You almost have to feel for President Hopey-Changey. No matter how many innocent civilians he butchers in pursuit of a foreign policy that in its way is even more bloodthirsty than Chimpy Bush's, he just doesn't ever seem to get the credit as evidenced by the way that Willard tried to used the killing of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens to score political points against him this past week.
So why is that, exactly? Well, Gary Brecher, author of the always entertaining and informative War Nerd column for The Exiled, explains it in an essay published on this most recent September 11th. The whole thing is well worth a read, but here is the relevant excerpt:
When you look back at Obama’s wars, you get a pretty clear idea what went wrong over the last four years. It wasn’t the way Obama’s team handled the wars. Truth is, they did damn well at that, better than I ever thought they would.
The real problem is that they don’t know what world they’re living in. These are people who’ve spent their lives getting straight A’s, collecting gold stars, avoiding mistakes. And they think war is just like all those other little hurdles you face in life.
That’s why they’ll never get credit for any of it. They have this delusion that sanity matters, and they’ve run their wars as sanely and boringly as an exterminator going after termites.
It’s sensible, it’s semi-effective, and it irritates the life out of the 99%. I don’t mean the Occupy 99%, all those “goodhearted ordinary Americans”; that’s a totally made-up imaginary species invented by people just as naive as Obama’s crew. I mean the real 99% of us living our rotten lives out there, mean and dumb and miserable, just waiting for some gore we can really get behind.
Obama just doesn’t understand his job as war chief of this big crazy tribe. A war chief doesn’t have to win; only a wonk’s view of the world would see things that way. A war chief has to look like a war chief and talk like one. And yell a lot. Obama just can’t manage that, and when he tries, he makes us feel stupid. He embarrasses us, trying to sing along to a tune you know he thinks is just dumb.
It’s a shame in a way, because his war wonks did a pretty good job actually running the wars. I like to think of them grumbling about it now, a bunch of youngish dressy-casual technocrats drowning their sorrows in frappucinos at some suburban DC Starbucks, counting off their so-what accomplishments: “We got out of Iraq … not one American killed there this year; we took down Qaddafi without one single American casualty; we killed bin Laden right in front of the Pakistani Army and got away with it; what does a C-in-C have to do to get a little respect around here?”
The answer is: He has to look convincing when he holds our enemy’s head up on a stick and shows it to the crowd, all drippy and drawing flies. That’s what we want, and Obama, with all that creepy self-control, is the last guy you’d pick for that job.
It was obvious, after he ordered the hit on bin Laden. For ten years Americans had been seeing that big long bearded face in their dreams, blasting it on gun-range targets, printing it on toilet paper, waiting for the big day when we could see the bastard in a pool of his own blood.
And boom, at last, Osama was dead. On Obama’s watch. Whoo-hoo! Let the victory parades begin!
Except there weren’t any. I remember real well the weird queasy hush after bin Laden died. Nobody ever tells the truth in this country, so nobody could talk about why Obama never got the cheers he expected, but we all know why. It’s simple: There are two tribes in America and neither one was in a mood to cheer. Obama’s liberal fans couldn’t cheer because they have some taboo about parading around with your enemy’s head on a stick. They think it’s crude or something, “a regrettable necessity”—you know that NYT editorial jabber they use.
And the other tribe, the flyover state white glob I come from, would sooner comp bin Laden a suite in Vegas than give Obama any creds for taking him down. They sulked through it like a confused, hungover Pillsbury doughboy; the way they saw it, Obama got bin Laden on a technicality. There’s always been a lot of Osama/Obama blur in the way they see things, and they might’ve been happier if it’d been Osama zapping that snotty Hawaiian instead of the other way around.
War always comes down to demographics — even this slow cold war we’re having in the US now. And Obama is stuck in the crotch of big demographic forked stick, between the sullen majority and the queasy coastals. The coastals don’t want a war chief, and the sullen doughboys can’t see him in the job.
As for me, admitted antiwar zealot that I am, I really don't know which aspect of Obama is more appalling...that he is as big a thug as Bush and Cheney, or that he is so damn cool about it. But go ahead, Democrats, keep convincing yourselves that he is morally superior to Willard Mitt Romney so you can spend the next four grueling years in just as much denial as you've spent the past four.
Bonus: "And now you do what they told ya, now you're under control"
Could the insanely stupid presidential campaign get any stupider? The answer to that question appears to be yes after Willard made quite a spectacle of himself by bizarrely attempting to politicize the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, before the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was even confirmed. In its own particular liberal, toadying-to-power way, the Atlantic Wire tried to explain the problem in an article entitled, "No One in the Presidential Campaign Really Wants to Talk About Foreign Policy":
The conservative backlash to the backlash to Mitt Romney's comments on the attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo and Benghazi Wednesday goes like this: You media people said you wanted Romney to talk about foreign policy, and now he is. What's the problem? Well, it's that no one — both campaigns and political press corps included — seems to really want to talk about foreign policy. The debate Romney wanted to get into on Wednesday wasn't a substantive one on actual foreign policy and how to make sure the new governments created by the Arab Spring remain friendly to the U.S. Romney instead wanted a cable news shoutfest about whether Obama made us look like wimps abroad. Instead the cable shoutfest was over whether Romney is qualified to answer 3 a.m. phone calls. You can understand why Romney supporters would like to change the subject. As National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote for Politico this morning:
"The old complaint about Romney was that he didn’t talk about foreign policy. The newly minted complaint about Romney was that he did talk about foreign policy. He gets it coming and going, and everywhere in between."
Lowry writes that foreign policy debate doesn't stop just because Americans die, and that wars and violence have always been campaign fodder. Likewise, a Wall Street Journal editorial is headlined "Romney Offends the Pundits." Subheadline: "Doesn't he know he's not supposed to debate foreign policy?" And The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol says Romney is "right to reject the counsel of the mainstream media," and that he should use a crisis for political purposes.
