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Naomi Klein trumps the doomsters
"(Neo-conservatism is) not some new invention but capitalism stripped of its Keynesian appendages, capitalism in its monopoly phase, a system that has let itself go -- that no longer has to work to keep its customers, that can be as antisocial, antidemocratic and boorish as it wants." Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine"I'm a great fan of James Kunstler's, "Clusterfuck Nation" blog. The prophet Jeremiah has nothing on Jimmy Kunstler's "Lamentations".
Probably the most prolific and apocalyptic of the "doomsters", Kunstler is always entertaining and thought provoking and though seen by many as extremist, in my opinion his diagnosis falls far short of being pessimistic enough.
Maybe it's because I've just been reading what is probably the most important political agitprop text of the XXI century, Naomi Klein's Polaroid of evil, "The Shock Doctrine", but I wonder how someone as justifiably alarmed and dramatically pessimistic about America's statu quo as James Kunstler is, can, at the same time, be such a starry-eyed optimist about human nature and the way, and for whose benefit, the world is run.
Kunstler sees our present wasteful system collapsing and being replaced by a healthy return to the soil, where the far flung suburbs are abandoned in favor of small cities populated by craftsmen surrounded by small, labor intensive farms that will supply them with food. Rather like the Middle Ages, but with Internet.
Here is a typical sample of his work:
American perestroika really boils down to this: we have to rescale the activities of daily life to a level consistent with the mandates of the future, especially the ones having to do with available energy and capital. We have to dismantle things that have no future and rebuild things that will allow daily life to function. We have to say goodbye to big box shopping and rebuild Main Street. More people will be needed to work in farming and fewer in tourism, public relations, gambling, and party planning. We have to make some basic useful products in this country again. We have to systematically decommission suburbia and reactivate our small towns and small cities. We have to prepare for the contraction of our large cities. We have to let the sun set on Happy Motoring and rebuild our trains, transit systems, harbors, and inland waterways. We have to reorganize schooling at a much more modest level. We have to close down most of the overseas military bases we're operating and conclude our wars in Asia. Mostly, we have to recover a national sense of common purpose and common decency. September 14, 2009Everything he says above makes sense to me as I'm sure it does to many people. The problem is that the public affairs of America have become a pantomime run for the benefit of special interest groups and what is worse a great percentage of the population are perfectly aware of this but impotent to change it.
To cut to the chase, Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys", Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney and George Bush, at the head (or the tail) of a legion of think tanks and lobbies have hollowed out America's institutional infrastructure, while filling their pockets and the pockets of those who sail in them and have impoverished millions of people all over the world in the process.
This is how the Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz reviewing Naomi Klein's, "The Shock Doctrine" in the New York Times puts it:
Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish.How does this democratic dysfunction work in America's daily life? In this case Arianna Huffington channels the "dark side" better than Stiglitz:
Listening to President Obama's heartfelt, well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve speech on financial reform today, my mind kept flashing on a story I heard the last time Washington, in the wake of the Enron scandal, promised to reform Wall Street. The story came from a friend who took a family trip on a cruise ship. Her 10-year-old son kept pestering the crew, begging for a chance to drive the massive ocean liner. The captain finally invited the family up to the bridge, whereupon the boy grabbed hold of the wheel and began vigorously turning it. My friend panicked -- until the captain leaned over and told her not to worry, that the ship was on autopilot, and that her son's maneuvers would have no effect. And that's the way it is with our leaders. They stand on the bridge making theatrical gestures they claim will steer us in a new direction while, down in the control room, the autopilot, programmed by politicians in the pocket of special interests, continues to guide the ship of state along its predetermined course.These groups have no concern for the general welfare and as long as their itches get scratched, they could care less if the rest of the population lives in rags... countries like this abound in the world. Why should Kuntsler think that the USA would be any different?
Often formerly prosperous countries have slid of the graphs when their money ceased to have value. Imagine the dollar collapsing. Here is what it might look like:
The dollar dropped to the lowest level in a year versus the euro as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's declaration that the recession is likely over led investors to sell the U.S. currency and buy riskier assets. BloombergThe possibility of the dollar collapsing is the leitmotif of much of today's international economic commentary. This would cause great hardship world wide, but I imagine that the Chinese and the EU are already preparing themselves for that eventuality. It is a chilling possibility that only a war or a plague might be enough to move the dollar back up in value as a momentary "refuge".
