THE BUCKS STOP HERE
The End Of The Dollar And Just About Everything Else
by
William Thomas
The death of this planet's number one reserve currency, in which most of the world's business is still transacted, has been long forecast - and even longer deferred. But like strengthening tremors coming at ever-shorter intervals, the signs of impending tectonic financial shifts can now only be ignored by politicians who remain hermetically insulated from reality.
Unfortunately, this includes the religious fundamentalists in the White House who are kiting billions of dollars every day in bogus checks and loans to keep their “faith-based” economy afloat. But unfortunately for all of us, the only denominations money worships are those backed by perceived value. And right now the greenback is backed only by the fear of inviting a global economic meltdown by dumping big bundles of rapidly diving dollars. [China Daily Oct 6/05; www.financialsense.com; www.publicdebt.treas.gov]
Can you spell, “v-u-l-n-e-r-a-b-l-e”?
It's no secret that GW Bush is destroying America. But he's getting plenty of help from a rubber-stamp Congress, a shilling media, and a desperate constituency up to their earlobes in debt. “Since taking office, the Bush administration has added $2.5 trillion to the national debt, from $5.662 trillion when Bush took office in January 2001 up to $8.170 trillion on New Year's Day 2006. This represents an astounding increase of 44% during a period when prior projections suggested a $4 billion surplus,” writes John Ince.
“Every day we ignore the problem, we increase the chances that the problem will have severe, if not catastrophic, consequences. 'Sooner or Later' is rapidly becoming Sooner than most Americans expect, adds the writer, director and producer of the documentary film, “Time Bomb”. “Americans have become mired in a culture of debt. We buy things we don't make and don't need with money borrowed from abroad…. Hence we sink even deeper into debt, comforted by the delusion that foreigners will continue to prop up our economy. America now relies upon the kindness of strangers to finance almost 50% of the government debt.”
But who wants more greenbacks, when the euro is stronger - and gaining in value, while the dollar declines? “In April 2007, the value of European stocks eclipsed Wall Street for the first time, signalling a shift in the real balance of global economic power,” The Independent reported. [Independent Apr 4/07]
GATES, BUFFET AND CHINA SHUN THE DOLLAR
Bill Gates (personal worth $47 billion) and Warren Buffet ($43 billion) have already voted on the dollar - by dumping it. “Decisions by the world's two wealthiest men to bet on a further weakening of the U.S. dollar, coupled with China's lack of confidence in American currency should grab the attention of every working person, urges Craig Smith, CEO of Swiss America Trading.”
Pointing to the widening chasm of U.S. trade and budget deficits - including federal IOUs totaling more than $7.6 trillion - Microsoft maven Bill Gates told the press in 2005: "I'm short the dollar. The ol' dollar, it's gonna go down."
"When I saw this quote, literally I had to catch my breath," admitted a shaken Craig Smith. "This is a clear-cut signal that the people who know money are running - they are not walking, in my opinion - they are running from the dollar." [WorldNetDaily Feb 3/05]
Beijing's accountants are panicking over the daily erosion of the more than 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars that account for more than 70% of China's currency reserves. What pushed Buffet and Gates into full flight mode was the mandarins' announcement that China was following the lead of Venezuela, Syria, Kuwait, Iran and other major economies in “diversifying” away from the U.S. dollar, and more loans to Washington's in the form of Treasury bills and bonds. Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute in Beijing, stunned financial markets when he announced to the December 2004 World Economic Forum that "The U.S. dollar is no longer - in our opinion - a stable currency and is devaluing all the time."
"An average American has to ask himself this question, 'If the two richest men in the world are abandoning the dollar, why should I stay in it?'" Smith rhetorically asked. “We are first world reserve currency issued by a debtor nation. How long will the rest of the world accept that?” [WorldNetDaily Feb 3/05; Telegraph Aug 8/07; Financial Times Jan 6/06]
Commenting in the China Daily, Lau Nai-Keung explained that U.S. Government indebtedness is financed by the daily widening gap between exports sold abroad (primarily weapons) and imports purchased (mostly oil, and cheap goods from China). As the White House prints more money to finance its deepening debt, central banks - particularly in Japan - have lent enough money to finance “as much as 90% of the federal deficit.”
