Deep thought and depression – Oct 14

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This stock collapse is petty when compared to the nature crunch
George Monbiot, The Guardian
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services – such as locking up carbon and providing fresh water – that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation…
(14 October 2008)

My Depression — or Ours?
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Among my somewhat over-the-hill crowd — I’m 64 — there’s one thing friends have said to me repeatedly since the stock market started to tumble, the global economic system began to melt down, and Iceland went from bank haven to bankrupt. They say, “I’m just not looking. I don’t want to know.” And they’re not referring to the world situation, they’re talking about their pension plans, or 401(k)s, or IRAs, or whatever they put their money into, so much of which is melting away in plain sight even as Iceland freezes up.

I’ve said it myself. Think of it as a pragmatic acknowledgement of reality at an extreme moment, but also as a statement of denial and despair. The point is: Why look? The news is going to be worse than you think, and it’s way too late anyway. This is what crosses your mind when the ground under you starts to crumble. Don’t look, not yet, not when the life you know, the one you took for granted, is vanishing, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.

Today, in my world at least, this is the most commonplace of comments. It’s just not a line I’ve seen much when the press and TV bring on the parade of financial experts — most of whom are there largely because they didn’t have the faintest idea that anything like this might happen. Whether they’re reporting on, or opining about, the latest market nosedives, panic selling, chaotic bailouts, arcane derivatives, A.I.G. facials, or bank and stock-exchange closures, it still always sounds like someone else’s story. I guess that’s the nature of the media.

It’s professional for reporters and pundits to write or talk about the pain of others, not their own. Normally, you just assume that’s the case. So, for instance, when Frank Bruni, in a front page New York Times piece on the second presidential debate, writes, “Now the situation looks gloomier still, with markets in other continents tumbling — with a world of hurt at hand,” it really doesn’t cross your mind that he might be including Frank Bruni in that description.

… At this point, despite the onslaught of news about how bad things are, dotted with portrayals of Americans in trouble, I suspect there’s quite a gap between the world as reported and the world as felt by most Americans.

… And speaking of depressions no one is much talking about, let me just say what a journalist can’t: I’m depressed.

It crept up on me, but I can date the feeling to the first week of October because a friend emailed me on September 29th this way: “I’m given to gloomy thoughts… You really get the sense that things are on the verge of spinning out of control.”

I remember the email I wrote back with a certain embarrassment. I was neither gloomy nor down, I responded. My reigning feeling was one of “awe” — that you could live your whole life and never experience a moment like this one. At about the same time, I told another friend that I found it staggering to turn a corner, bump into History, and discover that he’s unbelievably gargantuan.

Even as I sent that email off, it felt kind of callous to me, but it was what I thought I felt.

… In these last days, I’ve thought some about my parents, about their whole generation which lived through the Great Depression, those fathers and mothers who had a “depression mentality” for which we, the young growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, had no patience, and about which we had next to no curiosity whatsoever. I sure didn’t anyway. That was so past. Despite the good times, they feared otherwise.

It’s unnerving when history becomes yours, when no one can tell you where the bottom is, or what life will be like after that bottom is reached.
(13 October 2008)

Thinking Ahead: Predicting the Depression
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
One of the hardest things about facing tough times is figuring out what to do. The right choice depends on an uncertain future – it depends on guessing right about what will happen. Do you transfer your stock market funds to Treasuries? Get out of the market? Give up on retirement? Go back to school? Should you be preparing for a job loss? Should you let your house go? And of course, we’re gambling with your future, and losing has high stakes.

A lot of people have emailed me lately asking me what I expect to have happen, so that they can make plans. This is not something I’m totally wild about – I’d personally rather you base this on your own analysis. I have been doing fairly well at the prediction game so far – I predicted a deflationary depression with rising food prices just about a year ago and my annual New Year’s predictions are now officially 8 for 10, but I also would have predicted oil prices to remain fairly high for a while into the recession, and I’ve long said that I though the fundamentals of the economy were so bizarre and unstable that I didn’t understand why it hadn’t crashed already. That is, I do not think that every word that comes out of my mouth was put there by a divine being, and neither should you. I’m wrong sometimes, and you should remember that. But because so many people are asking me to give them a sense of what we’re facing, I’m going to do that, if you promise not to make any life decisions solely based upon my thinking.

So here are my bets for what we’re facing the coming decade in re: food, energy, etc…

– That in retrospect, the current economic shifts will last at least 7 years, and probably a decade or more before stabilizing, almost certainly at a new, lower economic and energy level. During that period, there will be a number of seeming signs of recovery, periods where things are worse, declarations the crisis is over (I like CNBC’s website for a daily promise that the crisis is over today and that the last set of interventions have worked. They start out every morning with that promise, and amend their claims according to the end of the day.)