"Still, the fact remains that the events of September 11, 2012, represent a big moment for the country. Romney is right to sense this, and to seize on this moment as an occasion to explain the difference between his foreign policy and President Obama’s."
It's true that during Romney's press conference Wednesday, every question reporters asked was whether Romney felt bad about issuing a political statement before he knew Ambassador Christopher Stevens had died. But it's not just the timing that has pundits, including Republican ones—not to mention one anonymous Romney aide whose comment was deleted from a New York Times news story—saying Romney mishandled the events. It's also that Romney got one small fact wrong, claiming the Obama administration's "first response" to the attacks was to apologize, when, in actuality, the Cairo embassy had posted the statement in question before the protests, before anyone died, and before getting approval to do so from the State Department.
Then there's Romney's larger statement—a talking point he's promoted for years—that Obama has been overly concerned with the hurt feelings of Muslim radicals who want to kill Americans. For once thing, Obama hasn't done that much IRL coddling -- Lowry describes the "signature Obama foreign policy success," as "killing people." For another, in 2010, Romney himself condemned an American preacher who was going to hold a Koran burning because, "It puts troops in danger, and it violates a founding principle of our republic." But that was two years out from the presidential election, not two months.
The section I've highlighted above is the key point--no one in the campaign wants to talk about foreign policy because then they would have to admit that there is essentially NO difference between Romney and Obama on foreign policy...just as there is essentially no difference between Romney and Obama in terms of kissing Wall Street's ass and propping up the zombie economy by giving out as much "free" money as the big banks are willing to take. As the two potential faces of the American Empire, circa 2013-2017, Obama and Romney are nothing more than a sophisticated good cop, bad cop routine.
As the article states, Obama's signature foreign policy success has been killing people, which will no doubt be Romney's primary foreign policy pursuit should he be elected to replace him in November. It is what should be expected from a declining empire that can feel the sands of history shifting under its feet and knows no other way to try and forestall its inevitable downfall.
I've mentioned here before that at one time I was an NFL season ticket holder. So why did I give it up? Well, it was a combination of the skyrocketing ticket costs, the league's increasingly mediocre level of play, the media hype that has reached insane levels, the seemingly endless displays of superficial patriotism and the advertisements that bombard you continuously from the moment you set foot in the stadium...oh, and also so I don't have to ever again be in physical proximity to clueless idiots like the people who appear in the video above from opening weekend. Seriously, what a fucking freak show.
You want to know why America is going down the shitter? It's because people like these alleged adults are not only walking around free, but are actually allowed to vote. And remember, these are morons who are somehow still prosperous enough to be able to scrape together the cash to attend a ridiculously overpriced NFL game. Yep, instead of spending hundreds of dollars and battling the traffic and the crowds I spent much of this past Sunday afternoon napping on my couch and reading a book...and I'm a happier man for it.
But hey, fan stupidity isn't always grim. Sometimes, it's even good for a laugh:
Quick question: which of the current candidates running for President of the United States issued the following statement last year on the 10th anniversary of 9/11?
“As we all pause this weekend to remember the events of September 11, 2001, our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, those who saved so many lives, and a nation that showed its greatness in countless ways. 9/11 and the days after were a time when ordinary Americans did extraordinary things. Our thoughts and our gratitude are also with the amazing men and women of our military who are putting themselves on the line every day to keep us safe. The fight against those who would do us harm continues today, and it is a fight we must carry out with the same determination that was so magnificently displayed by the heroes of 9/11.
“America is about liberty. Ten years ago, liberty was attacked. To those who lost their lives and those many more whose lives were forever changed, our deep obligation is to insure that liberty prevails not just today, but for generations to come.”
So was it job-exporting, Wall Street oligarch Willard Mitt Romney? Or was it Patriot Act-loving, American-citizen assassinating President Hopey-Changey? Wrong, Natch. It was, in fact, Libertarian candidate for president and supposed lover of human freedom Gary Johnson.
Whatever else you may think about the events of 9/11, and I am not here to get into a debate about whether it was an inside job or anything like that, it must be stated that no singular event in American history has caused a greater curtailment of civil liberties and human freedom than our government's out of control reaction to it. Two unnecessary wars of choice that have massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians, the establsihment of concentration camp in Gunatanamo Bay, a world wide campaign of assassination without trial, the acceptance of torture as a legitimate use of government power, drone missile strikes abroad, drone surveillance at home and the enactment of the Patriot Act are merely the highlights of a systemic program representing a far greater attack on "liberty" than anything Osama bin Laden and his minions could have whipped up in their wildest dreams.
I've been on record here stating that I do not plan to participate in the upcoming sham election this November, but if I did go to the polls it would be to at least cast a ballot against the two oligarch-approved candidates by voting third party. With a statement like the one above, however, that could have come from one of the horrible speeches at the recently concluded Republican and Democratic National conventions, Gary Johnson has placed himself squarely on the side of our oppressors and thus is unworthy of support by anyone who REALLY cares about liberty.
So what should Governor Johnson have said instead? How about something along these lines:
"As we pause to remember the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States and to appreciate again the actions of the heroic first responders who gave their lives on that awful day, we must also reexamine ourselves and question whether our nation's collective response during this past decade to those attacks have been appropriate or consistent with a nation that supposedly values liberty.
"We must strive to curtail the abuse of liberty by immediately ending all foreign occupations, closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, vigorously prosecuting the use of torture, repealing the Patriot Act, ending assassinations without trial and stopping the use of drone missiles to carry out random attacks abroad and drone aircraft to conduct domestic surveillance. Only by respecting the human rights and dignity of all of the world's people and the Constitutional rights of our own citizens here at home may we possibly hope to maintain the ideals of liberty and freedom that the founders of this great nation bestowed upon us."
After all, if you can't trust the Libertarian Party to support liberty, whom can you trust?
