Entries Tagged 'Collapse' ↓

Much ado is being made of the rioting in England, and for good reason: it’s massively destructive and is scaring the bejeezus out of those of us who enjoy and understand the benefits of civilized, lawful society.

Much blame is being placed on the thugs doing the damage. Fair enough; the idiots are wrecking things that others spent their lives building. That said, the rest of us have to recognize that when people grow up as self-entitled prats with very little hope of achieving a better future (social mobility is quite low in England), well, they may ‘act out.’

Some commentators have complained that these thugs have “weak moral fibre,” or are otherwise fundamentally defective. They may well have weak moral fibre, but moral fibre is something you develop over time by doing things that require moral fibre, and by observing that being honest, hard-working, and contributing to society is valued. It is quite clear by the behaviour of those at the top that this is not how you get ahead in our society; the ethic of those in power is “If you can get away with it, it’s okay.”

These low-level thugs are simply showing the brutish, crude manifestation of the same behaviour their ‘betters’ have been exhibiting for years.

Here’s a decent description of why this is happening, courtesy of strongmince on Reddit:

The looting, attacks on property and police are an entirely predictable and to an extent justifiable reaction to decades of rising deprivation, poverty, unemployment, lack or very poorly maintained social housing, police brutality, racial profiling and shit schools in many deprived areas in London with variable amounts of “regeneration” (read gentrification) there to attempt to fix these problems. In general the governments attacks on the youth in England (abolishment of education maintenance allowance, absurd rise in tuition fees) and attacks on the working class (harsh austerity measures finishing off what Thatcher started including privitisation of large chunks of the public sector, continual erosion of any remaining labour movements, erosion of labour rights, casualisation of work, underemployment, unemployment, the near constant spectre of crisis, poorly defined class enemies who seem immune to any attack, huge rises in energy prices, increase in VAT etc…..) need to also be considered. All coupled together, a disaffected youth with little to no future prospects, brought up in poverty living in supposedly one of the most prosperous areas of western Europe were given an opportunity to air their rage with little to lose.

Putting innocent people in danger is a big fucking no-no in my book (sorry insurrectionists.. j/k), but what I’ve seen seems to corroborate with my friends and others accounts of events that these fuckers are a minority. This is not a homogenous group of people with one motive, its a mixture of motives, opportunities and emotions. Denouncing all as acting like one generic “criminal” ignores the very reasons that will cause this to flare up again. Stating that these kids are “politically unaware” is ridiculous when you consider the items in the list above are all fucking political, they exist and are real things being felt directly by human beings.

Anyway, living in an area thats been under attack tonight, I’ve been running around helping friends and family who have been stuck getting home from work, scared etc.. so apologies for any incoherence.

The Guardian has some good background, too. A key quote:

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

The middle class is the foundation of economic and political stability. The extremes of rich and poor are both destabilizing, the former because their greed is limitless and the latter because they have no hope.

UPDATE:

Interesting the online response. Lots of people saying that the rioters are ‘yobs’ and essentially unredeemable. They don’t suggest a solution, but presumably it would be extermination or walling them off so they don’t harm the rest of us. I wonder if they feel the same about the bank CEOs who crashed the world economy in 2008? It would be easy to make the same argument that some of those banksters are irredeemable sociopaths.  In fact, as much damage as these ‘yobs’ are doing, the yobs running the world economy into the ground have done far more by many orders of magnitude.

The US ‘debt ceiling deal’ simply reinforces that, for sensible people, Obama is definitely not ‘the guy’ we hoped he would be. And never was. Way back when first elected, he appointed Steven Chu as his Energy Secretary, and one of the first things Chu said was that California was running out of water and agriculture there couldn’t last much longer – and the cities were in big trouble, too. He was muzzled after that. That was an ominous sign that Obama was not much more tolerant of truth than Bush II.

Since then, of course, Obama has greatly expanded the unconstitutional presidential powers that Bush II had no right taking in the first place, and it’s been one cave-in after another. In fact, it seems clear to me that Obama is not so much caving in to the radical right but seems…fine with much of what they propose. How else to describe all his pre-emptive capitulations?

Obama started with health care, which was a huge and, to me anyway, obvious blunder. In the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, after the Clintons failed with their health care initiative, Obama goes with health care instead of jobs. The ultimate bill ended up being virtually identical to one proposed by Republicans some years earlier.