But not for much longer.
“One thing is for sure,” Nai-Keung warned. “Some time in the not too distant future, every central bank and institutional investor is going to dump U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds. Once, when a country like South Korea dumps the dollar, the still unsold U.S. Treasuries in the asset column of Asian central banks - $2,000 billion according to some estimates - will collapse. The cheapened dollar will cause a sudden jump in the U.S. inflation, which forces the Fed to jack up interest rates. A giant leap in inflation will cause a severe recession, or perhaps a depression, in the US. These countries' exports to America will dry up, which in turn will spread the global economic downturn like wildfire.” [China Daily Oct 6/05]
Just like the last, not-so-Great-Depression.
DOOM AND BOOM!
Flash forward to February 2006: Congress passes a $2.8 trillion budget based on fantasy, fear and yet more foreign borrowing against their grandchildren's future. In order to pay for “the blood-and-money pit in Iraq,” Truthdig's Robert Scheer observes, “the Bush budget demands Draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36-billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next five years” (after GW campaigned on a promise to expand healthcare services for seniors). “Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years, and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program that provides food assistance to low-income seniors, needy pregnant women and children,” Scheer adds.
As state-sanctioned experts in the mass murder of civilian populations (3 million dead in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; two million dead in Iraq since 1991), the U.S. military raked in a massive 48% spending increase in just four years. Despite growing chaos and calamity, the beat goes on for endless wars, which continue to shovel the U.S. Treasury into the pockets of Bush and Cheney cronies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater and the Carlyle Group - while impoverishing present and future generations of Americans - at a “burn rate” of $3 billion every week. [Truthdig.com Feb 8/06; Days of Deception: Ground Zero And Beyond by William Thomas]
Bob Chapman runs down the current situation in the United States of America at the International Forecaster: “We have an irresponsible government. We have a government that is despised by more than 75% of the people in the world and that brings negative responses. These attitudes and our terrible financial condition are driving people out of dollar assets. Our financial flank is open and vulnerable. We have no rule of law, but rather rule by edict and private profiteering is the name of the game even if it involves invading virtually defenseless sovereign nations. The world knows we have a corporatist fascist government, but Americans still do not realize it. Denial will be terribly costly for Americans.
“We have a terrible current account deficit, we have almost completely lost our manufacturing base via free trade and globalization, we now depend on foreign imports, we have massive debt and two trillion dollar wars, manipulated markets and a leader who believes he is Caligula and who has conversations with the Lord.
HOUSES OF CARDS
"The housing bubble has virtually become our economy," warned James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century - one year before the bubble burst. ?As the housing bubble deflates, the magical mortgage machinery spinning off a fabulous stream of hallucinated credit, to be re-packaged as tradable debt, will also stop flowing into the finance sector.
[PetroCollapse New York Conference Oct 5/05]
In 2006, house prices - generations-old symbol of the American Dream - became a nightmare as they plunged 34%. Long-term housing vacancies nearly doubled. In February 2007 the collapse in gimmick mortgages and new home construction spread in a widening tsunami across every related employment and manufacturing sector.
The implosion of the U.S. “subprime” housing market - in which people with little savings of their own were offered gigantic home loans for little or no money down - “shares similarities with the junk bond burnout of the 1980s,” economist Scott Thill agrees. “Indeed, the subprime loans that carved America's cash cow for the last few years were rated just as poorly as Milken's junk bonds and ended up pretty much the same way: with the scattering of investors and players from a hailstorm of collapsed debts, besmirched reputations and impending government oversight. But this time the outlook is worse… It is this growing gap between paid for and fantasy loans and shares that “is primed to explode the subprime collapse into a full-blown economic depression.”
