US Nationalism and Peak Oil

[Gil Hamilton]

Support for the Republican party in the base only collapsed the moment Bush started ramming through pro-immigration legislation, however.

On the other hand, Bush would have been merely a vaguely regrettable one term President if not for that Scapegoat #3 on my list; Foreigners. 9/11 was possibly the best thing that happened to Bush's presidency in that regard.

Now, the Republican party is losing all but the Faithful because it's becoming clear that they are hideously corrupt and abusive of the power that had been handed to them. Hell, on Bill Moyer's Journal (excellent show for real political discussion!) the other night on QED, they had the same lawyer who wrote the impeachment procedures against Bill Clinton, no liberal or Democrat, in a discussion panel who said it was vital that Bush be impeached now for his crimes, because it was of great importance to reversing all the power that the President had granted himself and fix the damage being done to how government does business. It's not just just his pro-immigration stance that's turning people against the Republican party; the Republican party and President Bush in particular are becoming one of the biggest bipartisan issues that people are agreeing upon. They are too corrupt and they have to go. I think that's what's chaffing alot of (ex) Republican nipples; they got what they asked and fought for all that time... it just turned out to be a hideous beast.

[Knife]

I mean - look at the opposition to something like universal health care! If people are that scared communism might gain a toehold in the US they'll let people suffer and die because they can't access medical care do you really think gas at $5 or $10 a gallon would suddenly make them change their minds?

Hmm, my knee jerk reaction would be to agree with that. However, thinking about it, it may not be the case. A lot of the anti commie shit might go the way of the do-do with the generation that grew up with the red scare aging and passing in the next couple decades.

My grandma still won't buy Japanese products and bitches about the Germans, while I have no problem with sony or VW's. A lot of the anti socialization shit might tone down a bit in twenty or so years. Add on top of that the actual need to tone it down and it might be a different situation.

[NeoGoomba]

The thing is, I can see IP's post's content taking place now and has been taking place for years it would seem. Whether that is down to the topic here or not is debatable, but I've not doubt PO would accelerate the trend if it exists as I believe it does.

Fool. I, and others of the Faithful will be ascending on golden wings into enternal paradise when you foul, unclean beasts will be struggling to rape the earth of her precious gemstones to generate petty warmth. Don't you all understand? It is so much easier to accept divine trancendance than to toil under such...philistine conditions!

See you all in oblivion!

[Illuminatus Primus]

The thing is, I can see IP's post's content taking place now and has been taking place for years it would seem. Whether that is down to the topic here or not is debatable, but I've not doubt PO would accelerate the trend if it exists as I believe it does.

I did say the U.S. would slide FURTHER into illiberal democracy. People can claim that pessimism regarding the present is as unfounded in the past, but I defy those people to explain how the past decade has not shown trends toward harder times.

Energy which was plentiful and a laughing matter in the '90's is not now. Weather trends have gotten worse. Energy issues have pressured the U.S. into a more acrimonious and unpleasant foreign policy that inexorably traps us in the southwest Asia and exacerbates terrorism by politically and economically disenfranchised, uneducated religious fundamentalists at the edge of the world. The U.S.'s economy has become further and further based on absurd financing and credit schemes - seemingly generating more imaginary fiat money by just moving the existing money around - totally free of productive output (the average American owes more on credit than he has saved in the bank, giving us the unenviable status of having a net personal savings rate that is a negative number). All of the major auto manufacturers now make more money financing their cars than producing them. Credit card companies now claim over 5000 dollars in debt from each average American. They now yield nearly a third of their revenues from late fees. Sixteen years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the U.S. led an international coalition unopposed by any significant factor to arguably the most one sided military triumph in history with the expulsion of Hussein's Baathist Iraq from Kuwait. Bush the Elder declared the "new world order." America's strife came from loonies out in Montana driveling about UN black helicopters and chemtrails. Now, large numbers of young Muslim men want to kill us and our sepoys and clients worldwide. The environmental destruction of China, the endless expansion of "neoliberal" economics (which basically stands for the adoption of the USD as a reserve currency and favorable balances of trade and prices for the American consumer and corporations in exchange for IMF/World Bank bribes), the vast sense of personal and national alienation are all consequences of this trend. We've just allowed ourselves to be doped up heavier - like the heroin addict who must move on to more and more veins with more and more frequent injections - with ever bigger cars and houses in more and more disconnected developments devoid of local culture, community consciousness, or civil responsibility. Ignoring the blight of the inner cities and the drug problems by moving further and further away, by moving our children in private schools or ever escalating magnet and gifted programs, isolating them from the masses that have been given up on since the mid-'70's. Back when we had a choice to manage scarcity and chose to largely ignore it, and when real wages for the working class stopped increasing.