Move over Japan. Investors spent a decade borrowing in zero-interest-rate yen and putting the funds in higher-yielding assets overseas. It's the U.S.'s turn to flood the world with cheap funding and the risks of this going wrong are huge.(...) imagine what might happen if the world's reserve currency became its most shorted. Carry trades are, after all, bets that the funding currency will weaken further or stay down for an extended period of time. It's also a wager that a central bank is trapped into keeping borrowing costs low indefinitely.(...) The dollar-carry trade says nothing good about confidence in the U.S. economy. It's also a reminder that the side effects of this crisis may be setting us up for a bigger one. William Pesek - Bloomberg
If the dollar so fell in value that it ceased to be the world's reserve currency, then the USA would need to export massively to gain hard currency. The USA hardly manufactures anything anymore, so what to sell?
We often forget that the United States is the world's greatest exporter of agricultural commodities: wheat, rice, corn, soybeans and yes, if we needed the cash badly enough, oil. This is one of the great differences between America and the developing world's other former empires: America itself can be pillaged.
I remember that the late Peter Drucker was worried, way back during the "Japan is number one" panic, that the USA would simply end up supplying grain to the Japanese.
If the dollar goes blooey the Chinese will be happy to buy our commodities, on the cheap, just as they are happy to buy oil from Sudan or soybeans from Argentina.
I think the most likely model for America's future, on much more massive scale of course, would be that of Argentina and Uruguay -- Brazil seems to be more sensibly run -- once they were wealthy countries with highly educated middle classes and strong social nets, which now find themselves prostrated by Chicago Boys induced debt and corruption, at the mercy of the world's commodity markets.
So what I envisage is not the disappearance of America's great cities, as Jim Kuntsler does, but their conversion into the South American mixture of a tiny group of wealthy owners of the natural resources, their foreign currency safely stashed offshore, who live in well guarded communities, protected by bodyguards, who fly in private helicopters over the squalor of immense, sprawling, sordid, miserable trailer park like slums, where desperate people live by their wits, selling drugs, or their bodies, where gamines scavenge in garbage heaps, where in order to feed the rest, parents sell their prettier children into prostitution, so the rich of the world can come to America for sex tourism, like they do in Cambodia or Thailand.
I can imagine, because I have seen it happen in other places, that this could lead to the rise of fascist populism, antisemitism, military coups, martial law and much desperate violence.
It really doesn't take much imagination, just studying what happens when resource-rich countries that once had a prosperous middle class take this path.
So, having read Naomi Klein, I'm afraid I don't see Jim Kunstler's Arcadia coming, not with the political and economic leaders that control America today and in any foreseeable future.
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Get over to the Oil Drum and you'll find folks a lot more apocalyptic than Kunstler. The Tainter crowd, for instance.
September 21, 2009 8:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is not about oil or commodities, this is about greed and dysfunction, of leaving the vulnerable behind.
September 21, 2009 8:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tainter's textbook is called The Collapse of Complex Societies, and is not limited to oil or commodities, either.
September 21, 2009 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for leading me to Tainter!
September 21, 2009 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Democracy and the middle class are symbiotic: they need each other. As the middle class declines, so to does democracy. This is fine for the industrialists and financiers, fascism is their preferred form of government. You just can't have a proper aristocracy without serfs.
September 21, 2009 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you forgot one of our other made in America product categories: Weapons.
September 21, 2009 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Rather like Russia, if you think about it.
September 21, 2009 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Isn't the greatest danger conversion to "ideocracy" - regime based on social and political fable, either Right or Left? The greatest killer of the 20th century, which took the record for body count, was the new religion of the age: politics. And the bloodiest atrocities were driven by ideologies thoroughly counterintuitive and detached from human nature. They fell, to be replaced by religion, once again the Thing Worth Killing For. Great post.
September 21, 2009 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
I read the book and was amazed how well choreographed Bu$h and his minions had been in slowly turning the soft underbelly of the nation over to make it easier to be butchered. And with the goose-stepping right going out of their way to stymie any and all efforts to reach a point of stability it won't be too long before those words from her documentary come to haunt the US:
September 21, 2009 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
"slowly turning the soft underbelly of the nation over to make it easier to be butchered"
Powerfully stated.
September 21, 2009 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you read the book, you'll see it as clear as day. Obama may have inherited a nation that's almost been completely filleted by the corporatist of the most choicest cuts. Social security and government and military pensions with associated benefits like Medicare and Tricare(military) are pretty much the heart of what's left.
