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February 19 2010: A thousand miles behind

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

– And people wonder why I’ve moved to New Zealand and write a Blog. Jeez.

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Ilargi: When on any given morning you see consecutive headlines that read

“US bank lending falls at the fastest rate in history”,
“Lending to British businesses falls at record pace”,
“UK mortgage lending falls to 10-year low “,
”Shock as British deficit equals that of Greece” and
“Britain posts first deficit for January since records began”

is your first thought that the economic recovery is nicely on pace? If so, perhaps a Tiger Woods press-op is more your thing.

How about we add this one:

“Fed raises interest rate on emergency loans to banks”

Think perhaps that would switch on the light?

See, what those headlines tell us is that the spigots on the private sector are not just closed, they’re still tightening ever more. While at the same time, government debt keeps rising. There can be only one conclusion. The only thing that lets our economies continue to exude a semblance of normality is the dwindling rests of our own remaining wealth, and we are not only not adding any, we are spending what is left, and fast. Our governments, eager to stay in power and remain wealthy, keep us thinking we’re doing just fine, borrow enormous amounts of money in world markets that is not used for any sort of recovery, but instead to pay for the debts of a small group of people who gained access to our full faith and credit by buying the representatives we elect.

And once the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates, while simultaneously drawing down its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, we will come to understand that we have been living in a soapbubble of our own making, built at the expense of many trillions of dollars and that this bubble is about to pop. That is true in the US as it is in the UK, and all the attention presently squandered on Greece and Ireland is but a trick to make us look the other way for a little bit longer, until everything of value has been stripped from around us and we can wake up one day to find all support and stimulus measures vanished into thin air, a bad moon rising, and a cold wind blowing through the cracks of our unheated MacMansions, with no gas stations able to supply us with the fuel to get out and get away.

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

We’re having the wrong conversations

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

– I’m not the only one who’s on about Corporations and their power over American politics. This is from over on The Automatic Earth Blog.

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I’ve said it before and I know I’ll have to say it a million more times, and you still won’t get it, because you just don’t want it to be true. But it’s time.

We’re having the wrong conversations.

We speak the language of the world of finance, a language that doesn’t contain any words or expressions to describe the final stages of the world of finance itself. And I’m not saying that world is about to end, just that it lacks the terms to tell of its own demise. Modeled after other holy writings.

And it’s not all that farfetched either. If we, the taxpayer, hadn’t bought off their debts, none or close to none of the major financial institutions in America would still be alive. That includes Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and all the rest too busy with paying bonuses to answer our phone calls. Still, despicable as all that may seem to you, they’re not really the masterminds or main culprits, are they, the bankers?

They operate in an environment allowed and legislated for them by the very same people that you all voted for, from the President to your local Congressman. Anger directed at bankers is anger misdirected and misunderstood. How about you? Bankers can only act within the law. And who makes the laws?

Obama could have come in on January 21, 2009 with a proposal to kill any and all bankers’ influence in American politics. He did not do that. He did a 180 and chose to invite Wall Street to run American finance policy.

That’s a choice, it’s not some sort of accident, as some prefer to believe. Thinking anything else equals selling Obama short as some sort of douche. And then the president has left all these people in place one year later.So here we are. And that’s no accident either.

Tall tales keep on emerging on Obama’s confidantes, and even if every single one were a lie, he couldn’t keep all of them at a safe distance from the presidency, neither the stories nor the people. Geithner, Summers, Rubin, Romer, Goolsbee and Volcker, by now they’re all entangled in the same web, as is the nation. And there’s no way out using the same kind of thinking, nor the same people. Some may be helpful in defining new laws, new measures, new ways to limit Wall Street influence in Washington. But those limits will necessarily be limited. That’s how Washington works. Got a newborn? Lemme break its shinbones, just in case.