American things used to be better because they were better. Now Americans think American things are better because they are American.

Dick Cheney has delivered speeches where he acknowledged peak oil and resource scarcity. They know that its gone on too long, too far. That not just our leaders, but each one of us, both individually and collectively, chose to ignore the problem and keep taking hits from the dope needle, anesthetizing the pain of purposeless modern American consumerism with even shinier and more elitist gimmicks. They're just trying to wall off that 5% I was talking about. I won't pretend to be a populist. My father is an anesthesiologist and a senior partner in the regional anesthesiologists' practice. My grandfather was a wealthy landowner and businessman. Economically I probably belong to that class and my father voted for George W. Bush to selfishly protect his paychecks and capital gains. But looking from the outside in, well off Americans gave up on everyone else a long time ago, and simply want to squeeze as much out as possible before the gig is up. And the rest of the classes has decided to ignore the signs and use jingoism, consumerism, and celebrity bullshit to cover up any fear or concern, to alleviate themselves from the burden of civic and personal responsibility while their child, who statistically speaking is more than 50% likely to not leave high school with his or her diploma. They choose to pay paltry wages for lawn care and restaurant meals, where they are served by illegal immigrant labor, but go home and scream alongside Bill O'reilly at Mexico.

Watch MTV. Over-the-top extravagant hip hop music celebrating absurd lives of cocaine trafficking and promiscuity with inner city women while dancing about in diamonds is the track by which the average college student lives their life. Whole shows are dedicated to over-the-top, inappropriate, nouveau rich displays of wealth in birthday parties for their spoiled little brat sixteen year old. I should know, I went to a high school where one of those shows was shot.

Authors can't write irony and poignant foreshadowing this well. This decade reads and will read as if torn out of The Great Gatsby, with America standing in for Jay Gatsby - spiritually and personally dead, drowning in hidden losses, and surrounded by gaudy displays financed by unethical gains.

Anyone who can't believe things are getting worse is obviously under a rock or willfully delusional. I was in some absurd exurb a hour commute outside Tampa (in good traffic). I was there to meet a friend, and they could not meet me for a couple hours. Bereft of anything to do, I tried in vain to find a cafe or someplace one could quietly read and wait. And hard as I tried, it was physically impossible to do anything in this place without driving long distances to a big box store, go in and out and buy something. There was literally nothing else for one to do to sustain oneself. I asked a clerk at the Target if there was a bookstore. And then a Publix. No one in this postmodern shithole could even explain to me where a man could go if he wanted to physically read books with content in them. This is the kind of community that Americans collectively demanded into being in the last ten years, and I can't really say I feel that bad about its future.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shit, there goes my dream of immigrating to America. I know that I need to escape the Third World. Where the fuck can I go without getting fucked?! You guys make it sound so scary, and if worse hits worse, you're probably right.

[Illuminatus Primus]

This is the most substantiative, informative, and grounded post on the subject of peak oil that I have yet seen on this board, and frankly, it's probably your greatest contribution to the board in the whole time you've been posting on it. It is both succinct and comprehensive, and I wish I could force everyone who posts on SD.net to read it.

Oh, and thank you very much.

I've not been alive very long, but its obvious to me that things have gotten worse in my adolescence and young adulthood, and while I've made mistakes, growing up is about taking responsibility. And I've made serious thought about my ability to make a life a man can at least be content with, if not accomplish all of one's dreams. And that means being honest with hardship and the future, something I think a lot of people don't want to admit to. There's a lot of people who don't want to admit they're not going to be able to spend all day blowing time on SDN and the rest of the Internet indefinitely, in their balmy climate controlled house, eating Ramen blissfully for the rest of their life.

