Oh my.
I've been unconvinced either to join or to follow Twitter, but for him I'll make an exception. Not to say I'll join or become a Twitter follower, but I'll tune in regularly.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Brace Yourselves
says this.
However:
However:
While much of the world will be roasting (he prefers the term "global heating"), there will be a few oases to weather out the storm, he says. Island nations, such as his own Britain as well as New Zealand, Ireland and Hawaii, will do fine thanks to the moderating effects of oceans and their rainstorms. Ditto for currently cold northern areas, including parts of Canada and Siberia, which will gain a more hospitable climate.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Hating on Conan: What's the Point?
James Wolcott says, "Conan O'Brien, who cares." But then he goes on and on: "[I]s there anything worth remembering from O'Brien's multiyear stint on Late Night?" If Triumph isn't memorable, who or what is?
Wolcott's ideal host may be Dick Cavett, but an entire generation watched Letterman (whom he grudgingly accepts), Leno, and Conan. Arsenio, too, but he's largely forgotten today. Twenty years ago, though, Arsenio was the hottest late-night host. (This graph offers more proof of Arsenio's stark rise and fall.) I watched Arsenio all the way through to his last show with James Brown.
Dennis Perrin explains to Conan fans who took offense to his previous post, that he really likes Conan but thinks he's in way over his head as the new Tonight host, and will have to water down his style even more. But he stands by his assertion that Jimmy Fallon's a mediocre host. (No kudos for having The Roots as his band?) As for me, I can't really say. And nobody mentions Carson Daly!
Link Updates
Click on All Links in the sidebar. Among the new links are Professor Zero and Dennis Perrin, whom I've been reading for a while. This is what finally made me decide to add him.
The closest local (i.e., Hawaii) blog to his is Andy Parx's Got Windmills.
The closest local (i.e., Hawaii) blog to his is Andy Parx's Got Windmills.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day Motoring
Traditionally, people drive around on Memorial Day. Kunstler implies that this is the last one for doing that.
Island Chevrolet closed its Hilo and Kona dealerships last week, and I plan to post some photos of the Hilo lot, empty but not yet desolate. For that, there's a gas station on Kamehameha Avenue, closed for several years now. I think it was a Shell.
May 25, 2009
Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies
Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer.
This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out." One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the "former middle class." Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications.
Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently.
Even assuming some Americans can continue buying cars one way or another, I'm not convinced that we can make the kinds we fantasize about. Notice, nobody talks about hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars anymore. Why not? Because the technicalities and logistics could not be overcome at the scale required -- i.e. at the current scale of mass highway motoring and commuting. Sure, you could build a demonstration vehicle and run it around a test track a few times, but could you build a mass production car by the tens of millions that would run for 150,000 miles without a hugely expensive fuel cell change-out? No, at least not within the time-window that the liquid hydrocarbon fuel problem presented. Or could you construct a hydrogen fuel station (and product delivery) network replacing the old gasoline stations? Fuggeddabowdit. Hydrogen, as an element, was just too hard to move and contain. It's teeny-weeny atoms leaked out of valves and gaskets remorselessly and you couldn't pack enough into a tanker truck to make the trip to its destination worthwhile. Schemes to generate hydrogen on-board all ended up in the "perpetual motion" sink.
The current wish is that the dregs of GM and Chrysler will hire low-paid elves with no pension or health benefits and pump out hybrid and/or electric cars. It's conceivable that we could "reverse-engineer" a Prius or an Insight, but considering what a lousy job American car companies did on reverse-engineering everything that Japan or Germany pumped out over the past thirty-five years, the odds are pretty high that these new products will be just lame enough to fail against the established competition. What's more, they also present logistical and technical problems. For the hybrid, gasoline is still an issue (and Jevon's Paradox comes into play: the more efficient you make a means for using a resource, the more of that resource you will use). For both the hybrid and the electric car, the issue of how to get enough lithium for the batteries obtains, at least for now, given the current state-of-the-art battery technology. Most of this rare metal now comes from one place, Bolivia, and everybody wants "a piece" of it. Electric vehicles in large numbers depend on either coal or nuclear powered electric generation, each presenting special hazards. Both hybrids and electric cars would depend on the old installment loan purchase system -- at least to work in the current mode of suburban living, long-range commuting, and interstate highway travel.
