually an extremely common phenomenon in nations and societies - societies rise to a particular level of function, they run into hard limits, often ecological limits, as documented by, among others, Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail", and Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Systems", and they fall to a much lower level of functioning.

How low is up for grabs, and depends on the kind of response the society makes. At times this level can be extremely low - there's Easter Island for example. More recently, Rwanda and Burundi have several times (in my lifetime) collapsed into untenable violence and endless civil war, with horrifyingly bloody consequences for the people... ones that don't look that far off of Mad Max.

On the other hand, we could look at the most recent society that has collapsed - Iceland. In 2008 and into 2009, Iceland which had become enormously wealth and prosperous underwent an economic collapse, the effects of which are still playing out. The banking collapse in Iceland was the largest ever suffered, relative to the nation's size, in economic history.

What happened in Iceland is probably very reassuring for people who are worried about collapse - the situation wasn't at all pleasant for people, but compared to Rwanda, it was a walk in the park. There was rioting and the government was broadly speaking, changed, some suicides and emigrations. The costs of dealing with the crisis were enormous, there was widespread unemployment, interest rates shot up and imports stalled, there was a foreclosure crisis, many formerly high paying professionals had to go back to the fishing industry which promptly began to see fish stock collapses, imported goods became expensive, and people got a lot poorer. On the other hand, one's pickled kale was comparatively safe.

So the first thing we can say about collapse is that it is highly variable - you can have economic collapse, you can have an energy supply related collapse, a political collapse, collapse into civil war - and that some collapses are better than others. Indeed, Dmitry Orlov, the author of the superb _ReInventing Collapse_ which compares what he believes is the coming US collapse with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he in part witnessed, has written the very thoughtful and funny essay "The Five Stages of Collapse" where he makes precisely this point:

Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy - a conscious but inexorable march to perdition - rather than a farce ("Oops! Ah, here we are, Stage 5." - "So, whom do we eat first?" - "Me! I am delicious!") Let us sketch out this process.

I admit, I find it enormously difficult to imagine a scenario in which the US does not collapse on some level - in nearly every available measure, the US is in danger of doing so. Certainly, while we trumpet that we've averted economic collapse, more accurately, we've pushed some of it off for a few years, and made it more likely that crushing economic burdens will fall more heavily on people under 50 and future generations. Much the same can accurately be said of our energy crisis and certainly, of climate change. I think it is hard to imagine anyone who would deny that in all three areas, our policies are short term, designed to forestall us immediately bearing a burden, rather than to actually avert a crisis.

What leads me to believe that the crises in these regards will be as severe as a collapse? In general, the analysis of fairly trustworthy and impartial analysts. For example, in 2005, the US Department of Energy commissioned the Hirsch Report to evaluate whether Peak Oil was a meaningful threat. Robert Hirsch, the lead scientist in the report has since become a Peak Oil believer, but didn't start out that way. The DOE report concluded that with 20 years of WWII-level investment, we could avert collapse, but that less than 20 years means a major crisis. That's not my conclusion, but the DOE's - since we're not engaged in a WWII-level build out of renewable energies and even the USGS predicts Peak Oil by 2023, simple arithmetic suggests that we are headed for some fairly serious problems. The US Army has produced a similar report on peak oil with related conclusions.

What about climate change? Well, consider The Stern Review, compiled by Sir Nicholas Stern on the economic consequences of climate change. Among his conclusions (and this was based upon a now-out-of-date set of assumptions about climate targets and their viability - he assumes that 550 ppm avoids more consequences than it probably does), was that unchecked, climate change could lead to mitigation costs of up to 20% of world GDP - a burden no economy could bear without, well, collapsing. Given that we show no signs of being able to stabilize our ecology at the lower levels we know are safe, it seems reasonable to presume we are facing high mitigation costs, with heavy economic consequences.

The same is true of my assumptions about the practical, material consequences of climate change - the predictions of the IPCC and other studies suggest that among the logical effects of climate change will be large numbers of refugees, conflict over scarce resources, drought, lowered rates of food production, increases in disease, heavier storms and more natural disasters, etc... Not only do these things have economic costs, they have material ones - they result in collapsed societies - New Orleans, for example, can be reasonably said to have collapsed to a much lower level of function for quite a long time, and it isn't totally clear whether it will ever come back.

