Invitations sent to Potential Contributors

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dear potential contributors (DK, Tom Tom, Kramerfaust, Sunson),

I am going to send you an invitation tonight so that you can contribute. You’ll have to sign up with wordpress in order to submit your work to me. It looks like Kramerfaust already has a wordpress account set up. Per the WordPress staff:

Your new user will now be able to access your blog by visiting the My Blogs section of their dashboard when they log in to WordPress.com.

You won’t have to blog at the site you initially create; it’s just a required formality. Or you can simply email me at Collapsitarians@gmail.com. I’m looking forward to reading your posts. More voices means more worldly knowledge to glean from and different perspectives to appreciate.

Since I started this site, the stats tell me that the top four google searches which have brought people here are the following:

1.) collapse of industrial civilization

2.) the price of offshore revisited

3.) james holmes sociopath

4.) collapse peak oil

The first one is an obvious outcome. I was surprised this domain had not been previously claimed since it seems to be such a hackneyed phrase. As Greer has noted, in the twilight of past civilizations, the elite are increasingly seen as corrupt and stories of societal collapse become popular in the mainstream culture. The second one relates to my post about the trillions being hoarded in offshore tax havens by the 0.001%. Backed by the power of the State, the global elite live in a cocoon of cossetted comfort, indifferent to the hand-to-mouth existence of the majority. They’ve got the iron fist of the Military Industrial Complex and Police State to protect their wealth from the rest of humanity who will be falling off the net energy cliff into poverty and desperation.

The third google search phrase is apparent to all unless you have been living under a rock since July 20th. We have these mass shootings periodically here in the Land of the Second Amendment just as a reminder that guns don’t kill people. Guns are completely innocent in these mass bloodlettings and should not be denied their freedom of getting into the hands of every man, woman, and child in the country. The response by the public is simply to buy even more guns. Why refute such logic in a world that thinks more debt is the answer. More debt, more growth, more firepower, more people, more wars, more cars, more profit, more, more, and more…..

 
And the last google search is not a surprise either. Despite all the propaganda of another oil surfeit, educated peak-oilers have not been swayed.

Terrorism: The Existential Threat Used for Total Control Here and Abroad

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Connecting the ‘War on Terror’ with the control of resources abroad and the crushing of dissent both here and overseas:

In order to overtake and dominate, sometimes you have to draw your opponent in close to you. Knowing that the oil and gas reserves of the Middle East make it an area of vital geopolitical and national security importance, an empire would use all available opportunities to insert itself there, even if it meant invasion under some false pretense. With the trumped-up claims of terrorist ties to Iraq and WMD, 9-11 gave the empire the pretense to invade. Today we can see the results here and here and here.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who worked for the NSA, laid out this general strategy in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives‘.

A few quotes:

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)

“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (p.35)

“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected(!), and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)

Now we get to today’s video from Journeyman pictures which gives further evidence from a whistleblower that all the stops were pulled in order to make this ‘War on Terror’ fly. No more Geneva Convention, no more questioning of the efficacy or, for that matter, morality of the brutal torture done by countries we once condemned as barbaric:
 
 
And the War on Terror is being used to suppress dissent not just in the Middle East, but also here in the US and all other ‘developed countries’ where militarized local police departments have been given the latest armory and weapons to be unleashed on a growing population falling deeper and deeper into joblessness and destitution, the levels of which have not been seen in half a century.

The War on Terror was the perfect existential threat needed to prop up neoliberal capitalism and its resultant world of an opulently rich class ruling over the teeming masses of serfs. In a civilization dominated globally by such an economic system which is designed to funnel the shrinking wealth (i.e. energy) of society into the hands of a tiny elite, there can be no other future to look forward to for those at the bottom but despair and poverty:
 

Help Wanted: Fellow Writer/Thinker for this Site

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Peak Oil

≈ 15 Comments

When I started this site a few months ago, my intent was to blog for my own self-awareness on the state of the globalized industrial world. Since this is such a heavy subject, it has become apparent to me that breaks from the computer and this sedentary lifestyle are necessary if I am to continue this work. My feelings were confirmed after I read this article. So in light of that realization, I am putting a request out to the blogosphere for a fellow writer who would like to team up with me on this project. With two people, it would be much easier and there would be an opportunity for exchange of ideas.

