The Teeming Brain

CARDIN COMMENTS:

Bye-bye to Business As Usual

If there’s a single theme that unites the past week’s crop of news, analysis, commentary, and prophetic utterances, it is that Business As Usual — a term that surely deserves the proper-noun caps by this point — is altogether dead.

Okay, that may be jumping the gun a bit. Presently BAU still in the dying stage. But for all practical purposes, as a model for what we inhabitants of planet earth can and should expect out of life from here to the end, Business As Usual is a freshly minted corpse.

By BAU, I refer to the fossil fuel-based, technologically advanced lifestyle that all of us, whether we hail from the “developed” or “developing” world, whether we’re members of any nation from the First World to the Third, from any and all cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds — the lifestyle, I say, that we all, each and every one of us, have come to think of either normal (if we’re from the First World “developed” nations) or desirable (if we’re from anywhere else). For the better part of a century, we have all either been shoring up and improving our hold on this way of life or else pining after and struggling to achieve it.

That’s too bad, since this way of life is a dead end.

I leave it to the assembled links and excerpts below, as well as all of the other relevant items you can find anywhere and everywhere these days, to establish the point. I’ll just end this week’s comment by noting the poignancy of the phenomenon identified by The Los Angeles Times in the final piece excerpted below. Titled “Raised in boom times, many Gen-X and Gen-Yers see their dreams go bust,” the article reports:

Raised amid a long stretch of financial bounty and weaned on video games, cellphones, iPods and weekends at the mall, many Generation X and Y members have barely seen a time when they couldn’t spend freely on the latest styles and gadgets.

….”This generation as a whole has not experienced any substantial kind of financial difficulty,” said Leslie Winefield, director of the Portland, Maine-based Institute for Financial Literacy. “It could be a defining moment for them.”

This relates directly to what I wrote a couple of weeks ago in “The end of the future as we knew it,” where I said,

We members of modern industrial civilization, especially we members of its current Western (especially American) variety, are no longer able to pretend that we’re going to live in a Star Trek-type utopia that emerges as the logical endpoint of the civilizational trajectory our collective lives have followed for the past several decades. Sorry, but it’s over. It’s just not going to happen. That future is almost certainly dead.

….And for some but probably not all of us, what may die in this process is not just a particular vision of the future — the one you see embodied in advertisements for cell phones, iPods, automobiles, restaurants, clothing, retail stores, television programs, computer platforms, tooth whitening products, exercise machines, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, etc., etc., etc. — but the very idea that the future is real. Maybe, just maybe, some of us will experience an awakening to the present that does away once and for all with the fallacious notion that there’s really a future out there and a past behind us, and that we’re sandwiched between them and burdened with the weight of both.

It’s not all that surprising, really, that I was writing preemptively in tune with what the L.A. Times article identifies. After all, I’m a Gen-Xer myself, raised in the 1970s and 80s with VCRs and cable television (both of which my family first acquired when I was in junior high school) and come of age during the hyper-pseudo-prosperity of the Reagan years. That article from Los Angeles is talking about me and my generation.

And I, for one, can report that it’s not so bad having your basic economic, political, cultural, and environmental view of the world exposed as an illusion. I mean, sure, it’s shocking and disorienting at first, but when you come to see clearly that your inherited and preprogrammed view of the world was a big lie that was based on and supportive of a fundamentally empty, inhuman, and ecologically unsustainable set of assumptions, the prospect of Business As Usual going bye-bye becomes rather attractive.

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The Era of Cheap Food, Energy, and Credit at an End

The Daily Reckoning (U.K. edition), April 24

Eight years into a new millennium, it feels like the end of an era. The end of the eras of cheap credit, cheap food and cheap energy. Will they be back? Even Pollyanna might swallow hard before giving the nod to that one.

On the credit front, banks around the world may have lost somewhere in the region of a $1trn between them, so something has to give. Namely loans to customers. Whether they be first time buyers trying to get a foot on the housing ladder, a business needing finance or some private equity house putting together a leveraged buyout. Subprime has blown a large hole in the banks, and that means credit rationing for customers.

….As for the era of cheap food, its return looks unlikely unless there’s a catastrophic reversal of the long-term economic and demographic growth trends in place. Or agricultural production revives once again confounds global warming and the Malthusians. China will one day boast a middle class whose numbers will equal the entire population of the US. Will they want to subsist on a bowl of rice a day? No. They’ll be wanting hamburgers, pizza, steak and sushi… or the cultural equivalent thereof. The rich world will just have to learn to share with the nouveau riche world and bid more for it. Food rationing in the east. Food rationing in the west. Mighty US retailer Walmart is limiting the purchase of rice, reports Bloomberg, and another US retail giant, Costco, is considering a similar move. Elsewhere, Irish Banana importer Fyffes reports higher import costs are accelerating fruit price inflation.

And then there’s cheap energy… Well, maybe one day we’ll be saved by science, but the quest for an alternative to finite hydrocarbons remains a live one. And until that day comes we’ll continue to be pay close attention to the oil price, now retreated to $117 from its recent relentless march up to $120 high. And on the idea mentioned recently of what price oil has to hit before people start giving up on the car, a reader writes…

“Oil at 200 bucks within the next five years? Quite probable, but down to 80-85 first as this spike runs out of steam. Overall when peak oil (maximum daily supply exceeded by minimum daily demand — not the stuff in the ground ) hits us then the price will go as high as it can ($400) before the global transportation infrastructure grinds to a halt and with it the global economic infrastructure. Global warming just doesn’t stand a chance because we won’t see 2100 as a civilised planet.”

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Say goodbye to ‘business as usual’

John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report, April 23

Those of us who are watching the crisis of industrial society arrive on schedule take our omens where we find them, and one appeared yesterday morning in the unlikely form of an internet ad riding shotgun on a peak oil blog. The header was striking enough — “Oil Will Hit $100!” — or it would have been, except that one of the main benchmark grades of crude oil closed not far below $120 a barrel that evening. When the ads on your computer screen have already been left in the dust by the headlines, it’s fair to say, yesterday’s assumptions are in serious need of revision.

Meanwhile, rolling blackouts and food shortages are making life more difficult for people in many of the world’s poorer nations. Even in the United States, where instant availability of consumer products is generally considered an inalienable right, the first spot shortages of grain products have made ripples in the media. I won’t even get into the plunging real estate prices and financial implosions along the route of the slow-motion train wreck the global economy resembles so much these days. One way or another, it’s turning into a bad week for believers in an imminent return to what most people nowadays consider business as usual.

….What we most need to realize at this juncture is that the way things have been in the world’s industrial societies over the last century or so is in no way normal. It’s precisely equivalent to the new lifestyle adopted by winners of a lottery whose very modest income has suddenly leapt upward by $1 million a year or so. After a few years, the lottery winners might well become accustomed to the privileges and possessions that influx of wealth made possible, and children growing up in such a family might never realize that life could be any other way. The hard fact remains, though, that when the lottery money runs out, it runs out, and if no provision has been made for the future, the transition from a million dollars a year to the much more modest income available from an ordinary job can be very, very rough.

….[W]e’re running out of the energy resources that make it possible for every man, woman and child in America to dispose of the equivalent of $512,811 in labor every year. It’s as though the 30 billion invisible guest workers whose sweat powers the American economy are quitting their jobs one by one, and moving back home to the Paleozoic. When the process completes itself, and the long curve of depletion finally sinks low enough that it’s no longer economically worthwhile to extract the remaining dregs of fossil fuel from the ground, the amount of labor each of us will have at our disposal will be much, much less than it is today.