I don't think I actually need to explain why I think an economic collapse could happen - we know that it does all the time. Moreover, we know it nearly did by most assessments in fall 2008.

We also know energy supply collapses happen - often along with economic collapses for example, former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaider wrote a book arguing that the Soviet Union Collapsed (under his watch, actually) due to its dependency on foreign energy exports and the shift of its population out of the countryside and into cities. For a long time, the Soviet Union was able to rely on energy exports to allow them to pay for food on foreign markets, but when energy prices collapsed, there were not enough farmers left to grow food for the population, and the government could not hold.

We know that this caused some subsidary collapses - Cuba collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsed, and stopped sending oil imports. We know that Cuba lost 1/5th of its energy imports, and the societal structures fell largely apart - people went hungry and started eating fried grapefruit peels because of lack of energy to run its highly technological agricultural system.

What's interesting about the examples of Cuba is that it is further evidence to suggest that fairly small energy resource shocks can cause fairly serious consequences - 1/5 of all oil shouldn't actually have caused people to starve - most people would reasonably argue that waste in the system and proper allocation of resources should have been able to absorb this - or will argue that the fault was the Cuban government's. To some extent that last point is probably true, but we should remember that we have examples from the US that show that small energy supply disruptions can be extremely destructive - the oil shocks of the 1970s and the subsequent major recession that followed it resulted from a reduction in imports of just over 5%.

So yes, I think we're on a path towards some kind of collapse, without necessarily assuming cannibalism or even roving gangs of white-supremacist kale eaters. I would like such a collapse to be averted very much, since I actually have other things to do too ;-), plus I've got kids, but I find it increasingly unlikely that we will avert it. When I began writing about this stuff in 2003, I felt that it was much more likely that climate change would unfold more slowly and that we might be able to tackle one crisis at a time.

Now, I think the evidence is becoming compelling that we are going to be facing an economic, energy and climate crisis all at the same time - and that I find it hard to imagine us navigating successfully. Is it impossible? Probably not impossible, but certainly improbable - the societal restructuring would be enormous - and would have to involve nearly all the things I'm suggesting anyway. Nearly everyone dealing with these issues talks about WWII style build outs and war footings - having to do something roughly equivalent to the 1940s build out (Niels Bohr famously said that it would be impossible to develop the atom bomb without turning the entire nation into a factory, and then, in 1944, observed that we had). Having to do such a thing while dealing with a multi-front crisis seems even less likely.

At a minimum, however, I think we should assume the possibility of failure. And that's a problem in a society that seems to think that there's an either-or relationship to failure - that you shouldn't prepare for lack of success, or have a backup plan for failure. I think psychologically, we tend to assume that once we begin to think hard about the possibility we might not succeed, it becomes inevitable. Thus, we don't like to make wills because it seems morbid. We don't prepare for disasters, even when they seem likely. We don't keep food around, even though both FEMA and the American Red Cross advise us to and the FEMA chief recently acknowledged that the first line of defense was personal preparedness. We tend to take an either/or approach, when in fact, we often need both - a will *and* care crossing the street, to build up the levies *and* have an evacuation plan, food in the pantry *and* stronger social supports.

Moreover, most of what I recommend works well for people who are not in an official collapse, but whose lives are undergoing collapse - they are out of work, they are losing their homes, they don't have enough to eat, they have a medical crisis and no health insurance... that is most of the things that I encourage people to do, including building up a reserve of food and strengthening social supports works for the *people* who are experiencing collapse even if their society doesn't officially get that label.

What are the common features of collapsed societies?
I could go back to Rome, of course, but there's probably no need. There are some common features of modern collapses that we can speak of.

1. People get really pissed at their government. This usually leads to some measure of civil unrest, and often government change. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad - it also, as we know, can lead to the government or others scapegoating someone or other, which is really bad. Generally the better outcomes come when the government seems to respond to the people, and also, when the government gets out of the people's way and also lets them respond.