Boone Pickens's plan of last year for converting the US car fleet to natural gas was another fantasy with wide appeal. But it depended on the companion fantasy of building massive wind-farm infrastructure on the great plains to shift natural gas use from power plants to vehicles, and the financial crisis has destroyed the capital necessary to even begin planning that project -- it even destroyed a large part of Mr. Pickens own capital reserves. Anyway, I would not be so sanguine about the long-term future of the shale gas plays that this scheme was based on. The depletion rates of these wells is horrendous and the amount of steel needed to keep production up is not consistent with the realities of the available infrastructure.
All the technologies under consideration are not likely to extend the Happy Motoring era. A prayerful reflection on them can only reinforce the specialness of oil and its byproducts -- cheap oil double-specially -- as well as reinforcing the reality that the cheap energy era itself is over. And, of course, in the play of events over the past several years we can see the relationship between cheap energy and easy credit, and how our entire economy has run aground, one way or another, on resource limits.
The implications of all this in the sociopolitical and geopolitical realms are pretty daunting. As long as we maintain Happy Motoring as the normal mode of existence in this country, we are going to see an ever-growing class of very resentful citizens pissed off at being foreclosed from it. In my oft-repeated scheme-of-things, this leads very quickly to the trap of political extremism, perhaps even corn-pone Naziism, as the system becomes increasingly difficult to prop up except by force. In geopolitical terms it leads to ever more dangerous international contests over the world's remaining oil reserves.
All this leads to two conclusions.
One is to accept the fact that the Happy Motoring era is over and to devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities, and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are. If the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making the rolling stock for public transit -- and for now the most intelligent choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines instead of venturing into grandiose new transit systems requiring stupendous capital outlays. Let the car era wind down gracefully. Triage and prioritize the highway maintenance agenda -- we won't be affluent enough to keep repaving the whole existing system -- and let other nations meet the diminishing demand for cars in the USA. This would be a "best case" scenario. (Other nations may decide to go further up the Happy Motoring road at their own eventual peril.)
My second conclusion is not so appetizing, namely that the bankruptcy of General Motors may set in motion a chain of events that will accelerate the destructive unwind of the bad credit economy, the damage to our bond values, the loss of faith in our currency, and the authority and legitimacy of our leaders. This last dire outcome might be allayed if, say, President Obama directed his policy efforts to the items in the paragraph above, that is, a reality-based agenda for true change in how we live -- but who can feel confident about that happening these days? Maybe it will take a horrifying chain of events to get Mr. Obama there. And then, tragically, he may be overwhelmed by the chain of events itself. I hope not.
Island Chevrolet closed its Hilo and Kona dealerships last week, and I plan to post some photos of the Hilo lot, empty but not yet desolate. For that, there's a gas station on Kamehameha Avenue, closed for several years now. I think it was a Shell.
May 25, 2009
Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies
Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer.
This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out." One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the "former middle class." Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications.
Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently.
Even assuming some Americans can continue buying cars one way or another, I'm not convinced that we can make the kinds we fantasize about. Notice, nobody talks about hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars anymore. Why not? Because the technicalities and logistics could not be overcome at the scale required -- i.e. at the current scale of mass highway motoring and commuting. Sure, you could build a demonstration vehicle and run it around a test track a few times, but could you build a mass production car by the tens of millions that would run for 150,000 miles without a hugely expensive fuel cell change-out? No, at least not within the time-window that the liquid hydrocarbon fuel problem presented. Or could you construct a hydrogen fuel station (and product delivery) network replacing the old gasoline stations? Fuggeddabowdit. Hydrogen, as an element, was just too hard to move and contain. It's teeny-weeny atoms leaked out of valves and gaskets remorselessly and you couldn't pack enough into a tanker truck to make the trip to its destination worthwhile. Schemes to generate hydrogen on-board all ended up in the "perpetual motion" sink.