[Marketwatch; AP July 9/07]
Purchasing houses - or stocks - with IOUs instead of cash is "essentially counterfeiting," says Overstock.com CEO and hedge fund activist Patrick Byrne. "There are a lot of us who think we are living on the edge of 1929. When you consider what's happened with mortgage-backed securities, you get the feeling these might be the first rumblings. There may be more IOUs in the system than there is liquidity, in which case the entire thing is going to vapor lock as soon as it is exposed. One of the healthiest indications of the vibrancy of an economy is capital formation. Seven years ago, America was responsible for 57 percent of IPO capital raised around the world. Now it's down to 16 percent. A national disaster."
[AlterNet July 26/07]
Looking ahead, an anticipated minimum loss of almost $4 trillion dollars in housing wealth… “will have a huge impact on the economy. We will likely lose more than a million jobs in construction, real estate, mortgage banking, and other housing-related sectors,” Byrne figures. “A loss of $4 trillion in housing wealth will lead to a reduction of approximately $200 billion in annual consumption. This drop in consumption, coupled with the downturn in the housing sector, virtually guarantees a recession, and quite likely a very severe recession. Tens of millions of homeowners will lose much of their life's savings.
[www.cepr.net]
ALL SHOOK UP
But this is just the beginning. “We are at the beginning of a major shake-up and there's going to be a lot more blood on the tracks before things settle down,” says British market oracle Mike Whitney.
Settle down?
With Bush and company holding daily Armageddon prayer meetings in the White House caboose, this fast-approaching train wreck is about to impact the stock market, “which appears to be lagging the real estate market by about 6 months,” Whitney notes. And he's not just talking about Jane and Joe investor losing their savings.
As Chapman explains, "The largest banks, such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America” hold more than 80% of the loans used to purchase Over The Counter stocks. Hedge funds - which bet on an ever-rising market - account for 58% of the volume in credit-purchased stocks and even riskier speculative instruments. “One or two major mistakes or events and the whole sector goes up in smoke and the financial system with it.”
1929 REDUX
Meanwhile, we have some three million Americans living on the streets, tens of millions without health care, and more than five million Americans out of work. The result is that many are using their credit cards for basic purchases, while others seek to assuage their financial anxiety by splurging. In January 2007, Americans borrowed $6.4 billion more than they made, Chapman reports. Total outstanding U.S. consumer credit that could be called at any time is $2.4 trillion.
The White House is running the country the same way. With the current deficit between what the U.S. spends and brings in running at about $800 billion per year, Washington must attract about more than $2 billion in foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds and similar securities every day, Whitney worries. Still, no one is putting on the brakes - despite a recent reversal of net capital inflows from an urgently needed additional 70 billion bucks - “to an outflow of $11 billion!” he exclaims in alarm.
[AP July 9/07]
Who will pony up for ever higher stacks of increasingly worthless dollars? Currently financing 90% of the U.S. federal deficit by holding over $1.7 trillion in U.S. currency and America-based assets, China and Japan cannot afford to dump their increasingly ephemeral dollars outright. But they cannot afford to keep taking in billions more, either.
[China Daily Oct 6/05]
In fact, Whitney tells investors, “foreign investment is drying up and the world is no longer eager to purchase America's lavish debt. The only thing the Federal Reserve can do is raise interest rates to attract foreign capital, or let the dollar fall in value. If the Fed raises rates, the real estate market will collapse even faster, which will strangle consumer spending and shrivel GDP.”
Checkmate.
“The economy is already in recession,” Whitney insists. “The growth numbers are regularly massaged by the Commerce Department to put a smiley face on an underperforming economy, while millions of good-paying factory jobs are being airmailed to China, where labor is a mere fraction of the cost in the USA. Also, automobile inventories are up while factory production is in freefall. New jobless claims soared to 357,000 in the week ending February 10, 2007. Forty-four thousand more desperate workers have been given their pink slips so they can join the huddled masses in Bush's Weimar Dystopia.
