Category Archives: argybargy

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Just look at corn and soybeans, subsidized with taxpayer money –creating a market that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Why? So agribusiness firms have cheap inputs to make processed food. the taxpayers are basically subsidizing corporations to make crap, when we could have grown real food on our own. But, of course, they’ve made growing food illegal now… How can people be free if they can’t feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations? (Freedom TM pg 104)

Quiet Coup

Lots of people have pointed to Simon Johnson’s The Quiet Coup, in The Atlantic’s online version. If you haven’t already read it, here’s another voice suggesting that you should. I’m not much of a fan of the IMF, but their perspective is supremely relevant to the panics of the moment, and Johnson’s experience allows him to find parallels that others might miss. Just one example:

…the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise…

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

Johnson warms to the task as he goes, and by the last paragraph one begins to hear the creak of the tumbril’s wheels:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

Lurching leftward

I must be getting soft-headed, or something. It just seems obvious to me that (a) Juan Cole’s Informed Comment is right about most of the issues it raises (for example, his treatment of Khamenei’s Speech Replying to Obama is vastly clearer than other stuff I’ve seen), and (b) Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover (“The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution”) nails what happened/is happening better than most of what I hear or read. viz:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Mauled

The almost-tragic rootlessness of the (North?) American psyche is mightily exemplified in a New York Times article on The Mall of America. A snippet:

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.

In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.

So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.

Malls are Nacirema and Naidanac writ large, revealing all the brassy crumminess and deficiencies of taste that these societies celebrate in architecture and mass consumption (how’s that for blanket indictment?). Take a wander through deadmalls.com, and peek into deadmalls.blogspot.com for daily doses of mallery. Note that malls are the quintessential securitized Panopticons, bristling with CCTV and private police forces. And don’t let’s get started on mall food, probably the greatest concentrations of high-fructose corn syrup dispensing on the planet (and of deep fat frying too). And mall music…

…described as “pop contemporary adult hottest hits.” South Avenue collects the upscale, chic stores and pipes in “rock adult album alternative.” East Broadway is supposed to feel contemporary and gets “pop adult contemporary/modern.”

Oooooh.

Harsh words and grim prospects

from Mike “Mish” Shedlock, a “registered investment advisor” with what look to me like Libertarian predilections:

In total, the Treasury has now committed to squander $700 billion and that is before Obama squanders anywhere from $750 billion to $1 trillion trying to prop up a dying consumer-based economy that really can’t be propped up.

More or less the same analysis of the overall plight as Jim Kunstler, though I’m not sure on which points the two would disagree. Kunstler (in his Forecast for 2009) is focused on the upshots of what he summarizes as the Happy Motoring fallacy, which is of course not just about cars:

Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway…

Another voice with some of the same tidings is NYU economist Nouriel Roubini:

But the worst is still ahead of us. In the next few months, the macroeconomic news and earnings/profits reports from around the world will be much worse than expected, putting further downward pressure on prices of risky assets, because equity analysts are still deluding themselves that the economic contraction will be mild and short… The credit crunch will get worse; deleveraging will continue, as hedge funds and other leveraged players are forced to sell assets into illiquid and distressed markets, thus causing more price falls and driving more insolvent financial institutions out of business. A few emerging-market economies will certainly enter a full-blown financial crisis.

Kunstler calls it

Here’s what Jim Kunstler said in his Forecast for 2008 (Jan 1 2008):

Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.

Sorta makes you curious what he predicts for 2009, dunnit? Look here for that, in this overall context:

I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

You don’t have to believe every word, but here and there are bits of astute observation and palpable truth (palp it yourself, you’ll see):

The tragic part of all this, of course, is that the temporary plunge in oil prices has prompted an incurious American public to assume, once again, that the global oil predicament is some kind of a fraud. Given the flood tide of fraud they have been subject to in banking and investment matters, I suppose you can’t blame them from thinking that everything is some kind of a scam…

The over-arching geopolitical theme of 2009 will be the end of robust globalism as we’ve known it for some time. Reduced trade, competition for energy resources, sore feelings over debts and currencies will drive the nations inward or, at least, direct their energies toward their own regions.

So read it and file it where you can find it next year end…

Extrapolatory and “plausible futures” fiction

Over at Jyri Zengestrom’s blog I happened upon this statement:

The most disruptive social objects articulate something masses of people urgently feel, but lack a way to express.

…and it fits nicely with a number of things I’ve been reading lately. Not everyone will share my enthusiasm for Warren Ellis’s Freak Angels (a serialized graphic novel, dark and violent), or for the near-future (and alternate-past) genres like Cyberpunk and Steampunk, but it’s obvious that authors in these realms are working with materials that are highly relevant to the present. And I’m reminded of the John Brunner masterpieces Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up that I used in courses 30-some years ago, to get students thinking about possible futures and different views of the present…

I’ve been following Jim Kunstler’s blog for a while now, and his World Made By Hand arrived a couple of days ago and has been inhaled. The novel is interesting on several levels, but especially as an exercise in imagining the contingencies of an all-too-plausible future –that is, as a sort of projective anthropology. A visit to the World Made By Hand website will reward in a number of ways. It’s the first time I’ve seen a trailer for a novel:

and there’s an interview with Jim Kunstler in which he talks about how he wrote the book. Two bits that jumped out at me:

the footing underneath reality is not quite what we’ve been used to…

…when you’re composing a novel like this, you set certain elements in motion and they end up dictating how things will play out –it’s an emergent, self-organizing process