The current wish is that the dregs of GM and Chrysler will hire low-paid elves with no pension or health benefits and pump out hybrid and/or electric cars. It's conceivable that we could "reverse-engineer" a Prius or an Insight, but considering what a lousy job American car companies did on reverse-engineering everything that Japan or Germany pumped out over the past thirty-five years, the odds are pretty high that these new products will be just lame enough to fail against the established competition. What's more, they also present logistical and technical problems. For the hybrid, gasoline is still an issue (and Jevon's Paradox comes into play: the more efficient you make a means for using a resource, the more of that resource you will use). For both the hybrid and the electric car, the issue of how to get enough lithium for the batteries obtains, at least for now, given the current state-of-the-art battery technology. Most of this rare metal now comes from one place, Bolivia, and everybody wants "a piece" of it. Electric vehicles in large numbers depend on either coal or nuclear powered electric generation, each presenting special hazards. Both hybrids and electric cars would depend on the old installment loan purchase system -- at least to work in the current mode of suburban living, long-range commuting, and interstate highway travel.
Boone Pickens's plan of last year for converting the US car fleet to natural gas was another fantasy with wide appeal. But it depended on the companion fantasy of building massive wind-farm infrastructure on the great plains to shift natural gas use from power plants to vehicles, and the financial crisis has destroyed the capital necessary to even begin planning that project -- it even destroyed a large part of Mr. Pickens own capital reserves. Anyway, I would not be so sanguine about the long-term future of the shale gas plays that this scheme was based on. The depletion rates of these wells is horrendous and the amount of steel needed to keep production up is not consistent with the realities of the available infrastructure.
All the technologies under consideration are not likely to extend the Happy Motoring era. A prayerful reflection on them can only reinforce the specialness of oil and its byproducts -- cheap oil double-specially -- as well as reinforcing the reality that the cheap energy era itself is over. And, of course, in the play of events over the past several years we can see the relationship between cheap energy and easy credit, and how our entire economy has run aground, one way or another, on resource limits.
The implications of all this in the sociopolitical and geopolitical realms are pretty daunting. As long as we maintain Happy Motoring as the normal mode of existence in this country, we are going to see an ever-growing class of very resentful citizens pissed off at being foreclosed from it. In my oft-repeated scheme-of-things, this leads very quickly to the trap of political extremism, perhaps even corn-pone Naziism, as the system becomes increasingly difficult to prop up except by force. In geopolitical terms it leads to ever more dangerous international contests over the world's remaining oil reserves.
All this leads to two conclusions.
One is to accept the fact that the Happy Motoring era is over and to devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities, and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are. If the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making the rolling stock for public transit -- and for now the most intelligent choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines instead of venturing into grandiose new transit systems requiring stupendous capital outlays. Let the car era wind down gracefully. Triage and prioritize the highway maintenance agenda -- we won't be affluent enough to keep repaving the whole existing system -- and let other nations meet the diminishing demand for cars in the USA. This would be a "best case" scenario. (Other nations may decide to go further up the Happy Motoring road at their own eventual peril.)
My second conclusion is not so appetizing, namely that the bankruptcy of General Motors may set in motion a chain of events that will accelerate the destructive unwind of the bad credit economy, the damage to our bond values, the loss of faith in our currency, and the authority and legitimacy of our leaders. This last dire outcome might be allayed if, say, President Obama directed his policy efforts to the items in the paragraph above, that is, a reality-based agenda for true change in how we live -- but who can feel confident about that happening these days? Maybe it will take a horrifying chain of events to get Mr. Obama there. And then, tragically, he may be overwhelmed by the chain of events itself. I hope not.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Star-Bulletin Back in Hilo
On the way to the supermarket I saw that the nearby Star-Bulletin vending machine was full. I picked up a copy inside the store. It's in a tabloid format, eighty-plus pages. It reminds me of The Village Voice and The New York Post.
25 May update: Only the Sunday paper is available in Hilo. Better than nothing, I guess. It's now two dollars a copy, jumping fifty cents.
25 May update: Only the Sunday paper is available in Hilo. Better than nothing, I guess. It's now two dollars a copy, jumping fifty cents.
Friday, May 15, 2009
The American Conservative Now Monthly
The current (May 18) issue of the magazine contains an important announcement that bears repeating for on-line readers: The American Conservative, endangered though it has been by the economic collapse, will survive. An outpouring of support from readers (and authors) heartened us to continue; that boost, plus some restructuring and an ambitious plan for fundraising, have enabled us to fight on. And after all, we could hardly absent the field while a struggle is underway for the future of the Right.