This is bound to be a stunning blow to the banks that are low on reserves ($44 billion) but have generated $4.5 trillion in shaky mortgage debt in the last 6 years.”
It's 1929 all over again.
“The parallels between our present situation and the period preceding the Great Depression are striking,” Whitney writes. “Just as massive debt was accumulating in the market from the purchase of stocks "on margin," so too, mortgage debt between 2000 and 2006 soared from $4.8 trillion to $9.5 trillion. In both cases the 'wealth effect' spawned a spending spree which looked like growth but was really the steady, insidious expansion of debt… In both periods wages were either flat or declining and the gap between rich and working class was growing more extreme by the year.”
[Onlinejhournla.com Feb 22/07]
Oops.
EURO OIL
By dissing its friends, and giving the finger to the rest of the world, the United States is fast running out of options that do not require even more guns and desperation. But how do you shoot a deficit - without spending even more on non-productive weapons and making it worse?
Meanwhile, the world's biggest oil producers are asking themselves, why continue trading in a currency that continues to lose its value while supplying the world's biggest addiction in the face of rising demand? Once OPEC and other oil suppliers start demanding euros for their increasingly scarce barrels, "it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike" says A.G. Edwards commodities analyst, Bill O'Grady. "If OPEC decided they didn't want dollars anymore, it would be the end of American hegemony by signaling the end to the dollar as the sole reserve currency."
Just as the U.S. invaded Iraq after Saddam Hussein demanded euros for the world's second largest oil reserves, Russian political scientist, Igor Panarin observes, “Everybody knows the real reason for American belligerence is not the Iranian nuclear program, but the decision to launch an oil bourse where oil will be traded in euros instead of US dollars. The oil market will break the dominance of the dollar and lead to a decline of global American hegemony."
Or, as Bloomberg puts it, “Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States.” If there is less demand for the dollar to buy oil no longer sold in that currency, “the value of the dollar will sink accordingly; pushing energy, housing, food and other prices higher.”
With world oil traded in greenbacks since the 1970s, the United States was able to run “huge account deficits without fear of crippling interest rate hikes,” Whitney notes. “Currently, the national debt is a whopping $8.4 trillion with an equally harrowing $800 billion trade deficit. The ever-increasing demand for the greenback in the oil trade is the only thing that has kept the dollar from freefalling to earth.
But…
“Even a small conversion to euros will erode the dollar's value and could precipitate a sell-off. If the (Iranian oil) bourse opens, central banks around the world will reduce their stockpiles of dollars to maintain a portion of their currency in euros. This is the logical step for Europe, which buys 70% of Iran's oil. It is also the reasonable choice for Russia, which sells two-thirds of its oil to Europe but (amazingly) continues to denominate those transactions in dollars.”
As Bush continues to prod a pugnacious Putin with threats of anti-missile batteries on Russia's borders, and nuclear strikes against one of Moscow's main business partners, don't bet on this Russian oil-for-dollars deal continuing.
“Profligate spending, budget-busting tax cuts, and the shocking increase in the money supply (the Fed has doubled the money supply in one decade) has the greenback headed for the dumpster,” Whitney proclaims. “The European Central Bank and Japan's central bank are frantically trying to conceal the probability of a dollar collapse by issuing carefully worded statements to allay public fears while they to prepare for an 'orderly' retreat. But, it won't be 'orderly'. The dollar… is quickly headed south.”
Last year, former Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker predicted "a 75% chance of a dollar crash in the next five years."
[Bloomberg June 4/07;
www.informationclearinghouse.info]
BAILING OUT WITHOUT A PARACHUTE
Conventional denial insists that the Fed will always bail out the biggest fools and greedheads - just as that privately held bank did in August 2007, when it pumped hastily printed cash into the U.S. economy and lowered interest rates to ease the pressure on surviving home mortgage borrowers.
The French, among other observers, were aghast: “In recent days, the American central bank has primarily acted preventatively, with an unprecedented haste, rushing up at every stock market hiccup,” Le Temps wrote, before predicting: “Banks and investment funds will suffer losses as a result. There will be mass layoffs, liquidations of investment funds, sales of bank divisions.”
