Blood Makes the Grass Grow

About a year ago, I began to become fascinated by the idea of social collapse. Not simply the collapse of a particular industry or of another near miss collapse of the economy which would be bailed out by unhappy taxpayers funding the next round of Goldman Sachs bonuses, but the total wholesale systemic cataclysmic collapse of everything.

Of the whole damn system.

My fear started to slowly percolate amid the tidal deluge of so much bad news that came in the form of endless narratives of dystopian American democracy, corporate scandals, and misbegotten wars for both liberation and revenge. Reading the news, watching television, and scanning the Internet blogs – being the voracious consumers of concentrated fractious information fragments as we have all become – it had the cumulative effect of inducing within me a terminal anxiety about the future.

And, fearing for the future, I began to choke on everything: Climate change, terrorism, Federal bail-outs of banks, illegal immigration and drug feuds in Mexico, genocide in Africa, school shootings, and an endless conveyor belt of news stories detailing horrible crimes that reminded me how perfectly awful my species was. We seemed involved in a perpetual game of sadistic escalation, pushing back the boundaries of that which would trigger our outrage.

It felt as if every facet and structure of our world had been pulled taut, that there was no tension left in the line and everything was on a razor’s edge of slipping into some great cataclysm from which there would be no return. Whether it was catastrophic climate change, impending economic collapse, or the outbreak of some new and deadly virus, our last chapter seemed to perpetually exist just a few pages away.

Of course, investigating the phenomenon is a tricky business. It’s one laden with political and ideological landmines and crowded by charlatans. A Google search for “economic collapse” is just as likely to turn up search results for real concerns – like the OMB’s (Office of Management and Budget) forecast of perpetual debts for America’s future far into the mid-point of the new century – as it is to turn up search results for the Trilateral Commission and secret cabals of Jewish bankers.

Of course, feelings of anxiety about the state of the future has been a normative condition among societies since the dawn of civilization. Thinking back to my father’s generation in the 1960s, I often marvel at how chaotic the events of his day must have seemed with the nation entangled in Vietnam, race riots in the streets, the repetitious assassination of important public figures, and the nation held hostage under the specter of Soviet nuclear annihilation. And how many times as a child had I heard my grandfather miserly remarking about the decline of society? It seems reasonable to conclude that as far back as the Sumerians, elders have always been surmising the course of perceived future history with a rueful disdain. Doomsday soothsaying, it seems, is genetically coded into the human DNA.

The sky is always falling.

But then, crisis is averted, the doomsayers feel foolish, and the world rolls on, hobbling and pitched, but moving forward nonetheless.

And this became the question that haunts me: Are the present conditions that define our current state of affairs simply systematic of the ever-present illusion of a society steeped towards terminal decline, or have we traversed far enough along an axis of disorder, that things have finally gotten to a point where we were are in for a chaotic transition of gargantuan proportions? For a systemic collapse?

As a logical proposition, it’s a question easily solved. Nations, resources, and social structure never last forever. It was the only inevitability of history. Just ask the Sumerians. It isn’t so much an issue of if, but when. The idea of systemic collapse seems absurd only in as much that it has never happened before to American society, as if we alone are immune to the long yawning stretch of world history which is cluttered with the debris of so many contracted civilizations. The problem is attempting to define the exact edge at which massive transition occurs, and from the driver’s seat in the paralytic fog of the moment, the landscape plays tricks and the precipice always seems just ahead and around the corner.

And so it becomes that otherwise intelligent people assume that everything will be okay. One of my good friends takes great comfort in this position because the idea of societal contraction is something he simply has no frame of reference for.

But this is the thing: There are measurable and objective scientifically discerned facts which suggest that present-day situations are uniquely different at this present point in time than at any previous point in history. Facts which suggest that how things are now won’t continue as a state of permanency. Facts which suggest that the past isn’t a good guide for the future, because we’ve reached tipping points for which the momentum for change becomes unavoidable.Change that can only result in steep and severe social contraction.

And what are these facts?