There will be a few changes: TAC’s print version is going monthly. (Subscribers will, of course, receive the full number of issues that they signed up for, even on the new schedule — and you’ll be getting a thicker magazine, too, since we’ve upped the page count.) There will be a short hiatus — six weeks — between the current issue and our first monthly issue, which goes to press June 18. In the meantime, we’re going to continue building up the website — the addition this week of John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth blog is just the first step.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/05/14/the-future-of-the-american-conservative/
There will be a few changes: TAC’s print version is going monthly. (Subscribers will, of course, receive the full number of issues that they signed up for, even on the new schedule — and you’ll be getting a thicker magazine, too, since we’ve upped the page count.) There will be a short hiatus — six weeks — between the current issue and our first monthly issue, which goes to press June 18. In the meantime, we’re going to continue building up the website — the addition this week of John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth blog is just the first step.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/05/14/the-future-of-the-american-conservative/
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Adorno, the Flu, and Other Things
I've been reading Adorno these past few days. Thanks to Google Books, among other sites, I've read parts of Minima Moralia and The Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as Adorno: A Biography and Adorno in America. He's one of the densest (and I don't mean dumb) people I've read, and very fascinating, too.
Other interesting books include Weimar on the Pacific, from which one learns that Adorno lived at 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood (1941-9), then at 803 Yale Street in Santa Monica (1949). And I found a great New York Times article, "Following Weimar to Sunset Boulevard" and a supplementary letter.
==
I'll have something soon on the swine flu.
2 June update: What can I say that hasn't been said about it. I notice that hand sanitizers are used far more frequently. That's about it.
Other interesting books include Weimar on the Pacific, from which one learns that Adorno lived at 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood (1941-9), then at 803 Yale Street in Santa Monica (1949). And I found a great New York Times article, "Following Weimar to Sunset Boulevard" and a supplementary letter.
==
I'll have something soon on the swine flu.
2 June update: What can I say that hasn't been said about it. I notice that hand sanitizers are used far more frequently. That's about it.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Where He's Been
I've told you where I've been. Readers of Alan McNarie's blog have probably wondered where he's been. Now they know.
Keep your eyeballs peeled for the lowdown on such funzanoons as Clift Tsuji.
My apologies for the infrequent posts lately. I've been heavily engaged in a little research project. I've been going through the campaign spending reports of local legislators, and making my own annotated versions: figuring out what the acronyms of the various political actions committees stood for, who [sic] the individuals worked for, which of them were lobbyists. The results have been pretty eye-opening.
Keep your eyeballs peeled for the lowdown on such funzanoons as Clift Tsuji.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Global Economy Sloughing Away in Big, Horrid Gobs!
The flu takes a lot out of one, hence my absence.
This is Kunstler's latest.
April 6, 2009
Strange Days
Even while a wave of reflex nausea washed over America last week, and the unemployment rolls swelled by much more than another half million, the greatest stock market suckers' rally in seventy years pulled in the last of the credulous. These are strange days. The earth is heaving and the buds swelling again -- at least north of the equator, where most of the action is -- and the global economy, which was supposed to be a permanent new add-on to the human condition, is sloughing away in big horrid gobs. But no one in charge of anything can believe it. The banking fiasco has introduced so much noise into the system that world leadership can't think straight.
What they're missing is real simple: peak oil means no more ability to service debt at all levels, personal, corporate, and government. End of story. All the other exertions being performed in opposition to this basic fact-of-life amount to a spastic soft-shoe performed before a smokescreen concealing a world of hurt. If the "quantitative easing" (money creation) and fiscal legerdemain (TARPs, TARFs, et cetera) happen to jack up the "velocity" of the new funny-money, and the world resumes its previous level of oil use, the price of oil would rise again -- this time astronomically because the previous crash of oil prices crushed the development of new oil projects to offset depletion -- and the global economy will crash again. Only the next phase of the disease is liable to move beyond the financial and into the social and political realms. Disorder of various kinds will rule -- toppled governments, civil unrest, international tension and conflict.
The US is doing everything possible to avoid these awful realities, but probably the worst self-deception is the idea that everything would be okay if we could just "re-start lending." That's just not going to happen. There is no more capacity to service the debt we've already piled on. Americans borrowed too much, and the bankers who made obscene fortunes in fees and bonuses in fraudulent lending managed to leverage this unpayable debt into the greatest collective swindle the world has ever known. The swindle has sent poison into every cell of the macro socio-economic organism, and further swindles are unlikely to revive it.