If the US ever wishes to get out of its present predicament, it needs to force its representatives to do two things. Which they will never do, because having that as a platform will be so sure of a losing bet that no bookie will take your spread. Here goes, and no, I can’t believe either I’m posting this for free:

First thing that has to happen on Capitol Hill if we want to prevent the US as a country, a society, and an idea for that matter, to live on and G-d help us prosper, is this:

Get business out of politics
Joe Blow you and me will never have any say, or regain it, as long as Goldman, Cargill and GE can buy theirs. That is really all that needs to be said. The Supreme Court decision to increase corporate influence just was the icing on the cake that makes one think, in the words of Bugs: “Each people gets what they desoive”. It’s a death blow to anyone not in the inner circle having even a faint and remote say in where we’re heading, though, and that’s not what the Constitution meant to convey. But then again , once you get away with re-interpreting both Darwin and the Bible, what does the Constitution have on you?

Humbug! Politics! Let’s get to number 2, something strangely missing from all Obama, his elves and his reindeer have said so far.
Come up with a plan B
It’s not just us having the wrong conversations either, it’s all over the planet, where people who have nice jobs, especially the government ones, refuse to take a pay cut and insist they have a right to what’s theirs even if that means others will lose their jobs. Smart. Not.

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Why Britain faces a bleak future of food shortages

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Britain faces a ‘perfect storm’ of water shortage and lack of food, says the government’s chief scientist, and climate change and crop andÂ animal diseases will add to future woes. Science is now striving to find solutions.

It was an ecological disaster that occurred on the other side of the planet. Yet the drought that devastated the Australian wheat harvest last year had consequences that shook the world. It sent food prices soaring in every nation. Wheat prices across the globe soared by 130%, while shopping bills in Britain leapt by 15%.

A year later and the cost of food today has still to fall to previous levels. More alarmingly, scientists are warning that far worse lies ahead. A “perfect storm” of food shortages and water scarcity now threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict in the next 20 years, the government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, has warned.

In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive, just as the nation’s farmers start to feel the impact of disrupted rainfall and rising temperatures caused by climate change. “If we don’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move to avoid food and water shortages,” he told a conference earlier this year.

The reliable availability of food – once taken for granted – has become a major cause for alarm among politicians and scientists. Next month several of Britain’s research councils, together with the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for International Development – will announce a taskforce that will channel the UK’s efforts in feeding its own population and playing a full role in preventing starvation in other nations.

The problem is summed up by Professor Janet Allen, director of research at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). “We will have to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertiliser while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

No one said science was easy, of course. Nevertheless, the scale of the problem is striking. It is also unprecedented, says Professor Mike Bevan, acting director of the John Innes Centre in Norfolk. “We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do.”

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Got Gas?

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

– A good friend of mine sent me this article saying, “Interesting article on natural gas“.

– It is, indeed, an interesting article but I saw it in a different light than many perhaps do.

– My response to my friend:

—

An interesting and potentially game-changing story, indeed.

But, it is a classic case of humanity’s inborn tendency to jump at the short term relief without fairly balancing it against the long-term consequences.

To see the consequences, I’d like to see someone make the assumption that ALL the fossil fuel we burn from here forward is this cleaner gas.Â Â And, to be really fair, we can drop all considerations of the collateral damages associated with obtaining the gas that were mentioned in the article.

Just assume that the world will continue growing and producing and have more babies and all the rest of it for the next 20 to 50 years – all largely fueled by this gas.

The analysis should show what will happen to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere from consuming just this gas.Â And then it should consider the consequences of this change in CO2 levels on global weather, ecosystems, environmental refugees, depleted glaciers and winter snow packs, increasing desertification, species die-offs and an entire host of follow-on consequences that will attend continued rising of global CO2 levels.

Short-term thinkers are enthusiastic about these new gas producing technologies because they allow us, for the moment, to avoid having to deal with the really tough long term questions regarding what we have to do to get into a sustainable long-term homeostatic balance with the planet’s ecosphere.

Long term, it’s really the only question that matters much.

Everything else is an avoidance or a denial that only take us further down the road wherein we do not solve this problem and cause a major crater in the Earth’s evolutionary history; killing many species, altering the weather for tens of thousands of years and killing the majority of the human beings alive and reducing the ones that survive to miserable circumstances.

Not an insignificant outcome – and all the more terrible because, difficult as it may be, we could avoid most of it if we had the grit and the will to do so.

Dennis

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

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