….The farmers of the future may well use intensive organic methods rather than the field agriculture of an earlier day, just as the craftspeople of the future may well spend some of their time crafting solar hot water heaters and shortwave radios. Still, this sort of handicraft economy is a mature and effective social technology, and far and away the most common way societies provide for the needs of their members. It is, one might say, business as usual.

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The Peak Oil Crisis: The Case for 2008

Tom Whipple, Falls Church News-Press, April 24

In recent weeks there have been developments suggesting that the troubles associated with peak oil may be coming faster than many realize.

….If our stockpiles do not start to build more rapidly in the next month or two, then watch out, for in recent years the U.S. has slowly moved towards a just-in-time system for oil and products to lower inventory costs. Keep in mind that much of our “stockpile” is trapped in pipelines, sitting in partially-processed tanks at refineries, and aboard ships and barges where it is no use to the consumer. It was only a couple of years ago that we were hours away from shortages.

There are many forces at work in the world’s oil markets today. How they will all balance out over the rest of the year is impossible to tell. During the last few months, however, developments suggesting much higher prices and shortages have come to the fore as witnessed by the steadily increasing prices for oil and gasoline. Unless something comes along to reverse these forces in the next few months, we are likely to suffer very serious economic troubles before the year is out.

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Peter Schiff: The American standard of living is on the way down; it’s time to start stockpiling things

Interview with Peter Schiff on the Glenn Beck Program, March 17

SCHIFF: [Politicians] don’t want to admit they have been lying to us all these years. They want to create the U.S. economy as if we had a good economy. You know, sub crime wasn’t just a problem that happened in a healthy economy. The sub prime was the pin that predicted the bubble. The problem was we had a bubble economy in the first place. It wasn’t viable. You can’t have an economy where everybody runs deficits, where we just import things that we didn’t make and give the world an IOU. And we all live on a giant credit card. That can’t last. That can’t happen forever and, you know, it’s finally come to an end and so rather than trying to recreate that bubble, rather than going deeper into debt and sending everybody, you know, checks and hoping that there’s a stimulus package so they go out and spend more money, we need to address the fundamentals that got us into this mess. We need to return to a nation where people save money, not spend money. And where we actually produce stuff. But, you know, the transition back to a viable economy from a bubble economy cannot happen without a recession. It can’t happen without a lot of people losing money. But the Fed doesn’t want to fess up and politicians don’t want to admit the mess that we’re in. So they want to prepare that they can make it all better by printing money and they can’t.

GLENN: What does the average Joe do?

SCHIFF: Well, the average Joe has to understand the mess we’re in. Just like you had the heads of Bear Stearns on television last week saying, hey, there’s no problem, everything is great, these rumors are false and next thing you know the stock falls through the floor. Well, it’s the same thing with the entire U.S. economy. You get, you know, the big wigs, the Ben Bernankes and you get Henry Paulson going on all the Sunday morning shows ensuring us that the fundamentals are sound, that everything is great. They are just as fundamentally sound as Bear Stearns were. So people have to understand they are getting lied to by Wall Street, they are getting lied to by the government. Most of the financial shows out there that they think they are getting advice, they are not. They are getting Wall Street propaganda. So people have to take action. They have got to do what I wrote with my book, Crash Proof. People have to get rid of the U.S. dollar or get into other currencies like the Swiss franc or the Singapore dollar or the — they have got to buy gold.

GLENN: Peter, I’m talking about the average person. I’m talking about the guy who is bustin’ his butt, the family is living paycheck to paycheck.

SCHIFF: You want the average person who has no savings.

GLENN: I’m talking about, yeah, the average person in America that is just barely squeaking by. What do they do?

SCHIFF: You know, I don’t know. It’s going to be tough. I mean, maybe one thing they can do is stop making their mortgage payments because that’s a waste of money and maybe they can do something constructive with that money. I mean, certainly people can start stockpiling things.

GLENN: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, I can’t just have you say on national radio stop making your mortgage payments. What do you mean by that?

SCHIFF: You are throwing money down a rat hole. It’s going to be tough for people that don’t have any savings and they are working paycheck to paycheck. Certainly they can stockpile things. Things are going to get more expensive. So, you know, don’t wait to buy, you know, your food items, things are nonperishable, fill up your cupboards. You can buy things like razor blades and shaving cream, things you know you are going to need because they are going to get more expensive.

GLENN: I don’t think we also need to be recommending to people buying razor blades.

SCHIFF: Not to slit their wrists but just so they can shave. It’s going to get tough. What it means to be American, our whole standard of living is going to decline because of years of living beyond our means. It should be no surprise that when you live on debt and eventually when the bills come due and you can’t afford to pay them that you are going to have to reduce your standard of living. You know, a lot of Americans are going to have to find more viable forms of employment. There’s going to be a lot of Americans who are retired right now who a couple of years from now are going to be looking for work because the savings they have are just not going to be adequate to afford the higher cost of living that we’re all going to be stuck with.

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Load up the pantry, it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food

Brett Arends, The Wall Street Journal, April 21

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food. No, this is not a drill.

You’ve seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they’re a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

“Load up the pantry,” says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street’s top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. “I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn’t going to happen here. But I don’t know how the food companies can absorb higher costs.”

….The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

These are trends that have been in place for some time. And if you are hoping they will pass, here’s the bad news: They may actually accelerate.

….You can’t easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it’s the rosy memory of a bygone age.

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Epic ‘noise’ in financial markets means what comes next is anybody’s guess

The Daily Reckoning, April 24

There is so much ‘noise’ in the financial system, it is hard to think. The papers are full of distractions and absurdities. You can find almost any point-of-view you want. Some argue that central banks are winning…that the stock market hasn’t gone down because it is getting ready to go up…and soon, the housing market will bottom out too.

“Fears of bank failures recede,” says a headline in the Financial Times today.

Others argue that the worst is still ahead…that the stock market will melt down…that housing prices will fall another 20%…and that the whole world will go into a monumental downturn.

“Housing slump may exceed Depression,” says a San Diego paper.

We take a middle view — that financial assets (including paper money), the financial industry, the credit cycle, the dollar-standard monetary system and the U.S.A. itself are in an historic decline…while emerging markets, gold and commodities are in a once-in-a-lifetime upswing.

We’ve heard about the panic that the doubling of wheat and rice prices is causing in China, India and other Asian countries. But now, reports the Washington Times, this panic is beginning to spill over to Americans. The article goes on to point out that bulk grocery stores, such as Costco, are having to put a limit on how much rice customers in certain states can buy. Americans have gotten a whiff of the high prices and fear that the shortages will spread from overseas, and have begun hoarding necessities such as oil, rice and flour.

….But for all those mommas hoping to get their babies a place at Goldman or Blackrock, we have a suggestion: aim for the legal department. Yesterday brought word from the Financial Times that “sub-prime produces a tsunami of lawsuits.” Our guess is that the financial industry has seen its best days. The wheels are falling off the deal machine. Bonuses are coming down. Employees are being laid off, cast off, spun off, and blown off in every department — save where the legal team does its work. The next few years are likely to produce further trimming in the financial industry ranks. But the in-house lawyers…and lawyers who work face them from outside firms…are bound to enjoy a boom. They’ve got to work out, renegotiate, defend, and deny thousands of claims. Their jobs are safe for years to come.

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Things are seriously out of whack, and we’re on the verge of something major

James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, April 28

This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of “The Long Emergency” accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We’re in a strange collective psychic bubble. We’d like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up — what’s wrong with that?

But there’s an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We’re on the edge of something. We’re at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you’re spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days?

Events are not through with us this year. They’ll keep moving where they will whether we believe in them or not. I’m hardly even convinced that it matters who wins the presidential race this year. It could end up being the world’s biggest booby prize.