Forget more bailouts.
“The recession will know how to circumvent the central banks.”
[Le Temps Aug 20/07]
CHINA'S 'NUCLEAR OPTION' PROMISES WORLDWIDE FALLOUT
The tremblers continued into August 2007, when the Chinese Government began threatening to liquidate its massive holdings of U.S. funds if a bill drafted by a Republican senators calling for trade tariffs against Chinese products was not withdrawn.
Described as China's "nuclear option" in that nation's state-approved media, “such action could trigger a dollar crash,” the London Telegraph reported, “at a time when the U.S. currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.”
[Telegraph Aug 8/07]
In a frantic bid to attract more foreign investors, the Fed finally raised the interest payments on more than $900 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds held by China - furtherer hammering American adjustable rate mortgage holders with heftier monthly payments.
And the Federal Reserve intervened once again, injecting a further $38 billion cash transfusion into a banking system on life support. But much of this money came from selling yet more mortgage-backed bonds “backed by home loans to riskier borrowers,” as Bloomberg put it.
In other words, in order to stave off a crash from bad loans now due, the Fed loaned even more money to creditors at higher interest rates it could not afford to pay when those new loans become due. The new borrowing needed to repay these new loans will, in turn, demand an ever-expanding tower of debt that must - sooner rather than later - run out of people willing to place more goods and currencies of real value in its crumbling base.
The credit crunch that started with the collapsing U.S. home mortgage market is already spreading outwards, with Countrywide Financial Corpse - the biggest U.S. mortgage lender - admitting that it faces "unprecedented disruptions".
As Big Banks continue to experience "unusual funding needs,” according to the Federal Reserve - “On average, the Fed has added about $9 billion in temporary funds daily this year,” Bloomberg reports.
[www.Bloomberg.com Aug 10/07]
PERFORMING SUTTEE ON THE BANKS OF THE POTAMAC
David Walker, comptroller general of the United States of America, says the U.S. government is now on a 'burning platform' of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.
In an August 2007 report on his country's future, Walker described "chilling long-term simulations" that include "dramatic" tax rises, slashed government services, and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of their holdings of U.S. dollars and debt.
Drawing disturbing parallels with the end of the Roman Empire, Walker warned of "striking similarities" between America's current fiscal situation (while maintaining more than 700 military bases in 130 countries), and the factors that brought down Rome and its far-flung legions - including "declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.
"In my view, it's time to learn from history,” this non-partisan person in charge of the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded. "With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiraling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks."
What he meant by that, is “an explosion” of unsustainable debt.
[Financial Times Aug 14/07; “Why We Fight” DVD]
“A VERY DANGEROUS SITUATION”
"This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar," says Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas. With the Middle East holding $3,500 billion in U.S. dollars, the Fed's dramatic half point interest rate cut to 4.75% to prevent more home mortgage holders from defaulting “caused a plunge in the world dollar index to a fifteen year low, touching with weakest level ever against the mighty euro,” The Telegraph telegraphed.
“There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the U.S. bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of U.S. bonds from $97 billion to just $19 billion in July… The danger is that this could leave America “starved of foreign capital flows needed to cover its current account deficit - expected to reach $850 billion this year.”
[Telegraph Sept 20/07]
Strike “could”…
AN AVALANCHE OF MONEY AND DEBT
Jim Rogers - the “Commodity King” and former partner of zillionaire George Soros - chastises the Federal Reserve for “playing with fire” by cutting interest rates so aggressively at a time when the incredible shrinking dollar urgently needs creditors willing to buy Treasury bonds offering higher returns. Rogers remarks that this continuing “flight from U.S. bonds” [will] push up the base price of credit for most mortgages - driving the U.S. property market into even deeper crisis.
