Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Irresponsible acquiescence to budget deficits and mounting debt by numerous countries has translated into austere fiscal policies and drastic cuts in social services. These choices have generated public protests in Latin America, Israel, Spain and Greece. I recently analyzed thirty years of disorder in French and British cities, the only European countries experiencing recurrent urban outbreaks.
Peaceful protests were ignored, casualties of a corrupt and alienated society. Is it any wonder violence and theft have taken their place?
Youngsters are running riot around the country. Some of us, who work in education and on the ‘street’, predicted and warned of this possible eventuality. It has happened. Our kids have been trained to consume; have been thwarted by lack of progression and aspiration. …. The middle classes didn’t bother about the ‘ghettos’ of housing estates where such behaviours have been going for years, and, us, working in these areas, just knew that eventually something would kick off. Well, it has.
This week saw riots on Britain’s streets and in world markets. The IEA monthly oil report referred to the oil market as a ‘big dipper ride’ as Brent oil dropped below $100 for the first time since early February, before regaining some of the losses later in the week. Pundits compared the turmoil with 2008, but in some ways it looks far worse…
-An open letter to David Cameron’s parents
-Why we need to stop trying to ‘save the planet’ and just realise our place in it
-New Zealand quake: Christchurch ‘to be garden city’
-Riots are no reason to surrender our rights
-Shopocalypse Now
-The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
-Can the Aftermath of Disaster Be Beautiful?
-The Secretary of Energy Advisor Board Shale Gas Production Subcommittee Ninety-Day Report – August 11, 2011
-Gas Fracking Poses Serious Environmental Risks, Panel Finds
-Panel Seeks Stiffer Rules for Drilling of Gas Wells
In both the entrepreneurial and the financial pyramid scams, the magic ingredient is confidence. The investors believe in the financial guru or in the person who initiates them into the marketing chain. And, of course, the investors are confident that they’ll make lots of money. In some cases, as in the pyramid schemes that ripped through the former communist world in the 1990s, many investors even knew about the fraud but believed that they could get in and get out with a bag of money before the whole thing collapsed.
If the analogy holds, then the U.S. economy is…a giant pyramid scheme?
To get past the wall of potential financial-monetary collapse, governments would have to resort to extraordinary emergency measures. In the best instance, this would create time and space to begin coming up with long-term, infrastructural responses to declining energy supplies and climate change—responses involving the redesign of transport systems, power generation and transmission systems, food systems, and so on. Of course, there is no guarantee that time, once gained, will be well spent. Nevertheless, in principle the wall can be traversed.
Dmitry Orlov scares me. But it would be a shame if his fearsome reputation as a relentless doomer scared others off from reading the revised edition of his book that came out this year, Reinventing Collapse: the Soviet Experience and American Prospects. As a foreign-born analyst of the American scene, Orlov is as prescient as Alexis de Tocqueville. But Orlov, of course, is edgier, just like that other analyst of the American character: Gallagher. Yes, that Gallagher, the prop comic we loved in the 1980s for smashing watermelons on stage.
There are signs that more GDP growth may not be in the cards, regardless whose economic remedy is chosen. In fact, the day may have arrived when GDP itself has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had…If the “recovery” was all smoke and mirrors, we’ve just run out of mirrors.
The growing tension in the Eurozone is matched by a total failure by the media to give space for alternative views of how our economic lives, and especially our monetary policy, might be determined.
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight.