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Raised in boom times, many Gen-X and Gen-Yers see their dreams go bust

The Log Angeles Times, April 27

People everywhere are coping with rising credit card balances, falling home values and layoffs. But such worries are particularly jarring for a younger slice of the workforce that has known little but long-term financial prosperity and optimism.

After all, a large share of today’s 20- and 30-somethings — a nearly 80-million strong cohort — were in college or high school (and some in grade school) the last time the country experienced a severe financial jolt. Some can barely remember the mild recession of 2001, which was followed by an extraordinary boom that coincided with their entry into the workforce.

Raised amid a long stretch of financial bounty and weaned on video games, cellphones, iPods and weekends at the mall, many Generation X and Y members have barely seen a time when they couldn’t spend freely on the latest styles and gadgets.

In these tighter times, they’re watching their spending and they’re borrowing money from family members for the first time. To economize, some are moving in with friends and — the horror — even Mom and Dad.

And after years of being able to boast about promotions and climbing income, a growing number find themselves having to admit that they are out of a job. In the last year, the unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds rose from 4.3% to 5.4% — nearly twice the increase for age groups above them.

“This generation as a whole has not experienced any substantial kind of financial difficulty,” said Leslie Winefield, director of the Portland, Maine-based Institute for Financial Literacy. “It could be a defining moment for them.”

A few weeks ago I went and jumped headfirst into the ruckus about Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth over at Oprah Winfrey’s message boards.

Surely you’ve heard about the controversy, haven’t you? Ms. Winfrey recently picked Tolle’s book as the subject for a groundbreaking 10-week video class that streams across the Internet and around the world. Her decision has catapulted the book to the top of the bestseller lists (making it by far the most awesomely popular of her numerous book club picks) and has elicited both great excitement and great negativity from crowds far and wide.

The excitement has come from two types of people, those who already know Tolle’s brilliant work as a spiritual author and teacher and those who are thrilled to be introduced to it for the first time. The negativity has come from legions of fundamentalist Protestant Christians who are filling Oprah’s message boards, and also a lot of the rest of the Internet and World Wide Web, with criticisms of and attacks upon Tolle as an evil New Age deceiver and Oprah as the founder of a proprietary cult that probably has something to do with the anti-Christ and is certainly leading many people away from God, Christ, truth, and so on. It’s as if Winfrey’s decision to promote Tolle’s book has popped a kind of boil on the face of American religion, releasing a flood of pent up, festering nastiness.

You can find out all about it, if you like, by visiting YouTube or Google and entering Tolle’s and Oprah’s names as search terms. You’ll find homemade video segments about Tolle and Oprah that aspire to the status of exposés. You’ll find Pentecostal pastors speaking to large crowds at revival meetings about poor and/or dastardly Oprah Winfrey and her satanically inspired deception of the masses. You’ll find an Internet pastor challenging Oprah to a public debate about religion. You’ll find articles and blog posts by fundamentalist Protestants arguing that Tolle is just America’s “guru of the moment” who preaches a watered-down New Age pantheism and feel-good self-help philosophy, and that Oprah is a veritable she-devil who has made it her mission in life to twist, corrupt, and oppose the (literal, inerrant, non-negotiable, non-interpretable) truth of the Bible.

You can also visit the section of Oprah’s message boards devoted to discussing Tolle and A New Earth, where you’ll find vigorous conversations and arguments in progress about all of these things. If you poke around there long enough, you just might stumble across the following message written by me in response to somebody who suggested that participants in those conversations should consider drawing distinctions between types of Christians, since not all of the self-identified Christians who have been jumping into the conversation at those message boards are writing from a fundamentalist viewpoint.

I happen to know a little something about religion in general and Christianity in particular. I even have the by-God academic credential to talk with some authority about the matter. Here’s what I wrote in response to this very reasonable suggestion:

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You raise an excellent point. Over the past 30 years the words “Christian” and “Christianity” have been hijacked, so to speak, in America’s general public discourse to refer primarily or even solely to fundamentalist Christians and Christianity.

Fundamentalism is the attitude or approach to any given subject or issue (not just religion) that reduces it to a handful of rigid beliefs that are then held as utterly nonnegotiable. They’re also viewed as being pretty much the only points worth talking about. Moreover, in the specific phenomenon of religious fundamentalism, the beliefs are generally held in a literalistic, externalized sense. Anybody who won’t give assent to these rigid beliefs is viewed as an outsider, somebody who’s completely wrong and probably dangerous to those insiders who assent to the beliefs. In short, fundamentalism reduces religion etc. to a dogmatic belief system.

For American fundamentalist Christians this belief system involves a number of standard items, including the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the only Son of God; that his death on a Roman cross was in reality a substitutionary sacrifice where he played the part of a sacrificial lamb according to the old Jewish system of ritual animal sacrifice (an idea that came not from him but from later interpreters of his life, death, and teachings, including, especially, Saint Paul); that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible are completely without error, are to be read in a literalistic sense (six days of creation and so forth), and are the sole statement of religious truth, beside which all other purported scriptures are satanic deceptions; and so on. Fundamentalist Protestantism is entirely about “right belief.” It teaches that spiritual salvation is found in intellectual assent to its propositions.

That’s why fundamentalist Christians are so suspicious of competing belief systems: because their entire religion is at root nothing more nor less than embrace of a belief system. Doctrinal purity is everything to them. This means they’re putting intellect in the chief position. Their religion is, as Tolle would say, “nothing but thoughts in their head.” That means they have trouble even recognizing that some religious and spiritual approaches are completely different, that some religious and spiritual paths are not belief-system based but what we might called “way” based, that is, ways of transformation instead of systems of doctrines. For fundamentalists this is generally incomprehensible and often infuriating.

Obviously I’ve drawn an ideal type here. Most fundamentalists aren’t really as rigid as all this. But they are pretty danged rigid, and some of them conform entirely to the broad picture I’ve drawn. Thankfully, there are lots of other Christians who are not like that.

Who would have thought it? None other than Joan Collins, one of the living symbols of a former era in mass entertainment culture, deplores the catastrophic collapse of taste, intelligence, and attention span that’s been spawned by the current tabloid-ized version of that very world.

Just check out this excerpt from a recent interview in BlackBook magazine titled “Bling Dynasty,” dated April 17:

BlackBook: Any idea why the “tabloid” is back at the moment in culture, with people obsessing over every little detail about celebrity pregnancies, what they wear?

Joan Collins: Our civilization has become extremely dumbed down, with shorter attention spans. All they want are sound bites. People don’t have the concentration to read an in-depth article or a book, or watch a serious movie. I can’t understand it. And the tabloid magazines are exactly the same every week! People has the same cover as InTouch as OK! as US Weekly as Star magazine. They’re exactly the same! You never read about De Niro, Pacino, Harrison Ford… well, you do hear about him since he’s with Calista Flockhart. Meryl Streep. These new stars are appealing to a young audience, or a rather dumb audience.

The interviewer also asks Ms. Collins for her take on the current crop of young female celebrities a la Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and she offers an extremely negative assessment of both them and the culture of carefully marketed narcissism and voyeurism that enables their pathological behavior:

BB: And what about their clothes, these celebrities like Britney and Lindsay and Paris who go out wearing trashy outfits and no panties?

JC: I don’t think she is well, Britney. I definitely think there is something wrong with her: depression, illness. No normal girl goes out and lets photographers shoot at that angle. It’s bizarre, isn’t it? We have these girls in England. Glamour models. And they will flash their breasts in a desperate attempt to get their photos in the paper. I asked my friend Glenda Bailey [editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar] why she would put Lindsay Lohan on her cover. And she said, “It sells magazines.