My general research regime is to scour the headlines on the RSS links you see to the left as well as some research on google and youtube in search of a salient news article or essay to talk about. The subjects I focus on are the following, many of which overlap:

 TOPICS

  • Capitalism
  • Climate Change
  • Consumerism
  • Corporate State
  • Cyber-Warfare
  • Ecological Overshoot
  • Empire
  • Environmental Degradation
  • Finance
  • Inequality
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Neo-Colonialism
  • Peak Oil
  • Pollution
  • Wall Street Fraud

With the end of growth and our current economic system becoming increasingly dysfunctional, the creation of a more just and socially benevolent system would be a welcome development if we are to avoid widespread suffering from the widening wealth gap and future wars over dwindling resources. One of my goals is to show how the current scheme is not working and is in fact a brutish, Darwinian model that needs to be scrapped if the continued existence of humanity is to be achieved in any civilized form. Human nature may never allow such a thing; however, we really have no choice but to try.

So if you are interested in teaming up, drop me a line in the comment section.

 Image

At Least $21 Trillion Hidden in Tax Havens While the 99% are Forced to Foot the Bill

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore. 

Now the following story should lay to rest the question of who is really waging this class war and laying waste to the rest of humanity. While the Über Rich hide their wealth in tax havens to the tune of at least $21 trillion, the Working Class lose their jobs due to the criminal acts of white-collar crooks, sacrifice their children in foreign wars, cope with cutbacks on social services and shoulder the burden of increased taxes to pay for the roads, bridges, and infrastructure required for society to function, resort to food stamps in an attempt to feed their families, and in some cases commit suicide to escape the hell they have been thrown into by the protected thieving class of the upper 1%.

And a recent example that shows the aloof, above-the-law mentality of these elitist pricks is illustrated in the following video:

 
This is reality: The elite feel they are above paying the taxes needed to run a functioning society while the rest of humanity is expected and forced to pay those government taxes as well as corporate bailouts. It’s called accumulation by dispossession.

Super–rich stash $21 tn in offshore havens 

Wealthy tax evaders, aided by private banks have exploited loopholes in tax legislation and stashed over $21 tn in offshore funds, says a report. The capital drained from some developing countries since 1970 would be enough to pay off national debts.

The findings show the gap between the haves and the have-nots is much larger than previously thought.

The document, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited, was commissioned by The Tax Justice Network campaign group and leaked to the Guardian. The report provides the most detailed valuation of the offshore economy to date.

“The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments,” wrote James Henry, expert on tax havens and former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey in his report.

The document cites the world’s leading private banks as cherry-picking from the ranks of the uber-rich and siphoning their fortunes into tax-free havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

The wealth of the super-rich is “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.”

Henry writes that a large part of the trillion dollar hoard belongs to around 92,000 individuals, an elite class of super-rich who make up 0.001 percent of the global population.

“These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people,” said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.

The report records the flow of capital from countries into offshores over the past few decades. Saudi Arabia saw almost $300 billion drained from their economy since the 1970s, while Russia saw almost $800 billion leave its economy in hidden assets since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nigeria issued a loss of $300 billion since the mid-1970s.
Henry points the finger at the world’s top ten private banks, among them UBS and Credit Suisse, for aiding wealthy clients to dodge taxes.

According to Henry’s figures, the top financial leaders processed more than $6 trillion in funds in 2010, more than double the previous year.

Banking system – rotten to the core

Last week the US Senate released a report damning the actions of the UK bank HSBC. The report highlighted evidence of the bank’s law security policies leading to money laundering cases.

It referenced $7 billion in cash that had crossed the Mexican border into the US and been deposited in HSBC from 2007 to 2008. The report suggests that the billions of dollars could have come from drug sales in Mexico.

The probe also shed light on a number of other instances when the bank bypassed US safeguards, potentially bankrolling terrorists and drug lords in the process.

The bank had previously had to pay out $1bn to US authorities for money laundering offenses committed between 2004 and 2010.

The G20 has repeatedly made calls to end tax-free havens since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, but these plans have not yet come to fruition.

The Joke’s on Us: Guns in a Sociopathic Society

21 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

He looked like an assassin ready to go to war,” said Jordan Crofter, a moviegoer who was unhurt in the attack early Friday, about a half-hour after the special midnight opening of “The Dark Knight Rises.