I'd be happy marrying my girlfriend, and spending the rest of my life tending to a small farm and repairing the wind turbines and riding the carriage to and fro the market, and raising my children. If that's how bad it gets, at least I've psychologically prepared myself and found a pocket of happiness that one can call his own. Maybe not what this generation was raised to expect. Hoping instead for the American Dream - to get everything and earn none of it - but its more than the most people on the Earth today, and certainly most of history have ever had. And preparing oneself and being honest with what the future holds so one can protect their loved ones is a basic human duty of any person on this board, and anyone anywhere.

The choice is not one between your dreams and failure, but the choice is between a road for self-reliance and self-actualization, or regret and loss by spending all the remaining time and energy wishing and hoping it doesn't happen instead of at least taking moments to think of alternatives, and what one could content themselves with - the best of options.

Even if we're wrong and its not as bad, it is certain that the U.S. populace has collectively and electorally made bad choices for a long time, and the U.S. WILL undergo economic troubles and loss. The decaying infrastructure, the overextended foreign policy, the absurdly irresponsible modern credit regime, the weak dollar, and terrorism will assure this. People need to take control of their lives and adapt. Each of us is only here because our direct ancestors all the way back to a soup of self-replicating organic molecules adapted for survival.

Shit, there goes my dream of immigrating to America. I know that I need to escape the Third World. Where the fuck can I go without getting fucked?! You guys make it sound so scary, and if worse hits worse, you're probably right.

Well, North America has been exploited for less time than the Old World, and our supply of coal, uranium, oil shale, arable land, lower population density and gross population, and exploitable waterways and rivers actually places us in a position of overall long term survival. In 100 years there will still be a North America largely full of culturally European, largely European-descended English speakers with a high standard of living and life expectancy and opportunity relative to the rest of the world.

However, there are other alternatives. South America may be not well off, but Brazil might pull through due to their size, petroleum independence, and plentiful arable land and natural resources. Scandinavia and France will do very well. Russia, all things considered, will probably not do too bad, what with warming temperatures making it actually more hospitable and increasing arable land, having plentiful natural resources, enough domestic petroleum to keep them going, and nuclear technology. South Asia and Africa is a fucking mess. I fully expect a nuclear war in south Asia in the next 100 years. North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, and Iran? Not enough room and desperation redoes much of the game theory on nuclear war. To say nothing of their terrible environmental contamination and exploitation. Africa is going to eat itself alive between AIDS and collapsing farm yields and dried up fuel. The Muslim world is just going to starve to death, and nothing is going to prevent that.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Shit, there goes my dream of immigrating to America. I know that I need to escape the Third World. Where the fuck can I go without getting fucked?! You guys make it sound so scary, and if worse hits worse, you're probably right.

Staying in the Third World will simply send you into poverty, then death.

[Xon]

Illuminatus Primus, that was a disturbing, but accurate, descripting of current America I have read.

[phongn]

Illuminatus Primus, that was a disturbing, but accurate, description of current America I have read.

I was trying to think of something to add to his essays on America but for the life of me I can't quite think of what to add.

[Broomstick]

I can think of something to add - get the hell out of Florida.

Here in bumfuck, Northwest Indiana, we have bookstores where people are encouraged to come in, sit down, and browse. We have coffeehouses (and not just starbucks) and parks.

A little further away, Chicago is a relatively pedestrian friendly city, with miles of sidewalks, more bookstores, more coffehouses, more parks, open-air eateries, and downtown has several city-sponsored locales providing free-of-charge resting areas for the public. There is mass transit, so you don't need a car even for long distances.

Which is not to say it's perfect (and some spots it's downright ugly) but the picture painted by Illuminatus Primus is by no means universal

[Broomstick]

I've not been alive very long, but its obvious to me that things have gotten worse in my adolescence and young adulthood

That is entirely true.

Guess what - the economy runs in cycles. I've lived through a couple of ups-and-downs. What is entirely new and frightening to you is something I have seen variants of before.