Bonus: "Whether your state is red or is blue...always be wary of people who rule"
image: street scene, Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- the future is now
On Saturday, Dave Cohen of Decline of the Empire blog posted about a new book called The Betrayal of the American Dream, in which authors Donald Bartlett and James Steele discuss the ongoing destruction of the American middle class. As Cohen rightly points out, what most Americans, raised in a maddeningly insular society in the midst of the post-World War Two economic boom, do not understand is that their very existence as non-elites enjoying any genuine prosperity is an historical anomaly. The fact that the predatory sociopaths who really run the country are in the process of taking back what they feel was "stolen" from them by the New Deal and Great Society programs is not nearly as astonishing as is the ease and speed by which the dumbed down and media benumbed citizenry is allowing them to do it.
So where is it all heading? Well, assuming that enough energy supplies remain to be exploited to allow the elites to maintain control, which given the all out exploitation of the world's remaining energy reserves that is currently going on seems likely to continue for many years yet, I think I know the answer to that question. In my own post from Saturday, I briefly mentioned that I have been reading the book Cambodia's Curse by journalist Joel Brinkley, a recently published history of that unfortunate country. Brinkley spent a couple of years travelling around Cambodia interviewing everyone from top officials to dirt poor farmers and the portrait he draws is both arresting and frightening in its implications. Whereas Brinkley is attempting to tell Cambodia's sad story to the outside world, I chose to see what he has written as a warning of what our own future potentially holds for us.
Because you see, modern Cambodia is actually Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's wet dream. Imagine a nation where the government's only real role in the lives of the citizenry is to provide for the national defense and to build roads and bridges in order to enable commerce. Imagine a country where other than a few select elite government officials like Paul Ryan, every civil servant is paid at most a few dollars a day with no health or retirement benefits whatsoever. Imagine a nation where every natural resource, including vast tracts of lush hardwood forests, is stripped down and illegally sold abroad to line the pockets of its kleptocrat rulers. Imagine, too, a country where workers have zero rights vis-a-vis their employers, who pay them as little as they can possibly get away with. If Ayn Rand were still alive, she would probably be having spontaneous orgasms just thinking about it while conveniently ignoring the fact that Cambodian dictator Prime Minister Hun Sen used to be a dirty rotten communist, though one could argue that Pol Pot was the ultimate real world John Galt.
So how much fun is it to be an ordinary citizen in such a country? Oh loads, as long as you don't mind giving your children a wad of Riel every morning so that they can bribe their teacher so he will agree to actually teach them that day even though he might only have a third grade education himself. Oh, and if your precious snowflake is particularly dense, you can give the teacher another bribe to ensure that she passes her final exams. This method of "education" then continues right on up the line and even into the universities and medical schools, with those who do have the means paying bribes to ensure they eventually earn their diplomas.
Speaking of medical schools, when you get sick or injured and have to go to the hospital, you'll need to pay a bribe to that doctor who bribed his way through school in order to get him to treat you at all. If you don't pay him, you'll be given long expired medications if any at all, and left in a bug infested ward on a straw mat to recover or not more or less on your own.
You could try to complain to the police about the doctor's request for a bribe, but unless you bribe them they won't investigate, and unless you bribe the prosector he won't bring a case and unless you bribe the judge you won't get a ruling in your favor anyway. And then on your way home from court, you might be stopped at a random police roadblock and have to pay another bribe so they will overlook the fact that your left tail light is out or your driving license is expired. Oh, so you say you want to renew that driving license? If so, you'll have to bribe the local government official who is in charge of issuing licenses--doesn't matter if you actually know how to drive or not.
Let's then say you become sick and tired of all this corruption and want to launch a public campaign against it. Great. Just be mindful that when you try to have a public rally to support your cause, some disguised government thug may throw a grenade in the midst of it and then the police will blame you for trying to score political points against the regime by killing and maiming your own supporters.
Yep, Cambodia is true worker's paradise. It's the type of place where your boss, a military officer, can order you to go by motorbike and pick up a rare endangered animal so that it can be illegally transported to China to be eaten. Just don't let that animal accidentally escape, or you'll have to face the wrath of your boss, who might just be so enraged that he will douse you with gasoline and set you on fire, and when you die your wife and child will be left destitute. Surely, you think, that if an employer tried such a thing the press would find out and make a big stink about it, right? Well, they would, except that the newspaper reporter went to the army officer and requested a bribe so that the story would never be published.
This is just a little taste of what it is like to live in a country that has been stripped of most of its resources and where the unaccountable elites feel no obligation to provide any kind of safety net for its citizens. This is exactly the kind of society our own predatory oligarchs are slowly establishing here in America. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how if providing for the less fortunate is an unalterable established political consensus several American public officeholders have within this last year publicly compared the food stamp program to "feeding wild animals?" Even five years ago, such utterances would have been unthinkable in the public arena. That's just one small example of how the public rhetoric, to eventually be followed by public policy, is evolving--or rather devolving--in America these days. Not incidentally, impoverishing the working and middle classes has the added benefit of stretching out the availability of the planet's increasingly scarce resources. That, as any Harvard educated MBA would tell you, is a classic example of a win-win.
The Betrayal of The American Dream is very good way of portraying what is happening in this country, though it really only tells half of the story. The sad fact is that the betrayal would not be happening without the active complicity of so many average Americans. Starting in earnest around 1980, a vast majority of this country's citizenry chose to shut off their brains and turn the "thinking" about America's future over to frauds and charlatans, starting with Ronald Reagan, who promised easy answers while initiating the betrayal. Thirty years later we are now collectively reaping our very just rewards for our failure to recognize who the real enemies are.
Bonus: "I have only committed this mistake...of believing in you, the Americans"
Well, the excruciatingly horrible Democratic and Republican National Conventions are now over and the general election campaign can "officially" begin in earnest. In reality, however, the selections of Willard Mitt Romney and President Hopey-Changey to be the respective nominees of the only two parties which matter were actually made a long time ago. It was a foregone conclusion that no matter how often President Sellout rubbed his delusional supporters' noses in the dogshit that is his undying support of big business, war and empire he would face no reelection challenge from the left wing of his own party. As for Willard, despite the fact that his party's base hates his RomneyObamacare passing guts and a couple of rogue billionaires tried to throw a monkey wrench in the process by momentarily underwriting challenges from the hilariously inept Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the fix was in from the beginning. The last Republican president was the first MBA to hold the position, and now the party has gone one step further and ended all pretense by nominating a full blown Wall Street oligarch as its standard bearer. That's what passes for "progress" in American politics these days, I'm afraid.
