Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
...an old proverb
Visit my blog, Twelfth Bough.
Books:
Revising Prose by Richard Lanham - read the reviews, buy it used
A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald
Video:
Funding the War is Killing the Troops
George Carlin: It's Called the American Dream...
The Onion: Class Warfare in Richistan
Politics:
Am I negative, or am I simply realistic?
First, two basic points about our economy:
1. Our economy runs on cheap oil.
2. Cheap oil is unsustainable in the immediate future.
For specifics, click through the links.
Peak Oil 101 - because you don't want to be the last to know, now do you?
The
issue is not one of "running out" so much as it is not having enough to
keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil
for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration
for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a
200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so
crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn't need to lose
all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A
loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.
In
a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn't need to
deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A
shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is
enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its
citizenry to poverty.
Jim Kunstler - for bracing slaps across the face regarding Peak Oil, every Monday morning
Now, some other items to consider...
3. The middle class has been struggling under flat wages and increasing expenses.
4. A lot of people live above their means. Circumstances vary.
Dr. Housing Bubble - lays out the problem
We live in a society were folks are forced to go into debt. Instead of addressing our negative savings rate, corporate America decides to create credit products that will put you even further in debt. They use the machines of marketing to subtly make you feel that having 10 credit cards, student loan debt, and steroid induced mortgages is okay. In fact, if you don’t have these products you are some loser flunky that simply doesn’t understand success 2.0 in this country. I’m sure many of you have seen the current spin of advertising. Have you seen the commercials where anyone paying with cash at the mall, fast food store, or ball game is seen as some slow scumbag? The subconscious message is this, “hey, you are a lowlife if you carry infectious cash, pay with a credit card and GET IN LINE!” So what if you want to pay with cash. In
fact, you should get kudos for doing this since it demonstrates that
you are paying with real world money instead of mortgaging your future
for a cup of espresso.
No kidding. But let's go on...
5. The financial sector is a smoky, mirror-filled house of cards (to grind a few metaphors together).
Behold! - a coherent explanation of the sub-prime mess, by Andrew Leonard
Enter the collateralized debt obligation. The CDO takes a pool of risky
mortgage loans and divides it into slices. (Wall Street calls these
slices "tranches," but that seems to be a word that makes the brains of
normal people freeze up, so we'll ignore it.) For simplicity's sake,
let's say that a mortgage-backed security gets divided into two slices
when it is transformed into a CDO -- a senior slice and a junior slice.
Let's say that the senior slice gets rated AAA+ and the junior slice
gets rated BBB-. But if anything goes wrong -- if the homeowners whose
loans are part of this security start missing their payments -- the
investors in the junior slice have to lose all of their money before
the investors in the senior slice start feeling any pain. That's the
beauty of the scheme. You take a bunch of bad loans and turn some of
them into high-rated gold and some into lower-rated bronze. You sell
the gold to the cautious and the bronze to the bold. If a few loans go
kaput, the bronze investors suffer. If all the loans go kaput,
everybody gets hurt. Unless there's a total financial meltdown,
everyone is happily making money.
Robert Reich - on Moral Hazard
It’s true that people tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll
be bailed out. Economists call this "moral hazard." But even when
they’re being reasonably careful, people cannot always assess risks
accurately. Many of the mostly poor home buyers who got into trouble
did NOT in fact know they couldn’t afford the mortgage payments they
were signing on to. The banks and mortgage lenders that pulled out all
the stops to persuade them to the contrary were in a far better
position to know; after all, they had lots of experience at this game.
So did the credit-rating agencies that gave these loans solid credit
ratings, as did the financiers who bundled them with less-risky loans
and sold them to other financial institutions, and the hedge fund
managers who quietly tucked them into their portfolios.
Charles Hugh Smith - and the subprime meteorite analogy
In comparing the dinosaurs' passing to the exponential extremes
which have proliferated in our financial realms, we have to ask: now that the subprime
meteorite has struck, are all these "had their day in the sun" financial species doomed to
extinction?
If all these dominant behemoths of the financial world were weakening from internal forces,
perhaps the so-called "subprime meltdown" is the "event" which nudges them off the cliff to
extinction.
Tanta - on the financially inept
I remain convinced that there's something wrong with blaming the
financially inept for not realizing that they are financially inept,
when those who are supposed to be financially ept--loan officers,
brokers, financial counselors, advice columnists in business
publications--spent the last several years refusing to tell them that
they were financially inept.
Meanwhile, while you're very busy working and not paying such close attention to current events...