Perhaps it would be out of character for me to offer the hearty accolade, “You go, girlfriend!” But I’ll offer it anyway.

Gee whiz, Ms. Collins sounds a lot like Stephen Jones in my forthcoming interview with him for Cemetery Dance magazine, to wit:

Almost nobody reads these days. There are too many other distractions: cell phones, Playstations, reality TV….Nowadays, in Britain, at least, newspapers have become part of the “dumbing down” process. Here we now have “lite” newspapers that are more like MTV newsbites for people who don’t want to read about anything in-depth. And what they read about is the latest gossip surrounding such empty vessels as Paris, Britney, Lindsay or Angelina. They aren’t actually learning anything—except how not to behave in public and what the latest fashion accessory is.

She also sounds a lot like Morris Berman, Neil Postman, Daniel Boorstin, Ray Bradbury, and any number of additional culture critics, commentators, and writers of dystopian fiction who have seen what’s going on and recognized that the modern mass entertainment milieu represents an absolutely unprecedented and, as it so happens, cataclysmic cultural development in terms of collective intelligence, taste, emotional centering, moral outlook, and historical memory.

So, to repeat (because I just can’t help myself): You go, Joan!

GENERAL COMMENT FROM CARDIN:

An economic bleedout or a swift death?

I’ve written such an extended assortment of commentary to go with the assembled items below that I’ll let them do most of the talking for me this week. Just scroll through and look for my introductory comments, which are clearly marked.

But I’ll pause here at the outset to say that as it appears to me right now, two general scenarios for the U.S. are equally likely in the immediate future, as in, the next few days, weeks, months, and years.

One might be labeled the “slow bleed” scenario. This would involve more of what we have already been seeing, namely, a society-wide and economy-wide squeeze from various general and specific economic pressures — inflating energy and food prices, cratering housing market, ongoing discoveries of “toxic” debt being held by all kinds of companies, the relentless progression of the home foreclosure catastrophe, the drain and strain of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increasing scalebacks and failures of basic government services, the progressive death of the middle class and widening of the gap between rich and poor, etc., etc. — that continue to mount steadily, with perhaps a few intermittent periods of perceived relief, so that we slowly hemorrhage our way into a new and vastly altered cultural and economic landscape characterized by a stupendous decrease in our standard of living and a dramatically altered political environment.

The other might be labeled the “spurting wound” scenario, in which a sudden and acute crisis slashes our national jugular vein and alters things practically overnight. Any number of events might accomplish this, including the failure of one or more large financial institutions, a terrorist attack, the onset of fuel shortages, a natural disaster (earthquake? hurricane?), and/or an outbreak of civil unrest akin to the recent food riots in Haiti, Egypt, and elsewhere. For the first time since the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, life here in America is pervaded by an authentic and undeniable sense of imminent crisis and breakdown. It wouldn’t really surprise most of us — or at least those among us who aren’t completely encased in the soporific cocoon of mass entertainment culture — to wake up tomorrow morning and be greeted with news of a large scale disaster and political/economic/military lockdown.

The end result of both scenarios will of course be similar or the same (that decreased standard of living and altered political environment mentioned above). And it will of course not be an either/or situation. The slow bleed and spurting wound aren’t mutually exclusive. We will experience both, with our steady hemorrhage being punctuated by periods of acute injury.

Sorry, but them’s the facts.

* * * * *

Anarchy or worse: Peak oil and the end of the world as we know it

Horizon, KAET (Arizona PBS), April 14

[Cardin comments: In my last installment of Headlines from the Meltdown, "The end of the future as we knew it," I included excerpts from an op-ed in The Arizona Republic by University of Arizona professor Guy McPherson about the imminent end of life as we know it due to the societal and civilizational breakdown that will be occasioned by peak oil. A little over a week after that article appeared, McPherson was interviewed on Horizon, a nightly public affairs program on Arizona PBS station KAET. The interviewer grilled him about the flat-out apocalypticism of his views and asked him how he expects people to react to such a prediction. It's well worth watching. Here's the entire interview as archived on YouTube. But you should only watch it if you're prepared for a serious dose of darkness (as measured by common emotional standards). McPherson speaks in a calm, friendly, and matter-of-fact manner about the complete breakdown of America and, by implication, all other industrialized nations within our lifetimes.]

* * * * *

Global food fight

CNN, April 14, 2008

[Cardin comments: At 1:40 into the following video there's an itemized list of factors that economists say are causing or contributing to the current global food inflation crisis. They include:

• Bad weather
• High oil prices
• More demand in China and India
• Competition with ethanol

Notice how this falls entirely in line with what should be expected in a scenario characterized by peak oil and catastrophic climate change. "Bad weather" is a climate change factor as well as a peak oil-related factor due to the carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels. High oil prices and competition with ethanol are drawn directly from the peak oil playbook. And the increased demand from China and India likewise spin off from this same nexus of factors, since the population explosion and technological expansion that have occurred in these nations and elsewhere (including the U.S.) over the past several decades have been entirely facilitated and enabled by reliance on oil in all areas of life.]

* * * * *

IMF director warns food price spike may trigger mass starvation among world’s poor

Bloomberg.com, April 12

Further gains in food prices would be “terrible” for the world’s poor and throw hundreds of thousands of them into starvation, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

Governments throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East are seeking to combat food inflation and avoid social unrest by curbing exports or lifting import duties on basic food staples such as rice. Global food prices surged 57 percent last month from a year earlier, according to the United Nations, and the World Bank warns civil disturbances may be triggered in 33 countries.

If food inflation keeps accelerating at its current rate “the consequences will be terrible,” Strauss-Kahn told reporters at the IMF’s semi-annual meeting in Washington today. “Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving, leading to a disruption in the economic environment.”

* * * * *

ABC News: Food riots deliver ‘an apocalyptic warning’

ABC News, April 14

Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries. The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time.

The desperation in dozens of countries has turned deadly of late. In the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon.

World Vision Australia head Tim Costello says the situation is desperate and chronic. “It is an apocalyptic warning,” he said. “Until recently we had plenty of food. The question was distribution. The truth is because of rising oil prices, global warming and the loss of arable land, all countries that can produce food now desperately need to produce more.

….”Disruption may occur in the economic environment so that at the end of the day most governments, having done well for the last five or 10 years, will see what they have done totally destroyed and their legitimacy facing the population destroyed also.”

* * * * *

Around the world, empties bellies are bringing rising anger, riots, political instability

The New York Times, April 18

[Cardin comments: This is serious. And if you live in the U.S. or another First World country and think this kind of thing can't happen to you, think again. As reported on Bill Moyers Journal on April 11, a hunger crisis is already underway on the lower end of the economic spectrum in the U.S. Also see the article immediately below about the food rationing that is currently going on in the U.S. What's more, the entire populace is increasingly uneasy and riled up by the increasingly undeniable signs of, first, a serious nationwide social/economic/political/ecological crisis, and second, a real failure of leadership at all levels of government. The problem with food prices is now creeping and will continue to creep up the economic ladder, affecting an ever greater portion of the population. Revolution, anyone? Or widespread chaos and social breakdown? Don't think it can't happen. But don't expect it to be pretty or to solve much of anything. Remember the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?]

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing….Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach

….That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

….“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

….“This is a perfect storm,” President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún, Mexico. “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries.”

* * * * *

Food rationing: major U.S. retailers limiting food purchases in New England, California

The New York Sun, April 21

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

….Shoppers said the limits [at a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, California] had been in place for a few days, and that rice supplies had been spotty for a few weeks. A store manager referred questions to officials at Costco headquarters near Seattle, who did not return calls or e-mail messages yesterday.

