The Free and the Dead

Peacenik thinks this little essay by Jim Kunstler is appropriate as summer holidays arrive. Images of the lake and boats and kids having fun on tubes. Peacenik has read all the economic doomsday predictions. Kunstler says American's are in a dreamworld...partying on...while their society collapses. But Peacenik admits Peacenik is thinking about summer frivolity as well.

It may not be very realistic, but summer is short in Canada. And Peacenik acknowledges that everyone, including Peacenik, needs a little R & R. As George Bush used to say it is tough work worrying about everything. So Peacenik looks forward to some holidays, and doesn't begrudge people their last chance at a bit of a golden summer. Harsh reality will come soon enough. Have fun, why fight it?

By James Howard Kunstler
on July 6, 2009 6:34 AM

I was out on a big Adirondack lake in a canoe this weekend while the American economy was dying -- but you wouldn't have known it for the fleets of giant power boats dragging children back and forth across the water on rubber tubes, and the giant camping vehicles crammed into every bare spot. How do people pay for these things, I wondered. For not a few, installment loans, no doubt -- though that still begs the question. The sheer programming of American life runs wide and deep. We are, apparently, a people born to drag children behind hundred-and-fifty horsepower two-stroke engines, so that's what we do, no matter what is really going on in the world. Alas, mindless programming is the sort of thing that kills societies.

Watching the summer panorama on an Adirondack lake is like reading a history of the post World War Two decades, because almost nothing on view there now existed before 1945 and we'll be stunned to see how swiftly it all terminates. The fantastic prosperity of these postwar decades killed the wildness of these once-remote lakes. Fortunes were made -- like everywhere else in the USA -- carving up the landscape and deploying graceless houses made of cheap, fabricated materials. All the diabolical genius brought to engineering the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs was eventually turned loose on the Adirondack wilderness, with predictable results. The lakes themselves, stuffed with all those sleek plastic power boats, are like the Long Island Expressway minus the painted lanes.

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Will America's Beseiged Middle Class Snap?

It looks like Peacenik isn't the only one wondering about how our dystopian present will play out. Yesterday Charles Hugh Smith was writing about a devolutionary spiral. Today Yves Lavinge is wondering when the middle class will snap. Peacenik is finding it curious and worrisome that more and more people are finding it difficult to understand how the sheeple are letting themselves be raped and pillaged....without objection.

It seems to Peacenik that the only thing holding society together right now is society's willful ignorance. The Oil Drum had this interesting post on this the other day, Does knowledge of the collapse contribute to the collapse? What will it take to get you off your ass and into the streets with a pitch fork? Hunger? Homelessness? Sickness? Revenge? Hopelessness? How much longer is society going to hold the illusion together that things are ok....or might be ok? Peacenik doesn't think much longer. Have a good weekend.

Naked Capitalism

A paradox arises to the extent that it is true that the market is dependent on normative underpinning (to provide the pre-contractural foundations such as trust, cooperation, and honesty) which all contractural relations require: The more people accept the neoclasical paradigm as a guide for their behavior, the more the ability to sustain a market economy is undermined. This holds for all those who engage in transactions without ever-present inspectors, auditors, lawyers, and police: if they do not limit themselves to legitimate (i.e. normative) means of competition out of internlized values, the system will collapse, because the transaction costs of a fully or even highly "policed" system are prohibitive. This holds even more so for the regulators that every market requires. If those whose duty it is to set and to enforce the rules of the game are out to maximize their own profits, a-la-Public Choice, there is no hope for the system

Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics

I’ve been amazed at the complacency of Americans in the face of rape and pillage by the moneyed classes. Of course, I underestimate the impact of overwork and media brainwashing. If you are a member of the dwindling middle class, you are probably devoting all your energies to hanging on to your job and trying to be a decent partner and for those with families, parent. Any kind of sustained political action (unless you grew up with it in a serious way) is unlikely to rate as high as a tertiary concern. In our total information society, protesting has high odds of getting one’s mug in a video that could come back to haunt you. An arrest would show up in a background check. What a great way to keep the peasantry in line.

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Devolution: 20 Predictions

Peacenik has posted a lot about societal collapse. And Peacenik has thought a lot about societal collapse. But Peacenik has had a hard time visualizing what societal collapse will look like.

