March 24, 2003
     Thanks to several correspondents who informed me it was Karl Marx who made that crack about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Apparently Marx said this in connection with Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Napoleon III -- which seemed very unfair, since Nappy III (Louis Napoleon, ruled 1851 - 1870) was in many ways a far more beneficent figure than his glorious uncle.
     Anyway, this is off the point, which is that Gulf War II -- if that's what we call it -- has now moved beyond its farcical opening hours into the kind of deadly seriousness we expect of real war. The Iraqis have stopped rolling over. American soldiers are dying in combat (or being executed after capture). The mystery of why Saddam failed to fire up his oil wells in the south has not been cleared up yet, and the greater oil fields of northern Iraq are apparently intact for the moment. No nerve gas or bio-weapons have been deployed yet, or even found in the captured zones, but I don't take this to mean that they don't exist. Rather, I assume they are carefully concealed. We seem to be entering a pretty down-and-dirty phase of this conflict.
      As it unfolds, a clearer sense emerges of why it is happening.
      First, this is the result of brushing the issue of proliferation under the rug for decades. We're now faced with a set of irresponsible states who have the means to fabricate terrible weapons, and the will to either use them directly against American interests or engage and assist non-state proxies to do it. The US has to at least demonstrate the will to oppose them.
      It's not an accident that this war is occuring in a place that holds the world's second largest reserves of oil, but it is not the primary purpose of the war. The primary purpose is to occupy forward positions adjacent to Iran and cause Iran to think very carefully about mounting a nuclear arms program, which they are close to starting.
      Iraqi oil, if extracted optimally, under the most favorable circumstances, will only postpone the world fossil fuels reckoning by a few years. There is a persistent buzz on the internet -- strangely absent in the other media -- that the war is also about the threat of oil-exporting nations converting their transactions to being euro-based rather than in dollars as has been the standard for decades. Saddam Hussein was in the process of doing just this. It seems abstruse, perhaps, but with the dollar losing value against the euro, dollar-denominated oil sales tend more and more to subsidize American users and penalize non-Americans, who have to get dollars to buy oil. They get dollars by selling us manufactured goods. But the dollars they get are worth less and less every month.
      The reason the dollar loses value is because we import much more stuff (including products and oil) than we export. Our global trade account is wildly out of balance, and has been for years. The only thing compensating for it has been the belief -- despite apparent trends -- that the US is still the world's most stable society and therefore the best place to park surplus wealth -- which is done in dollar-denominated investment instruments like stocks. So exported dollars have steadily returned here from abroad, propping up our credibility.
      The slow-motion crash of the stock markets has made foreigners think twice about parking their wealth in the US. Meanwhile, we've outsourced our manufacturing capacity to Mexico and Asia so that the American economy has come to be based soley on the creation of suburban sprawl, financed on credit, which is to say hallucinated money. Suburban sprawl is a meta-machine for consumption of resources. It produces nothing of value in and of itself. The world is onto this.
      The US economy is therefore in the process of losing its legitimacy. As this occurs, the world will not want to assign the dollar the role as its reserve currency -- i.e. the unit of money presumed to be backed by the strongest society, nor will they want to use the dollar as the basis for oil sales. As more foreign investment is withdrawn from the US and put into euros or possibly even Chinese yuan, the value of the dollar is apt to fall sharply.
      By the way, I would not interpret the recent "war rally" in the stock markets as having any significance. The markets, like the world, are onto the true nature of the US economy -- that's why they have been declining steadily since 2000. They are only going through a temporary delirium based on the end of uncertainty about whether war would actually happen.
      So, getting back to the internet buzz, the idea was that if the US could get Iraqi oil back onto dollar-denominated transactions, it could halt the world trend against the dollar and postpone the erosion of economic legitimacy. This is said to account for the hostile attitude of France and Germany (the euro's chief backers) toward the Iraq adventure. Europe would benefit hugely from oil sales denominated in their own currency.
      Assuming that this theory has something to it, I doubt that the US can halt the trend away from the dollar in any case. OPEC may decide to shift all their oil trade to the euro no matter what the US is able to achieve in the way of controlling Iraq.