An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

….At the moment, large chain retailers seem more prone to shortages and limits than do smaller chains and mom-and-pop stores, perhaps because store managers at the larger companies have less discretion to increase prices locally. Mr. Rawles said the spot shortages seemed to be most frequent in the Northeast and all the way along the West Coast. He said he had heard reports of buying limits at Sam’s Club warehouses, which are owned by Wal-Mart Stores, but a spokesman for the company, Kory Lundberg, said he was not aware of any shortages or limits.

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice at Costco. “I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption,” he wrote.

* * * * *

The USA: The Third World’s First Superpower

Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, April 16

To those of you currently ensconsed in quiet, comfortable suburban America, the notion that the U.S. shares a number of disturbing traits with Third World countries might seem implausible or even insulting. But please read on before passing judgment.

Here are some key traits the U.S. shares with Third World nations — trends which are only growing more visible with each passing month:

1. Income and wealth inequality. One of the defining characteristics of Third World countries is extremes of income and wealth; a relative handful of families/elites control most of the property, wealth and “means of production” (wealth generating assets) while the majority of citizens own and earn essentially nothing.

Here in the U.S. it’s not that visibly extreme, but facts are facts: a relative handful own the vast majority of key wealth-producing assets

….2. The gutting of public services to pay burdensome interest on massive public debt.

….3. The gutting of public services as public employee elites rally round their salaries, benefits and fiefdoms. One of the distinctions of a Third World economy is the extremely high premium placed on securing a government bureaucracy position, as these are essentially the only secure jobs in the entire country.

….4. Secure “formal” jobs are replaced with insecure “informal” jobs. You know the drill: fire all your salaried workers in a downsizing, then hire back the best as contract workers without benefits or pensions.

With secure permanent positions as rare as gold statues, laid-off workers take part-time jobs, or reluctantly enter the “informal” job market as handymen, babysitters, etc. On a societal-wide basis, this means the destruction of tens of millions of once-secure or relatively secure jobs, which are then replaced with completely insecure, informal jobs with no pension or healthcare protections/benefits.

….5. As the economy falters, a vast prison-state/gulag acts to control petty criminals and provide patronage-rich public-worker positions. Sell a gram of cocaine, go to jail for 25 years. The prison guards union is one of the most powerful and feared lobbying organizations in the state of California, surpassing even the mighty Teachers Union and trial lawyers for political power. More prisons? You can bet we need them.

6. As secure, decent-paying jobs vanish, the working poor turn to the Military for secure jobs with benefits.

….7. Top-level public education is increasingly expensive and thus increasingly out of reach for average citizens’s offspring. Since when did students have to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend public universities?

….Put this all together and what do you have? A nation which clearly shares key characteristics with oft-maligned Third World “basketcase” nations which are wallowing in debt, unfilled potholes, overflowing prisons and declining public-sector services. Does that mean the U.S. is a Third World state? Of course not; but the above trends should raise our collective awareness of the risks ahead.

* * * * *

U.S. Fed says economy has further weakened, Bernanke actually uses the ‘r’ word

CNNMoney, April 16

[Cardin comments: So now Bernanke has actually uttered the word "recession"! This is a distinct step up from his and Paulson's and Bush's ongoing insistence on playing the political game of impressions and perceptions by referring only to economic "pressures" and the possibility of a "slowdown" and "downturn." As I (and others) have been saying for some time now, based on nothing but the experience of the very recent past you can bet the farm on the fact that public statements by government officials about the unfolding economic crisis are deliberately targeted several notches below the actual severity of the situation. And this means you should perk your ears up every time one of them concedes a worsening of any aspect of the situation, since the reality behind the rhetoric must undoubtedly be very dire indeed to have forced such a concession. Or, in a nutshell, and to repeat myself: It's all much worse than they're letting on.]

The country’s economic health deteriorated further in the early spring as shoppers buckled under the strains of the housing and credit debacles and a weaker employment climate.

Manufacturers and other businesses, meanwhile, were walloped by zooming prices for energy and other raw materials. However, their ability to jack up retail prices to customers was mixed, with some companies restrained by competitive pressures, according to the Federal Reserve’s new snapshot of nationwide economic conditions released Wednesday.

“Economic conditions have weakened,” the Fed report stated.

Many analysts believe the economy has fallen into a recession, predicting that economic activity contracted in the first three months of this year and is still ebbing now.

Even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently acknowledged for the first time that a recession was possible. That was a rare utterance of the “r” word for a Fed chief.

* * * * *

Reports Offer Grim Picture of Economy

The Washington Post, April 17

The economy is slowing across the nation, the home-building sector is tanking more than even the pessimists could have imagined a few months ago and prices keep rising at an uncomfortably high rate.

Those are the unpleasant conclusions of several government reports released yesterday that, together, offer a picture of a U.S. economy being squeezed from all directions.

“Today’s news confirms a lot of what we’ve been hearing and how people have been feeling about the economy,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wachovia. “There is a clear case that the economy is lousy, but not a clear case that the economy is in recession.”

The bad news was in line with economists’ expectations and did not restrain a rally on Wall Street

Economic conditions have weakened almost across the board in the past six weeks, according to the “beige book,” a compilation of anecdotal reports about business conditions from around the United States prepared by the Federal Reserve.

* * * * *

Mortage crisis turning Minnesota suburbs into ghost towns

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 21

There are few trees or hills in this flat, predominantly rural county to obscure the evidence: Rows of vacant and unfinished homes, often with lockboxes on the front doors and foreclosure notices taped to the windows. Realtors call them “see-through houses,” so empty of furniture and curtains that it’s possible to see right through them.

“Based on what I see out here, we’re headed for the Great Depression,” said Dan Frie, a sales agent with Wright Sherburne Realty in Monticello, who has been in the business nearly 30 years.

While Frie blames fraud for exacerbating the problem, many of the mortgages that are in default are held by people who believed — as many did and as the real estate community told them — that real estate doesn’t lose its value.

“And just because the national economy recovers doesn’t mean that our local economy will recover, and that’s what I’m worried about,” Frie said.

* * * * *

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet: The home foreclosure crisis has only just begun

USA Today, April 16

The nation’s already alarming pace of home foreclosures is poised to accelerate through the rest of the year, according to RealtyTrac, which reported Tuesday that foreclosure filings jumped 57% in March from March 2007.

The report painted a grim picture of growing numbers of people unable to make their mortgage payments. Bank repossessions more than doubled in March. Foreclosure filings surged 57% last month from March 2007, with one in every 538 households receiving a foreclosure filing during the month, RealtyTrac said. Nevada, California and Florida were the states hardest hit. In total, more than 234,000 homes were in some stage of foreclosure in March.

….“This isn’t a subprime problem,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “The underlying issue is housing prices are falling. It’s going to get worse. Subprime (foreclosures) may have peaked and will start to trail off. In terms of the rest of the market, we’re just beginning.”

My interview with horror editor/anthologist extraordinaire Stephen Jones has finally been given a definite publication date in the venerable horror industry magazine Cemetery Dance. I first mentioned this interview nearly a year ago, in May of 2007, in a post titled “Stephen Jones on the death of reading” that contained a substantial excerpt detailing Steve’s views on the likely cataclysmic decline of imaginative reading habits among the general population of modern entertainment-drunk societies (like Great Britain and the United States) in the foreseeable future.

CD has had a rough year, what with one of its editors suffering some family crises. They’ve fallen behind schedule but are now back on track. Just today I discovered that they’ve posted the contents of Issue #59, and that my conversation with Steve is included. Elsewhere at their site (in the April 13 update on their Breaking News page) they mention that the previous issue, #58, is shipping right now, and that #59 is “already deep in production” and should go to the printers soon.

So it’s cold beers all around!