And that means being honest with hardship and the future, something I think a lot of people don't want to admit to. There's a lot of people who don't want to admit they're not going to be able to spend all day blowing time on SDN and the rest of the Internet indefinitely, in their balmy climate controlled house, eating Ramen blissfully for the rest of their life.

Well, no, because everyone has ups and downs. I've lived in really shitty conditions for years at a time. Know what? I'll enjoy the internet, and my ramen, for as long as I can have them. The climate control is a nice bonus, but I've lived without that, too.

I'd be happy marrying my girlfriend, and spending the rest of my life tending to a small farm and repairing the wind turbines and riding the carriage to and fro the market, and raising my children. If that's how bad it gets, at least I've psychologically prepared myself and found a pocket of happiness that one can call his own. Maybe not what this generation was raised to expect.

Not universally - my neighbors down the road, the Amish, have had that lifestyle for generations. In fact, it's probably a good thing they've preserved the technology and know-how of that sort.

Even if we're wrong and its not as bad, it is certain that the U.S. populace has collectively and electorally made bad choices for a long time, and the U.S. WILL undergo economic troubles and loss. The decaying infrastructure, the overextended foreign policy, the absurdly irresponsible modern credit regime, the weak dollar, and terrorism will assure this.

And we have been here before - most recently from 1929 through 1941. Or did you think the Great Depression "just happened"? Hoover was unapoligetically pro-business, perhaps even more so than the current Bush. The stock market was turned into a Ponzi scheme. The rich were amazingly rich and getting more so, and the general population running hard to stay in place when the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

Then there were the boom-and-bust cycles throughout the 19th Century...

Which is why it's not enough to know historical facts, one needs a historical perspective as well.

People need to take control of their lives and adapt.

Wisdom for the ages, that.

South Asia and Africa is a fucking mess. I fully expect a nuclear war in south Asia in the next 100 years. North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, and Iran?

Frankly, most days I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

Africa is going to eat itself alive between AIDS and collapsing farm yields and dried up fuel.

But, on the upside, with the Great Human Die-Off the wildlife should do much better in the future than in the 20th Century.

The Muslim world is just going to starve to death, and nothing is going to prevent that.

If Muslim men keep blowing people up no one will want to do anything to prevent that....

[Xon]

Which is why it's not enough to know historical facts, one needs a historical perspective as well.

Historically, there has always been bountiful resources avaliable to rebuild after a crash. Guess what; as time gos on this gets to be less and less the case.

This makes a big fucking difference when trying to restart an industry based on metal or petroleum if you do not need bleeding cutting edge technology to get the stuff in economically viable levels.

[AniThyng]

Shit, there goes my dream of immigrating to America. I know that I need to escape the Third World. Where the fuck can I go without getting fucked?! You guys make it sound so scary, and if worse hits worse, you're probably right.

Staying in the Third World will simply send you into poverty, then death.

Feel that way about Malaysia and Singapore as well?

[Mr. T]

Africa is going to eat itself alive between AIDS and collapsing farm yields and dried up fuel.

But, on the upside, with the Great Human Die-Off the wildlife should do much better in the future than in the 20th Century.

Just a minor nitpick. It's always been assumed in the threads I'd read that Africa is fucked in terms of food seeing as alot of their current food supply comes from surplus first world agriculture. But after the peak, when globalization will reverse itself to some extent, won't we see the Multi-national Corporations dropping out of Africa, if not collapsing all together and returning their cash-cropping agricultural land making bullshit produce for the West of things like "snow peas" back to local African farmers who in turn will be able to feed the locales with their own crops for a change?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Africa is going to eat itself alive between AIDS and collapsing farm yields and dried up fuel.

But, on the upside, with the Great Human Die-Off the wildlife should do much better in the future than in the 20th Century.

Just a minor nitpick. It's always been assumed in the threads I'd read that Africa is fucked in terms of food seeing as alot of their current food supply comes from surplus first world agriculture. But after the peak, when globalization will reverse itself to some extent, won't we see the Multi-national Corporations dropping out of Africa, if not collapsing all together and returning their cash-cropping agricultural land making bullshit produce for the West of things like "snow peas" back to local African farmers who in turn will be able to feed the locales with their own crops for a change?