2. Crime rates go up and services like police protection are less available or privatized - one universal features of collapsed societies is that they are more violent. But that doesn't tend to mean warlords killing everyone in their path - it tends to mean more street violence, robbery, rape, and murder, along with sometimes for-profit kidnapping. It tends to mean that people are vulnerable, and afraid, and often can't trust the authorities - it could be rather like being African-American in many poor urban neighborhoods, or it could be like living in Baghdad. Generally speaking, you don't want your kids to go out very much, you tend to avoid going out yourself, and safety becomes a serious issue.

3. Everyone gets poorer fast - this perhaps the most universal outcome. When societies collapse, the percentage of people who are poor goes way up - in Argentina, for example, the 2001 collapse virtually wiped out the middle class and pushed poverty levels up from lows around 20% to nearly 57%. This, I think, is the one universal likely outcome, and of course, right at the moment it is occurring.

4. The cost and attainability of food becomes an issue. Accounts from Argentina, which was previously both stable and affluent suggests that many desired foods, particularly imports are often unavailable, and more importantly, widespread economic impacts make it harder to buy food. Health impacts from this, and lack of medical care, along with depression and drug and alcohol use begin to show up.

5. Services and utilities are widely disrupted. Sometimes the disruption comes, as is common among the US poor, because people can't afford to pay the bill - tens of thousands of US households, for example, will have their utilities cut off on April 1, just as soon as it is legal (most utilities can't cut off a household in the winter). But people also endure service interruptions because of aging infrastructure and because of social disruption. You are much more likely to spend time with no power, have no trash pickup, run out of gas and have the delivery trucks not come through...

6. People are pushed together - whether they are herded into ghettos or lose their housing, extended families, biological and otherwise come to rely on each other. So do communities and neighbors - when someone has food, you share. When someone needs a place to stay, you let them come in. A culture of sharing emerges, and it is extremely useful to have stuff to share.

These are the near-universals - all these things happen in collapsed societies pretty much inevitably. Now in some collapsed societies, your neighbors start murdering you, or gangs terrorize your neighborhood - but this isn't inevitable.

Now, the question is, if collapse is likely, where do you concentrate your efforts? Do you try and prevent it, even if that is increasingly unlikely, or do you focus your efforts on, as Orlov puts it, stopping the elevator to the basement? I think the answer is both - but that emphasis should be put on strategies that are dual purpose - whenever you face a likelihood of major systems failure, multi-purpose strategies that both reduce impacts and increase resilience are clear winners. I like to think that most of what I advocate - not all - falls in those categories.

If a collapse of some sort does happen, what helps? We know for example, that social supports make an enormous difference in a collapsing society. "Reinventing Collapse" for example, finds that the major factors in keeping the Russian people from disaster were a system of social supports.

Making medical care, food and shelter available to people in crisis keeps things from being too awful. In Cuba, for example, for all its limitations, the Cuban government did some things that were remarkable, because they are precisely the opposite of what America has been doing - they strengthened social supports at the expense of potential growth. That is, in the face of the "special period" they expanded educational programs into more smaller campuses, put more clinics out into rural and underserved areas, and expanded food support programs.

As I argue in "Depletion and Abundance" this is precisely what's needed here - that investment in health care, food security, education and safety net programs for the elderly, disabled and children should be our highest priority. What's useful about this as a political strategy, IMHO, is that it turns out that all the things that people say they care most about personally in the political sphere turn out to be what actually matter.

Unfortunately, that's not the culture we live in - Americans uniformly respond to economic and social crisis by beefing up government and military programs and by cutting social safety networks. We're already seeing this happen - which is one of the reasons I put so much effort on truly local safety nets, private (not in the sense of ability to pay, but familial and community-based for those within the community) and other smaller resources, rather than large scale programs.

Such programs serve as a last layer of support for people who have fallen through the sliced nets above them, but are likely to survive even in the absence of federal or state funding, because they can operate on a fairly small scale. That doesn't mean I'm for the gutting of other social programs. I'm manifestly not, and have written about the importance of universal health care, funding LiHeap, Food stamps, WIC and programs for the disabled and elderly many times over the past years. But while I expend some energy advocating for these programs, I also think that building more localized backups underneath them is urgent.