It sort of reminds me of the farcical elections they used hold in the old Soviet Union. Communist regimes always seemed to have the words "Democratic" or "Republic" somewhere in their official title, so as a result I guess they thought that they had to go through the motions of allowing their citizens to actually vote for something. How it worked was the Communist party selected all of the candidates, there would be a few weeks of campaigning and then the voters were free to vote for or against each candidate. Routinely, candidates would receive about 99% of the vote each election day and then when the farce was over everybody would go back to standing in line waiting for turnips.
In America today, by contrast, each party's oligarchs select which "safe" candidate they are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars supporting so that they can utterly obliterate any troublesome outsiders with thoughts of puling an upset in the primaries. And in case any of the non-select don't get the memo, they'll use their dictatorial powers to completely stifle them and their supporters at the convention (please go sit in a corner and shut up, Dr. Paul). The two nominees might differ on a few issues of no importance to the monied interests such as abortion and gay marriage, but when it comes to unwavering support of big business, war and empire they really will be, as the old political adage goes, an echo and not a choice.
The office of President of the United States has in effect become equivalent to the position of Premier of the Soviet Union, who was the titular head of government but took his marching orders from the elites, particularly the General Secretary of the Communist Party, who really ran the country. In America today, the oligarchs are not a completely unified group, and their battles for supremacy each election cycle may seem very real to them as evidenced by the billions of dollars now thrown into the campaigns in our post-Citizens United dystopia, but the results for the average person are always the same no matter who wins. That's how you get a guy installed in the Oval Office on the basis of his very tepid opposition to the Iraq War who then turns around and doubles down on the even more unpopular and pointless Afghanistan occupation.
On November 6th, more than 100 million Americans will dutifully trudge off to the polls to vote for one of two members of the ruling class who are no more representative of their interests than the candidates on those old Soviet ballots were for the average Russian or Ukrainian. Sure, there will be a few fringe third parties on the American ballot like the Libertarians and the Greens to make it look good, but 99%+ of the voters will cast their lot with the oligarchs, just like they did in those old Soviet elections. The one real difference is that the denizens of the Soviet Union likely suffered no delusions as to whether they were participating in anything other than a sham imitation of a true democratic process, which is far more than you can say about their contemporary American counterparts.
Bonus: "They couldn't hear this song in Russia...but couldn't understand the words anyway"
image: former 1960s hippie chick greets former Khmer Rouge practitioner of genocide
My recent visit to Cambodia rekindled my interest in beleaguered country (even if I did not personally get to witness much of its beleaguerment), and since I got home I've been reading a copy of Cambodia's Curse, a recently published history written by journalist Joel Brinkley. Through hundreds of interviews with Cambodian citizens and politicians as well as westerners who have recently worked in or served in country, Brinkley meticulously details how the Cambodia people have been repeatedly abused and sold out by their own corrupt government and venal national politicians even after the hideously evil Khmer Rouge movement passed into the dustbin of history.
The book's primary focus is on Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (pictured above with Hillary Clinton), a true Machiavellian dictator who has effectively run the country since 1985. Sen was originally an officer in the army of the genocidal Khmer Rouge who defected to Vietnam about a year before the invasion that drove his previous patrons out of power. Installed as a communist Vietnamese puppet in 1985, Sen has somehow managed to survive the withdrawal of the Vietnamese army, the fall of the communist bloc and intractable opposition from anti-communists in the U.S. government to remain in power for more than a quarter of a century. Like most strongmen in charge of the world's poorest countries, Sen and his cronies have dedicated themselves to stealing everything that isn't tied down, including pocketing vast amounts of foreign aid money along with the proceeds from the illegal clear cutting of the country's few remaining hardwood forests. All the while, the vast majority of Cambodians suffer from abject poverty, malnutrition and among the highest rates of infant mortality in the world.
There are a couple of anecdotes in the book that struck me as being particularly relevant to those of us living in the west who have watched as our own governments have become gradually more corrupt and unaccountable to the citizenry. One involves Sen's habit of routinely having his thugs toss live grenades into opposition rallies and then having his police blame the opposition for the attacks claiming that they benefitted politically. The other is Sen's repeated promises to foreign aid donors to pass anti-corruption laws, promises he then conveniently forgets as soon as the aid money comes rolling in, which it always does. Both of these tactics are so ham-handed and obvious that a fifth grader should be able to see through them. And yet Sen's regime continues to do them repeatedly because, guess what, they succeed in achieving his ends.
I wrote in yesterday's post that one of the big mistakes made by many in the peak oil community in the wake of the 2008 oil price spike and subsequent market crash is assuming that governments will not do literally everything they can do to avoid a fast collapse. And while Americans might be tempted to smugly believe that their own government is too "civilized" to ever stoop to tactics like grenading its own citizens in order to maintain power, I would merely ask whether there is any real moral difference between that action and the drone missile campaigns, the assassination of American citizens without trial or the maintenance of a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. What is particularly odd is that I was able to purchase my copy of Cambodia's Curse for $8 in a market stall in Siem Reap, despite the book's rigorous lambasting of Sen. That tells me that just like in America, the Cambodian government believes people who actually read and know what is really going in the world are such a tiny isolated minority as to no longer pose a threat worthy of the expense of suppressing them.
To date, most of the actions governments have needed to take in response to the world wide financial crisis have been in the financial arena. There is no reason to expect, however, that more forceful tactics will not be employed as the long emergency drags on. The abuse of Occupy protesters by police around the country serves as a mere hint of what is likely to come in the future. Many in the peak oil community thought that the market crash of 2008 was beginning of the end, whereas I would humbly assert that the response to it was in fact the opening salvo of a dirty war against reality that will be going on for a very long time.