Africa's fucked for a whole bunch of reasons. There aren't many African regimes whose list of priorities goes very far beyond "Keep the regime in power" and "make the elites disgustingly rich at the expense of the plebes." Africa's been exploited more than assisted for most of the last century, so it has only peripherally benefitted from the largesse of the First World. Even so, they've gotten enough that they've developed unsustainable populations of shockingly ignorant people.

You'll see two Africas in the coming century, the parts of it with resources worth fighting over, and the rest of it, which will generally be left to its own devices. And one wouldn't want to live in either one. The parts of Africa worth fighting for . . . their people aren't going to be materially better off under foreign occupation, since if the locals can't produce, then the occupying powers will merely send in their own people and start shooting locals en-masse to keep them in line. And in the parts of Africa that are cut off, it will be utter anarchy, and they won't even be able to feed their own populations. Global warming is already expected to adversely effect African crop yields.

Finally, to address the earlier point. Wildlife is fucked. In Africa, wildlife already suffers heavily from both the traditional poaching, and to fuel the bushmeat trade. As foreign aid dries up in a place like the Congo, guess what's going to be on the menu more and more? Gorilla and chimpanzee. I fully expect many of the endangered large animals to be extinct by the time the next century or two comes to pass. Not to mention that, in other places, we're having to spend a lot of money to maintain and restore habitat. Money that's going to be diverted to fund the railways and mining needed to get through the downside of the oil curve. And with nations using as much coal as possible to fill in the gap left behind by petroleum . . . global warming isn't going to go away. So sure, it might be great for the ecosystems and wildlife that manage to survive the self-destructive orgy of global economic meltdown and global warming . . . it's just that a lot of species aren't going to get to live long enough to see the other side.

[Surlethe]

Which is why it's not enough to know historical facts, one needs a historical perspective as well.

Historically, there has always been bountiful resources avaliable to rebuild after a crash. Guess what; as time gos on this gets to be less and less the case.

This makes a big fucking difference when trying to restart an industry based on metal or petroleum if you do not need bleeding cutting edge technology to get the stuff in economically viable levels.

The Great Depression is different from the coming crash because the US was self-sufficient at the time. Oil production was rising exponentially, which meant energy was both abundant and cheap. We could burn our way into prosperity even though inefficiency was greater than 20,000 BTU per dollar.

Needless to say, this is not the case now. The US is gravely dependent on imported energy -- 29 quadrillion BTUs of crude and some 5-7 quadrillion BTUs of other energy (mostly Canadian natural gas). As Duchess is so fond of pointing out, recovering from the crash will require human labor to make up for the lost oil and gas imports until we can replace that energy with an electric infrastructure.

Historical knowledge and perspective are gravely important, but it's also necessary to recognize the differences between the past and present. They are very relevant. IP, Duchess, and I and many other young members haven't lived through more than one business cycle, so the experience of an economic downturn is new and scary (especially when we can see it coming), but it would be folly not to recognize why we were able to climb so easily out of recessions in the past and why it will be more difficult in the future.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Staying in the Third World will simply send you into poverty, then death.

Feel that way about Malaysia and Singapore as well?

Hahaha...

Singapore will never ever exist as a state again if the economy collapses. As it is, if the real threat of war ever arrived, the foreigners will be fleeing the country in droves and the economy collapses. Kinda ironic, since that was what happened during WWII as well.

[K. A. Pital]

The environmental destruction of China, the endless expansion of "neoliberal" economics (which basically stands for the adoption of the USD as a reserve currency and favorable balances of trade and prices for the American consumer and corporations in exchange for IMF/World Bank bribes), the vast sense of personal and national alienation are all consequences of this trend. We've just allowed ourselves to be doped up heavier - like the heroin addict who must move on to more and more veins with more and more frequent injections - with ever bigger cars and houses in more and more disconnected developments devoid of local culture, community consciousness, or civil responsibility. Ignoring the blight of the inner cities and the drug problems by moving further and further away, by moving our children in private schools or ever escalating magnet and gifted programs, isolating them from the masses that have been given up on since the mid-'70's. Back when we had a choice to manage scarcity and chose to largely ignore it, and when real wages for the working class stopped increasing.