The other thing that matters to reduce the rate of descent towards the basement are self-help strategies. In Cuba, for example, small scale agriculture in urban centers did a lot (not everything, imported staples also mattered) to alleviate hunger and nutritional deficiencies. In Russia, by all contemporary economic analysis, there should have been widespread starvation - instead, there was not, largely because small scale localized economics arose to replace what was missing. In Argentina, cardboard scavenging came to support 40,000 people - just barely though. In the US, during the Great Depression, which is an example, I think, of near-collapse in many ways, the number of informal economy jobs skyrocketed. In 1932, the New York Times observed that there were now 7,000 people, most of them adults, shining shoes in NYC, while in 1928, there were less than 200, almost all children.

Self-help/subsistence strategies and social support networks are not in conflict in these situations - both are needed, particularly when social support programs are under-fire or overwhelmed, as they are in the US at present. Neither alone can support the population or mitigate the worst outcomes - but simultaneously, in the best case scenarios, they can keep people alive and fed and reasonably secure.

On some level, it seems churlish, I think, to settle for that. Everyone wants better for themselves, their friends, the world, their children - I do too. Unfortunately, I think it is extremely unlikely that we can achieve much better - I realize this is a terribly depressing thing to say, and it is the kind of thing that turns people off. In some ways it would be nicer if I could believe that collapse will be good for us - but it won't. There are examples of people doing better in certain situations after a society has collapsed and reconstituted itself, but it is safe to say that no one likes the process. The project, then, is about how to avoid it being too awful, or resulting in a lot of death.

And this underlies my own assumptions about my personal project as well. PalMD thinks that my attempt to live sustainably is illusory - and he's right in some measure. I can document precisely what resources we use, because I've been tracking it for four years now - our family of six produces about 15% of the US average household emissions. We also produce about 20% of the garbage, use 40% of the water of an average US household, and spend 10% of the US on new consumer goods. The average American household has 2.6 people in it, so our actual usage is lower than that, as we are a family of six, but being that we're a large family, the least we can do is cut our usage.

But all of this does rely on a base of imported resources - our lives would be very difficult without them. But while my hope is that other people will also cut their energy usage (and since we've done this without major investments in things like solar panels, and since other members of the Riot for Austerity have demonstrated that something like it is feasible for people all over the world, in cities and suburbs as well as the countryside, for single parents and extended families and etc...etc... we know it can be done). But I'm under few illusions that this will become so trendy that it saves the world - even if it did become trendy, it is probably too late, and we'd still probably have to cut our emissions by another half or so.

Besides the moral reason to do this - because it is the right thing to do, because we know that our emissions do harm and we're supposed to do as little of that as we can, the real reason to do it, I think is that it enables you to function both individually and collectively - that is, building up a reserve of food, or organizing in your community allows you to both make sure your neighbors are eating, have something to give away, and also make sure your kids don't go hungry. They allow you to take some pressure off when you lose your job, but they also allow you to keep up the food pantry donations when your hours are cut back. They function both in collapse and out of it to make things better.

They don't function very well in the outer ends of the collapse spectrum - that is, if we start treating each other like Tutsi and the Hutu have since the 1970s, all the pickled kale on earth won't do you any good. If we install a fascist government that blames the Jews, the intellectuals, the athiests, the immigrants...we're fucked.

The best strategies involve putting the brakes on where it seems most feasible to put them on. I wish very much that it was possible to hit the brakes before we get to collapse at all - I think it is probably not. Instead, I think the relevant strategies involve putting on the brakes so that you end up as close to Iceland and as far from Rwanda as you can..