He should have started with jobs and cleaning up Wall Street and lobbying in general, but instead appointed half of Goldman Sachs as his financial advisors. It’s no surprise the US in in big fiscal shit now; he didn’t plunge the toilet first. He should have started with energy independence, which would have put people back to work and spent taxpayer dollars on green energy projects that reduced US dependence on foreign oil.

Definitely things are coming to a head. This latest US debt ceiling deal just punts the problem down the road a few months. I think we’re going to see a realignment of world power as companies and countries try to decouple themselves from the US, which is now more clearly than ever headed toward fiscal disaster. It probably won’t be immediate, and a lot of countries are much more heavily tied to the US than they would like to be, but you can see it coming when the ratings agencies are seriously threatening to downgrade the US credit rating. There must be enormous pressure on them NOT to do so, but they’re talking openly about it as if the US were Greece. And it has actually been happening, as companies relocate head offices and assets overseas, as are the rich.

The crises are coming so thick and fast that there is no time to deal with one before the next hits, from the Murdoch scandals to the US debt issue, from climate change to  oil depletion, from middle eastern uprisings to continuing recession in the US. The problems are systemic, and I can’t see a change until people in the developed countries take serious action against the powers-that-be. The super-rich have forgotten, don’t realise, or most likely don’t care that the middle class is the foundation of a stable society. At some point, enough Americans will be reduced to poverty with no hope of returning to the middle class, and when people lose hope, leaders lose their heads.

There are two options open to clean up the ‘leader of the free world’: nonviolent protest on the scale of the Civil Rights movement, or…. The super-rich are doing everything they can to destroy any possibility of nonviolent systemic change; they have corrupted the political process through lobbying, they have corrupted the media via Fox News, they have corrupted the public discourse via libertarian/extremist right-wing ‘think tanks’ like the Heritage Foundation and and other lying trash, and they have worked very hard to ensure that alternate loci of power – like unions – are destroyed. No matter what you think of unions, point me to a country with a high standard of living that does not also have a high degree of unionisation – they are few. Especially in the absence of a strong and honest government, unions are a necessary counterbalance to global corporations.

No conspiracy theory is required, although quite obviously scum like the Koch brothers and Murdoch are doing their best to control things. All it requires is many people voting or otherwise putting their short-term self-interest before that of everyone else and you get where the US is now.

I see no possibility of change until a serious crisis comes, and unfortunately that means much worse than the current recession. And when crisis hits and the old ways of organization are questioned and assaulted, the leaders who rise up will determine whether we end up with a better democracy, a more stable society, and a sustainable way of living – or whether things get exponentially worse.

We are nearing a tipping point, I believe, but it is impossible to predict what will be the trigger. It may seem to be something minor, but that’s only because we studiously ignored all the straw previously piled on the camel’s back.

The world oil supply is running down and we have no ready substitutes.

Climate change is happening now – stronger storms, more devastating wildfires, rising sea levels, diseases spreading – the list goes on, and there is every indication that it will continue to worsen.

The US economy, upon which the world economy still depends, is unstable due to corruption at the top, from most Congressmen to presidential advisors all being former bank executives.

Our leaders are not moving quickly enough to protect the economy in general, never mind your or my livelihoods in particular. Some of our leaders are actually doing things to worsen the situation, such as denying the very existence of climate change or ignoring the ever-rising price of oil.

We are facing “interesting times.” The turbulence has begun, and it’s buffeting us from all directions. Have you ever had the experience of going for a walk and, no matter which direction you were going, the wind always seemed to be in your face? That’s what the future is going to feel like for many people.

I could (and have) proposed large-scale responses to the situation, which frankly at this point need to be a WWII-scale mobilization to re-industrialize and re-do our living arrangements to drastically cut oil dependence immediately and, long-term, eliminate pollution of all kinds by moving to a ‘restorative economy.’

But we’re not going to do that in the foreseeable future, are we? Or anything even remotely close. If you take your family’s security seriously, then you will do what you can to buffer yourself against the coming storms. The best way I have seen to do that is Transition Initiative, and you should seriously consider joining (or starting) one in your area.

TI is a completely grassroots, apolitical initiative, and this is what they do:

Transition Network helps communities deal with climate change and shrinking supplies of cheap energy (peak oil). This process, which we call Transition, aims to create stronger, happier communities.

That’s how we’re going to get through this; by working together in local communities. As the Transition Network site puts it well:

What we are convinced of is this:

• • if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late
  • if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little
  • but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.

Your level of involvement can be minimal or massive; the choice is yours. Here are some things that local TIs do:

• Teach people how to grow a garden, save seeds, preserve foods
• Educate people by showing documentaries about peak oil, climate change, solutions, and more
• Host online and IRL forums to discuss and learn
• Show people how to insulate their homes or build a solar greenhouse

Like it or not, the world is changing. You can adapt, or not.