Just a half hour drive from Columbine is the city of Aurora Colorado in which the latest ritual blood bath has been carried out in a hail of bullets. 71 hit and 12 dead.

Clad in a gas mask, ballistic helmet, and body armor from the neck down to the legs, the gunman burst into a theater after tossing in a couple of gas canisters. Was this a terrorist act from some fundamentalist Middle East group? No, it came from 24-year-old American James Holmes, described as “shy”, “high-achieving” and from a “good family.” He was in fact a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. Tom Mai, a retired electrical engineer, said “the mother told him Holmes couldn’t find a job after earning a master’s degree and returned to school.” Holmes even left his apartment booby-trapped, a sort of double tap assault for those hunting him.

What can be said of this most recent disturbed outcry from modern civilization’s youth? I see it as a reflection of the perverse and twisted culture which this young person was faced with, an atomized society which commodifies everything in its site and turns all it can into a financial transaction of some sort. What is worth preserving of a society which destroys the future of its offspring with mountains of social debt in the form of exorbitant college loans, a degraded and polluted environment, no option for meaningful work, a two-tier class system of haves and have-nots, a rising Security and Surveillance State, and a world at war for the last of the earth’s resources? Of course this is all normal for a country that glorifies sociopathic behavior:

…Sociopathic behavior becomes normalized and even glorified in business culture, and the businessmen who are less sociopathic get eaten alive by the more sociopathic ones.

The entirety of business sociopathy is glorified by the nation’s culture, in art, media, etc. as tens of millions of Americans long to be the next Bill Gates, who is nothing more than a White Crips/Bloods gang member with glasses and a high IQ.

Less sociopathic businessmen who try to act decent are destroyed and then, for their decency, are attacked in common culture as losers, failures and even scum. Women avoid them and their families look at the ground when someone brings up their name. At the individual level, people who try to play fair and be nice are told that they are displaying loser attitudes and ordered to harden up and act more sociopathic.

Capitalism is really the normalization, rationalization, glorification and even deification of sociopathy across society.

My only surprise is that we don’t see more of these meltdowns taking place in this bankrupt and systemically corrupt system of ours. If you read medical journalist Robert Whitaker, America’s rise in mental illness has gone up in lockstep with “our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications.”

Another factor for America’s escalating random violence is the entrenched gun culture. America was awarded the dubious honor of being the ‘most armed country in the world’ by Reuters back in 2007. And lest we forget, America is the largest arms dealer in the world.

 
Surely the lack of effective gun laws that would prevent such massacres also is worth mentioning, thanks to the legendary lobbying power of the NRA whose motto was best exemplified by their now deceased spokesman Charlton Heston who said you can pry the gun “from my cold, dead hands.” America just loves its guns:

 
If there was a fast and sudden collapse of the economy and industrial civilization, America might be one of the last places you’d want to find yourself due to the above reasons I have described.

Dancing ‘Round the Issues Till the Circus Tent Collapses

19 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m politically agnostic so I don’t really pay too much attention to the machinations of our faux democracy, best described as a “kabuki theater of empty formalisms that disguise the offstage conspiracies of corporate/state elites.” Politics has become like the fake professional wrestling of the WWF: a rigged and meaningless spectacle for the apathetic masses.

The latest titillating maneuver comes from the DNC in the form of a video illustrating King Romney waffling over if/when he’ll disclose his income tax returns. It features Romney’s Olympic-qualified dressage horse named Rafalca and was to be Volume 1 of a series of videos:


 
But apparently the video cut too close to the bone for the Romney Royalty, and since late Wednesday the DNC has decided to pull the plug on the series:

…At the time, the DNC was billing the video as “the first in a series of digital products highlighting Rafalca.”

But by late Wednesday, the DNC had done a complete 180 and decided it “will longer use the Romney’s Olympic-bound dressage horse to portray Mitt Romney as ‘dancing around the issues’ because it could be seen as offensive to the (Mitt Romney’s) wife Ann,” CNN’s Political Ticker blog reported….