Here’s just a few:

Peak Oil. All around the globe, oil reservoirs are in steep decline. This is scientifically proven. In a roughly parallel arc, new discoveries of oil are also diminishing in roughly equal proportion. Demand is growing almost exponentially. Since the Carter administration in the 1970s when America’s own production went past its peak, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about depleting fossil fuels. Consequently, to the untrained mind, it appears as if nothing has changed, as if being on the edge of the decline is nothing new and certainly nothing to get excited over. Except that we’re capable of more than a gut check reaction that roughly decides the message is the same so the problem is the same. It’s not. Do the math. Geologists all over the world are screaming about it.

Climate change. It’s not just rising temperatures and weird weather. It’s about rivers drying up that feed entire sub-continents. It’s about the changing jet stream and desertification across much of the world’s agricultural belt. Many scientists suggest that it’s already too late to do anything about it. That it’s coming, regardless of what we do.

Mass Extinction. While animal species have always gone extinct and habitats have always been destroyed in parallel pacing with the march of technological progress, we are currently entering what biologists are calling one of the largest extinction periods the world has ever witnessed. That the extinction period we’re entering has only one claim of comparability, and that was when the dinosaurs died. All around the world, fish populations are collapsing beyond the point of recovery. From the polar bear to the whales, mammals, birds, and reptiles are dying off at never seen before rates.

Financial collapse. For half a century the United States and most of the Western world borrowed money to fund and fuel a lifestyle that we couldn’t afford. And now, for the first time in modern history, there are news reports about the previously unfathomable: Modern western democracies potentially defaulting on their loans. Greece gets mentioned a lot. But so does Britain and the United States. And with the USA’s Congressional Budget Office predicting a future of NEVER-ENDING deficits far into this next century, well, it’s safe to say that we’re fucked one way or another, and that’s assuming that we had passed decent financial regulatory reform to ensure that a repeat of the Fall of 2008 never happened again. Which, of course, was never passed.

All of which is to say nothing about our exploding population and a planet that will be ill-equipped to provide the resources needed for sustaining so many.

These are just four of the areas where we seem to be approaching tipping points that have never previously existed before. When people assume the future will be okay because the past was okay, it seems a ridiculous rebuttal. How can we derive a picture of the future from the past when we’ve never had these looming catastrophes before? Catastrophes which, when converged and layered on top of one another, will likely result in severe and intense social contraction.

I’ve seen the future, my friends: We’re fucked.

Great Film.

No links or embedded video clips today, just an observation.

Living in Britain, the lead story on almost every newscast and in every newspaper is how the volcanic eruption in Iceland is threatening the European recovery from recession.  More strikingly, already all over Britain and Europe, hospitals are running out of medicine and grocery store shelves are starting to appear bare from lack of re-stock.

What’s most frightening?  This is all based upon less than a single week of disrupted air traffic.  Is that the razor thin margin that industrial societies in Europe have to play with?  A single week?

A single week of disruption and food and medicines start to become in short supply?

What happens when the world encounters it’s first true oil shocks?

It’s snapshots like this volcano – or like Katrina in New Orleans – that serve as warning examples of what we can expect when the global oil supply starts its decline.  Unfortunately, then we won’t simply be able to wait for the air to clear.

So this is the question I’ve been discussing with a friend lately:  How do I know it’s going to be bad?

And by this, we mean the social contraction, end consequences, of so many of the problems I’ve been writing about.  In other words:  Peak oil, climate change, financial meltdown, etc.

My friend has read, watched, and listened to many of the same sources that I have. Like myself, he takes most of it at face value with the understanding that while some of it may be a bit exaggerated, there’s still enough truth there to safely suggest that we’re facing gargantuan problems with consequences that could be very dire.

But how dire?

The end game is, of course, the only part of these discussions where there’s no scientific evidence to suggest an outcome. We can scientifically prove that oil reserves are in decline, that the Earth’s climate is changing, that the USA is in a financially troublesome situation, but there’s no scientific consensus on what this means…

When will oil run out?

How much will the climate change?

What are the consequences of financial insolvency?

In other words: How bad will it all be?

Consider peak oil: Are we facing the end of industrial civilization as we know it, or simply a future of higher gas prices where the next generation of children might find the airfare we took for granted to be cost prohibitive, but where otherwise, life still goes on roughly the same – just with some changes.

More than my belief about the problems facing us, it’s my guess that the end is going to be both nasty and severe that marks me as seemingly slightly paranoid and, in some quarters, as a card-carrying member of the ideological fringe. I just see it as a rational realization of our own political and social impotence to affect even the slightest meaningful change.