The rally in stocks, the financials in particular, could go on for another month or two. In the meantime, banks are striving desperately to avoid calling in more bad loans -- especially in commercial real estate, malls, strip malls, Big Box power centers -- because they don't want any more losses on their balance sheets. That can only go on for so long, too. Sooner or later the daisy chain of credibility in the fundamental transactions of business lose legitimacy and something's got to give.
My guess is it will first take the form, sometime after Memorial Day (but maybe sooner) of wholesale liquidations of everything under the North American sun: companies, households, chattels, US Treasury paper of all kinds, and, of course, the S & P 500. We'll soon find out whether an organism the size of the United States can run an economy based on one family selling the contents of its garage to the family next door. My guess is that this type of economy won't support the standards of living previously enjoyed in places like Dallas and Minneapolis.
The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe. The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV News calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight. One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or Easthampton, New York. [Cf. Paul Fussell, whose Top-Out-of-Sights learned long ago to have their estates in the deep country or on islands--P.Z.] Unlike the beleaguered elites of South Africa (where I visited recently), who live behind layers of fortification, the executives of Citibank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and a long list of hedge funds, will be found cringing in their wine-lockers behind a measly layer of privet hedge when the tattooed minions of Glen Beck come a'calling.
This could perhaps be avoided if someone in authority like US Attorney General Eric Holder took an aggressive interest in the multiple swindles of the decade past, and commenced some prosecutions. But the window of opportunity for this sort of meliorating action may close sooner than the government and the mainstream media believe. Social phase-change, as in the formations of mobs, is nothing to screw around with. Once the first window is broken, all bets are off for social stability. My guess is that the various bail-out gifts to the bankers are long past having gone too far in the eyes of this increasingly flammable public.
We have no previous experience with this type of social unrest. The violence of the Vietnam era will look very limited and reasonable in comparison -- in the sense that it was an uprising on the grounds of principle, not survival. And the Civil War was a wholly regimented affair between two rival factions. This time, people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice. By the time Lloyd Blankfein sees the torches flickering through his privet, it will be too late to defend the honor of his cappuccino machine.
President Obama will have to starkly change his current game plan if this outcome is to be avoided. I think he's capable of turning off the mob -- of preventing the grasshoppers from turning into ravening locusts -- but it may take an extraordinary exercise in authority to do it, such as the true (not pretend) nationalization of the big banks, engineering the exit of Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve, sucking up the ignominy of having to replace failed regulator Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, and calling out the dogs on the swindlers who had the gall to play their country for a sucker.
As I've averred more than a few times in this space before, the standard of living in America has got to come way down. We mortgaged our future and the future has now begun. Tough noogies for us. But the broad public won't accept the reality of this as long as the grandees of finance and their myrmidons appear to still enjoy the high life. They've got to be brought down hard, perhaps even disgraced and humiliated in the courts, and certainly parted from some of their fortunes -- if only in lawyer's fees. Mr. Obama pretty much served notice to this effect last week, telling a delegation of bankers in the White House that he was the only thing standing between them and "the pitchforks." It's possible he understands the situation.
This is Kunstler's latest.
April 6, 2009
Strange Days
Even while a wave of reflex nausea washed over America last week, and the unemployment rolls swelled by much more than another half million, the greatest stock market suckers' rally in seventy years pulled in the last of the credulous. These are strange days. The earth is heaving and the buds swelling again -- at least north of the equator, where most of the action is -- and the global economy, which was supposed to be a permanent new add-on to the human condition, is sloughing away in big horrid gobs. But no one in charge of anything can believe it. The banking fiasco has introduced so much noise into the system that world leadership can't think straight.
What they're missing is real simple: peak oil means no more ability to service debt at all levels, personal, corporate, and government. End of story. All the other exertions being performed in opposition to this basic fact-of-life amount to a spastic soft-shoe performed before a smokescreen concealing a world of hurt. If the "quantitative easing" (money creation) and fiscal legerdemain (TARPs, TARFs, et cetera) happen to jack up the "velocity" of the new funny-money, and the world resumes its previous level of oil use, the price of oil would rise again -- this time astronomically because the previous crash of oil prices crushed the development of new oil projects to offset depletion -- and the global economy will crash again. Only the next phase of the disease is liable to move beyond the financial and into the social and political realms. Disorder of various kinds will rule -- toppled governments, civil unrest, international tension and conflict.