Charles Hugh Smith in this post, posits a possible and plausible scenario. But Charles Hugh Smith sees a fairly benign response from the sheeple as their standard of living disappears. The sheeple have shown a great tolerance for the race to the bottom, many cheering it on as they themselves get sucked to the bottom. Devolution or revolution? Passive or violent? Peacenik still thinks it will be a revolution. And a violent one.


Devolution: 20 Predictions

As cities, counties and states default on their obligations and unemployment insurance runs out, devolution sets in.


While some see a collapse of society in our future, right now I see devolution, not revolution. Devolution is both the process of degeneration and the surrender of governmental powers from central authorities to local authorities.

Devolution will take many forms. The key driver behind devolution is simple: there's not enough money to fund the status quo, so something has to be cut, axed, trimmed or devolved. Examples already abound: the number of school days in the year are reduced to shave expenses, two-times-a-week trash pickup is cut to once a week, etc.

The key constraint on devolution is also simple: the status quo power structure must be left intact. Nobody will willingly surrender their power, so devolution means services and front-end expenses will be cut in order to protect back-end administrative powers.

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Collapse psychosis: navigating the madness

by Carolyn Baker

It's happening daily now, almost hourly-rampant eruptions of violence throughout the so-called developed world. As civilization unravels, the uncivilized behavior of humans is becoming viral, and the culture of empire is quite simply going mad as its values, assumptions, and reasons for existing are evaporating with dizzying speed. For those who are and have been collapse-aware for some time, it is important not only to make sense of the epidemic violence, but to incorporate skillful responses to it.

First, I believe we need to deeply discern what is actually happening psychologically. The current outbreaks of violence are about more than unemployment and financial stressors. Yes, job loss, bankruptcy, foreclosure, homelessness, and loss of health care are breaking people and communities in pieces. Yet something even more fundamental is seething beneath the surface--something of which these losses are symptomatic.

Underlying the chaos is the reality of civilization's dissolution. But what does that actually mean?

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When Peacenik read this story about the ambush of three policemen in Pittsburg, Peacenik began to think about violence in societal collapse. Peacenik has thought about this in the past, but it is hard to understand. It is hard to put into a framework. This article helps put societal violence into context. Will militias attack bankers in their Mcmansions? How does Peacenik prepare for societal violence? Should Peacenik worry about these things? Is this just another moral panic, that will soon subside? Peacenik doesn't know.

Economic Brushfires for a Planet at the Brink

by Michael T. Klare

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

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Peacenik listened to Obama last night. The cadence of his speech was great. Content, not so much. Obama is stuck in the role of cheerleader. He can play that role very well. But the world needs leadership and solutions, not cheerleading. Oh, and did Peacenik forget to mention that there are no solutions? Equally absurd was Bobby Jindal's Republican response. Bobby is oblivious to the fact that 30 years of Republican/Neo-Conservative policies led us to today. And the TV pundits? Peacenik thinks they may be really crazy as they continue to attempt to frame the present crisis in the context of their limited grasp of past crises. Globalization, the global economy, global trade, the global financial system is no more. Wake up Obama. Look at Klare's list of economic hotspots. Missoula Montana is next, along with the rest of America. The DOW, perversely was up 250 points yesterday. Lots of window dressing and cheerleading coming down the pipe today. Will the world buy it? Will the DOW soar? Is that really all the world needed, some confidence and cheerleading? Peacenik thinks not.

The Final Countdown

The Triangle on that chart has a target ~3700 points lower, or if we were to break it tomorrow, approximately DOW 4200.

And that's the most bullish of the primary indices, all of which are sporting similar formations, and all of which closed right on the bottom boundary. Those of you who read The Ticker regularly know what my target is on the downside for the S&P 500 if this triangle breaks.

For the record, December closed at 8776 on the Dow Jones. The target on this technical formation is for a loss of another 50% from there, and as I said, that's the most bullish of the primary indices.

That would be back-to-back roughly 50% losses.

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Click thru to see the charts referred to above. Denninger doesn't think Obama is on the right track. The Dow tanked almost 400 points after the unveiling of Obama's plan yesterday. Peacenik didn't see too many pundits who thought things would get better today. But the Dow always surprises. Peacenik thinks capitulation could be this week. But investors may decide to keep pretending for a bit longer that there is value in the financial industry and the market. The world is on the edge of Doomsday.....Financial Armageddon. Will the world muddle through? Ask Peacenik on Friday.