"If Ben Bernanke starts running those printing presses even faster than he's already doing, we are going to have a serious recession. The dollar's going to collapse, the bond market's going to collapse. There's going to be a lot of problems," Rogers believes.
But the Fed is so freaked over the risk of a deepening recessionary slide, it “clearly calculates the risk of a sudden downturn is now so great that the it outweighs dangers of a dollar slide,” the Telegraph observes.
[Telegraph Sept 20/07]
Which is like trading a threatened landslide for a guaranteed avalanche.
OIL STORM
"Everything is made from petroleum products, every consumer item we can pretty much think of... Gas in our car and oil and natural gas that heats our houses is really just the tip of the iceberg," says Matt Simmons, head of the Huston-based Simmons & Company - the world's largest energy investment bank.
[KPFA Morning Show Aug 5/04]
Already, rising oil prices are inflating the cost of living. And the USA currently import more than one million barrels of gasoline a day to meet demand. We are heading toward $100-a-barrel oil - which could come in a heartbeat if America's self-styled "war president" convinces enough generals to attack Iran.
But it's coming nevertheless, and sooner than most of us imagine. "There is no Plan B," worries reporter Jim Puplava.
[www.financialsense.com
Already, the cost to drill and complete an average oil well has doubled, warns PhD Kenneth Deffeyes, former assistant to America's oil depletion prophet M. King Hubbert and author of Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak.
And close to half of all U.S. refinery capacity is concentrated in the Gulf States in the direct path of hurricanes.
"Katrina was our energy 9/11. Katrina took away was more capacity than we had left," Deffeyes notes - after destroying 108 oil and gas producing platforms, heavily damaging another 53 major platforms, shutting down another 342 offshore platforms, and putting 12 refineries and 21 gas processing plants offline. At a time when U.S. crude oil production was at it lowest level in 60 years, the loss of nearly 100 million barrels of crude oil output, and 200 million barrels of refinery output sent a spasm through the U.S. economy.
[Barclay's Capital in London; www.financialsense.com
One storm.
There will be more.
"Our failure to pay attention to what is important is unprecedented. The news section of last Sunday's New York Times did not contain one story about oil or gas-a week after Hurricane Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs and production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico," remarks James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. "We face a series of ramifying, self-reinforcing, terrifying breaks from business-as-usual, and we are not prepared. We are not talking about it in the traditional forums-only in the wilderness of the internet."
[PetroCollapse New York Conference Oct 5/05]
Meanwhile, says energy insider Matthew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, "Well over 97% of US transportation energy comes from petroleum... I believe we are either at or very close to peak oil. If I'm right, then we have to assume that five or 10 years from now we'll be producing less oil than we are today. And yet we have a society that is expecting, under the most conservative assumptions, that oil usage will grow by at least 30 to 50 percent over the next 25 years. In other words, we would end up with only 70% of the oil we have today when we would need to have 150%. It's a problem of staggering economic proportions.
[Grist Nov 10/05]
We're already "borrowing about $2.5 billion per day just to finance our trade deficit, and about 40% of that borrowing goes to pay for oil," Heinberg adds. "Without a global oil depletion protocol, prices are going to become so volatile that they will wreck any opportunity to plan our future."
[Federal News Service Sep 28/05]
"So what does a hard landing look like?" asks Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World and a prominent presenter in the must-see documentary film, "The End of Suburbia". "And the simplest of hard landings is a global recession worse than 1930, worse than the Great Depression."
"Change is coming whether we like it or not; whether we are prepared for it or not. If we don't begin right away to make better choices then we will face political, social, and economic disorders that will shake this nation to its foundation," agrees James Howard Kunstler.
[www.globalpublicmedia.com
But denial seems easier than action.
"We have put so much of our collective wealth into a particular infrastructure for daily life, that we can't imagine changing it, or reforming it, or letting go of it," Kunstler worries. "Americans were once a brave and forward-looking people, willing to face the facts, willing to work hard, to acknowledge the common good and contribute to it, willing to make difficult choices. We've become a nation of overfed clowns and crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent, narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live outside a reality-based community.