I think we are entering a Depression – and both the Great Depression and the 1970s recession took us a full decade to get out of. In both cases, they were essentially escaped by the application of lots of cheap energy – the former withe WWII build out, the latter with the cheap oil of the early 80s price collapse. It isn’t clear to me what would get us out of our current economic crisis – but we will probably reach various points of stability in between drops to lower economic levels, as John Michael Greer argues.

… – I have said this before, but I expect that generations are going to have to come to terms with one another really soon. That is, older folks who have been expecting to retire, or are retired, but now can’t do so or are struggling, are going to have to come together with younger folks who can work, but don’t have assets like housing or remaining funds, and have large debts from college and other sources. The only possible answer to this set of problems is for them to work together – parents with kids, younger friends with older ones. The good news is that this isn’t bad. The bad news is that both generations are going to have adjust their expectations of the future enormously – the all leisure retirement is probably over. So is the idea that living with your parents means you are a loser. Valid relational difficulties are going to have to be overcome – or chosen family will have to take on the characteristics of biological family – ie, they’ll love you and help you even when they don’t like you much.
(14 October 2008)
A fascinating look into the future. Sharon’s forecasts may be all the more valid because of her lack of formal background in economics. That is, conventional views about economics may be more misleading than helpful.

-BA

Ruppert: What Really Happened Today (9/29/08)
Mike Ruppert, FromTheWilderness.com
Tuesday, September 29, 2008, 7 P.M. PDT – For years I have told you exactly what was going to happen and it has. Today’s economic meltdown, with the Dow dropping 777 points and $1.2 trillion in equity lost is no exception. In our second FTW Economic Alert back in 2002 I predicted a market crash that saw $1 trillion in shareholder equity lost in the following three months — $1.2 trillion was destroyed just today. That and much more.

In FTW’s fourth and last Economic Alert (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061406_abyss_awaits.shtml) — just 11 days before our offices were burglarized on June 25, 2006 — I specifically warned that this day (metaphorically speaking) would come. What prompted that alert was an unprecedented move by President George W. Bush to give the National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, the authority to exempt “certain” Wall Street firms and banking giants from reporting their financial records to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was this move which permitted everything that has happened over the last month. That move allowed smaller banks and investors to continue buying pigs (without lipstick) in a poke while average Americans were led to believe that everything was OK. If you don’t believe me, go read the Economic Alert for yourself. It’s all right there — everything.

And if you had followed every piece of advice I gave in that warning — two years ago — today’s events would have made you money. They would have strengthened your family. They would have made you immune to the panic that today touched American public consciousness.

Gold is likely to explode in price in short order. $2,000 an ounce is possible within six months.

Since 2003 I have told my readers that the destruction of the U.S. economy was planned, essential and a foregone conclusion. It has to do with Peak Oil.

… Those who read FTW for years know that time after time, and year after year my predictions have been proven correct. The United States economy is being deliberately destroyed. The fact that it was Republican House members who blocked the bailout today confirms that they are helping the Bush Administration complete its last mission before leaving office: the complete destruction of the American economy and the financial crippling of the American people. I believe the intent is, and has been, to leave a newcomer African-American president with an economy on life support which will expire early in his watch. Every Obama campaign ad that now promises to “turn the economy around” only tightens the noose around his neck.

… Second; Venezuela, North Korea, Russia, rebels in Nigeria, and pirates off Somalia are becoming increasingly more aggressive. They do this not with the intent of physically attacking the United States itself, but with breaking its credibility and economic back. The U.S. has been humiliated in Georgia and North Korea is firing up its nuclear plants again. I have predicted this for years also and it is totally understandable given the belligerent, hostile and bullying foreign policy of the United States over the last eight years. I predict that on the geopolitical scene we are going to see (or not) some very serious realignments beginning over the next two weeks. They will be irreversible. The world is fragmenting along purely geographical lines. Yes, I predicted that too.

… I have broken an unspoken deal with the government to remain retired and not speak out. The legal harassments against me continue and I have just now crossed my own Rubicon. I am now preparing for physical attacks in the hopes that they do not occur. You who know how right I have been can help protect me by speaking my name in public, by writing to media outlets, to Congress and telling them about “Crossing the Rubicon” and our incredible record at FTW. Given that we predicted all of this, is it not reasonable to expect that someone might look to us and our work for solutions?
(29 September 2008)