I'm totally with IP on this one. When it comes to energy economics, his analysis is almost flawless. The US is indeed like an addict which subdues other nations to its will just to continue being drugged and making the consequences heavier not only for itself, but also for the entier US-dependent world. This style of globalization with "neoliberal" triumph is nothing more than a sheme to continue the current pattern of the US laughing in the face of downtrodden weaklings in the Second and Third worlds.

The only refuge I take is the knowledge that "twice the pride, double the fall". I wish to see this system dismantled when the US hits crisis and re-arranged in such a fashion post Peak Oil that other countries will get more say in world politics and also never repeat an error to submitting so freely to the will of a dangerous and powerful hegemon which essentially stands behind their future ruin.

[His Divine Shadow]

The environmental destruction of China, the endless expansion of "neoliberal" economics (which basically stands for the adoption of the USD as a reserve currency and favorable balances of trade and prices for the American consumer and corporations in exchange for IMF/World Bank bribes), the vast sense of personal and national alienation are all consequences of this trend.

Maybe we are defining neoliberal differently but AFAIK neoliberal economics on a global scale is mainly about lessening trade barriers and encouraging trade between nations and working against protectionist policies and things like the EU farm subsidies.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Guess what - the economy runs in cycles. I've lived through a couple of ups-and-downs. What is entirely new and frightening to you is something I have seen variants of before.

True enough. However, it was a new trend that begun in the '70's: and eerie combination of the flatlining of the working class' real wage, the plateau of oil production per capita worldwide, the collapse of the Bretton Woods currency standards (something the U.S., I might add, set up for the rest of the world, and was forced to abandon and leave the world financial system high and dry due to OUR international political and economic irresponsibility), and the rise of international terrorism. All of these components are the future of the West. The '70's presaged the rise of crime and bottom falling out of the inner cities, the collapse of the stable currency regime, the end of oil being available and stable, and the rise of terrorism.

These things will get worse. These things will ruin people's lives. Americans need to reevaluate their place in the world both as a collective, and personally in their day-to-day lives. No, I don't think I will starve to death in a ditch. I think the coming decade will involve life-changing changes for Americans, but not necessarily life-ending ones. But if you live in sub-Saharan Africa, well...

Well, no, because everyone has ups and downs. I've lived in really shitty conditions for years at a time. Know what? I'll enjoy the internet, and my ramen, for as long as I can have them. The climate control is a nice bonus, but I've lived without that, too.

Your generation has seen strife. It has seen stagflation. It has seen gas lines. It has seen rioting and civil disorder. The previous generations have known war where thousands of Americans died. My generation does not understand those things. They've been raised to think they were going to move right out of college into a cushy development/exurb and have a shiny new SUV and wear glitzy department store clothes. I know girls - most girls - who literally shop at the highest price department stores to relieve stress. These people are not prepared to deal with personal hardship. They look at plenty and opportunity as birth entitlements. And that's the rich class that makes it to a good college. And this class does not even really understand that poor people, people who cannot afford their health care bills and pay for gas and pay for groceries exist. And the fog of FNC and the various right wing garbage are really self-esteem coaches for this class. Telling them that their false preconceptions are correct. That only filthy hippies are trying to take away their status as the new Imperial American aristocracy. That their economic choices have no broad impact, and that externalities do not exist. And the lower classes are deluded with open propaganda - lies - that the foreign health care and urban development complexes are not better for them (though they very clearly are). Kids of this class grow up thinking that they will - through the phantasm of the "American Dream" - live the MTV lifestyle. And then when disillusioned, the consumption of cheap goods (a series of milestones to nowhere in the new American nihilistic consumerist lifestyle) and drugs and alcohol dulls the pain while their children continue to go on to high school and fail out without discernible skills or productive capacity. And that is in the new economy of magic money moving around for more magic money - and no objective output. Its not just me who thinks this. Read Warren Buffett's opinion of speculators and stock brokers. His opinion of the market.

I'm not saying that people cannot survive. I'm saying that the dope of American consumerism has blinded those who are in a power to do something for society - the rich - into ignoring or disbelieving the existence or plight of the lower class, while the lower classes are simply promised they'll have everything and left to settle with Wal-Mart crap and booze and drugs. And to challenge anything about the system or the patterns of consumption and marketing which has driven things to enrich speculators and the ultra-rich and only made the average American increasingly fucked in the future is to be a subversive.