New Burj Khaifa Closed

SUBHEAD: Terrifying elevator ordeal in Dubai at Burj Khalifa tower, the world’s tallest building. Image above: Mechanical and electrical problems shut down the Burj (tower) Khalifa (Abu Dhabi sheik) one week after grand opening. No reopening date has been determined. By Hugh Tomlinson on 10 February 2010 in the Times Online - (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7021145.ece) Terrified passengers were left stranded between floors in the world’s tallest building after a lift broke as they were descending in the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. Visitors queueing to descend from the observation deck on the 124th floor of the recently opened 828-metre (2,717ft) tower heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass from the lift shaft. Dust then billowed back into the room through the small gaps in the lift shaft doors. The 15 passengers inside the lift were left stranded for 45 minutes before they were rescued by staff who dropped a ladder into the shaft and helped them to climb out to the observation deck. About 60 tourists who had heard the incident were left on the deck without explanation as security guards said that nothing was wrong. They were eventually joined by hysterical and dazed passengers from a second lift, who had been descending the tower when the incident occurred in the adjacent shaft. Their lift also stopped but was later safely returned to the observation deck, which was eventually evacuated via a service lift. One visitor said that the initial lift failure sounded like “a small explosion”. It is still not clear whether anyone was injured. The Burj, which opened on January 4 with an extravagant firework display, was closed on Sunday after the incident. Public access to the observation deck has been halted indefinitely, leaving hundreds of disgruntled tourists queueing for refunds for what should have been a highlight of their visit to the Gulf state. Emaar, the building’s developer, declined to comment on the incident but initially blamed its closure on “unexpectedly high traffic” in the tower. It later added that unspecified electrical problems could be to blame. The lifts were promoted as one of the highlights of the tower. The fastest public lifts in the world, they reach more than 25mph (40k/ph), climbing to the top in about a minute. The observation deck was the only part of the tower to be opened so far. Saturday’s incident throws fresh doubt on the opening of other parts of the building. The launch of the world’s tallest building was intended to be the crowning achievement of this small city-state, drawing a line under its financial difficulties. Instead it highlighted the emirate’s dependence on its neighbour’s support. It was renamed the Burj Khalifa instead of the Burj Dubai, in honour of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. .

Haiti - US Troops Deployed

SUBHEAD: Washington’s principal concerns have been maintaining order and preventing Haitians fleeing the oppressive conditions of their homeland from reaching US shores.

By Bill Van Auken on 16 January 2010 in WSWS
(http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/hait-j16.shtml)


 
Image above: U.S. troops with the 82nd Airborne Division stack water supplies at Port-au-Prince airport. From (http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-haiti-quake17-2010jan17,0,3017051.story)  

The first contingents of a US military force expected to reach 10,000 troops arrived in Haiti as anger mounted over the failure of international aid to reach the millions left injured, homeless and destitute by Tuesday’s earthquake.

There were reports of looting and Port-au-Prince residents creating street barricades with the bodies of the dead to protest the lack of assistance. Thousands upon thousands of corpses line streets and are piled up outside hospitals and morgues.

Haitian officials reported Friday that 40,000 bodies have already been buried, many of them in common landfill-style mass graves. They estimate that there are 100,000 corpses still to be recovered. In some areas the number of dead is so overwhelming that bodies have been piled up and burned.

Haitian Health Minister Alex Larsen said the death toll from the January 12 earthquake would climb to half a million, with another 250,000 injured.

More than 300 combat-equipped paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division landed at the Port-au-Prince airport from Fort Bragg, North Carolina Thursday night, and a US naval flotilla led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson arrived off the coast on Friday.

The paratroopers, the advance guard of a force of about 3,000, are to be joined by some 2,000 marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit based in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Brought in on the amphibious landing ship, the USS Bataan, the Marines will remain at the ready in Port-au-Prince harbor to be called in if needed to deal with social unrest.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mike Mullen said that even more than 10,000 US troops would be deployed in the ravaged Caribbean nation if required.

For the estimated 3 million people affected by the earthquake, conditions are growing increasingly desperate. They are unable to find adequate food or water; medical care is rudimentary or non-existent; and electrical power and telephone communications remain down.

Correspondents in the Haitian capital Friday reported little if any sign that aid had reached the population.

At least 300,000 people have been rendered homeless as structures of every kind collapsed in the magnitude 7.0 quake, which struck Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area with a force equal to 500,000 tons of TNT, or 25 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While such a catastrophic event would have inflicted enormous damage anywhere, the effects in Haiti are multiplied by the pre-existing conditions of intense poverty and economic backwardness, the product of a century of imperialist oppression primarily at the hands of Washington.