I’m pleased to see that I’ll be keeping company between the covers of the mag with such worthy folks as Sarah Langan, Nick Mamatas, Brian Keene, Stephen Mark Rainey, Darren Speegle, Michael McBride, Steve Vernon, Paul Finch, and a few others. Very nice.

GENERAL COMMENT FROM CARDIN:

It’s the end of the future as we knew it (and I feel fine)

What a week! From food riots to fuel prices to more evidence of financial and economic meltdown, it was one for the history books.

But in fact what’s more important to notice than the significance of all this for history is its significance for the future.

To cut to the chase: We members of modern industrial civilization, especially we members of its current Western (especially American) variety, are no longer able to pretend that we’re going to live in a Star Trek-type utopia that emerges as the logical endpoint of the civilizational trajectory our collective lives have followed for the past several decades. Sorry, but it’s over. It’s just not going to happen. That future is almost certainly dead.

And this is a good thing. But instead of using this insight as a jumping-off point to expound on the soullessness of the future techno-utopia we have collectively envisioned — which is indeed a worthy topic — I’d like to make a different and, as it so happens, much more foundational point today:

That imagined future was never alive to begin with. In fact, NO future has ever been alive. The future does not exist! Only the present moment does! And this is profoundly liberating.

I leave it to you to verify this for yourself. You can do it either experimentally and experientially right now, right where you’re sitting, without moving a muscle, simply by becoming intensely aware of what truly is. Or you can track down some good books or articles, perhaps Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now or A New Earth (or why not read one of the several interviews available for free on the Web?). Or perhaps one or more of Alan Watts’s books or lectures. Or something by Ken Wilber. Or Josh Baran’s concise little book of nondual wisdom, 365 Nirvana Here and Now. Or either of Stephen Mitchell’s wonderful anthologies of excerpts from the written spiritual wisdom of the world, The Enlightened Heart (a poetry anthology) or The Enlightened Mind (prose). Or visit Douglas Harding’s Website and read some of the articles and do some of the provided awareness exercises. Or heck, just reread Jesus’ words in Matthew chapter 6 about seeking God’s kingdom and letting the future take care of itself.

But in case you need a pointer or two (as I know I surely do myself), consider the following statements:

The only moment that’s truly real is this one right now, the one in which you are reading these words, breathing in and out, and experiencing whatever thoughts, moods, emotions, memories, and sense perceptions are present. Any thoughts about the future are pure anticipation or expectation. That future does not really exist “out there” as a real, solid, finished entity, like a portion of a film reel that’s just waiting to thread past the projector bulb. What we commonly call “the future” is simply expectation and anticipation — sometimes fearful, sometimes eager — that exist right now. The actual future never arrives. You are never “in the future.” You are always and only in the now, right in this moment, as new events, conditions, and circumstances arise.

Tangentially but no less importantly, the same holds true for the past. It does not really exist “out there” as some permanent record stretching out “behind” us with real substance. What we commonly call “the past” is simply memory and conditioning that play out right now, in this present moment. When you call up a memory, you are not actually conjuring up some sort of mental window on a really existing former moment. Instead, you are focusing attention on the mental-emotional-biochemical trace of a former “now” that exists right now in this moment.

In short, as various writers about spiritual matters (especially Alan Watts) have been fond of saying: THIS IS IT. Right now, this moment as you sit these reading these words, is all that’s real. There is nothing else. Your memory of accessing this blog and beginning to read these paragraphs a few minutes ago is nothing but a trace remainder of something that is no longer real. Any thoughts or expectations about what you’ll do or what will occur at any point beyond this moment are equally unreal. The expected future never arrives. What actually arrives or arises in the present moment is like nothing else. It is comparable to nothing. If we see it through the mental filter of past or future — that is, through the haze of what we expect or wish it to be — then we’re not really seeing it. We’re not really seeing reality. We’re comparing what’s real to a mental phantom that exists only in our own heads.

The great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart wrote,

There exists only the present instant…a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence….The ‘now’ wherein God made the first man, and the ‘now’ wherein the last man disappears, and the ‘now’ I am speaking in, all are the same in God, where this is but the now.

The contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has said,

One never experiences the future, nor the past. One experiences only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can unfold only Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.

My erstwhile informal guru, the late Scott Morrison, whom I’ve mentioned here in the past, wrote in his wonderful little book, There Is Only Now,

There is only now. Everything we call the “past” is nothing but present memory. Everything we call the “future” is nothing but fantasy and commentary, that is, present memory rearranged. If we continue to pretend that there is some other time or place to be, besides right here, right now, we are cruelly and pathologically deluding ourselves.

All of this is why the death of our collective vision of the future that’s presently underway is so profoundly liberating: because what we have been doing as we have gone about the great project of building a gargantuan technological society erected on an economic base of epic financialization is to pursue a vision of the future that’s divorced from reality, not only in its ignoring of natural ecological limits but also in its ignoring of the truth that the future is an illusion. All of our activity has been a protracted process of hedging our bets against the possibility of future deprivation and boredom. We have been sucking the life out of the present by living for the specter of tomorrow, even as we have chattered to ourselves that we are enjoying the good life and living high on the hog.

The death of our ability to imagine the future we have programmed ourselves to imagine can seem like a terrible blow. It can seem positively tragic. It can profoundly depress and discourage us with a sense of disillusionment. But to lose our illusions is actually a positive thing (unless we live in a Lovecraftian/Ligottian universe where sanity depends on ignorance and illusion, in which case all bets are off). And for some but probably not all of us, what may die in this process is not just a particular vision of the future — the one you see embodied in advertisements for cell phones, iPods, automobiles, restaurants, clothing, retail stores, television programs, computer platforms, tooth whitening products, exercise machines, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, etc., etc., etc. — but the very idea that the future is real. Maybe, just maybe, some of us will experience an awakening to the present that does away once and for all with the fallacious notion that there’s really a future out there and a past behind us, and that we’re sandwiched between them and burdened with the weight of both.

As you read the excerpts from various commentators and news sources that follow, let this insight into the unreality of past and future remain lightly in the background of your awareness. Let it color your experience of reading the following word-montage of our current unfolding crisis, as it has obviously done for Carolyn Baker, who is quoted below (in the last of this week’s excerpts, “Recession, Depression, and Collapse” ) and whose words deserve to be highlighted here as well:

The world we wanted to have is not within our reach; the world we deeply dread is upon us. Meanwhile, the world we have known, ugly as it may be but nevertheless familiar, is vanishing before our eyes. Herein lies an opportunity to experience deeper layers of who we really are and what we are really made of. Collapse is compelling us to confront these issues, whether we want to or feel ready to do so or not. While I do not welcome the suffering this will entail, I do welcome the transformation of human consciousness and thus the evolutionary quantum leap it may offer us.

* * * * *

End of the world as we know it

Guy R. McPherson, The Arizona Republic, April 7

[Cardin comments: Dr. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona. He has been warning about impending civilizational and ecological catastrophe for quite a few years now. Presently it looks as if his predictions really are set to come true. Followers of the peak oil press sometimes classify this type of article as "doomer porn," that is, the venting of catastrophic and apocalyptic predictions that appeal to people who get their jollies by contemplating the cataclysmic end of everything. It's useful to know this, since the fact that there's a market for this type of writing leads some people to write it for purposes of pure entertainment, disguised (perhaps even to themselves) as factual analysis. But having said that, it's equally important to bear in mind that this doesn't have any real bearing on the factual basis of the claims being made. To paraphrase Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, just because a truth is unpleasant -- or just because some people take pleasure in positing unpleasant truths -- doesn't make it any less true.

For additional illuminating commentary, read my introductory remarks to the next piece below (the one from The Dallas Morning News), since they apply equally here.]