September 22, 2009 3:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Arcadia can only come about after earth-shattering change, when people are forced to switch to this lifestyle in order to survive. It's survivable and sustainable, but you don't get luxuries like the internet from it.
September 21, 2009 2:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Arcadia can never come because Arcadia never existed. The closest things to it that people have fantasized about are either poorly understood foreign societies (I can still remember when the Chinese Red Guards were "Arcadia") or golden ages for the white male.
And forget about China or any other state profiting from a collapse of the dollar. The Chinese I know are scared stiff at the prospect. Bang goes one of their biggest markets, bang goes a huge chunk of their foreign exchange holdings, and bang goes the rest of the world economy, within which they are now irrevocably bound. The only thing that keeps the Chinese Communist Party in power is the implicit understanding that the people will be passive if (enough of them) are prosperous. If the world economy collapses, it's a whole new ball game. China will have its hands too full to indulge in any gloating.
Finally, what is this about the age of cheap energy ending? It seems to me that it's just beginning. Oil and coal energy have seemed to be "cheap" because they were never required to account for all their long-term costs and liabilities. If they were, they'd be as expensive as nuclear. Wind power is now practical on a mass scale, solar is just about there, geothermal, tidal.... You want cheap power? That's what shifting over to renewable resources means.
It always amazes me how some seemingly intelligent people can indulge in this sort of apocalyto-onanism. I suppose it's because you never get called on it when the dismal prophesies don't come to pass. But, whatever floats your boat as a matter of personal pleasure... just don't ask the adults to take it seriously.
September 21, 2009 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course the Chinese are scared... the future of the dollar is not in their hands, but the future of China is and be sure that they are taking measures to protect themselves against the dollar imploding.
September 21, 2009 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think we are at a point, civilization-wise, when it's all going to come crashing down. However, the nature of that crash could be very differnt.
It could be a controlled crash from a petroeconomy to a cheap energy economy, as you say, if the resources to capture that energy can be brought online soon enough, and if even cheaper, virtually free energy research has enough time to develop.
Or it could be an uncontrolled crash that leads to a Mad Max world. I think the difference will be the timing of it. If we can keep the world limping along a bit longer, things are going to get better and our children will live in a very, very different world. The sooner it happens, the worse it will be.
September 21, 2009 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I'm calling you out on some of your statements.
Since you sort of cut-and-pasted some of this as a comment to one of mine below, you'll find my response down there.
Be prepared to come with a sharp #2 pencil and an erase. Or yes, and a few numbers to back up your claims.
September 21, 2009 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am going to tell you now that cheap energy already happened. It brought us the wonders of industrialization.
From here on out, energy is going to become cost prohibitive. There will be tiny minority of people who can indulge in extravagance, and the rest of us will live either more simply or in squalor.
I just don't see any other outcome because the scope of world governments has exceeded the problems. Nations have simply grown too cumbersome to deftly manage the contraction of energy and resources.
September 21, 2009 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
David,
It's a shame you classify Kunstler as a "Doomer" because it frames him as a Hebraic Prophet to begin with. Kunstler basic thesis is that all that we see is a result of cheap energy... so what happens when you remove cheap energy?
And that isn't doom...that's a fact.
Your quote:
is a bit off the mark. America has already been pillaged. Much of our farm lands turned into suburban subdivisions, we presently need significant petroleum inputs to push food production like you claim.
The real issue is what happens when you don't have cheap oil to grow all these foods. This past week, we lost Norman Borlaug, widely acknowledged as the father of the Green Revolution. It is estimated that he has saved as many as 1 billion lives from hunger -- certainly something far more impressive than anything that Ted Kennedy did -- yet not one TPM tribute that I saw. The Green Revolution was based on a modern view of agriculture as industrialization. It also has its critics which Borlaug can answer for himself:
The real issue is that we are clearly in overshoot without these methods at our disposal -- and these methods require cheap energy.
And by the way, Kunstler espouses a view of trying to move to a "controlled breakdown" to soft land our society into a new place. But he acknowledges that our leadership isn't properly preparing people. In that regards, the entire healthcare debate raging today is moot -- we will very soon not have the societal wealth to pay it out anyway.
September 21, 2009 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
How expensive is the wind? How expensive is the sun? How expensive are the tides or the heat within the earth?