…The catalyst for the DNC’s about-face on the wisdom of “highlighting Rafalca” was an interview, scheduled to air Thursday, in which Ann Romney told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, “It makes me laugh. It’s like ‘Really?’ You know, there’s so many people out of work right now, and there’s this guy right here that has the answers for fixing the economy, and all these attacks are going to be — they’re going to try everything. They’re going to throw spaghetti at the wall.”

What’s even more offensive and alarming is that the masses can’t readily see that, for all practical purposes, there is no difference between the two candidates we are being offered when it comes to reality-based issues such as the collapsing middles class, institutionalized criminal behavior on Wall Street, enthrallment to the banks and military industrial complex, and myopic vision on dire environmental issues like climate change which threatens to take us all down, rendering every other issue moot. But let’s humor the idea that humanity will still be here in any sizable numbers by mid-century and take a look at the financial viability of the 99%:

So we have the poverty-stricken plebs choosing between a wealthy elite and an exorbitantly wealthy elite. And many still think that’s a choice they need to make. To what end I don’t know. As some like to say, “Jesus wept!”
Cartoonist Ted Rall sums it up nicely:

Class War is Hell

Capitalism is Crisis

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Paul Craig Roberts has written a very insightful piece entitled War On All Fronts. He describes an Empire which is pushing on all fronts, despite a collapsing economy and declining living standards for its own citizens here at home. Yes, the cost of American Empire has outstripped the benefits it once offered to its common citizen.

The world is catching on to the American corporatocracy’s covert use of what are called NGOs [non-governmental agencies] in spreading dissent within other countries and over throwing foreign governments. The latest case is Russia which is now passing a law similar to what the U.S. uses whereby members of NGOs, who are funded by foreign governments, must register with the U.S. Justice Department as ‘foreign agents’ under America’s ‘Foreign Agents Registration Act’(FARA):

…The Washington-funded Russian political opposition masquerades behind “human rights” and says it works to “open Russia.” What the disloyal and treasonous Washington-funded Russian “political opposition” means by “open Russia” is to open Russia for brainwashing by Western propaganda, to open Russia to economic plunder by the West, and to open Russia to having its domestic and foreign policies determined by Washington.

“Non-governmental organizations” are very governmental. They have played pivotal roles in both financing and running the various “color revolutions” that have established American puppet states in former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. NGOs have been called “coup d’etat machines,” and they have served Washington well in this role. They are currently working in Venezuela against Chavez.

Of course, Washington is infuriated that its plans for achieving hegemony over a country too dangerous to attack militarily have been derailed by Russia’s awakening, after two decades, to the threat of being politically subverted by Washington-financed NGOs. Washington requires foreign-funded organizations to register as foreign agents (unless they are Israeli funded). However, this fact doesn’t stop Washington from denouncing the new Russian law as “anti-democratic,” “police state,” blah-blah. Caught with its hand in subversion, Washington calls Putin names. The pity is that most of the brainwashed West will fall for Washington’s lies, and we will hear more about “gangster state Russia.”…

Considering the revelation earlier this year that corporations were paying “strategic intelligence” firm Stratfor to spy on activists, it would come as no surprise that many NGOs here in the US are also used by multinational corporations to push their corporate agendas. As one commenter notes, the use of domestic NGOs in America by corporations is likely commonplace and key in controlling political dissent and keeping the ideology of neoliberal capitalism dominant over American society:

…How many of our “Tax-Exempt Foundations” and even religious organizations are in fact fronts for Global Corporations? Each state of the union could, if it had citizens with spines, force local do-good groups to register just like the outside agitators they really are. Politics in America would change overnight.

The Russians have been screwed by US “advice” since the Harvard Boys played Joseph to Russia’s Pharaoh after 1989 and destroyed their economy. Everyone should read the old Nation article even if only the cached version…

And on the Asian front we have China which is seen as another threat to be contained:

…per an ABC article from late last year:

…President Obama today was asked about the strategy of containing China by establishing stronger economic and diplomatic ties with countries in the region – such as with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, which excludes China — as well as with today’s military announcement. What does the US fear from China? he was asked.

“The notion that we fear China is mistaken,” he said. “The notion that we are looking to exclude China is mistaken.”