Those who believe in the problems but not in the dire outcome seem to suggest two possible scenarios: First, that at some point, when things get bad enough, we will pull together politically as a nation to face up to these tough issues. Secondly, that we will innovate and adapt; that we will develop technological game changers that will help alleviate the problems we’re facing.

Both of these are indeed possibilities, but like all possibilities, the potential solutions exist on a scale of probability. For myself, considering both our past and current efforts at combating national crisis, I’ve decided firmly on pessimism.

I say this for two reasons.

First, because the problem is one of scale. By this I mean that it’s easy to collectively respond to problems that pose an immediate overnight threat. Both Democrats and Republicans pulled together quite effectively immediately following both September 11^th, 2001 and in the Fall of 2008 when the nation was on the edge of economic collapse. But whether it’s peak oil or climate change or financial collapse, the problems that potentially threaten to lead to social contraction are ones which are slowly revealing themselves over the span of many years – sometimes perhaps decades. It’s going to be an incremental but ever worsening problem which means that along the way, it’ll be difficult to see the forest through the trees.

Humans are biologically hard-wired to face immediate threats that have immediate consequences. What we’re not so good at, is solving immediate threats that have long-term reaching consequences that affect us in the next decade, or the decade after that.

None of these problems – peak oil, climate change, or financial collapse – are problems that can be solved with the sort of quick fix band-aid, and it’s only these sort of quick fixes that politicians have shown themselves able to work together regarding. For example, when the twin towers fell in New York, it’s easy to vote together as a unified country to send Army Rangers and Special Forces groups into Afghanistan. It’s easy to vote for a “quick bail-out” to save the titans of Wall Street from taking down the rest of the economy. What’s hard – nigh near impossible - is the sort of long-term structural and cultural changes that are going to be needed decades before to fix the problem.

The distance of the consequences likely means that we will squander this precious time that has been given to us (what I like to call the “Now!”) and instead wait until tipping points have already been reached at which the momentum for change becomes unavoidable.

Secondly, our political system of democracy is one ill-suited for solving these sorts of problems. History is littered with the debris of failed democracies that ended in severe social contraction precisely because the structure of democracies aren’t organized to respond to problems that involve large-scale sacrifice. And it is only sacrifice that is going to pull us back from the brink. Democracies are ill-suited political structures because – let’s be honest – for the most part, they’re filled with self-interested largely irrational actors who are more likely to join up with some populist political bandwagon that promises them more rather than a rational leader who promises them some pain and much less.

Any viewing of our current political situation at the moment shows a country in paralytic deadlock. Consider the following: The entire economy almost collapsed in the Fall of 2008 and here it is almost April of 2010 and we still do not have and do not seem close to having any sort of solid financial regulatory reform. The only version currently with a chance of passing is so toothless, that Paul Krugman, the unabashed liberal from the New York Times who criticized Obama for not having a large enough stimulus, has gone on the record saying that the bill is so terrible, we’d be better off without passing anything.

How could this be? How could a country so furious over behind held hostage to corporations that had to bailed-out not be able to muster the political capital to simply legislate for simple fixes like capital holding requirements and having oversight for the derivatives market? How is it beyond our political ability to re-instate the Glass-Steagall Act?

It’s happened because Republicans are being obstructionist purely for political advantage all the while pretending to be some beacon of principled politic, as if they shared no responsibility for half a century of perpetual deficit spending. Meanwhile, the Tea Party advocates are living in some fantasy world where any public works project is considered to be part of an over-reaching socialist agenda, simultaneously loathing the Federal bail-outs while resisting the very sort of financial regulatory reform that would help a repeat from occurring. And the Democrats? Well, they’re beholden to the corporations who have sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to defeat any meaningful attempts at regulation.

In other words, the political environment is so confused, so muddled, that we cannot agree on even stopping financial investment banks from holding us hostage again at some future point in time. It should be noted that this is a political choice that doesn’t cost us the American people anything. We don’t have to sacrifice a thing to enact these regulatory reforms. Indeed, we have everything to lose by not doing so. Yet we’re unable to do even this.