Peak oil spells the end of civilization. And, if it’s not already too late, perhaps it will prevent the extinction of our species.

….Most of the world’s oil pumps are about to shut down. We have sufficient supply to keep the world running for 30 years or so, at the current level of demand. But that’s irrelevant because the days of inexpensive oil are behind us. And the American Empire absolutely demands cheap oil. Never mind the 3,000-mile Caesar salad to which we’ve become accustomed. Cheap oil forms the basis for the 12,000-mile supply chain underlying the “just-in-time” delivery of plastic toys from China.

There goes next year’s iPod.

….Within a decade, we’ll be staring down the barrel of a crisis: Oil at $400 per barrel brings down the American Empire, the project of globalization and water coming through the taps. Never mind happy motoring through the never-ending suburbs in the Valley of the Sun. In a decade, unemployment will be approaching 100 percent, inflation will be running at 1,000 percent and central heating will be a pipe dream.

In short, this country will be well on its way to the post-industrial Stone Age.

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Ninety percent of the oil consumed in this country is burned by airplanes, ships, trains and automobiles. You can kiss goodbye groceries at the local big-box grocery store: Our entire system of food production and delivery depends on cheap oil.

If you’re alive in a decade, it will be because you’ve figured out how to forage locally.

The death and suffering will be unimaginable. We have come to depend on cheap oil for the delivery of food, water, shelter and medicine. Most of us are incapable of supplying these four key elements of personal survival, so trouble lies ahead when we are forced to develop means of acquiring them that don’t involve a quick trip to Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, the forthcoming cessation of economic growth is truly good news for the world’s species and cultures. In addition, the abrupt halt of fossil-fuel consumption may slow the warming of our planetary home, thereby preventing our extinction at our own hand.

Our individual survival, and our common future, depends on our ability to quickly make other arrangements. We can view this as a personal challenge, or we can take the Hemingway out. The choice is ours.

For individuals interested in making other arrangements, it’s time to start acquiring myriad requisite skills. It is far too late to save civilization for 300 million Americans, much less the rest of the planet’s citizens, but we can take joy in a purpose-filled, intimate life.

It’s time to push away from the shore, to let the winds of change catch the sails of our leaky boat.

It’s time to trust in ourselves, our neighbors and the Earth that sustains us all.

Painful though it might be, it’s time to abandon the cruise ship of empire in exchange for a lifeboat.

* * * * *

U.S. at a national crisis and turning point, and neither conservatives nor liberals know what to do

Rod Dreher, The Dallas Morning News, March 30

[Cardin comments: You really need to click through and read Dreher's entire editorial. He's the editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News. As such, his views have a large audience. That's as it should be, because in this particular piece he nails the issue, and nails it hard. Read it. Let it sink in. Let it settle into your thinking, your emotions, your outlook. The biggest challenge facing us all isn't material or practical, although such matters are of course of crucial importance. The biggest challenge is psychological. We Americans have lived ourselves into a cultural and civilizational dead end, gripped as we've been by a fundamental outlook and set of assumptions that are fundamentally out of touch with reality. Such a situation could only exist for a brief period until reality came crashing in. That's what's happening right now. As Matt Savinar has placed as the slogan at the top of the front page of his Website Life After the Oil Crash, "Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You."]

The economic crisis now breaking upon us will be both a political and cultural event that may well be a turning point in our nation’s history as consequential as the Great Depression. Which, by the way, is the historical standard to which some smart people –- like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan –- are comparing this event.

When asked recently on National Public Radio why so many financial insiders are using such drastic rhetoric, Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel said the closer you are to the crisis, the more you understand just how “very frightening” it is.

The cultural roots of this crisis have to do with Americans’ refusal to recognize natural limits….For nearly a generation, Americans have had the luxury to organize their political fights around cultural issues like abortion and gay rights because economics haven’t been central to either politics or culture. And we have financed the illusion of sustainable progress through massive accumulation of debt, both personal and governmental. Prosperity masked decline; optimism occluded realism. As historian John Lukacs writes of the boom years in the current Chronicles, “The middle class habits (and virtues) of permanence, of saving, of passing their assets — and values — on to their children disappeared.” That now must change. The cost of our grand national experiment in living beyond our means is now coming due, and not just in the form of the housing crash. If the country indeed goes into a long, deep recession, forcing austerity and worse on the general public, the full social cost of casting aside traditional communal bonds and moral values — the beliefs that enabled people to thrive during hard times — will be painfully manifest. The psychological shock to the body politic will be sharp.

….Here’s the hope: Economic and related events will force a change in the culture toward sustainability and a revival in localism, personal asceticism and traditionalism. This, in turn, will produce a new, more responsible politics, one that keeps the excesses of a culture in material and social crisis from damaging the common good and public order. Here’s the fear: The cultural shift soon to occur will turn Hobbesian, producing a fearful, nationalistic, demagogic politics, and God knows what to follow.

We live in interesting times. And neither liberals nor conservatives are ready for what’s next.

* * * * *

Major powers play energy tug-of-war in Central Asia

CNNMoney.com, April 8

It’s got all the makings of an international geopolitical thriller: World powers move their armies into a violent, remote, and politically fragile region brimming with valuable oil and natural gas resources; except it’s not fiction.

Central Asia is the scene of this powerplay. Europe is maneuvering to satisfy its energy needs while it cuts greenhouse gas emissions. China and India need the region’s reserves to quench their booming economies’ thirst for fuel. Meanwhile, the U.S. is challenging Russia’s traditional control of the region’s gas reserves — which are large — but not large enough for everyone.

Tense jockeying is underway — complete with corporate intrigue, diplomacy, and guns — as the United States, the European Union, Russia, China and India all vie for the right to build huge pipelines to get the oil and massive natural gas reserves out of the remote nations of Central Asia.

* * * * *

It’s time to start hoarding

The Daily Reckoning, April 11

All over the world, food fights are breaking out. Not because there is too much food or too little, but because it has gone way up in price. Of course, you could put that another way: the paper money in which food is priced is going down faster than usual. There’s no less food than there was five years ago. But there is a lot more paper money. Modern central banking was invented so that we should have paper money — and have it in abundance. Now, we have so much that it is causing food prices to soar. But food is hardly in a class by itself. When one bubble pops, the authorities immediately begin pumping up another one. After the dot.com bubble deflated in 2000-2001, for example, up came even bigger bubbles in residential housing and the financial industry. Now, both housing and finance are losing air. But the central banks are still pumping hard. Where’s the air going? Apparently into commodities. In other words, worldwide inflation of food prices is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman might put it, not an agricultural phenomenon.

….Of course, hoarding is exactly what a smart family should do. Most likely, there will be runs on other commodities too…and then a run on gold itself. People will want something real…something sure…something with which they can buy rice, without having to worry about it doubling in price two weeks later. That something, traditionally, is gold.

Hoard it now, while you still can.

* * * * *

Chaos Spreads as Food Prices Skyrocket; World Banks calls for action

Der Spiegel, April 10

Gunfire in Haiti. Riots in Cameroon. A government crisis in the Philippines. The effects of skyrocketing food prices have reached every corner of the globe. Now, the World Bank has called for world leaders to take action before it is too late.

….Unrest triggered by the higher food and fuel prices has been gaining steam across the globe in recent weeks. During a two-day riot in Egypt earlier this week, one person was killed. Cameroon has also seen street violence. In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo warned on Tuesday that rice shortages were exacerbating political and social tensions in the country.

* * * * *

U.S. food banks under siege, hunger soaring

Bill Moyers Journal, April 11

[Cardin comments: From the page linked to below, you can click to read a full transcript of last Friday's story about hunger in America on Moyers Journal on PBS. You can also watch the archived video itself.]