It staggers me that the same people who argue, largely correctly, that we have to switch over to renewable energy sources can laud the cheapness and plenitude of such sources out of one side of their mouths, and moan about "the end of cheap energy" out of the other. Cognitive dissonance is clearly not limited to the extreme Right.
September 21, 2009 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who said wind and sun were cheap? There are significant costs in building and maintaining the farms and distributing the power.
As a simple example, even the Palm Springs wind turbine site says:
Not to mention the areas of land required to generate this power. In 2005, the US required 3.4 TW. This means 3.6 MILLION 950-kW turbines of the type in Palm Springs. Of course, this is assuming that the generators are working all the time (e.g. the wind is blowing, etc.) But let's not worry about that too much for now.
A wind-friendly website quotes 100 acres/950-kW turbine as the foot print. Okay, that's 360 MILLION acres of land required for this windfarm.
Or about the size of Alaska... our largest state.
And we haven't even talked about (a) distribution of this power (not all places are equally windy) and (b) how much of the US is windy enough to support this system. Or people bitching about windmills going up in their neighborhood.
Renewables come with their own costs. If they didn't, the oil companies would have already led the charge to them long ago... after all, they have the money and the energy expertise.
Finally, your examples forget about the petrochemical inputs for agriculture. You can't use wind as an input to make fertilizer/pesticides/etc. Nor can you run jets on batteries.
Get used to the idea: your lifestyle is unsustainable...and will change in the near future.
September 21, 2009 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
360 million acres sounds like a lot, until you notice that we've already paved around 40 million acres, which is considerably more materials-intensive than building a windmill with empty space around it.
September 21, 2009 8:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some people just don't seem to get your message.
First AA battery powered aircraft
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and undergraduates at the Tokyo Institute of Technology teamed up to build an aircraft powered by 160 AA battery cells and successfully flew it for a distance of 391 meters (1,280 ft) in July, 2006.
Nikola Tesla had visions of electric jets, and Tesla Motors is considering pursuing the partial patent sets Tesla left behind.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/tesla-founder-elon-musk-dreams-of-electric-airplanes/
September 22, 2009 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Agribusiness is in just a few hands, and believe me if those people have an export market that brings them hard cash (off shore preferably) they will have all the energy fossil, human or whatever to grow and sell what they need to stay rich... even if the majority of Americans wore rags and went to bed hungry, just like in all the other resource rich oligarchies in the world.
September 21, 2009 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are attendant costs of getting that fuel here... and protecting those mega-farms. And there is the fact that petro-chemicals are required as inputs for the Green Revolution -- it's not all about oil for energy.
Of course, we haven't even addressed how global climate change has the potential to wipe out the breadbasket of America, but that's a whole other topic.
Mighty corporations are merely a human invention and will pale behind the might of the real scale that nature works on. Even the corporations "live" on the same finite planet that the rest of us do. We are of the Earth and despite all illusions to the contrary, are subject to its laws, not the other way around.
September 21, 2009 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent summary. Thank you so much.
What is that old saying? “The mills of the gods grind slow but they grind exceeding small.” The devolution forward can also be thought of as the slow rusting and eroding away of all the artifacts of the industrial moment. Even the Native American admonition to think five generations ahead before making any important decision is too small a canvas on which to paint the knowable future.
There will be places where the grinding down will be just a faint noise in the background. But where? I had a lovely chat with a charming 10 year old boy at a wedding this weekend here in Oregon. He told me his ambition is to live in Norway. He liked it because it was sunny and quiet. Somehow he gets it already.
September 21, 2009 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
He liked Norway, because it was "sunny and quiet"... sunny and quiet? Quiet yes, but sunny? Maybe at 3AM on June 21rst.
September 21, 2009 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
But if your choice is Oslo-like or Baghdad like, well...
I think the young man was asking the right question.
September 22, 2009 6:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Another fine essay.
This all tells me that elections do make a difference.
September 21, 2009 5:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a Spanish saying that movement as a concept is proved by walking... If Obama really reforms health and Wall Street then we are talking about a significant difference. With the Clintonite crew that he has on board the prudent position is to wait and see.
September 21, 2009 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that should probably be "elections CAN make a difference." This one will only make a difference if accompanied by a clear-eyed walk back of corporate power embedded in the "politicization" of our elected and unelected government infrastructure, and re-regulation of our financial infrastructure.