The president insisted that “we haven’t excluded China from the TPP. What we have said is the future of this region depends on robust trade and commerce and the only way we’re going to grow that trade is if we have a high-standards trade agreement where everybody is playing by the same rules. …

Having drained the U.S. economy by offshoring to China in order to take advantage of their cheap labor pool and nonexistent environmental regulation over the last several decades, the American corporatocracy now looks to curtail a creature of its own making. Roberts notes the following:

…China has been cooperative with Washington, because the offshoring of the US economy to China was an important component in China’s unprecedented high rate of economic development. American capitalists got their short-run profits, and China got the capital and technology to build an economy that in another 2 or 3 years will have surpassed the sinking US economy. Jobs offshoring, mistaken for free trade by free market economists, has built China and destroyed America…

…It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership:

Pew Study Finds Steep Declines in faith in politicians and capitalism

There is a lot to think about in this latest article by Roberts and it says everything about the chaotic and expansionary nature of capitalism, much more than that of empire. Whether you are pro or anti-capitalist, the facts laid before our eyes do not lie. I found the following comment to Robert’s article a perfect mirror of my own thoughts:

Finally, revelations that Unregulated Capitalism and Democracy can only co-exist for so long. Those who have ignored this fact are now suffering from the ultimate results of this reality. Those who have always known this and are not surprised are likely doing quite well and could care less. Socialism, the Kryptonite to unregulated Capitalism, has reportedly gained increasing favor of late with younger people who can find no benefit associated with an economic philosophy that exists to serve a minority class consisting of the very wealthy as it strives to insure it’s dominance by perpetuating a Plutocracy masquerading as a functioning Democracy. Throughout history, Democracies have existed without a Capitalist economic system but the reverse is rare to find as Capitalism eventually requires total compliance by government to save it from it’s own excesses. Considering the fact that our economy has once again hit the fan, 11 recessions and two depressions in the last eighty years, when are we going to stop buying into the brainwashing and stop our blind acceptance of an unregulated economic system that is perpetually unstable and now requires a constant state of war and suffering by a majority of the planet’s inhabitance to insure a utopia for a wealthy minority at the very top?

Energy is God

16 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Someone said in my last post that I’m making energy into a God. I’m here to tell you that energy is a God. Like a diehard cigarette addict smoking through their tracheostomy, we continue to use the stuff in the face of extinction-threatening effects to the climate. Our foreign policy revolves around how to get the stuff. In patriotic flag-waving fervor, we send our kids off to war over the stuff. Hell, we’ll butcher an entire country to grab the stuff while dressing it all up as a War on Terror. We even have a term for those poor souls suffering from the affliction of sitting on the stuff. We call it the resource curse. True to form, Iraq is the most glaring example of this feeding frenzy by the multinational oil companies, accompanied by wholesale corruption and that thunderous sucking sound of taxpayer money down a bottomless pit:

I’m still amazed at the statistic that a majority of Americans still buy the propaganda about the Iraq war, i.e. ferreting out Al Qaeda or WMD.

But sometimes the truth just slips out:

EROEI and the Collapse of Empires

14 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

The above video is a discussion with Dr. Charles Hall of the Dept. of the SUNY-Environmental and Forest Biology. He is the primary creator behind the concept of EROEI in the field of biophysical economics. He also cowrote the new book “Energy and the Wealth of Nations“. I just heard about this book, but from the reviews I have read it appears to be essential reading for those concerned about a world faced with depleting energy sources and an economic system ill-suited to deal with this crisis.

Throughout the history of civilizations, economies have been based on energy inputs, whether by human slaves or oil energy slaves. The bits of paper and metal we receive for our work are only tokens representing muscle or brain output. Money is simply a token of energy exchange and has no intrinsic value of its own. Without the constant input of primary energy, a civilization’s economy ceases to function as it once did. The following comment by an engineer illustrates my point:

…Consider: A fit human being has a maximum productive energy output of about 100 watts.  Such a person working for 10 hours provides 1000 watt-hours of energy, which is to say, 1 kWh.  In other words, by working quite literally like a slave, a person can produce about 1kWh per day.  For this we pay $0.05 to $0.25 in most parts of this country.  Granted, that’s provided as electrical, not mechanical energy but my point is to illustrate the enormous gap between the energy intensity that was historically possible, and the energy intensity that we take for granted now.  The extreme cheapness that makes this energy intensity possible is a product of the fact that we are using up a one-time endowment of fossilized sunlight.  It is not something that can be duplicated with a renewable source.