What I am saying is its pretty much institutionally impossible for any politician to make meaningful steps until after things have already started to get bad. Draconian mileage standards increasing every couple years, government intervention into urban development, massive taxation, huge fuel taxes, massive government spending - all of these will make the average suburban American crow about the increasing cost of his retarded F150 he drives around in for pure show, and complain about the increasingly sinking value of his overspeculated, wood frame piece of shit house.

I'm saying my generation is not psychologically or educationally prepared for hardship in general, and particularly unprepared for the particular types of hardship which will strike America. They are going to react with mass panic. It will not be pretty. They expect too much, and they have little to offer, and they've been led down a road that goes nowhere.

Not universally - my neighbors down the road, the Amish, have had that lifestyle for generations. In fact, it's probably a good thing they've preserved the technology and know-how of that sort.

You're missing my point. I have dealt with this possible eventuality. I'm trying as hard as I can to prepare myself to be a responsible man who can take care of a family and protect them as much as possible from hardship and poverty and hunger, and give them security and some kind of future instead. But I'm not representative of my class and generation. They will panic. They will cry. They will vote for irrational and reactionary things if the option is placed at their fingertips. They'll go to war to keep Wal-Mart, the exurbs, and their SUV humming. Even if it'll just push us further down the slope trying.

And we have been here before - most recently from 1929 through 1941. Or did you think the Great Depression "just happened"? Hoover was unapoligetically pro-business, perhaps even more so than the current Bush. The stock market was turned into a Ponzi scheme. The rich were amazingly rich and getting more so, and the general population running hard to stay in place when the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

Then there were the boom-and-bust cycles throughout the 19th Century...

Which is why it's not enough to know historical facts, one needs a historical perspective as well.

I'm a student of economics and history. I know all of that. THAT generation had a background in subsistence farming and physical labor. That generation also went through extremely hard times. That generation was not living in a global superpower with occupation troops poised to do stupid things should the leadership demand it under pressure from the electorate. And the Great Depression was a transient phenomena generated by economic snafus. This is a long-duration state caused by physics and geology. Thermodynamics is less negotiable than economic principles.

I am saying that a generation groomed to expect plenty and a good life even if they haphazardly party their way through school and without any personal survival skills or mindset is critically unprepared.

Civilization is not going to collapse in North America. But people can make individual and collective decisions every day from now and it has real and major impact on whether things can go better or much much worse. And it is this like of personal and collective economic and psychological realism and preparedness that concerns me. And I'm trying to alert people to these realities. You're right. People have gone through horrible times before, like after 1929. But those are historical abstractions people my age believe cannot possibly occur ever again. But that's not true.

[K. A. Pital]

Maybe we are defining neoliberal differently but AFAIK neoliberal economics on a global scale is mainly about lessening trade barriers and encouraging trade between nations and working against protectionist policies and things like the EU farm subsidies.

Neoliberalism America-style is "open your markets and give us ALL we need from you, whereas we get to keep all of our protectionism and fuck your economy over". The WTO, WB and IMF, firmly under American control, play into one gate and enforce American economic interests on other countries.

That's not just "lessening trade barriers", that's "messing in someone's internal economic affairs to the benefit of America".

[Illuminatus Primus]

Basically, you're an adult hardened by perspective and experience. The feeling for those my age having realized what happened and is happening is akin to going to the bank having turned 18, promised your whole life an inheritance and college fund more than sufficient to build a life, and having discovered your parents spent it dry. I'm arriving on the prophesied Great Frontier - the American Promised Land - full of milk and honey, but I'm finding a great desert with a few shitty water holes to eke an existence out of. Its sobering. And I know there is nothing I can do about the past, so I'm trying to prepare for the new future. But its honestly heartbreaking realizing you've been misled, and when you arrive at the table you're left with the check. Being misled is unpleasant. But transcending that is part of adulthood, and the sooner people my age adjust to reality and make serious choices to develop assets that will be very valuable in the future and form a foundation of security for a family and exchanging out useless ones that the media and establishment of vultures has led you to believe is the future. Globalization, technology, the stock market - these are not the future. They have a vested interest in making money by keeping the mirage going. Self-reliance and self-sufficiency is the future. Everyone's duty to themselves as thinking men (the very meaning of our species) and to their loved ones who may depend on them.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The environmental destruction of China, the endless expansion of "neoliberal" economics (which basically stands for the adoption of the USD as a reserve currency and favorable balances of trade and prices for the American consumer and corporations in exchange for IMF/World Bank bribes), the vast sense of personal and national alienation are all consequences of this trend.