"These are the consequences of a value system that puts comfort, convenience, and leisure above all other considerations. That's what we call ourselves on TV, in the newspapers, in the legislatures. Consumers. What a degrading label for people who used to be citizens. Consumers have no duties, obligations, or responsibilities to anything besides their own desire to eat more Cheez Doodles and drink more beer. Think about yourself that way for twenty or thirty years and it will affect the collective spirit very negatively. And our behavior?
'The idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true-obviously comes from the immersive environment of advertising and the movies, which is to say, an immersive environment of make-believe, of pretend. Trouble is, the world-wide energy crisis is not make-believe, and we can't pretend our way through it, and those of us who are adults cannot afford to think like children, no matter how comforting it is? The biggest losers, of course, end up being the generations of human beings who will follow us.
"The world does not have to run out of oil or natural gas for severe instabilities, network breakdowns, and systems failures to occur. All that is necessary is for world production capacity to reach its absolute limit - a point at which no increased production is possible and the long arc of depletion commences, with oil production then falling by a few percentages steadily every year thereafter. That's the global oil peak: the end of absolute increased production and beginning of absolute declining production.
FIGHTING ON THE WRONG FRONT
If the Gulf Stream "radiator" shuts down and a perpetually frosty East coast is hit with leaping heating oil and natural gas prices as Greenland's slip-sliding glaciers thretaen to drown New York - what then? Not one End of Oil "expert" has mentioned overnight Climate Shift and its impacts on fossil fuel demand. Yet, with all life on Earth threatened by accelerating Climate Shift and the Sixth Great Extinction Event, in October 2007 the Republican Senate approved more than half-a-trillion additional borrowed dollars for more weapons and warfare.
[AP Oct 4/07; Air & Space Technology Oct/07]
The real enemy of our own creation is already here.
“The United States is facing hundreds of billions of dollars in weather-related damages in coming years if it does not act urgently on climate change, the first-ever comprehensive economic assessment of the problem has found reports the New York Times.
"Climate change will affect every American economically in significant, dramatic ways, and the longer it takes to respond, the greater the damage and the higher the costs," says the quoted report's co-author Matthias Ruth, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research.
Hurricane Katrina alone accounted for nearly $200 billion in economic losses. More frequent and intense tornadoes, droughts, floods, wind and rain storms will escalate this price-tag to war-time figures.
We are about to learn what the “eco” in “economy” really means.
“In the U.S. west and northwest, the cost of fire suppression and property damages will run in the billions due to changes in precipitation patterns and snow pack. The Great Plains will experience increased frequency and severity of flooding and drought, resulting in additional billions of dollars in damages to crops and property. The already sinking water levels will go lower in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River system, driving up shipping costs and producing major impacts on the Midwest manufacturing sector. Sea level rise and storm surges will eat away valuable property along the Atlantic coast - a single storm surge event can cost $2 billion to $6.5 billion…. For the Central Valley in California alone, the economy-wide loss during the driest years is predicted to be around $6 billion.”
Atlanta, home to more than four million people, could be out of water in four months.
“The situation is very dire,” declares Michael Hayes, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center.
[New York Times Oct 16/07; Inter Press Service Oct 16/07; International Herald Tribune Oct 16/07]Tell that to Rome's new Caligula.
PHOTO CREDITS
Worried www.americanstudies.pbwiki.com
Housing Bubble www.bigpicture.typepad.com
Free Money www.bigpicture.typepad.com
Price Reduced www. www.bloomberg.com
House Sale www. media.canada.com
Big squeeze Worth - www.worth1000.com
Twenties www.positron.ps.uci.edu
Euros www.kohm.com
2 Euro 2007 www.ec.europa.eu
Dennis Bragg on his parched 7,000 Alabama acres Erik Lesser, New York Times
NOW WHAT?
Coming soon at willthomasonline.net - Opportunites For Transformation: Great ideas and down home wisdom on how we can meet the challenges and changes ahead.