       And, course, the US is doing absolutely nothing to address our phony-baloney sprawl economy. In fact, the notion that we are entitled to this manner of living is very much conflated (on purpose) with our stated reasons for going to war. And if there is anything evil about our Iraq adventure, it is that. I don't blame George W. Bush for many of things my friends do -- being a shill for big business, etc. -- but I do blame him for failing to understand that our bad living habits are liable to kill our country as readily as any gang of Jihadistas.

March 21, 2003
     Who was it -- somebody help me here -- maybe George Santayana who declared famously that history repeats itself, moving from tragedy to farce. Because what seems to be going on in Iraq as I write is like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones, confronted by a vicious sword-wielding Arab, girds his loins, gazes at the silly bullwhip in his hand, has an epiphany, casts aside the bullwhip, reaches for his pistol, and summarily plugs the vicious (and now ridiculous) sword-wielding Arab.
      Is that what's going on?? Is it possible that Saddam was feckless enough to sit in one of his downtown Baghdad presidential palaces a few minutes before the get-out-of-Dodge ultimatum, and that one of our bombs either nailed him, maimed him, or turned his whole gang against him?
      Or is it a game -- as one guy on CNN put it -- of Rope-a-dope, Saddam hoping to draw thousands of over-confident American and British soldiers into his lair where he will proceed to pour on the nerve gas? Who the fuck knows?
        I must say I am astonished that he didn't fire up all the oil wells in the country at once on Wednesday. Who would have though Saddam would want to go down in the annals of Allah as a humanitarian softie rather than a flaming martyr. Will his apparent disgrace put a damper on Jihad-o-rama? The Islamic world is already pretty demoralized. It's hard to imagine that an Iraq roll-over will inspire recruits for martyrdom quite the way that an Alamo-style defense of Baghdad might (Saddam starring as Davey Crockett).
       Since events are moving so quickly I will shut up for now and check in later.
        

March 17, 2003
      Tom Friedman of the New York Times put it so nicely yesterday when he said it's an interesting world when George W. Bush loses a global popularity contest to Saddam Hussein.
       Well, we're back from a week's vacation in Key West, Florida, just in time for War-TV to begin. Key West was a strange experience. The little old town, a gem of preserved wooden buildings and sweet little streets, has been lately horribly over-programmed for hyper-festivity of a kind that seems oddly analogous to the frantic consumer fiesta on the mainland. The Key West economy is now based almost solely on drinking to excess and servicing the drunks who come to do it -- just as the mainland USA economy is now based soley on the development of suburban sprawl and the servicing of its primary inhabitants: cars.
      It was astonishing to see how much suburban crapola had actually been crammed into the newer, eastern half of Key West's island over recent decades, a staggering cavalcade of strip malls, McHotels, car dealerships, and other emblems of the world's highest standard of living.
      I think what you see in Key West is a snapshot of all America's wretched excess of recent decades in miniature. The value of real estate in Old Town, for instance, inflated at an even more fantastic rate than the housing bubble on the mainland. Little "conch cottages" built by shrimpers have been fetching well over $1 million. We saw an ominous number of realtors' signs planted in the tiny front yards, and it would appear that Key West is now poised for a housing market crash that will probably be disproportionatelty worse than the crash coming on the mainland. If there are any oil market disruptions in the period ahead, Key West tourism will crater. And since the town has become accustomed to hyper-tourism in the same way that the rest of America has become addicted to hyper-spending, hyper-consumption, and hyper-debt, its prospects are dubious.
       We learned a bit about Key West history during our week there. In a century and a half, the town has gone through some economic cycles so severe that it might have existed on different economic planets from era to era. The town first prospered off salvaging wrecks -- a kind of legal piracy -- the reefs fetching up a seemingly endless supply of booty. That business died when the US government began to take an interest in protecting ships by putting up lighthouses and marking the reefs. Fishing, shrimping, canning of Cuban pineapples, and cigar-making kept the town going modestly in the early 20th century. A hurricane took out Henry Flagler's heroic railroad causeway in the 1930s. By the 1960s, the town itself was a wreck, its treasure chest of wooden architecture falling to pieces, the cigar industry finished, commercial fishing near death. Dope smuggling was its chief economic engine for a while.
      The late 20th century cheap oil fiesta allowed Key West to ramp up as the Heavy Drinking Tourist Capital of the US. Airfares were cheap. The chains all built resort hotels where the shrimpers used to dock. The T-shirt shops took over the "normal" businesses on Duval -- Sample: "I said no to drugs, but they didn't listen." Hordes of gawking retirees debouched from the cruise lines there every day. It's been quite a party.