Bonus: "But I found out only two years ago that we don't live in a democracy"
So, here we are roughly four years after the first huge peak oil-related spike in oil prices helped trigger a major market meltdown and nearly caused the world's banking system to seize up. It was quite a scary time for me personally...not only did it seem like some of the more dire peak oil prophecies of a fast collapse of civilization were about to come to pass, but I had also just suffered a total ACL tear in my left knee and was worried about being crippled just as the crisis was coming to a head.
Flash forward four years later, and not only are corporate profits soaring, but the stock market is back to pre crash levels. There are still many ominous economic storm clouds on the horizon and much of the damage from the crash has been merely papered over, but each time it looks like another crisis is about to unfold our economic overlords pull another rabbit out of their hat and "save" the day. Just how long they can keep it up is anyone's guess, but still the question must be asked by those of us in the peak oil community: how is it that more than four years after world oil prices spiked to $147 dollars a barrel our industrial civilization has thus far managed to weather the storm as well as it has?
Quite obviously, many of the predictions made by members of the peak oil community back in the wake of the 2008 price spike and crash were wrong, even if peak oil theory itself remains valid. It is only by analyzing what we got wrong that we may strive to try and avoid making such erroneous predictions in the future. This list below is by no means intended to be comprehensive, but merely represents some of the predictions made by peak oil analysts four years ago that have turned out to be incorrect.
1). The "bumpy plateau" will be short lived and world oil production will soon go into inexorable decline.
World oil production appeared to hit a peak in the spring of 2005, and despite rapidly rising prices did not increase for the next three years. For peak oil adherents this appeared to be the proof they were looking for that the theory was correct and that the world had entered the "bumpy plateau" period, and indeed now more than seven years later production is still mired near 2005 levels, particularly if we just consider crude oil and not "total liquids."
Where many peak oil commentators got it wrong was in predicting that the plateau would be a short lived phenomenon. The chart above from The Oil Drum was one of the scarier ones floating around during the 2008-2009 time period. The theory behind it was that rapidly declining Energy Returned on Investment (EROI) was going to cause oil production to decline just as rapidly...indeed according to the chart, we should already be seeing a dramatic reduction in world oil supplies. As we all know in hindsight, this has not happened.
A somewhat more sober view from peak oil analyst Tom Whipple predicted that oil production would start to decline in 2014. Whipple still has another year or so to see whether he was correct in that assertion, but it is looking more and more like he is going to miss the mark as well. More recently, Dave Cohen of Decline of the Empire blog has predicted that the plateau will last at least through the end of this current decade, which seems far more likely as producers pull out all of the stops to keep the pumps flowing for as long as possible.
2). Oil prices will soon reach $200, $250, $300 or even more.
Remember all those wild predictions that were made right around the time oil made its first foray into triple digits prices? Ten dollar gasoline seemed to be right around the corner and Mad Max would no doubt come riding over the horizon not long after that. To his credit, peak oil writer Charles Hugh Smith predicted in May 2008 that oil prices spiking to $150 would crash the economy, causing oil prices to crash as well...a mere two months before that actually happened. But even Smith then predicted that oil would shortly resume its relentless upward march towards an unthinkable $1000 a barrel.
It should be obvious by now that what is going to happen instead is that there will continue to be just enough demand destruction at the edges of the world economy to keep oil prices from shooting into the stratosphere. Already in the U.S., for example, the total number of highway miles driven annually has decreased the past four years after rising steadily from 1965-2008. The former members of the working and middle class in America are being squeezed by the bad economy and thus driving less, and the reduced demand is helping to keep prices in check.
3). The American economy is "built to run on $20 oil" and cannot survive high oil and gas prices in the long term.
No doubt this oft-repeated assertion, which assumes that a consumer economy based upon long commutes from the suburbs and people making endless trips to the mall to buy stuff they don't need is unsustainable if they cannot afford to buy gasoline for their cars is true in the abstract, but the fact is that the economy has also proven to be much more resilient to high oil and gas prices than most people in the peak oil community expected. After recovering from the 2008 crash, world oil prices have essentially been hanging around the $100 mark for nearly two years. According to Gas Buddy, the price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has been solidly above $3.00 since December 2010. Conversely, the 2008 spike only sent prices to those levels for about 10 months, and there has been no corresponding crash of the economy as yet this time around.
Clearly, America's consumer economy has learned to adapt and survive on more expensive oil and gasoline. Just as clearly, there is no reason to expect that it won't continue to do so just so long as there are no rapid spikes in future prices. So why did many in the peak oil community get this prediction so wrong? I think it has to do with the assumption that I have made number four on the list below.
4). The government will stand idly by while the economy collapses.
This may not have been a specific prediction made by the peak oil community, but in hindsight anyone assuming there would be a fast collapse was also assuming that the governments worldwide would not pull out all of the stops to prevent it. However much we in the peak oil community have derided the massive amounts of federal deficit spending and the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing and zero interest rate policies, the fact is they HAVE stabilized the system. Call such initiatives unsustainable if you will, and you'll get no argument from me on that point, but they have worked to prevent a quick collapse and there is no reason to believe that they will not continue to work for some time yet. It is also undoubtedly no accident that the surveillance state is growing out-of-control just as we are reaching the point where it will be needed to prevent any outbreaks of massive civil unrest.
All of this is not to say that our industrial civilization is not in deep trouble, or that from a damage to the biosphere standpoint it would be better if collapse happened sooner rather than later. It's to say that with about 99% of population totally invested in the current system even if that system is treating them with utter contempt (what I call the REAL 99%), there is zero chance that there will be a demand from the public that the powers that be stop the madness and acknowledge our collective predicament. Even the most dedicated brie-nibbling, Prius-driving, Chardonnay-sipping, NPR-listening, Daily Show-watching, supposedly environmentally conscious Obama supporter would freak out if you told her that saving the world means that her precious snowflake won't be able to attend prep school. However much we may deplore the games being played to keep the party going for as long as possible, we should also acknowledge that as long those in charge can keep enough energy flowing to run the system from whatever sources they need to exploit, the chances that it will all come undone overnight are minuscule at best.