Nor is it something that we can continue to obtain from fossil fuels for very much longer, even if we don’t care about climate change or ecosystem health.  The cheapest of fuels, coal, comes with a set of fairly immediate externalized costs – if we pursue a coal-based energy system, those externalized costs will accumulate quickly enough to drag us down in fairly short order (through e.g. medical expenses).  The current, temporary glut of cheap natural gas notwithstanding, other fossil fuels will not fill this need either.  There may be “plenty” of oil at $100/bbl, but that abundance will not be sustained at a lower price point – again, a function of declining EROEI…

The less energy you get back from the energy you invested, the worse off you are. If a civilization is expending all its energy and resources and only getting enough fuel back to function at its current state, then it is just subsisting and cannot grow and expand in complexity. With a population that is constantly increasing, this means intractable unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and social unrest. As Joseph Tainter has explained, a complex society such as ours gets to the point where more energy is required simply to maintain the infrastructure it’s come to depend on. Forget growing or replacing, but just maintaining the present infrastructure requires more energy than was originally spent to build it. To make matters worse, a corrupt government and myopic ruling elite don’t recognize the realities of biophysical economics. Indeed, our entire economic system operates in a make-believe world that tries to impose neoclassical theorems on finite natural systems. Just as Rome imploded from the inability to maintain its over-extended reach through its limited energy resources, so too will the U.S. repeat this mistake of depleting returns on supporting a far-flung empire built from cheap fossil fuels.

Urban Decay in a Post-Bubble World

12 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Consumerism, Inequality, Peak Oil

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

I’m being more selective in my reading these days since I’m not so interested anymore in the minutia of the everyday happenings concerning industrial civilization’s decline. Certainly if the planetary tipping points continue to be breached by an economy dependent on infinite growth, then all these social issues everyone frets about will be meaningless anyway.

I read a very good article on urban decay by the Rogue Columnist this evening called ‘Growthgasm!‘ which reminded me of a very recent trip to one of my old stomping grounds in Phoenix, the Metrocenter Mall. Not too long ago when I was a teenager this was quite a popular hang-out, filled with thousands of shoppers on any given day. Today it has become a veritable ghost town. On my visit I saw no more than a few dozen customers within this expansive mall. Many of the shops are now vacant and locked-up. As you can see from the pictures below that I took, the empty building casts an eerie feeling of abandonment and lifelessness. The few tenants that remain are desperate to attract customers and some have posted employees outside their doors to try to make a hard sale and entice passersby to come in.

If you are a reader of this blog, then you’ll know I’m not a fan of the mass consumerism that was spawned after World War II, but in my younger days I was a reluctant participant growing up in that environment. Since the bursting of America’s last big bubble, the suburban utopia that this nation built for itself through the Great Ponzi Scheme of Sprawl is decaying. Those who can flee, the affluent who have managed to hold on to their economic well-being, are moving to newer ‘exurbs’ to be with others in their social status and to insulate themselves from the spreading poverty:

…suburbs facing the highest burdens of the new poverty will be least able to meet them because of the economic recession and the spatial retreat of the better off. Just as many white Americans fled the cities for the suburbs in the 1960s, leaving the cities behind with declining tax revenues and fewer job opportunities, there is new cycle of exodus of the well-to-do from inner-ring metropolitan suburbs. As the better-off retreat, the provision of amenities and essentials from parks to schools to garbage pickup, heavily funded by property taxes, are bound to flounder for those left-behind.

One recent study conducted by Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff of Stanford University documented the spatial sorting by income that is going on, with the wealthy flocking together in new exurbs as well as gentrifying pockets of urban centers. In 1970 — the high-water mark of a more homogeneous suburban America — only 15 percent of families in metropolitan areas lived in socio-economically segregated neighborhoods categorized as affluent or poor. In 2007, that figure was 31.7 percent.

The replacement of America’s middle-class suburbs, however flawed, by wealthier exurbs and secondhand suburban remnants is a leading symptom of America’s 21st-century reinvention as a society of stark class divisions, spatial segregation and inherited social status…

So will the suburbs of a country whose transportation and infrastructure was built on cheap oil become the favelas of the first world? It certainly seems inevitable in a world where class lines are growing deeper, high unemployment is intractable, and the age of cheap fossil fuels has drawn to a close.