      We were there during the merry time of Spring Break, and Duval Street had become a kind of rum-drenched mosh pit. The college kids have been busy turning themselves into proto-barbarians, all tattooed up and pierced, making themselves look scary, as though via some collective radar they all sense the kind of world they are growing up into. As they return to campus, now, they can watch it reveal itself on War-TV.
      

March 6, 2003
      Americans are going to have a very hard time understanding and adjusting to the end of the cheap oil age. Given our enormous media industries, and the frictionless, massive broadcasting of news, how do we explain the vapidity or the irrationality of the public discussion about the changes we face?
       I attribute it to cognitive dissonance, the mental static in our collective cultural imagination. In times leading up to turbulent change, the cognitive dissonance is always greatest. A wealth of "information" does not necessarily produce knowledge, wisdom, or the will to act. There truly is a thing called a public consensus about reality, and without a pretty firm consensus that comports to the way things actually are, individuals and societies have a lot of trouble making sense of their situation.
      Unfortunately, the existing public consensus in America is not consistent with reality. Americans are not entitled to a certain way of life -- namely, a fossil fuel-addicted drive-in utopia -- and the world does not owe it to America.
     In the years ahead, as the world passes the critical milepost of global peak oil extraction, the allocation system, a.k.a world oil markets, will respond by increasingly sharp oscillations up and down. The price will shoot up, the price will crash. The overall trend, though, will be remorsely upward in price, and the trend for reliability of supplies will be remorselessly negative. I think this is all going to happen within the next five years and certainly within ten. In fact it has already begun. So what we're facing is a permanent emergency.
      The public response so far has been simple denial (whaddaya talkin' 'bout; there's still plenty a'oil). The second one will be violent opposition to the remorseless facts. It will manifest itself first in a general conspiricy theory, in particular that oil companies are colluding to gouge "consumers" -- as citizens have pitifully come to label each other. Probably politicians will be included in the general conspiricy. But all the finger-pointing imaginable will not avail to restore our entitlements to consume. American life will become increasingly chaotic as our suburban arrangements become more and more untenable, and the so-called economy based on suburban construction, furnishing, and servicing grinds to paralysis. The next stage is political turmoil of the kind that produces revolutions, third reichs, and murderous despotisms.
      Among the delusions currently popular is the idea that fuels other than oil and gas will save our way of life. This idea was unfortunately reinforced when President Bush more or less promised the nation we would be delivered into a happy hydrogen-based economy in this year's State-of-the-Union speech. Forget it. There isn't going to be a hydrogen economy. It's a fantasy. It doesn't pencil out. It doesn't scale. Ain't gonna happen.
       There really is only way that this country is going to save its ass, and perhaps you heard it here first: we're going to have to downscale and reorganize all our activities and reactivate local networks of economic interdependence. It will probably entail a reduction in standards of living -- but that is something actually not so easily measured by statistical analysis. We may never see another Pop-Tart after the year 2011, but we may get to spend more time working and playing with our friends and loved ones. Schools may no longer run state-of-the-art computer labs, but children may know all the teachers in their smaller schools, and the transmission of culture may be more meaningful.
      It is certainly imperative that societies live within a framework of hope -- the alternative is nihilism and suicide. This nation could start today with many decisions and actions that would lay the groundwork for a better future. Can we agree to start with one do-able comprehensive national action: to restore railroad service? It's something we know how to do. All the methodology exists and is proven. A lot of the infrastucture is still on-the-ground, though much of it is in poor condition. It would not be nearly as costly as the highway projects currently underway, it would put a lot of people to work, and it would begin to move the nation in the right direction.
      Why aren't we talking about it? Why not start? Talk to somebody today about restoring railroad service in America and ask them to tell two other people. Break the ice with a joke. Tell them we have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of.

