Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The challenge of making sense of empires in general, and thus of the impending decline and fall of America’s empire, is made a good deal more challenging than it has to be by the haze of doubletalk and of simplistic us-vs.-them analyses. One way to clarify the way that empires work is to pay attention to who benefits from them–a matter that turns out to be considerably more complex than a casual glance might suggest.
– Peak people: The world’s losing its workers
– Monbiot: Is protecting the environment incompatible with social justice?
– Film review: The Forgotten Space (global trade)
– The Entropy of Capitalism & Urban Ag: Interview with Robert Biel
The twilight of cheap abundant energy is in many ways the dominant theme of global politics in our time, but another factor is coming to play an important role as well — the waning of America’s global empire. Impolite as it may be to mention the relation between America’s gargantuan military budgets and global network of bases, on the one hand, and the vastly disproportionate share of the world’s energy, materials, and industrial products Americans receive, on the other, the reality of America’s empire and the course of its decline have to be factored into any sense of the future ahead of us, and to do that, the nature of empire as a social, political, and economic reality has to be explored.
In this third and final article in this series, we will discuss seven new ways of living which we can adopt as economic growth fails. They are not revolutionary (revolutions never achieve their utopian visions because of something called “human nature”). Rather, they may allow us to “muddle through” the best we can right now with what we already know how to do. We will do these things because they will work — and we certainly need to stop doing things that don’t work, and find new ways that will work.
– Private Water Companies Come to Texas Bringing Soaring Rates, Little Recourse for Consumers
– Portraits of the Southwest in the Shadow of Drought
– No Time Left to Adapt to Melting Glaciers
Too many proposals for dealing with the end of the age of cheap abundant energy either ignore the economic dimension or offer wildly optimistic estimates. The widening spiral of economic dysfunction in today’s industrial societies makes both those stances problematic. We need to consider the possibility that an economic system that has few ways to pursue projects that don’t make a profit will find it impossible to profit from the measures that might ensure its survival.
Cities can no longer work separately in the global economy, they must form public and private partnerships to repair our old and outdated infrastructure, integrate an environmental agenda with economic and social agendas, invest in education, identify and leverage their assets and work regionally, says former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who also believes the Great Lakes region is “one of the most dynamic regions in America.”
By privatised public space, I mean that space which appears to be a public space (a square or a lane, for example) is in fact owned and controlled by a private landowner (or sometimes managed privately for a public owner.) Either way, different rules apply. It’s a trend which has been driven along by private sector regeneration schemes, and reinforced by a plethora of increasingly contentious public order legislation. But it is all but invisible.
Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-“wage-employed” groups, particularly children and seniors; and programs to minimize unemployment. Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be “reformed” and acquire a more human face. … The social-democratic solution has become an illusion. The question is what will replace it for the vast majority of the world’s populations.
-Germany and Greece flirt with mutual assured destruction
-Make foreign currencies legal in UK
-RMB: steaming ahead in Africa
-BerkShares boost the Berkshires in Massachusetts
Back in May in response to a question during an interview I suggested that when the sovereign debt of a major nation is finally questioned, it will signal the endgame for the worldwide bull market in just about everything. That moment has arrived, and my thesis will now be tested.
And, I’m not talking about the United States. I’m talking about France.
The energy descent from peak oil production imposes decades of contraction in the global economy. An orderly contraction, particularly in the US, is not likely for a number of reasons. The decline of the oil civilization is a phenomenon and spectacle of such complexity that understanding it requires a systems perspective. This summary of the case for a disorderly contraction and its core drivers demonstrates the capacity of systems tools to show the interlocking feedback structure that shapes how this momentous change plays out over time.