Bonus: "They won't want us to ask them, they are just going to want us to get it for them"
Continuing on with my observations from my recent trip abroad, I wanted to say a few words about the city where we spent most of our time: Bangkok, Thailand. If you want to know what the near term future of urbanized humanity looks like, I humbly suggest you'll find no better model. One tour book referred to Bangkok as the "Blade Runner City," and that description isn't too far from the truth. One night we had dinner in an open air restaurant perched on the 54th floor of local hotel (yes, really) and the view of the seemingly endless stretches of skyscrapers and their flashing neon lights was simply breathtaking. Moving down to ground level, however, quickly brings to mind the title of globalization apologist Tom Friedman's book: hot, flat and crowded.
The most striking thing about Bangkok is how massive wealth and abject poverty exist literally shoulder to shoulder throughout the city. Luxury high rise condo towers will actually have multilevel hovels buit right up against their sides. Take a walk on the crowded streets and you'll pass through countless open air markets selling everything from fresh foodstuffs to cheaply made manufactured good produced in nearby sweatshop factories. But if you keep walking until you reach the famous Sukhumvit Road, you'll find a seemingly never ending stretch of gigantic indoor shopping malls selling every luxury good imaginable in over-air conditioned comfort. Indeed, it is hardly unusual to have to step around a beat up looking female beggar holding her badly malnourished child as you venture to buy that Kate Spade designer hand bag that costs more money than the poor woman will see in a year.
The old part of the city is particularly spectacular, with its many Buddhist temples and various historic shrines and monuments. The Thai people are generally very welcoming and friendly, though you always have to be on your guard that the friendly tuk-tuk driver promising to take you to a particular tourist site for the equivalent of a few dollars isn't instead intending to detour you to his brother-in-law's jewelry store or tailor shop. After a couple of days immersed in the city's intoxicating rush, I began to see why many farang (as the Thais refer to all those of European ancestry) fall in love with the place even if the omnipresent year round heat and humidity would be a deal breaker for me.
Then there is the traffic. The picture above is one I took of a typical midday backup at a traffic light on a Bangkok surface street. To say that Bangkok is a city where the quality of life would be vastly improved if it had a lot fewer cars is an understatement. During the day, cars choke every street, alley and avenue, making even short vehicular trips a time consuming adventure and forcing pedestrians to be constantly on their guard lest they get run over and left for dead in a city where there is no ambulance service and going to the hospital means paying at the time of treatment. It is not unusual to see motorbikes actually driving along a crowded sidewalk, weaving around pedestrians in order to gain a slight advantage over the rest of the traffic.
Walking around, I quickly learned that the key to safely crossing any street on foot, even at a designated cross walk, was to follow the locals, who seemed to have a sixth sense as to when they could defy the moving wall of steel and rubber without getting splayed out on the pavement. Making matters more unpleasant, the exhaust from all of those idling vehicles combines with the high amount of water vapor in the air to create a noxious mess that many Thais try to avoid by means of wearing surgical masks out in public.
The sad part is that Bangkok does have a more robust public transportation system than do most American cities. The key features are a subway system and a sky train, which are both clean and efficient to ride, even if extremely crowded at rush hour. Moreover, most denizens who work in Bangkok appear to live in the city itself rather than in soulless, far flung suburbs. It's a place that could and should be much more walkable than it is. Sadly, like those gigantic air conditioned meccas of consumerism along Sukhumvit Road, the Thais have apparently bought into the self-defeating American notion that owning an automobile equals success in life, even if it means they have to spend half of their waking lives sitting immobilized and choking on fumes.
The other thing I noticed is despite the fact that you can easily and quickly down an entire meal of various fruits, vegetables and cooked meats from market stalls and carts on just about any street corner, there was also a distressingly high number of American fast food outlets, particularly McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I guess many Thais must also equate eating that highly processed garbage with success, even though it is both healthier and cheaper to patronize the market stalls. Chalk it up as one more temporary victory for globalization that, like those massive traffic jams, will last only as long as the world's fossil fuel supplies hold out.
Bonus: "I'd let you watch...I would invite you...but the queens we use would not excite you"
image: might this be a preview of what New York City will resemble 1,000 years from now?
Hey, all, I have finally returned to the U.S. after a refreshing (if exhausting) two weeks abroad. It sure is nice to get completely away from the American media machine for awhile and visit places where life is, if not better, at least different from our soul-deadening suburban nightmare.
On this trip I got about as far away from DC as it is possible to go, visiting Indochina for the first time in my life. Among the stops on the itinerary was a couple of days in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the famous ruins of Angkor. At first, the idea of vacationing in Cambodia was a little surreal. Growing up in the 1970s, I had vivid memories of the Killing Fields--both the news stories and the subsequent movie. So I mentally prepared myself ahead of time for the kind of hassle that usually accompanies visiting the world's poorest countries where the crumbling or non-existent infrastructure coupled with nightmarishly inefficient or corrupt bureaucracy can make travel quite arduous.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Despite the fact that Cambodia is still among the world's worst places, with a dirt poor population and a venal and vicious government that does virtually nothing for the country but pocket foreign aid money, that same government is so dependent upon the hard currency that flows in from booming Angkor tourism industry that Siem Reap has been turned into a tiny bubble of unreal prosperity floating on a sea of abject destitution. As such, both the ruins of Angkor and the modern city of Siem Reap provide interesting lessons for those of us westerners who constitute what I call the "reality based community."
First of all, a few words about the ruins of Angkor--they are, quite simply, an amazing site to behold. I'll admit that I knew little about them before I started preparing for this trip, and I was quite astonished to learn that they are actually the remains of what was circa the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the largest city on the planet, with over a million residents spread out in an area roughly the size of Los Angeles. The city and its many temples were built by powerful kings during Cambodia's glory days, when the Khmer Empire controlled much of what is modern day Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.