 

March 5, 2003
    I had the peculiar duty yesterday of giving my spiel on town planning to officers of the Environmental Protection Agency at their sprawling (literally) new regional headquarters located in the so-called Research Triangle Park, a stupendous suburban wasteland between the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
    The complex of buildings, opened in 2000, sits at the end of a half-mile-long driveway -- but of course !-- in a wooded pod amongst scores of other mega-gigantic corporate and governmental pods deployed about the Triangle. It's supposed to be a "green" building. Yeah, right. This is the kind of inane, delusional self-propaganda we Americans seem to specialize in lately as we slide into a catastrophic post-cheap-oil clusterfuck. The buildings are, in fact, massive steel and glass energy consuming machines. You can hear the HVAC humming from the parking lot (and make no mistake as our President likes to say, there's plenty of parking). Most bizarre of all, though, is that the cutting edge architect actually deployed four colossal smokestack towers on the top of the main building so that it looks literally like the HMS Titannic.
   It is also painfully obvious that the vast and expensive landscaping job surrounding the hulking complex, which includes an artifical lake, is an attempt to compensate for the complex's essential destructiveness by "naturing up" it's surroundings.
   The federal employees within are probably all dedicated and conscientious people, and no doubt some of them appreciate the peril that our suburban fiasco has placed us in. But their main task, one way or another, amounts to bean-counting -- how many carbon particles per-cubic-foot of air. . . how many benzene parts-per-million of water -- and they can keep on doing that until global warming swamps all the harbor towns of the world before they arrive at the recognition that the suburban way of life is killing our country.
      The reason for me giving my spiel to this group was ostensibly to inform them that we (all of us) had better start preparing to live differently in the years ahead, and to offer a framework for understanding what goes into the design and assembly of a sustainable and rewarding urban ecology. Ironically, almost every conversation I joined during my visit, over dinner and then lunch the next day, was a litany of complaint about the traffic that must be endured by those who live in the area. But it was clearly just the background noise of daily life for all concerned, as if it were something extrinsic to all the other things they do.
      It's not possible to visit the Raleigh / Durham Research Triangle Park without coming away with intense pangs of hopelessness about our national predicament.

February 28, 2003
     I just drove home from a lecture gig in Easton, Pa. -- a town which used to be a major regional railroad hub, from which twelve trains a day once ran to New York, but, alas, no more. So I drove. Much of the route took me through northern New Jersey, where the ranks of the new subdivisions and jive-plastic condo clusters are marching clear across the Poconos to the Pennsylvania line and beyond. There is apparently some idea that we will continue indefinitely to be nation of happy motorists, and monocultures of McHouses and McCondos are just what we need to accessorize our lives
      In fact, all you see absolutely everywhere around America anymore is a jamboree of motor vehicles (and their furnishings). Everything else has become an afterthought or a historical residue.
     Easton was an interesting case. It had been a manufacturing down in its heyday, as well as railroad town. The old industrial infrastructure was still visable in the form of ruins -- a majestic but boarded-up 19th century brick silk-works, the rusting remnants of the railroad bridges, the vacant lots where the local breweries once stood. The town's site in an elbow of the Lehigh Valley was very dramatic, and several neighborhoods loomed on bluffs above the old town center, which itself contained a beautiful central square with an obelisk in the middle, and quite few lovely streets coming off it where handsome rows of 19th century buildings still stood intact.
      But half the town two blocks over on the other side of the square at been bulldozed in a foolish "urban renewal" demolition spree that wiped out 500 buildings. That fabric had been replaced by acres of surface parking, a "senior housing" project that looked like a set of packing crates, a strip mall, and a Mickey-D. There was one splendid neighborhood on the hill around Lafayette College. The others were in various stages of decrepitation. Druggies and their suppliers, I was told, had been moving there on a wholesale basis for a decade or more -- New York City was seventy miles away -- and the old row houses once occupied by factory workers, merchants, and professionals had been chopped up into gnarly little apartments. The heavyweight boxer, Larry Holmes, who lives in the 'burbs outside Easton, had financed two horrendous office-park type buildings on a street near the riverfront (Bushkill Creek) that had been turned into a mini-freeway, with help from the villainous Penn-DOT.
       It also looked as if some prodigy of an aluminum siding salesman had blown through town about 1957 and sold seven-eighths of the population on his product. Now the claddings were miserably fatigued and dented, their enamel oxydized in scrofulous patches, and the soffits gray-green with the automobile exhaust of the ages.
      I got the sense from talking to a newspaper reporter there that the town's economy was in terrible trouble. Lucent Technology had just closed up a big new operation nearby, shedding up to ten thousand jobs that the town boosters had pinned their hopes on. Lesser businesses had shed more thousands.