The US is doing everything possible to avoid these awful realities, but probably the worst self-deception is the idea that everything would be okay if we could just "re-start lending." That's just not going to happen. There is no more capacity to service the debt we've already piled on. Americans borrowed too much, and the bankers who made obscene fortunes in fees and bonuses in fraudulent lending managed to leverage this unpayable debt into the greatest collective swindle the world has ever known. The swindle has sent poison into every cell of the macro socio-economic organism, and further swindles are unlikely to revive it.
The rally in stocks, the financials in particular, could go on for another month or two. In the meantime, banks are striving desperately to avoid calling in more bad loans -- especially in commercial real estate, malls, strip malls, Big Box power centers -- because they don't want any more losses on their balance sheets. That can only go on for so long, too. Sooner or later the daisy chain of credibility in the fundamental transactions of business lose legitimacy and something's got to give.
My guess is it will first take the form, sometime after Memorial Day (but maybe sooner) of wholesale liquidations of everything under the North American sun: companies, households, chattels, US Treasury paper of all kinds, and, of course, the S & P 500. We'll soon find out whether an organism the size of the United States can run an economy based on one family selling the contents of its garage to the family next door. My guess is that this type of economy won't support the standards of living previously enjoyed in places like Dallas and Minneapolis.
The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe. The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV News calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight. One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or Easthampton, New York. [Cf. Paul Fussell, whose Top-Out-of-Sights learned long ago to have their estates in the deep country or on islands--P.Z.] Unlike the beleaguered elites of South Africa (where I visited recently), who live behind layers of fortification, the executives of Citibank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and a long list of hedge funds, will be found cringing in their wine-lockers behind a measly layer of privet hedge when the tattooed minions of Glen Beck come a'calling.
This could perhaps be avoided if someone in authority like US Attorney General Eric Holder took an aggressive interest in the multiple swindles of the decade past, and commenced some prosecutions. But the window of opportunity for this sort of meliorating action may close sooner than the government and the mainstream media believe. Social phase-change, as in the formations of mobs, is nothing to screw around with. Once the first window is broken, all bets are off for social stability. My guess is that the various bail-out gifts to the bankers are long past having gone too far in the eyes of this increasingly flammable public.
We have no previous experience with this type of social unrest. The violence of the Vietnam era will look very limited and reasonable in comparison -- in the sense that it was an uprising on the grounds of principle, not survival. And the Civil War was a wholly regimented affair between two rival factions. This time, people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice. By the time Lloyd Blankfein sees the torches flickering through his privet, it will be too late to defend the honor of his cappuccino machine.
President Obama will have to starkly change his current game plan if this outcome is to be avoided. I think he's capable of turning off the mob -- of preventing the grasshoppers from turning into ravening locusts -- but it may take an extraordinary exercise in authority to do it, such as the true (not pretend) nationalization of the big banks, engineering the exit of Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve, sucking up the ignominy of having to replace failed regulator Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, and calling out the dogs on the swindlers who had the gall to play their country for a sucker.
As I've averred more than a few times in this space before, the standard of living in America has got to come way down. We mortgaged our future and the future has now begun. Tough noogies for us. But the broad public won't accept the reality of this as long as the grandees of finance and their myrmidons appear to still enjoy the high life. They've got to be brought down hard, perhaps even disgraced and humiliated in the courts, and certainly parted from some of their fortunes -- if only in lawyer's fees. Mr. Obama pretty much served notice to this effect last week, telling a delegation of bankers in the White House that he was the only thing standing between them and "the pitchforks." It's possible he understands the situation.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Monday, March 09, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Restaurants in Hilo
Domino's Pizza in Hilo recently reopened under new ownership, soon after the Kona branch reopened. And according to the sign pictured below, Bueno Burrito is soon to open in the Keawe Street space that housed Subway, which moved down the street.
Morgan's Deli, across the street from The Lyman Museum, has apparently closed.
20 March update: Bueno Burrito (969-9955) opened just this morning. It's open Mondays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.