September 21, 2009 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are still in the throes of the shock doctrine. Health care reform is being metamorphosed into a massive industry subsidy and we are being shocked into accepting it.
I can't help but view the two parties in our nation as good cop/bad cop playing the rest of us for patsies.
I am just in a foul mood today. Obama's Sunday media blitz was pathetic industry whoring.
September 21, 2009 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
David, your post, and more importantly Shock Doctrine, need to be read by many more people. Well, maybe simplified versions. Few people really understand the wake of destruction caused by the collusion between government and corporations. It's so outrageous, people would likely have a tough time even believing it.
Whatever the future brings, rank and file individuals will remain voiceless unless there is a massive shift toward a localized economy. There is already some movement in that direction. I'm marginally optimistic. However, I think things will get much worse before a lasting correction sets in.
Thank you for writing this.
September 21, 2009 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent job David!
I think the real question is which way is it going to go? Will the robber barons continue to call the shots and will their political enablers like, yes, Obama, Geithner, Summers, etc... do anything to protect the interests of the common American? I don't think it is certain at this point which way we will go. What is certain is that the powers that be must be brought to heel before it is too late because it is very true that they don't give a damn what happens to the average person in this country.
One note though, it is not true to say we don't manufacture much, if anything, of value any longer. We certainly do. But the difference between today and 20 or 30 years ago is that we do much less of it. Instead of leading the economy of the world in manufacturing, that sector has taken a back seat to financial services. We still manufacture a great deal and the manufcturing sector of our economy is quite significant. It has simply been on the retreat now for several decades. That trend does not have to continue, but as long as Wall Street is allowed to conduct it's ponzi schemes without even one of the thieves being indicted, let alone convicted, capital will continue to flow to the higher yielding and far riskier ventures Wall Street offers the investor.
September 22, 2009 1:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme and requires 2-3% per annum growth. Without that growth, there is no way to pay back loans in the future.
What fuels this growth? Increased consuming either via (a) more people or (b) more consumption per person.
All predicated on cheap energy.
Without the cheap energy, you won't get growth, and you'll be able to finally topple capitalism (there won't be a way of having money flowing since there is no way of paying it back in the future). There will be a tremendous collapse -- and that will include the present wealthy.
Too many fools are preaching political ideology when a practical stance is more valuable.
Don't worry, you'll know when the Ponzi scheme comes down. Everything with crash. Only those on the bottom rung won't have as far to fall.
That's justice.
September 22, 2009 1:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
The oligarch won't suffer a bit, although some people who imagined they were oligarchs will be shocked to find they are not... and as for the poor, they won't even have mayonnaise for their sandwiches. Study Argentina, study Uruguay.
September 22, 2009 2:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unlike the days of yore, our present civilization is terraforming the planet. The future oligarchy (so called) will be living a diminished life compared to even the poorer people's today.
Those who know how to survive in nature will be the new oligarchy. There has been much destruction of general knowledge in the past 200 years.
September 22, 2009 3:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
You can be sure that no matter how bad things get there will be those that will have plenty to eat, although most people starve around them, and they will wear warm, beautiful clothes although most people around them shiver in rags. You can be sure that they will have armies and police and judges and prisons to defend them and hungry poets to sing their praises and starving fathers and mothers will abound to sell them their pretty daughters.
Life will always be sweet for them, it always has been.
Examine the Nation Security State and see how well it could adapt to hard times.
September 22, 2009 5:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
September 22, 2009 5:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
That was a reply to clearthinker.
September 22, 2009 5:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I had a recent émigré from Russia do a little work on my apartment. He had lived in Moscow before he left. We had a nice chat about life and at one point he told a story. It seems a dispute arose between himself and a neighbor. One day the neighbor showed up as his door with an AK 47 and threatened him if he didn’t resolve the dispute in the neighbor’s favor. My Russian friend said it probably would seem to an American that this armed neighbor had a lot of leverage in this confrontation. However my Russian handyman explained that where he lived there was a military post just a few blocks away and that for $100 he could get a few soldiers to drive a tank up to his neighbor’s house and stick the barrel of its cannon in his doorway. Such was life in Moscow before he left.
Perhaps there is a moral to this story for us as we contemplate our own appointment with collapse: One should keep an open mind as to all the possibilities of the situation.
September 22, 2009 6:46 AM | Reply | Permalink