Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
The decline and fall of the American empire of debt
Andrew Leonard, Salon
Another election year, another jeremiad from Kevin Phillips. As the veteran political commentator notes in the preface to “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” the new book is his fourth in six years, which is impressive production by any standard. Phillips claims he did not originally intend to mark the 2008 election campaign with yet another tome lambasting the state of America. But really, what are you supposed to do when all your dire predictions of catastrophe and imperial decline start manifesting themselves in real time? As a Cassandra ready for his close-up, Phillips has every right to pump out a quickie I-told-you-so.
… In his three most recent books, “Wealth and Democracy,” “American Theocracy” and “American Dynasty,” Phillips obsessed over what he describes as “the scary intersection of oil, debt, and religion.” He doesn’t so much repeat himself in “Bad Money” (although regular readers will find a great deal that is familiar) as he delivers a masterly recapitulative summation. The dots have all been connected, the picture is now complete.
Phillips has warned for years about the inevitably malign consequences of what he calls the “financialization” of the American economy. Sometime in the mid-’90s, he writes, financial services overtook manufacturing as the biggest chunk of the U.S. gross domestic product.
… Phillips is renowned in American punditry circles because he is the rare example, in recent decades, of a conservative who has moved steadily to the left. At one time a senior strategist for Richard Nixon and the author of “The Emerging Republican Majority,” he is now utterly estranged from the Republican Party and makes no attempt to disguise his abject contempt for the current administration.
… As for oil, while at first it might seem a bit off-putting to find a chapter on “peak oil” in the middle of a book mostly devoted to financial shenanigans, the current price tags of a barrel of crude and a gallon of gasoline obviously pile even more stress on top of an economy already teetering after years of gross mismanagement. Phillips has long castigated the Bush administration for its energy misadventures — believing, as do many Bush critics, that the invasion of Iraq was motivated in large part by geopolitical petroleum concerns. But how could two oilmen in the White House have screwed up so spectacularly? Dark times are ahead, he foresees, as the major powers of the world struggle for control of the world’s dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. But as this time of peril hastens toward us, the once mighty U.S. is no longer master of its own manifest destiny.
(14 April 2008)
How soaring fuel prices hurt kids
Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney
Across the nation, school districts are slashing spending on teachers, books and computers as filling up the school bus gets more expensive.
—
The school buses in Dubuque County, Iowa, travel 4,900 miles each day ferrying kids to and from class. That’s the equivalent of driving across the entire United States and halfway back again.
The price of the diesel these buses run on has jumped 35 percent over the last year. The extra money paid to fuel the buses must come out of the local school district’s general fund – money it would prefer to spend on other things.
“It’s computers, it’s teachers, it’s you name it,” said Bob Hingtgen, director of transportation at Western Dubuque County Community School District, located 65 miles north of Iowa City. “The pie is only so big. If a bigger slice is going to transportation, it leaves a smaller slice for everything else.”
(10 April 2008)
US Water Pipelines Are Breaking
Colleen Long, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) – Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.
The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.
The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation’s cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.
(8 April 2008)