Maybe we are defining neoliberal differently but AFAIK neoliberal economics on a global scale is mainly about lessening trade barriers and encouraging trade between nations and working against protectionist policies and things like the EU farm subsidies.

You think the U.S. pays a fair or real value on what it consumes? And sells things for what they are worth. America buys from China BECAUSE they can maintain a slave existence on Chinese workers. Their plight and low standard of living and nonexistent labor rights - their suffering - are a subsidy on middle class Americans who like their cellphones cheap. The U.S. price of oil does not reflect the true cost of the military-political machinations and their social cost in the ME, to say nothing of the subsidized transport-fuel infrastructure and the externalities of air pollution and global warming. The U.S. subsidizes its agriculture, castrating much of Africa and Latin America's only substantive products, and forcing their prices ever lower relative to sustainability. In Bolivia we burn coca plantations and leave campesinos with nothing while the only reason they grew it in the first place was because socialite Americans cannot stop frying their brains by snorting white powder. Our influence is baleful. We've helped dismantle countless countries' governments because a participant in a coalition government was a communist or someone we chose to call communist because they opposed the low prices at which we bought their goods and because we owned their national resources.

Free trade is not neither free nor fair. It is coerced and one-sided.

[His Divine Shadow]

Maybe we are defining neoliberal differently but AFAIK neoliberal economics on a global scale is mainly about lessening trade barriers and encouraging trade between nations and working against protectionist policies and things like the EU farm subsidies.

Neoliberalism America-style is "open your markets and give us ALL we need from you, whereas we get to keep all of our protectionism and fuck your economy over". The WTO, WB and IMF, firmly under American control, play into one gate and enforce American economic interests on other countries.

That's not just "lessening trade barriers", that's "messing in someone's internal economic affairs to the benefit of America".

Yes that is not free trade between nations, just like the EU subsidies fucks over thirld world farmers.

[His Divine Shadow]

The environmental destruction of China, the endless expansion of "neoliberal" economics (which basically stands for the adoption of the USD as a reserve currency and favorable balances of trade and prices for the American consumer and corporations in exchange for IMF/World Bank bribes), the vast sense of personal and national alienation are all consequences of this trend.

Maybe we are defining neoliberal differently but AFAIK neoliberal economics on a global scale is mainly about lessening trade barriers and encouraging trade between nations and working against protectionist policies and things like the EU farm subsidies.

You think the U.S. pays a fair or real value on what it consumes? And sells things for what they are worth. America buys from China BECAUSE they can maintain a slave existence on Chinese workers. Their plight and low standard of living and nonexistent labor rights - their suffering - are a subsidy on middle class Americans who like their cellphones cheap. The U.S. price of oil does not reflect the true cost of the military-political machinations and their social cost in the ME, to say nothing of the subsidized transport-fuel infrastructure and the externalities of air pollution and global warming. The U.S. subsidizes its agriculture, castrating much of Africa and Latin America's only substantive products, and forcing their prices ever lower relative to sustainability. In Bolivia we burn coca plantations and leave campesinos with nothing while the only reason they grew it in the first place was because socialite Americans cannot stop frying their brains by snorting white powder. Our influence is baleful. We've helped dismantle countless countries' governments because a participant in a coalition government was a communist or someone we chose to call communist because they opposed the low prices at which we bought their goods and because we owned their national resources.

Free trade is not neither free nor fair. It is coerced and one-sided.

I see your point but are you saying there can be no such thing as free trade on a global scale, or just that this perverted version wherein america fucks over other countries isn't free nor fair?