      I did my thing in an evening slide-talk at a lovely old chapel on the Lafayette campus. The group that brought me in was determined to do better things with the town than their fathers and grandfathers had, but they acted pretty demoralized. Their local politicians were clueless and uninterested in anything but fast food boxes, yet more parking, and other mindless sops to the life of endless motoring.
     The audience didn't believe me when I told them to expect a future that featured a lot less driving (and parking). They never do, even the ones who understand how devastating our sick romance with cars has been. They seemed even more shocked when one questioner asked about the hydrogen economy promised by President Bush and I offered my opinion that it was a utter fantasy. The next big energy source for the US is much more likely to be coal, and perhaps Easton's fortunes will turn on their proximity to the big seams of anthracite a few miles to the north. You can bet it will be a much more austere economy, anyway you cut it.
      For all it's troubles the place is at least fortunate to be a traditional town located on an important geographic site. One can't help but be much more pessimistic about those ranks of McHouses and McCondos I saw on the way in and out. Rolling north toward home on I-287, the radio was full of pre-war jitter news. Crude oil was nearing $40 a barrel. How much longer can this game run, I wondered.
      

February 17, 2003
     Saturday we had a fair complement of peace marchers occupying the four corners of our main street around city hall. I knew quite a few of the faces in the crowd and I was quite sure that many of them had driven their cars downtown to the peace march. This weekend was the climax of a prolonged six-week cold snap, and temperatures on Saturday were below ten degrees.
     I don't doubt the sincerity of the peace marchers, but I worry that the extraordinary comfort we Americans have enjoyed the past thirty years is an impediment to understanding what is happening now in the world. We're about to go to war precisely so that peace marchers can drive comfortably downtown to engage in their civic and communal ceremonies.
      Years from now when we look back on these days and ask ourselves what was the war about? what will we say?
      That it was the first War of Proliferation? The ostensible reasons for going into Iraq are to 1.) prevent the despot in charge of Iraq from using or distributing to the enemies of his enemies extremely dangerous weapons; and 2.) to prevent the despot from using his oil wealth to gain political hegemony over the adjoining oil states which altogether contain over half the world's remaining reserves.
     The war is not happening to enrich American and British oil companies, though they may benefit as a side consequence. The objective is to place Iraqi oil capacity in the hands of Iraqis who can be relied on to enjoy their profits peacefully, with the side benefit for the West of stabilizing oil markets and prices for a few extra years before the problem of world peak production brings on more contests over scarcity.
     I happen to believe that the war will not play out strategically in a clean and orderly way. We are on a collision course with world Islam despite what the Boomer multiculturist rainbow people wish. The Jihadistas are not interested in celebrating diversity. They want to celebrate the death of the Judeo-Christian West, including especially its lead sponsor in the world, the US. I can't see any reason that hostilities will not at least continue at the margin indefinitely, and from time to time we may be rudely shocked when hostilities are projected at our center. It is ridiculously easy to move weapons and personnel around the US. Our borders are seives, especially the one with Mexico, and I doubt that the average border guard could tell the difference between a dozen fruitpickers from Sonora and twelve trained Arabian Jihadistas under cover. Only five percent of the shipping containers coming through major ports like San Pedro and Norfolk are ever inspected. One of these days, a Heartland city like Chicago is going to get whacked. This is a war that is liable to go on for a long time and spread to a lot of fronts and cost a lot in blood and dollars, and there may be no way we can avoid it.
      Right now, the oil situation in the world is becoming quietly very desperate. Venezuela is still a political mess and their oil industry is in lockdown. Nigeria, an OPEC member which sells more than half its oil to America, is about to go through a wrenching strike. In Colombia, pipelines are blown up practically every week. Everybody is now aware that Saddam Hussein is prepared to torch the Iraqi fields on a moment's notice. We're about to become a whole lot less comfortable. Oil industry reserves around the nation are at their lowest level in thirty years, barely enough to keep the refineries going (and refineries don't like to be stopped and restarted).
     The danger here is that Americans have become so complacent, so comfortable, so narcotized by a sense of entitlement to that comfort, that we will fail to appreciate the meaning of the coming oil shock. We have to change the way we live and the way we do business in this nation. Suburbia is already obsolete and we don't know it, as is an economy based on recreational shopping, tanning parlors, theme park excursions, and Indian gambling casinos. When these imperatives hit us hard, and compel us to change, we may just start pointing fingers and acting like crybabies. Meanwhile, the Jihadista's will circle around in the gathering darkness.