With time running out for many of the earthquake’s victims, both those trapped in the rubble and those who have suffered internal injuries, multiple fractures and severe wounds that are going untreated, the so-called bottle neck impeding the flow of aid amounts to a death sentence.

“People are without water; children are without food and without shelter,” Ian Rodgers, a senior adviser to Save the Children told the CNN cable news network. “What we will see with the lack of water is the possibility of diarrheal diseases and, of course, that can kill children in a matter of hours if not tended to appropriately.”

“It is very possible,” Rodgers added, “that the situation can go from dire to absolutely catastrophic if we don’t get enough food and medicine and work with children and their families to help them.”

In other words, hundreds of thousands more who survived the initial destruction may die from injuries and disease.

The lack of adequate infrastructure in terms of airports, roads and port facilities to bring in supplies, together with the virtual absence of any government presence coordinating rescue operations are the result not just of Tuesday’s natural disaster. Nor are they—as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates described them Friday—merely “facts of life.”

Rather, they are a manifestation of the enforced backwardness to which Haiti has been condemned by the major banks and corporations represented by the US government and the international finance agencies. Their sole interest in Haiti has been a predatory one, based on the ability to make profits off of near-starvation wages. Together they have systematically undermined the Haitian government ever since the 1986 mass upheavals that brought an end to the three decades of US-backed dictatorship by the Duvaliers.

The president first elected in the wake of the dictatorship, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown in US-backed coups not once, but twice—in 1991 and 2004. Meanwhile, Washington and the lending agencies pushed through one round of privatizations after another, stripping the Haitian state of any real power or resources.

Even in the best of times, essential services in Haiti such as health care, housing, transportation, communications, electricity, water and sewerage are grossly inadequate and tenuous.

Rather than developing the country’s infrastructure or ameliorating its desperate poverty, Washington’s principal concerns have been maintaining order and preventing Haitians fleeing the oppressive conditions of their homeland from reaching US shores.

The present intervention being mounted by the Obama administration and the Pentagon is based on similar motives. It is also driven by Washington’s stepped-up efforts to assert its dominance in the hemisphere, expressed in recent months in the right-wing military coup in Honduras and the agreement to set up US military bases in Colombia.

The deployment of troops has taken priority over the distribution of aid. As the Miami Herald reported Friday, “US air-cargo traffic was grounded to give the military airlift priority to bring moving equipment and the first 100 of a planned 900-paratrooper deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division from North Carolina.”

UNICEF, which has massed relief supplies in Panama, sent a plane full of medical kits, blankets and tents, but was denied permission to land and forced to return to Panama.

Initial rescue operations were noticeably focused on aiding US citizens and other foreign nationals. Search and rescue teams brought in from the US and France focused their initial efforts on the flattened four-star Hotel Montana, a watering hole for the Haitian ruling elite and foreign visitors, and the United Nations peacekeeping mission’s headquarters. Haitians were left to dig for their loved-ones and neighbors using their bare hands and pieces of rubble.

The first to be evacuated from the damaged Port-au-Prince airport, which has been taken over by American military controllers, were US citizens.

Haitians are conscious that the lives of foreigners are given more value than their own. “They were furious, though not surprised, that they were left to themselves to dig out the trapped, haul off the dead, beg for help for the dying,” reported the Los Angeles Times.

There are increasing reports of anger among the earthquake’s survivors over the delay in aid. Gunfire has also been reported, along with looting by young men armed with machetes. International officials warn that the longer the situation continues, the greater the chances it will turn into mass revolt.

“Unfortunately, they’re slowly getting more angry and impatient,” said David Wimhurst, spokesman for the Brazilian-led United Nations peacekeeping mission. “I fear we’re all aware that the situation is getting more tense as the poorest people who need so much are waiting for deliveries. I think tempers might be frayed.”

Kim Boldue, the acting chief of the UN Mission, said that “the risk of having social unrest very soon” made it imperative that relief supplies begin arriving.

The real attitude of US imperialism toward the Haitian people found expression in an article posted by Time magazine and entitled, “Will Criminal Gangs Take Control in Haiti’s Chaos?” The article declared, “As Haitian and international officials try to coordinate an effective response to what is probably the worst disaster to ever hit the western hemisphere’s poorest country, they’ll need to be mindful of the human rats that come out of the capital’s woodwork at times like these.”