6. Our media delivers highly suspect information, day after day.
Bob Somerby - for "mordant chuckles"
We’re all accustomed to analyzing the press corps’ work in terms of
bias. That’s an important type of discussion, but it sometimes obscures
the astounding incompetence of this least-capable cohort. And let’s be
clear: The mainstream press can survive such blunders because they
alone, among American professions, control what is written about
themselves. In other professions, clownish incompetence gets discussed
in the press. But when the press corps bumbles in its time-honored
ways, nary a word is spoken.
Eric Bohelert - on the press
Let's
put a very fine point on this: The New
York Times has
no idea how Bush came to his
decision to commute Libby's sentence. None. The decision was arguably the
most momentous political verdict of Bush's second term and Times reporters were absolutely clueless -- lacking a single
independent source -- as to how Bush came to it,
and what went into the White House deliberations.
Glenn Greenwald - because brain cells are a terrible thing to waste
Yet it does not matter. Even though the condition they all proclaimed
must be met in order to stay has not been met, they still all insist we
must stay. It's always the same: (1) If X does not happen by Y date, there is no justification for staying, they proclaim;
(2) X has not happened;
(3) We must stay. Here is but a tiny sample of
the consensus that the political Establishment spewed in May. If you
listened to any of this, you wasted brain cells, because it all proved
to be completely meaningless, as always:
Phil Nugent - on patriotism
By contrast, Ms. Stupegia understands what it means to pay tribute to
war veterans in the modern Republican age. She understands this as well
as President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and any of the Republican
presidential candidates. One pays tribute to those who have died
defending our country by inviting others to applaud your show of
patriotism in claiming to care about the veterans.
Stephen Pizzo - on detecting BS
For some months now I've had a link on my own site
to a remarkable address given 38-years ago to a convention of English
teachers. It was delivered by author and scholar, Neil Postman way back
in 1969. The speech was quite long, and some of it dealt with teaching.
Which is why I suspect many folks never cut through the whole thing. So
I've edited out the extraneous matter leaving intact Postman's core
message, which I would summarize as, "Citizens living in a democracy,
if they hope to keep that democracy, need to learn how to tell the
difference between facts and bullshit."
And, therefore, this is where we are now. Welcome to America.
Chris Floyd - Post-Mortem America
Tomorrow is here.
The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead.
Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore.
It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or
mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete
realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy
and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the
way that people live.
Bill Christison - on justice before peace
All of this, of course, is
logically nonsensical. Take a minute and think of the mess the
peace movement has created. First, the very name reflects the
movement's shallowness. What good is a hypocritical, utterly
out-of-touch and ineffective "peace movement," when beyond
question ordinary people on this earth want justice before they
want peace? The U.S. government and its ultra-close ally Israel
actually want more unjust colonial wars and covert action to
strengthen their own already unjust influence over a major part
of the globe, in this case the Middle East. Peace above all is
for those who support the status quo, but if you're in
that category you're in a small minority. So let's banish the
peace movement and get a global justice movement going.
Peace may be all right long-term, but if you're one of the angry
billions on this earth constantly surrounded by a stench of
injustice that smothers all hope, chances are that, in your
mind, peace should follow justice, not precede it. Chances are,
in fact, that you have no favorable thoughts of any type about
U.S. peaceniks.
And though all of us surely bear responsibility for this mess, some have relentlessly jostled and elbowed their way to the front of the line.
Philip Agre - on conservatism
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the
most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically
internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the
aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals
often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to
mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal
of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social
and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality
and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy,
are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply
to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism
that the people must literally love the order that dominates them.
Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is
perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists
such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of
voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety
of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives,
rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe
that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its
intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast,
believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the
antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
So what to do?
Carolyn Baker - Start by accepting reality.
The first thing I'm not going to tell you is that collapse can be
avoided or that human ingenuity and technology will come up with
something to spare us from it. I'm not going to tell you that there
will be some mass movement-some magic http://www.collapse.org/
that will organize progressives into a groundswell of protest, writing
letters to Congress, creating blogs and websites, supporting the
"right" candidate, and asking for donations. No, what I'm going to tell
you is that as a nation and as a planet, we are screwed, fucked, and
shit out of luck, or if you prefer Spanish, estamos jodidos.
Prepare
Antidote - Check frequently to remind yourself that, bad as it is, we can still love and adore something sweet, something harmless, something that will make us smile. Love.
Religion:
Religion and politics can be tricky, but the basic tenets of Christianity are not complicated. It boils down to this: love one another. If you have this religion, whatever name you call it by, your politics will follow. And nobody ever said it would be easy.
Ray Dubuque - on Being Liberal
A Quiz - on Catholic teaching
Religion Reading List - from the Blind Chihuahua
Art:
William Blake Archives - Search and Enjoy
Home Improvement - for the Moderately Ambitious
Poison Pen Letters - For your venting enjoyment, instructions by TRex
Alternative News Sources:
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