     

February 7, 2003
       Here's a possible scenario for the period ahead:
       The war to disarm Iraq proves to be less than a cakewalk. Iraq retaliates by dosing US soldiers with a far-advanced version of the bio-agent that caused Gulf War Syndrome. Thousands of US troops die or are permanently disabled. Saddam, as expected, torches his oil wells, pipelines, and port facilities. Jihad-o-rama is declared by Islamic radicals worldwide. Major terrorist acts occur in England, the US and Israel. Israel does not nuke Iraq because the terror act against it is claimed by al Qaeda. The Saud family is overthrown in Arabia. Oil imports to the US and UK are cut off by the new regime (China retained as primary market). The US attempts to intervene in Arabia. Street fighting in Riyadh makes Mogadishu look like Sunday in the Park with George.
       Back home: the price of oil shoots up and supplies become spotty. Motorists, far more numerous than in 1973, wait angrily in gas lines. The hypertrophied suburbs in places like Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Chicago, Orlando, Long Island, New Jersey, and all over California, become deeply dysfunctional overnight. Citizens can't get to their jobs. Mommies can't deliver offspring to school or go fetch groceries at the SuperMart. Big Box corporations can't move their merchandise on the vaunted "warehouse on wheels," because of the gasoline shortage.
       North Korea attempts to take advantage of the chaos by rushing its nuke program. The US takes out their production reactor and as many artillery and missile batteries as possible along the border, but North Korea still manages to trash Seoul while it sends 500,000 soldiers across the DMZ. The US then turns North Korea into an ashtray. The stranded North Korean army has no country to return to. China looks on with shock and opprobrium but does not act to intervene. (V. Putin applauds in the privacy of his Kremlin apartment.)
      The Iraq campaign is concluded at a much greater cost in lives than anticipated. The attempt to "rebuild" the infrastructure -- especially the oil production infrastructure -- is impeded by persistant guerilla actions carried out by Jihadistas. International oil companies are unable to bring Iraq's considerable reserves "on-line," at least not enough to compensate for the loss of Arabian oil (aggravated by shortages from Venezuela, as well as other Islamic oil nations sympathizing with Arabia).
      Back home, the "consumer" economy begins to fall to pieces. A massive withdrawal of foreign investment that has been propping up US consumer credit spending, sends the dollar into free fall. The house-buying (and building) jamboree comes to an abrupt end as America finds itself stuck up a suburban cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up.WalMart greeters find they suddenly have the loneliest job in the world -- that is, those who are able to get to their jobs.
     As time goes on, these other events come into play:
     It becomes evident that the US Mexican border is an utterly porous membrane. The surging Latino population in the Southwest defies the politically correct expectations of government multiculturalists and begins pressing irredentist reverse manifest destiny claims for territory. Meanwhile the Mexican economy collapses and political anarchy sends millions more to the perceived greater safety of El Norte. States begin to demand that the US military take serious steps to control the border, but an over-extended US Army is slow to comply, leaving the federal government irrelevent in this part of the country. California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are on their own. Defense of the border becomes local.
      By now, tanking mutual funds and a collapsing dollar leave yuppie Baby Boomers facing a dog-food caliber future. The middle class becomes the formerly middle class. Shipping lanes in the Pacific have closed due to hostilities around Korea. The transient circumstances once known as the global economy have now changed. An industrially hollowed-out US is left to its own limited devices.
      The war in Iraq is declared "a victory."

January 31, 2003
      Commentator Jim Minter on the Energy Resources list-serve makes some excellent points about the looming Iraq war vis-a-vis oil. Note, Minter is not a war hawk. he is just trying to explain what is really behind our policy.

     Iraq has a lot of oil that is soon to be needed in the global oil market. It doesn't matter to this market whether American, British, French or Russian companies pump and sell it. It's a global market! Iraqi oil doesn't even need to come to the U.S. Even if Iraqi oil only went to Europe it would increase the global supply and lower the global price. Oil companies are multi-national. Their investors are international. Don't trap yourselves into old-think nationalism. As we slide deeper into this decade, global oil consumers need Iraqi oil.