The article went on to warn that “criminal bands from poor neighborhoods like Cité Soleil and La Saline are almost certain to try to exploit the security void.” It quoted Roberto Perito, described as an expert on Haitian gangs at the Institute of Peace, a government-funded agency with close ties to US intelligence and the Pentagon, saying that the supposed threat is “surely why the US military deployment is adding a security component.”

Time added: “The US military has had its share of experience with Port-au-Prince’s gangs,” noting that they are often “political in nature,” coalescing, as Perito put it, “around charismatic and ruthless Robin Hood figures.”

There is every likelihood that the US military deployment will be turned against the people of Haiti in the suppression of mass unrest. Having occupied the country for 20 years in the first part of the 20th century and intervened twice more in 1994 and 2004, the US military is once again assuming control in what senior commanders say will be a long-term operation.

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Haiti Earthquake Disaster

SUBHEAD: The earthquake is a tragic setback for a long-awaited economic recovery that had appeared to show the first signs of taking root.

By Pooja Bhatia and John Lyonson 14 January 2010 in Wall Street Journal - 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704362004575000460345415900.html) 

Image above: Street on Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after 1/12/10 earthquake. From (http://www.examiner.com/x-12837-US-Headlines-Examiner~y2010m1d13-70-Haiti-earthquake-leaves-country-in-ruins)  
 Port-au-Prince, Haiti—Cries from victims entombed beneath concrete debris pierced the air of seemingly every street in this crowded capital Wednesday, where shocked residents carried the injured and the dead a day after the nation was hit by a quake that some estimate has killed more than 100,000 people. Haitians tried digging through rubble with their bare hands to rescue people trapped after the biggest earthquake to hit the impoverished Caribbean nation in two centuries. Thousands of buildings from shanties to the presidential palace were destroyed, streets were blocked by debris and telephone service was knocked out.

Countries around the world, meanwhile, scrambled to send in help. "Amwe! Amwe!"—"Help me!" in Creole—one woman called out amid the rubble of a primary school that collapsed in the Turgeau neighborhood. Florence Devereaux, a paraplegic often found sitting outside her house in the Bois Verna neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, pointed to a house next door that had collapsed, burying at least four children under rubble. "We heard them asking for water, asking to get them out. But we can't. We have no tools. Where are the rescue teams?" Many Haitians complained about the nonexistent rescue efforts from their own government and the apparently slow arrival of help from abroad, in particular the nearby U.S. "Who is in charge?"—Ki e ski responsab?—was a common question on the streets.

"A Chinese rescue team and two rescue teams from the U.S. should have arrived this evening," United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters. He said the U.N. would coordinate the rescue effort of teams from various nations that will be arriving in coming days. France, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe and other nations were also sending help to the Haitian capital, U.N. officials said.

The government of Mexico, which regularly suffers from earthquakes, said it sent a team of specialists with trained dogs to help look for survivors. For many Haitians, help was already too late. "It's a horror show," said John Burns, an American agricultural consultant who drove a four-wheel drive car around the city. "There are dead people all over the place, some covered, some uncovered." Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN and Reuters that the death toll could top 100,000. "I don't think that's an exaggeration," said Alice Blanchet, a special adviser to the Haitian prime minister who lives in Brooklyn. She said Haiti's Justice Minister Paul Denis was unaccounted for.

"I don't know of a single friend or family member of mine in Haiti who hasn't lost their home. They are all sleeping on the street. I have two cousins who are unaccounted for," she said, pausing for a moment. "I don't think I can understand what a big tragedy this is." Among those who lost their home was the Haitian President René Préval, who told CNN that he didn't yet know where he would spend the night. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared the earthquake tragedy with the Asian tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people five years ago.