As I read World Made By Hand I found myself marking bits of text that serve as technological and sociological mise en scène, and I feel compelled to lay at least some of them out here. Why? Hmmmm. I suppose it’s an exercise in “projective anthropology” but it’s also part of my own continuing rumination on what-all underpins the lives we lead in the ethnographic present –the unexamined assumptions and contingencies that support our material lives. Anthropology is, after all, one of the means to wrestle with the question: where does structure come from for people’s lives? So here’s a passel of short extracts, with pages noted, each of them a potential jumping-off place for thought and discussion:

since we didn’t have news reporters anymore and you barely knew what was going on five miles away (3)

The turbines and metal parts had long since been sold for scrap and every other useful thing was scavenged out. We couldn’t replace them anymore. (4)

Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many of the houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food. (5)

You could still find rubber tires here and there, but you couldn’t get patch kits or the kinds of adhesives that would stand up to a repair job anymore (5)

The strip mall stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything else worth scavenging was stripped out. (11)

People are on the move again (12)

Being so few in numbers, children no longer enjoyed solidarity in rebellion, and our society was too fragile to indulge much symbolic misbehavior (13)

The various shifting factions worked hard at managing the news even as the TV, newspapers, and Internet were failing in one way or another from irregular electric service (15)

the federal government was little more than a figment of the collective memory. Everything was local now. (15)

We had trouble getting wheat latelybecause trade had fallen off, and we couldn’t grow it locally because of a persistent wheat rust in the soil that returned no matter how you rested a field. Mostly we had to rely on corn and buckwheat, with some barley, rye, and oats (16)

“It’s not all bad now,” I said.
“Weve lost our world.”
“Only the part that the machines lived in.” (18)

commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising, had gone with it (21)

milk was more difficult to keep in high summer because we lacked refrigeration (22)

…after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. Freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went home with their cargoes undelivered. (23)

…it was obvious there would be no return to “normality.” The economy wouldn’t be coming back. Globalism was over. (24)

We didn’t have coffee anymore, or any caffeinated substitutes for it (24)

…in the absence of complex polymers and advanced cements…(25)

When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump, which had been capped over in the 1990s (28)

By then the justice system had ground to a halt like so many things that had once seemed woven into the fabric of regular life (29)

There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and traveling was something you just didn’t do anymore (30)

with the population so far down, and many empty houses in town itself, and the oil gone, and no ability to drive heroic distances, these buildings had no value except for salvage (31)

Agriculture had changed completely without oil. We’d gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half (35)

With the electricity off, you didn’t hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself (36)

There were still plenty of guns around, but manufactured ammunition was nearly impossible to get (49)

No one years ago would have anticipated how much production moved back into the home when the machine age ended (57)

There were no official safety nets in our little society, no more social services, no life insurance, nothing but the goodwill of neighbors. (70)

A lot of what had been forsaken, leftover terrain in the old days, was coming back into cultivation (74)

“…all these individuals in the town trying to live like it’s still old times, each on its own, each family alone against the world. You can’t have that in these new times or things will fall apart…” (90)

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore (101)

In a world without electric powered saws, you had to take care with hand tools (112)

You never knew the weather in advance anymore. You might be said to have a good weather eye but nobody knew anything for sure and some were just better guessers than others (115)

You couldn’t be too careful about infected wounds when there were no
more antibiotic medicines (134)

Less pollution of all kinds ran into the river, no more factory fertilizers and pest control poisons, no more detergents. So the fish had returned in numbers not seen in anyone’s memory (135)

“There’s grievances and vendettas all around at every level. Poor against what rich are left. Black against white. English-speaking against the Spanish. More than one bunch on the Jews. You name it, there’s a fight on. Groups in flight everywhere…” (149)

“This is just a time when nobody seems to know how to do anything, to get things done. A fellow makes a few things happen, and the world falls at his feet…” (162)

…a talented fellow whose fix-it shop was vital in a society that was forced to recycle virtually everything (199-200)

…going back to the old days, when television and all the other bygone diversions held people hostage in their homes after the sun went down, and you could hardly pry people out of their living rooms –as we used to call the place where the TVs lived (208)

“Even back in the old days, in the big hospitals, the docs lost patients,” I said. “What they gained in technological magic, they lost in bureaucracy and inattention and sloppiness.” (229)

“The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. they made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end.” (305)

The immense overburden of skyscrapers in Manhattan had proven unuseable without electric service (317)

I’m sure that a lot of this material is handled in more expository fashion in Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, which I haven’t read. Suppose I should, and his earlier writings too.

Jim Kunstler

The question of Who Gets It Right is always vexing, and the search usually involves dabblings at the fringes of opinion, be it in realms of food, of music, of politics, of education or whatever. As a lifelong adventurer in interstices, such territory is pretty familiar to me. I’m probably a contrarian by preference, though I’m fairly closeted in terms of expressing my views to audiences who don’t already know (and, mostly, share…) my predilections.

One of the writers I seem to be in pretty close agreement with is Jim Kunstler, author of (among others) The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape and the recent novel World Made By Hand (which I haven’t read yet) and a lively blog. From the penultimate paragraph of today’s posting:

The only “change” that America really wants to hear about is evicting George Bush from the White House. They’re sick of him and all the disturbance he has caused in their financial affairs. But beyond that, the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face — such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class’s private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future.

The whole posting (couched as a list “Does Mr. O know?” that’s heavy on the subject of the prospects of oil) is surely worth reading, and should be filed in the Look Again in 6 Months file. That one is beginning to bulge… and might well be turned into a blog of its own, which would deliver stuff for re-reading at a later date. Wonder if there’s any software out there to facilitate such a service?