The ruins themselves are quite spectacular, with the photo above providing only one tiny glimpse of an area that takes several days to see, even travelling in an automobile with a local tour guide. The highlight is Angkor Wat, the huge Buddhist temple that lies at the center of it all and has been called the largest single religious monument in the world. Despite having been abandoned, stripped of everything of value and allowed to be overrun by the jungle for nearly half a millennia, its former grandeur and ostentation is still quite evident. Standing atop the huge stone edifice, you can still feel the power wielded by the Khmer kings, who at the empire's height were among the world's most powerful monarchs.
And yet, here is the rub. Despite literally being a combination of New York City (commercial hub), Washington D.C. and the Vatican, after the downfall of the empire in the early 15th century Angkor was not only abandoned, but forgotten so thoroughly that it was all but completely unknown to the world at the time the French "discovered" it in the 1850s. The photo shows the gigantic trees that literally grow out of the stone walls any place where they have not actually been removed. At one time, the entire site looked like this. We westerners who sit smugly in our own modern temples confident that we have built a civilization representing "the end of history," as Francis Fukuyama so ridiculously phrased it, should pay close attention to what the ruins of Angkor portend for us when the fossil fuels on which we have so foolishly built our societies to be totally dependent upon do finally run out.
It was sobering enough to consider the ruins of Angkor, but I actually found the nearby modern city of Siem Reap to be just as enlightening in its own way. The World Bank's most recent data (2011) lists Cambodia's GDP per capita at a paltry $900 per year, ranking it 159th in the world and barely above such notoriously poor countries as Haiti, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. And yet it is likely that few of the approximately three million tourists who now visit Angkor ever year are at all aware of the abject poverty the prevails in most of the country.
The Siem Reap airport, where we flew in from Bangkok, is small but the facilities are probably more modern than most American airports. Not only is there a huge selection of duty free shops selling such unnecessary luxuries as Gucci and Coach that represent six months' salary for the average Cambodian, but the terminal also features a Dairy Queen franchise where you can soothe your sweet tooth without risking eating one of those weird jungle fruits they sell in the market stalls throughout Southeast Asia. When we arrived on our propeller-driven puddle jumper, there were more officers at the immigration counter than passengers on our plane--all the better to get the tourists through the terminal and out spending money in the local economy as quickly as possible.
The tourist hotels range from Holiday Inn quality (where we stayed) to full fledge resorts for those who have to travel in style no matter where they go. There were plenty of decent restaurants that few locals could ever afford to patronize, including a buffet place we went to that was overrun with hundreds of Vietnamese there on package bus tours to the country their government invaded and overran to drive out the notorious Khmer Rouge in 1979. Looking at all those prosperous middle class denizens of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City really brought home the utter futility of America's last big colonial war of the previous century.
Siem Reap did have a more traditional large open air market area, but it didn't take long for me to realize how unnaturally orderly it was compared to similar markets I walked through in Bangkok. Clearly, the place was being tightly controlled and patrolled by the tourist police (yes, that's what they are actually called) to ensure that none of the big spenders who pass through are robbed or unduly hassled by the ever-present children hawking postcards, tour books and cheap trinkets.
Being a newbie to the country, I made the rookie mistake of exchanging $40 at the airport for Cambodian Riel in order to have some walking around money. Incredibly, the exchange rate was about 3800 to 1. As it turned out, I shouldn't have bothered and had a hard time spending even that small amount of cash. As I quickly learned, every local who works in the Siem Reap area desperately wants dollars rather than their own virtually worthless currency. The prices in all the shops and restaurants were usually listed exclusively in dollars and people would actually get annoyed when I tried to pay them with Riel. One shopkeeper my wife and I bought some sodas and bottled water from actually had to pull out his calculator to figure out what the price of his own merchandise was in his own nation's currency. It rendered pretty laughable the idea that the U.S. dollar is going to collapse any time soon. Someone should send a memo to all the gold bugs and Ron Paul supporters out there.
The real unexpected kicker was the billboards around town advertising the local golf resort. Yes, it's true, you can go play the links on a finely manicured lawn placed smack dab in the middle of a the same nation where there are weekly casualties from all the landmines that are still laying about the countryside. Personally, I think the golf course would have been far more interesting had they gone ahead and left land mines in the sand traps, but then again I've always hated that boring ass, elitist sport.
I was still trying to comprehend who exactly would travel to one of the world's most unfortunate countries just to get in 18 holes when it hit me what it was that I was really witnessing. Siem Reap today represents the vision of what the whole non-first world would look like if the neoliberal economists, neoconservative strategists and rampant globalizers were to get their way and peak oil and resource depletion were not a factor.
Imagine a world where every former hostile government has become complacent and bought off so that every spot on the globe that a wealthy tourist might want to visit features facilities brought up to first world standards that the locals could never afford to enjoy themselves. Imagine a world where the spending of these wealthy tourists is one of the prime sources of income for the quisling governments who keep troublemakers, such as anyone who might agitate for social justice, in line--by force if necessary. Imagine a world so homogenized that you can kick back with a daiquiri by the pool after a rousing round of golf in the very same city where a couple of generations ago Brother Number One forcibly hauled all of the educated professionals out to countryside to be slaughtered en masse in the name of building a nightmare dystopia so horrible as to be beyond even the darkest visons of our best science fiction writers.
Because you see, that's what the bastards really want. And if you are one of the lucky few who can afford (and are of a mindset) to buy that Coach handbag as you are waiting at Siem Reap airport to board the plane that will whisk you to your next exotic destination, it must seem like paradise. But for those poor subsistance level farmers doing the backbreaking work in the debilitating heat and humidity of the nearby rice paddies, or for the slum dwellers of Phnom Penh who sell their barely pubescent teenaged daughters into service in the many brothels of Bankgok, it is a dismal nightmare and one from which they will never awaken.