The news at the grocery store is grim for many. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices rose by 4% last year, the largest increase in 17 years. And, the USDA predicts they will rise another 4% this year. Eggs are up 40% in the past year; milk up 26% a gallon; a loaf of standard bread, 20%.

All across the nation families, government agencies and food banks are feeling the pinch. So many people are in precarious straits our government figures 28 million Americans will be using food stamps this year, the highest level since the program began in the 1960s. Almost one in 10 people in Ohio get food stamps; one in eight in Michigan, and one in six West Virginians. The rising food prices make that assistance worth less and less and food banks and pantries are facing increased need and those same higher prices.

* * * * *

Blow to GE highlights depth of global crisis

The U.K. Times Online, April 13

It was, perhaps, the point at which the world began to realise that General Electric, the US industrial giant whose annual sales would eclipse the output of many a small country, is more than a maker of lightbulbs, jet engines, Hollywood films and railway locomotives.

On Friday GE issued its results for the first three months of the year. They were truly dreadful – far worse than Wall Street had been expecting. And Jeff Immelt, GE’s chairman and chief executive since 2001, readily identified the reason for the disappointment. He said: “Our primary short-fall was a decline in financial-services earnings.”

….It is GE’s size — with a turnover last year larger than the output of countries such as Colombia, the Czech Republic and Malaysia – that has given it the status of a bellwether of the US economy.

* * * *

The decline and fall of the American empire of debt

Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, April 14

[Kevin] Phillips [author of Wealth and Democracy, American Theocracy, and American Dynasty] has warned for years about the inevitably malign consequences of what he calls the “financialization” of the American economy. Sometime in the mid-’90s, he writes, financial services overtook manufacturing as the biggest chunk of the U.S. gross domestic product. If you believe, as Phillips does, that all the furious activity on Wall Street masterminded by the likes of Citigroup and Goldman-Sachs and Merrill Lynch is just a bunch of speculation and froth that doesn’t actually result in the creation of anything real, then there has never been a better time for triumphantly pointing out [as he does in his newest book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,] the disasters that ensue when the rest of the world also realizes that Wall Street is wearing no clothes.

This book’s thesis, now that a quarter century’s results are in hand, is that the eighties can be identified as the launching pad of a decisive financial sector takeover of the U.S. economy, consummated by turbocharged, relentless expansion of financial debt, and eventual extension of mortgage credit to subprime and other unqualified buyers. The two converging pumps helped to swell the housing, mortgage, and credit bubble that began imploding in the summer of 2007.

….As for oil, while at first it might seem a bit off-putting to find a chapter on “peak oil” in the middle of a book mostly devoted to financial shenanigans, the current price tags of a barrel of crude and a gallon of gasoline obviously pile even more stress on top of an economy already teetering after years of gross mismanagement….Dark times are ahead, he foresees, as the major powers of the world struggle for control of the world’s dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. But as this time of peril hastens toward us, the once mighty U.S. is no longer master of its own manifest destiny.

….My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence, and quantitative negligence.

* * * * *

IMF says US crisis is ‘largest financial shock since Great Depression’

The Guardian, April 9

America’s mortgage crisis has spiralled into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today.

The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a “mild recession” but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.

The report made it clear that there will be no early resolution to the global financial crisis. “The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, as the US sub-prime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably to inflict extensive damage on markets and institutions at the heart of the financial system,” it said.

* * * *

For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t

The New York Times, April 9

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

* * * * *

Recession, Depression, and Collapse

Carolyn Baker at CarolynBaker.net, April 11

No one walking away from a foreclosed home, no one declaring bankruptcy, no uninsured person staring in the face tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills needs a maestro or any other member of the ruling elite to tell them that not only are we in a recession, but we are on a fast-track to a depression that is going to make 1929 look like living in the lap of luxury. It’s called the collapse of Western civilization, and it is well underway.

….What I want the reader to understand is that collapse is already happening. Your resentment of the word doesn’t change the fact that it is occurring. Like Greenspan and Paulson, we all have the option of masking the realities of meltdown and continuing to wait for someone or something to “prove” to us that the world as we have known it is over.

Is talking about collapse scary? You bet. Does that mean we should avoid the word or “re-frame” it into something more “acceptable.” Only if we insist on living in denial. If we feel fear about collapse, does that mean that we are “living in fear”? Only if we feel nothing else about it except fear and allow the fear to paralyze us.

….The world we wanted to have is not within our reach; the world we deeply dread is upon us. Meanwhile, the world we have known, ugly as it may be but nevertheless familiar, is vanishing before our eyes. Herein lies an opportunity to experience deeper layers of who we really are and what we are really made of. Collapse is compelling us to confront these issues, whether we want to or feel ready to do so or not. While I do not welcome the suffering this will entail, I do welcome the transformation of human consciousness and thus the evolutionary quantum leap it may offer us.

Here’s the link and associated description:

Global Food Crisis

April 9, 2008

In some countries, food inflation is turning violent, with Divya Reddy, Eurasia Group; Victor Lespinasse, GrainAnalyst.com; and CNBC’s Erin Burnett.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=707473516

The video stream takes a bit of time to load — or at least it does through my satellite Internet connection — but it’s worth watching, not only for its images of common people in Egypt rioting in the streets on April 7 while police in riot gear stand by but also for its speculations about the combination of natural/environmental and manmade economic factors that are causing this crisis. The price of rice is soaring. Who or what is to blame? That’s the question of the hour.

Is it just me or is this kind of news segment, especially the opening part showing video footage of the actual rioting, invested with a kind of apocalyptic aura that we have traditionally associated with fiction? It’s the kind of thing I would expect to see, and indeed have seen many times before, in dystopian movies that show fictional television news reports from a future society that’s crumbling.

That future, it would seem, is now.

For me, YouTube videos tend to load more quickly and easily than CNBC and other news site videos, so here’s a YouTube stream of an Al Jazeera story (running time: 1:40) about the same event.

The associated text says, “More than two hundred people have been arrested across Egypt after a day of protest over rising food prices and low wages. The worst trouble was in the northern city of Mahalla, where thousands of people battled with riot police. The violence there came late in the day, after it appeared a heavy security presence had succeeded in preventing any trouble.”

GENERAL COMMENT FROM CARDIN:

There’s a new world a-comin’

Various life obligations have kept me from composing a detailed comment for this week’s installment of Headlines from the Meltdown, so I’ll let others do the talking for me, including Carolyn Baker, Richard Heinberg, and Eckhart Tolle (see below).

But if I were to write up a comment this week, it would surely focus on the fact that the past seven days’ worth of financial and economic news have been positively mind-blowing in the way they’ve highlighted the unprecedented nature of our unfolding economic catastrophe. On any given day, at any given hour, during the week of March 30 through April 5, you could visit a financial news site like Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, or any other, and be greeted with the schizophrenic-seeming spectacle of an unmitigated avalanche of dire economic news — job losses, epic write-downs, rampant inflation, failed companies, record foreclosures, surging bankruptcies, etc. — accompanied by stable or slightly rising financial markets.

What? Huh? What the hell’s going on here?

Exactly. It may well be that the markets’ unseemly performance was caused by widespread calls for a bottom. “It’s over! We’re saved! Everybody in!” So crowed many a pundit and financial news show host. But they proclaimed this in the face of an economic and financial monster show whose fundamental factors have done nothing but worsen. Indeed, they can’t do anything but get worse. This show is far from over.

Moving on to the people whose words I’m borrowing, first is Carolyn Baker, whose general worldview is a bit more radical than mine (visit her site, www.carolynbaker.net, to see this in action) but who still expre