The problems we’re facing are going to require large sacrifices from the American public. But in a Democracy, no politician has ever succeeded by telling the American public they have to sacrifice. Requesting this sacrifice will be incrementally harder as the years go by because the situation for the average American will have gotten increasingly worse: Higher gas prices, less government assistance, more debt, fewer jobs. Asking people to sacrifice when they’re comfortable is one thing, asking people to sacrifice when they’re already hurting is considerably harder. With each passing point, the necessary solution becomes one that will become increasingly harder to muster either political courage or will.

It’s much more likely that within the long periods of time the crisis’ we’re facing will take to play out that we’ll further fracture into a nation of Tea Partiers, fringe conservatives, and a generally apathetic and distrustful public as the blame accentuates and pile up rather than unite together as a nation to solve these problems.

If things do start to get bad, to the point that optimists suggest might focus us as a nation to finally act together, I find it much more likely that instead of electing rational level-headed politicians, our democratic impulses will instead lead us to elect increasingly fringe personalities like Sarah Palin’s who appeal to populist sentiment during elections, but who as individuals will probably be the least suited to solving our problems. Instead of getting professorial Obama type of candidates and handing them the political capital to solve problems, we’re more likely to elect religious demagogues and extreme partisans.

All of which is to say that politically, the idea that we’re going to band together as a nation at some undefined future point seems, to myself, at least – almost farcical.

But what about technological innovation? Good old fashioned American know how? While I agree that this is our best bet to at least alleviate the effects of the problems we face (it’s been suggested that the invention of a single car battery which could double mileage could stave off the impending peak of oil depletion by as much as a couple of decades!) , at the end of the day, barring any sort of revolutionary cold fusion type of technology, we’re still faced with the fact that these technologies needed to be developed and implemented ten years ago to have a profound difference in outcomes.

Additionally, while the effects of peak oil could be alleviated by new technology, for many of the problems we’re facing like climate change, environmental destruction, and impending financial collapse, these are the sort of problems for which there are no quick fix technologies that can or could be developed. The only way to get ourselves out of these other impending disasters is massive structural and cultural change of the sort that we’re nowhere near adapting. It seems much more likely that we’ll collectively end up driving off the edge of the cliff while arguing with one another rather than saving the day and ourselves.

But that’s just me.

Like I said, I’m a pessimist.

David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller for the Government Accountability Office (GAO), was on NPR’s Fresh Air a couple days ago speaking, as he always does, about the out of control government debt and the impending costs of Medicaid and Social Security which threaten to break us.  As David explains, in just twenty-five years time, every penny of income for the Federal government will be used only to service the national debt.

Of special interest to me, however, was his use of the phrase “tipping point” – a phrase I use often on this blog, myself – a tipping point is the point at which the momentum for change becomes unavoidable.  In the context of national debt, it’s the point at which no matter what we do, we will be unable to face the consequences of past actions.  It’s the point at which attempting alternative behaviors becomes a useless endeavor.  And most important, in regards to national debt, it’s the point at which the U.S. becomes completely insolvent, an event which would likely have an unspeakable crippling ripple effect throughout the global economy.

On the show, David said:  ”One of the things that we need to do is first, we have to take steps to avoid passing a tipping point. Which tipping point would be a loss of confidence on behalf of foreign lenders in our ability to put our federal financial house in order…we’re going to need to spend more money in order to be able to create a better future but we just can’t layer it on top of what we’re already doing, because what we’re already doing is unaffordable and unsustainable over time. So we have to start making tough choices to reprioritize, to eliminate, to target, and to be able to give us the ability to do more in areas where it makes sense to do more.”

Ahh…tough choices.

Seriously, does anyone really have any confidence that with our increasingly polarized political system we’ll be able to elect officials who will be able to work together to fix this problem, especially when the fix necessarily calls for great sacrifice from the American people?

You can read the transcript of NPR’s interview with David here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=124460237

In another article in the New York Times, Moody’s Investor Service, a credit rating agency, has gone on the record to state that America and many European governments are coming increasingly closer to losing their AAA ratings.  While on it’s face not perhaps a completely dire predicament, many economists have suggested that losing this premium rating could be catastrophic in regards to the interest rate jump that would accompany future debts taken out under anything less than a AAA rating.  A single simple interest jump of 2 percentage points could translate into tens of billions of dollars in the short term, and hundreds of billions in the long-term as these countries attempt to service this debt over the next century.