One last observation, and this has to do with the power of denial. Shortly before we departed Siem Reap, we visited the local war museum, which is run by the Government of Cambodia. A survivor of the wars against the Khmer Rouge who had lost one leg and whose body was full of shrapnel was happy to show us the gallery of old Russian and Chinese tanks, artillery pieces, mortars and other weaponry on display and relay for us tales of the horrible things that happened to his country during that awful decade of the 1970s when Pol Pot was the world's most successful if least acknowledged practitioner of mass genocide.
But there was one peculiar aspect of the presentation. All the displays indicated that the weapons had been captured or used in battles during the final 1979 conflict that drove the Khmer Rouge from power. We were lectured on the evils of communism and the bad perpetrated by China and Russia in supporting the Khmer Rouge, which might have been expected from a survivor of that brutal period. However, there was not one mention in the displays or by our guide that it was the communist government of Vietnam which ultimately rescued its beleaguered neighbor from that hideous evil.
It's not that I would have expected fawning gratitude--after all the Vietnamese were motivated to act for the usual reasons of realpolitik rather than out of any humanitarian concerns--but it is quite obviously an inconvenient truth for the Government of Cambodia and its lust for western tourism dollars and foreign aid. Better to let those visitors to the museum who are ignorant of Cambodia's recent history think that the Cambodian peasants spontaneously rose up out of the killing fields to overthrow their Khmer Rouge oppressors. After all, as the old cliche has it, the truth is the first casualty of any war, especially when the terms of the peace are being dictated half-a-world away by a declining empire which in its hubris foolishly believes that it will never go the way of Angkor.
Bonus: "So you been to school...for a year or two...and you know you've seen it all...in daddy's car...thinkin' you'll go far"
"To Kaitlyn, the scourge came from a different population. She aimed at the rabble who nibbled at the edge of her dream: the weak-willed smokers, dead beat dads and welfare cheats, single moms incessantly breeding, the flouters of speed laws and those who had only themselves to blame for their ridiculous credit card debt."
There is just something primal about a great zombie story. Maybe it's because zombies touch the deep fear many of us have of ever being singled out for destruction by a crowd of our fellow citizens, or maybe it's because zombies make the perfect metaphor for our brain dead, out-of-control consumer culture, but it is probably no accident in these paranoid times that the zombie has risen (so to speak) from B-movie status to become a very prominent icon in our popular culture.
That said, and take this as coming from someone who considers himself a bit of a zombie aficionado, most zombie novels (ahem) stink. They are often either self-published and atrociously edited and/or, the hero/protagonist is portrayed as some cartoonish action figure mowing down legions of the undead and ushering his little band of survivors to safety. Left unexplored in such books is a thoughtful examination of what it would be like to actually live in a world overrun with the undead. The one previous novel that explored such territory was Max Brooks's sublime World War Z, which stands as a towering monument among the vast wasteland that is zombie literature.
Well, now we can add a second entry to the list of great zombie novels. Colson Whitehead is probably the most talented writer to ever tackle the genre, and his writing style more resembles someone who produces short fiction for the New Yorker than someone who writes with too much testosterone and not enough (double ahem) brains. Zone One starts off kind of slowly, and much of the action takes place in a series of flashbacks, but it picks up steam and towards the end begins to deliver a series of strong stomach punches to the reader.
The story's protagonist, whose true name is never revealed but who goes by the ironic nickname of Mark Spitz, has been assigned as a sweeper, disposing of straggling numbers of the walking dead from lower Manhattan as part of a project by the newly reborn U.S. government to retake the island and once again make it suitable for habitation by the living. Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers move methodically from building to building, ousting and dispatching the occasional animated corpse while dealing with their own tormented memories of the Last Night and everything they have lost and have witnessed since then. A constant theme of the novel is whether the survivors should let themselves hope that civilization can really be reborn, or whether they should remain within their hardened psychic shells (suffering from variations of a malady wryly named Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, or PASD) until the war against the undead has truly been won.
As all good zombie stories should, Zone One contains plenty of wry social commentary on the times in which we live, satirizing everything from the militarization of our society to the banality of reality television. The plot, despite the many detours through each main character's personal history, builds to a appropriate and logical climax. My one forewarning is that this is a literary zombie novel, and the style of writing may be a bit off-putting at first (this could also be why it has such a low average customer review rating on Amazon). Overall, Zone One is a very appropriate story that seems distinctively tailored to times in which we live.
Site announcement: I will be out of town starting tomorrow until after Labor Day (September 3rd). There will no posting and there may be long delays in moderating comments (depending on my Internet connectivity) during this time.
The latest Gallup poll has what would appear to be bad news for America's Congresscritters, especially those who are running for reelection this fall:
Ten percent of Americans in August approve of the job Congress is doing, tying last February's reading as the lowest in Gallup's 38-year history of this measure. Eighty-three percent disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.
Congress approval was 30% in Gallup's first measure using this question wording in April 1974, and has averaged 34% across the more than 230 times it has been measured since. Congress approval has been below 40% since early 2005, and below 20% every month since June 2011 -- dropping to 10% in February of this year and again now.
Before 2007, Congress approval had been below 20% only twice -- in 1979 and 1992. The highest congressional job approval in Gallup's history was 84% in October 2001, a month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
Congressional approval is down among all political groups and is now virtually the same across these groups -- with Democrats at 9%, independents at 11%, and Republicans at 10%. Democrats' approval declined the most, from 18% in July.
I say "would appear to be bad news" except for one little countervailing point: despite the fact that Congress's approval ratings have averaged a mere 34% since this poll began in 1974, more than 90% of all incumbents have won reelection every two years since that time. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that, despite the current record lows in Congressional approval ratings, the 90%-plus figure will be substantially different this year.
So in other words, an overwhelming majority of American voters hate Congress but yet will dutifully trudge off to the polls in November and vote for the sitting representative in their district and Senator for their state, assuming he or she is running this time. If the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, the only conclusion you can therefore draw from this poll, my friends, is that American voters are certifiably insane.
Bonus: More and more, Bob Roberts looks like a documentary