Morgan's Deli, across the street from The Lyman Museum, has apparently closed.
20 March update: Bueno Burrito (969-9955) opened just this morning. It's open Mondays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Congratulations, Slumdog Millionaire!
Don't overlook the little guy.
==
5 March update:
I found this comment on Philip Weiss's blog:
This is not a political film. It's a romance about destiny. And the dignity it has lent the poor of Mumbai is an achievement that compares with Dickens's treatment of the London slums or Van Gogh's and Millet's paintings of country people, which were considered inappropriate subjects at the time.
As for those who dismiss Slumdog as "poverty porn", I assume none of them are actually from the slums.
==
20 March update: I looked at the 12 October issue of USA Weekend, which briefly reviewed the major movies to be released in late 2008. Slumdog Millionaire was not mentioned at all, despite its limited release date of 12 November and its wide release date of 25 December.
http://www.usaweekend.com/08_issues/081012/081012movies-sneak-peek.html
==
5 March update:
I found this comment on Philip Weiss's blog:
This is not a political film. It's a romance about destiny. And the dignity it has lent the poor of Mumbai is an achievement that compares with Dickens's treatment of the London slums or Van Gogh's and Millet's paintings of country people, which were considered inappropriate subjects at the time.
As for those who dismiss Slumdog as "poverty porn", I assume none of them are actually from the slums.
==
20 March update: I looked at the 12 October issue of USA Weekend, which briefly reviewed the major movies to be released in late 2008. Slumdog Millionaire was not mentioned at all, despite its limited release date of 12 November and its wide release date of 25 December.
http://www.usaweekend.com/08_issues/081012/081012movies-sneak-peek.html
Monday, February 16, 2009
On the Recession: A Post in Progress
This post is about the late 2000s recession and financial crises that persist to this day. It will be continuously updated.
This CounterPuncharticle asserts that this is a white recession but a black depression.
From The International Monetary Fund: 'World Economic Outlook Update: Global Economic Slump Challenges Policies.'
==
28 February update:
Economy Shrinks at Fastest Pace in 26 Years
Tax-Deduction Plan Won't Hurt Charities During Recession, White House Says
Hard Economic Times a Boon for Libraries
==
4 March update:
What Does the Worst Recession in a Generation Look Like?"
4 August update: Middle-aged white men hard hit by the recession but the recession could cause the black middle class to go extinct. (11 August update: Hattie takes note of this in her post.) See also Muhammad's February CounterPunch article, which link is near the top of this post.
8 August update: The South is the epicenter of job loss. And Britain faces a power shortage. Many, but not all of these links are from the excellent LifeAftertheOilCrash website. Please visit regularly.
This CounterPuncharticle asserts that this is a white recession but a black depression.
From The International Monetary Fund: 'World Economic Outlook Update: Global Economic Slump Challenges Policies.'
==
28 February update:
Economy Shrinks at Fastest Pace in 26 Years
Tax-Deduction Plan Won't Hurt Charities During Recession, White House Says
Hard Economic Times a Boon for Libraries
==
4 March update:
What Does the Worst Recession in a Generation Look Like?"
4 August update: Middle-aged white men hard hit by the recession but the recession could cause the black middle class to go extinct. (11 August update: Hattie takes note of this in her post.) See also Muhammad's February CounterPunch article, which link is near the top of this post.
8 August update: The South is the epicenter of job loss. And Britain faces a power shortage. Many, but not all of these links are from the excellent LifeAftertheOilCrash website. Please visit regularly.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
More Link Updates
I've removed some defunct links to sites in the Politics of Hawaii category in The Ever-Evolving List of Links. They are:
AkamaiVoters.com, AlohaPolitics, 808AlohaState, HaolesforHawaiians, HunterBishop.com, and MauiTalk.
I have to look at a few links; apparently, one, HawaiiMatters.com, has turned Japanese! Since I don't know Japanese, I can't tell if it's still about Hawaii politics.
AkamaiVoters.com, AlohaPolitics, 808AlohaState, HaolesforHawaiians, HunterBishop.com, and MauiTalk.
I have to look at a few links; apparently, one, HawaiiMatters.com, has turned Japanese! Since I don't know Japanese, I can't tell if it's still about Hawaii politics.
Monday, February 02, 2009
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