Most striking was this quote: “Growth alone will not resolve an increasingly complicated debt equation,” Moody’s said. “Preserving debt affordability” — the ratio of interest payments to government revenues — “at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion.”

Did you catch that?

Will test social cohesion.

What’s remarkable about this statement is that it was offered in a public forum where statements tend to be even-handed and of the sort that are intended to inspire confidence.  That they were willing to say this publicly speaks volumes as to the urgency and seriousness with which these concerns are held privately by the good folks over at Moody’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/business/global/16rating.html?hp

Here Rep. Paul Kanjorsk, D-Pennsylvania from the 11th District and Chair of the Capital Markets Subcommittee talks about the Fall of 2008 and how close the country came to a total and wholesale economic collapse.

Check out approximately 1 minute and 20 seconds in where he says, “…it would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed…it would have been the end of our entire economic and political system as we know it.”

Nice to know we still haven’t made any of those financial regulatory reforms and that the investment banks are back to trading derivatives.

For those of you looking for some infuriating viewing and reading, here are some book and documentary recommendations.

“Control Room” – A fascinating documentary that looks into the newsroom of Al Jazeera and how they and their viewers saw the start of the war in Iraq.  Quite different from what you might have seen on Fox News.

“Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam.  A sociologist writes brilliantly about the declining levels of civic participation in the United States.

“America Betrayed” – A documentary that looks at the little explored perpetual string of scandals associated with the Army Corps of Engineers and the high-level fraud and corruption that has persisted within its ranks throughout the decades.

“Collapse of the Common Good” by Philip K. Howard.  Howard dutifully documents a nation of citizens unable to participate or interact with one another in any meaningful way in a society steeped towards litigiousness.

“The Corporation” – A documentary that examines the corporation as if a psychological entity and reveals that it has all the characteristics of clinical psychopathy.  Also demonstrates how corporations ended up getting the status of person-hood bestowed upon them by the Supreme Court.

“The Dark Side” by Jane Mayer.  In this book, Mayer documents the Bush administration’s move to instill torture as a normative function of the U.S. security apparatus.

“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” – A documentary that shows how one of America’s most profitable corporations used fake accounting tactics to obscure massive debts while its top shareholders made themselves obscenely wealthy.

“The End of Suburbia” – A documentary that looks at how America squandered so much of its wealth in the creation of a non-sustainable experiment known as “suburbia.”

“Failed States” by Noam Chomsky.  If you’ve never read Chomsky before, you don’t know what you’re missing.

“Flow” – A documentary that goes around the world examining the corporate take-over of water supplies in some of the poorest countries.

“Hacking Democracy” – A documentary that examines the fallibility of voting machines which are leased to governments by for-profit corporations; and the repeated but little publicized instances of fraud that have accompanied their use.

“Iraq for Sale: War Profiteers” – A documentary that exposes the profiteering of so many corporations in Iraq and the wholesale abuses that have been perpetrated onto the taxpayers of America.

“I.O.U.S.A.” – A documentary that examines America’s massive deficits and the long-term and endemic structural deficits that threaten to bankrupt us that our politicians have yet to even begin to look at.

“Twilight in the Desert” by Matthew Simmons.  In this book, Simmons, a former Bush/Cheney energy advisor examines the geological structure of the Saudia Arabia oil reservoirs and finds that they are decrepit, depleting, and in danger of collapse.

“The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein.  In this book, Klein examines the Milton Friedman school of economics at the University of Chicago and how it has been used as the philosophical basis to induce a rubric of “disaster capitalism” on emerging markets which tends to have the effect of eviscerating the middle class, and making a small group of people wealthy.

“The War on Democracy” – This documentary documents the U.S. involvement in the attempted coup against Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.

“Why We Fight” – A documentary that examines the endemic impulses of the military industrial complex and how our continuous wars are a result of this influence.

“The Panama Deception” – A documentary that examines the brief invasion of Panama by George Bush Sr. and the government’s propaganda regarding it’s relationship with Manuel Noriega.

“The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler.  In this book, Kunstler examines the growing threat of peak oil and its likely affects on a nation which has structured itself to be dependent upon the continuous flow of fossil fuels.

“Food, Inc.” – A documentary that looks at the transformation of the agricultural industry from one of small town farmers to large corporate giants and the scandalous conditions in which most of our food is now produced within.