At the rate we’re going, we may not make it even that long. I’m not really a “doomer,” but I have always maintained that political events may bring a sudden end to our current idea of civilization long before climate change or even peak oil really set in. And current political events in the Middle East should be giving any thoughtful person plenty of reason to wonder if they will be a catalyst to rapid change.

By-the-way, apparently the Mayans didn’t really predict the end of the world in 2012; that’s simply when their calendar ran out, and we have interpreted that as the end of times. Interestingly, the Christian tradition predicts an apocalypse – which will start in the Middle East. I’m no expert on either, so readers please feel free to chime in.

I’ll lay out my concern, and I have no doubt that it is shared by the Pentagon, top U.S., British, and other government officials, and anyone with a stake in anything – family or business – in the Middle East.

• There are currently popular uprisings in several countries in the Middle East. The Tunisian government has fallen, Egypt’s government is threatened, and now so is Yemen’s.
• All of these states were tacitly or concretely supported by the U.S. and other Western countries like the U.K. and France.
• All of these states are, or in the case of Tunisia, were dictatorships. Elections, if they took place, were a farce.
• Fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood, while currently keeping relatively quiet, are almost certainly awaiting their opportunity to step in and seize power, as they have done elsewhere.

So far, we are not staring into the abyss, and we can sit comfortably in our developed, more-or-less democratic and peaceful countries and wish the residents of these countries well. We don’t depend upon Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen in any real way.

However.

Saudi Arabia is also a dictatorship. Iraq is hardly stable. Iran’s autocratic government came close to being overthrown in 2009 in the Green Revolution. These are major oil-producing nations, where Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are not. If they are destabilized in any way, the price of oil will go through the roof, and the U.S. economy will literally grind to a halt.

I do mean literally; essentially 100% of transportation of people and goods in the United States is via diesel or gas-powered means: Planes, trains, trucks, and cars. Industrial farming is utterly dependent upon oil in various forms. Everything plastic – which these days is almost everything – is made of oil. I have discussed this elsewhere, as have many others better educated on the topic than I. There is a reason the Pentagon is planning for oil depletion.

Whether the reins of power are seized by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other entity, or whether real democracy and elections break out, decades of support by oil-junkie Western nations for the former despotic regimes is hardly likely to endear those who take power to the West.

They may also be economically unsophisticated. Remember the oil shocks of the 1970′s? There were long line-ups at the gas pumps, prices soared, and we experienced nasty recessions. That was when the Iranians persuaded their fellow Arabs to use “the oil weapon” against the United States. It was a very successful weapon of mass economic destruction – but the backlash was that the subsequent recessions caused the price of oil to plunge, and that slashed revenues for the oil-producing nations.

The Saudis and others learned the hard way that their economies – and therefore the security of the despots in power – was directly tied to the economic prosperity of the United States. Incoming, unfriendly governments may well not remember that lesson, or think that it no longer applies, given the tremendous worldwide demand for oil and the current price of ~$90/barrel.

If any major oil-producing nation significantly reduces oil sales to the U.S. for any reason – unfriendly government, terrorist bombing of oil distribution facilities, war, civil unrest – the price of oil is going up-up-up, and our economies are going down-down-down. Fast.

What that leads to is anyone’s guess. Here’s  mine.

First, I should state that what we could and should do are not likely to be what we actually do. We could, for example, immediately redirect much electricity generation to producing wind, solar, nuclear, etc power plants. We could and should immediately start retrofitting cities with electrified buses and light rail. Above all, we could and should fund conservation measures and local agriculture. That has the potential to drastically cut out oil consumption quickly, possibly saving the economy from collapse.

However, again.

We have had years of warnings. We have had “oil shocks” followed by recessions. We are currently in a bad recession, yet suffering food and fuel price inflation. And, the two most important obstacles:

• Our own governments are not as democratic as we like to believe; they are largely captive to monied special interests like oil companies. There is a reason they continue to receive large subsidies despite earning record profits.
• We are all oil junkies; most of us expect to be able to commute to work and Walmart.

Anybody trying to change the nation’s course will have to overcome both these special interests and a mass of people who feel they are entitled.

We could be in for a bumpy ride sooner rather than later. I hope not; I hope we have the time and wisdom to transition our economies off oil dependency. However, up until now we have not demonstrated that wisdom, and it looks like time is running out sooner than expected.