"This will be a very high loss of life as well," said Mrs. Clinton, who said she is cutting short a trip to the Asia-Pacific to return to Washington to help oversee U.S. relief efforts. Matthew Marek, country director for the American Red Cross, said he expected a very high death toll. "This will make the hurricanes looks like child's play," he said, referring to a series of storms that swept through Haiti in 2008. Officials at the U.N, which had thousands of peacekeepers and other relief workers stationed in Haiti at the time of the quake, reported Wednesday that more than 150 workers remained missing in Port-au-Prince, including as many as 100 trapped in the rubble of its headquarters at the Christopher Hotel.

The mission's head, Hedi Annabi, also was feared dead. Brazil's army said at least 11 Brazilian members of the 9,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti were killed. Mr. Ban pledged to try to reconstruct the impoverished country's economy. The capital's Roman Catholic archbishop was killed, according to the Associated Press.

At a briefing on Haiti before the U.N. General Assembly Wednesday afternoon, former President Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy to Haiti, said the country's top relief priorities now are water, food, shelter and first-aid supplies. "That's what we need," he said. He urged people who would like to help to donate cash to relief organizations, and not supplies. Overnight on Wednesday, thousands of Haitians opted to stay outdoors rather than sleep in their homes for fear of more aftershocks.

A large Haitian diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere frantically tried to reach loved ones. Monique Cenecharles, a Haitian expatriate in Montreal, was trying to get in touch with her husband, Nikenson, an engineer in Port-au-Prince. The two last spoke Tuesday evening over an instant-messaging service, just minutes before the earthquake hit. "He said he had to go to his English class," she said. "I said goodbye and I love you." Ms. Cenecharles hasn't been able to reach him since, either online, by phone or through relatives.

She says she is also searching for three aunts and two uncles in the capital city. Early Wednesday, she received a photo of an injured nephew in Port-au-Prince. "I am looking at the picture of my nephew laying down," she said. "He's cut deadly." She said she didn't know whether the nephew would receive medical attention. On a Facebook page called "Earthquake Haiti," hundreds of users searched for loved ones they couldn't reach in Port-au-Prince, posting photos and asking for information.

"Looking for Al and Ev Hromek," wrote Julie Thiessen. "They were at 33 Delmas Port-au-Prince." Survivors caked in white concrete dust walked the streets or huddled in small groups, dazed. Some had bright red marks from blood that stood out against the chalky powder on their skin.

Throughout the night following the quake and into the early hours of Wednesday, the rolling thunder of building collapses could be heard throughout the city. Aftershocks caused moments of renewed panic. As the bodies of the dead were being piled up on city streets, residents began worrying about how to survive the coming days. Outside the collapsed Twins Market on Avenue Jean Paul II, people carried five-gallon water containers, boxes of corn flakes, Coca-Cola, and other provisions. A man on the street yelled to this reporter: "Hey, foreigner. We're dying." Worries about looting or violence also grew after reports that Haiti's main prison had partially collapsed, allowing inmates to escape.

From hills around the city, once the proud seat of the world's first black republic, one could see a changed cityscape. The white domes of the National Palace had collapsed on the walls below, the roof and sides of the National Cathedral were gone, and, in the distance, the slum of Bel Air looked flattened. Citigroup Inc.'s three-story office building in Port-au-Prince was destroyed, and the New York company was trying to account for all of its 40 employees. In a country deeply divided between rich and poor, people at all socioeconomic levels suffered. Grand houses in bourgeois neighborhoods such as Pacot and Petionville were leveled. The capital's most prominent hotel, the Hotel Montana, was damaged, trapping scores of guests, according to eyewitnesses. Several hospitals were badly damaged. Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said its three hospitals in Haiti were unusable.

Mr. Marek and other Red Cross members gave first aid to hundreds of injured residents of the shanty towns built into the hillside behind the Red Cross office. With only a few bottles of antiseptic, gauze and tape, he and several staff members attempted to treat deep wounds. Decades of urban migration into shoddily constructed, hillside slums render the city painfully vulnerable to disasters. The earthquake is a tragic setback for a long-awaited economic recovery that had appeared to show the first signs of taking root in the hemisphere's poorest nation, a place where eight in ten live in poverty and half live in extreme poverty.

"People were beginning to feel that if Haiti was going to have a chance, this was it," said Johanna Mendelson Forman, who follows Haiti at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. "I hope now people will be more determined to do something."