Funeral of slain teen brings more violence to Athens

By ANTHEE CARASSAVA and RACHEL DONADIO International Herald Tribune,
The New York TimesPublished: December 9, 2008

ATHENS: Thousands of protesters marched on central Athens on Tuesday, facing off against police in riot gear and shouting anti-government slogans as Greece buried the teenager whose shooting by the police on Saturday set off some of the worst rioting here in recent years.

Violence erupted after the funeral of the teenager, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15, was held in the southern Athens suburb of Paleo Faliro.

The hour-long funeral went calmly but afterwards, as the hundreds of people who had gathered at the cemetery began to leave, bands of youths turned violent, hurling gasoline bombs and rocks as riot police moved in from the edges. Riot police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters.

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Peacenik was reluctant to post Ilargi's post today. It is too bleak. Instead Peacenik is wondering about these riots in Greece. There also have been recent riots in Kenya and Zimbabwe. And in France in 2007. And today workers are occupying a factory in Chicago. In Guelph, Ontario, anarchists recently broke some windows in a Macdonalds. In spite of the enormous firepower of the state, citizens seem to be willing to take to the streets and protest. Now contemplate 5 or 6 million newly unemployed in the U.S. and Canada in the next several months. Imagine empty shelves in stores and empty tanks at gas stations. Maybe Peacenik just should have posted Ilargi after all.

Debt Rattle, December 8 2008: Thinking about a thousand year depression

GliderGuider: A comment by a reader at The Automatic Earth has me ruminating this morning:
Cyclical terms like “recession” and “depression” are looking less appropriate by the day. It’s like calling the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance a “depression”.

I know the our situation is vastly different from the state of the world in Roman times, but the idea that we could be on the brink of a fundamental reset of civilization is intriguing, to say the least.

I've been convinced for several years that we are looking at the convergence of a set of wicked interlocking global problems -- ecological problems (climate chaos, the death of the oceans, fresh water shortages etc.), energy shortages due to fossil fuel depletion, and overpopulation with the resulting pressure on the global food supply. This convergence is happening under the umbrella of the current global financial collapse that constrains our ability to respond to any of these problems individually, let alone any further problems that might emerge from interactions between them.

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When Peacenik started posting doomsday articles there were many doubters. What seemed fanciful in August seems like the good old days today. Is it possible? GliderGuider makes it sound not only possible but probable. Today the Chicago Tribune declared bankruptcy. All those leveraged buyouts by private equity firms don't seem likes such a good idea now. And there were thousands of them, all designed to rape the companies of value for the benefit of a few. It is all coming apart now. But Peacenik is optimistic. It won't be the worst case scenario. And once things do start to turn as most business cycles do, there may be a chance to rebuild a better society from the ashes of this one. Hows that for upbeat?

Zombie Economics

by Jim Kunstler

Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer. I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep WalMart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we'll learn that "change" is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.

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Peacenik was feeling kind of discombobulated this morning when Peacenik realized Peacenik hadn't read Kunstler's Monday morning eye opener. Yes, all is well, everything is still going to hell in a handcart. But Kunstler at least prescribes a few remedies.

Society's downward spiral must play out first

Written by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #206, Oct. 18, 2008

Society's sad and terminal state is not an abstraction of issues or dollars. It is the wasted human potential of the intelligent, charitable individual who is stifled and hemmed in. Yet, our many wonderful members of society are creatures of artificial "comfort." Convenience comes at costs such as cancer and heart disease that were rare diseases until the last hundred years. Forced by the present economy to be self-centered, we also suppress our creativity and innate potential for triumphing over a clear threat.

For the most part the modern human being labors in exchange for essentials handed over at whatever the market will bear. Food, shelter and clothing are not won or collected from nature, or in cooperation with helpful tribe members, but rather obtained in exchange for becoming a kind of slave. Neuroses from overcrowding are apparent, but none dare call it overpopulation.

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Peacenik can't remember the hippies call to action or non-action. This essay has echoes of it though, and though it is generally downbeat it has a glimmer of hope. Times are changing and maybe society's reaction won't be all bad. Turn on, tune in, drop out. That's it. As a matter of fact Peacenik is going off-grid for the weekend. Have a good weekend.