      Saddam has out-waited us--at terrible cost to the Iraqi people--but nevertheless shutting off Iraqi oil from the global market will soon hurt global consumers worse than it hurts Saddam's regime. Why? GLOBAL OIL PRODUCTION IS AT PEAK, as Matthew Simmons, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère and other knowledgeable experts have shown... as the highest levels of U.S. and British decision-makers know from their highly-classified briefings. And so, because global oil production peaks in this decade, Iraqi oil must re-enter the global mainstream--and soon! Saddam can't have those profits. It's as simple as that. The global community cannot afford to have the profits from the very imminent massive pumping of Iraqi oil funding the arsenal of that maniac. That regime has got to go
       It's a stark picture and I suppose the best "humanitarian" face we can candidly put on it goes something like this: "The goal is to see peace and stability come to Iraq and the oil-producing Middle East while the global economy pumps its oil. The aim of the global community is to set up a 'democratic, market-economy regime' in Iraq with the oil revenues going to build a stable, secular and prosperous society in Iraq. The Iraqi people can select whomever they please to help them quickly develop their oil, and God bless them (though guess who has the best oil technology?).
       Oil directly fuels more than a third of the American economy, most specifically our entire transportation system. That includes the auto/truck industry (everything from manufacturing to repair to insurance) road building and maintenance, all commerce and industry (trucking delivers everything and even the few trains left are diesel), air transport, and every facet of our daily lives from commuting to tourism. There is no substitute fuel for our present transportation system. None. Nada, Zilch. That has been conclusively and finally demonstrated to exhaustion on this Energy Resources Web Site. But even if those lame, low-net transportation-fuel substitutes touted by a few stubbornly-giddy techno-cornucopians were viable, none can claim that their pet schemes can be put on-line in time to provide an alternative-fueled transportation system for America in this decade... or even the next decade. Without our petroleum transportation system, the U.S. economy dies. Also having trans-continental economies, Canada and Australia are in the same boat. Next in transportation vulnerability are Europe and Japan.
      Oil is also the base feed stock for our petro-chemical industry and possibly half of all the non-edible, physical products we now consume. There are some substitute feed stocks in some products, but they are not likely to be as cheap or as usable as oil stock is presently. Oil products also drive much of our non-transportation machinery, in addition to heating and powering a chunk of our built-infrastructure. Here, at least, petroleum products can be almost totally replaced, though not always swiftly or efficiently... and rarely, cheaply. We can run our buildings, if not our cars, on something besides petroleum. However, our modern agricultural system is totally petroleum-dependant. So is our forestry and fishing.
       Bottom line: Our transcontinental economy is built upon the cheap transportation provided by petroleum. For the foreseeable future there is no alternative. If oil fails totally, which is not likely, we fail totally. But [as we advance into the future and] oil becomes restricted and expensive, we enter the same "stagflation" of inflation-with-recession that we experienced after the last oil crisis in the mid-70s. Simply put: Without petroleum the U.S. faces catastrophe; with constrained supplies or expensive supplies of petroleum we only face disaster.
       The rapid flow of Iraqi oil into the global bloodstream for the next dozen-or-so years will not, of course, alleviate the total decline in global petro-stocks. But rapidly pumping Iraqi oil can push forward in time the "felt effects" of the global "Hubbert Peak" decline. Pumping Iraq and Saudi Arabia at ever-accelerated rates can for a time cover the decline of the North Sea and the North Slope, the continental U.S., and other aging oil fields. Of course, as many here at Energy Resources have already pointed out, this reckless course of blindly fueling the growth of oil consumption only assures that when the supply/demand crunch finally does arrive, it will be more precipitous and more catastrophic than the sane and sensible "soft path down" proposed by our late guru, Howard T, Odum and many others.
      I am NOT advocating or defending the impending war to depose Saddam -- just explaining why it is going to happen and why no amount of outrage and righteous indignation is going to stop it. I think the world's oil gluttony is deplorable. I do not think that consuming nations have a right to other people's resources. What I am trying to explain is the relentless logic of our blind consumption. We are at Peak but we do not understand it. We have been lied to by our corporations and our government. Our news media has been credulous, blind, corrupted and stupid. And so the momentum of our economy and our society is going full-tilt to business-as-usual, which means getting all the petroleum we can pump into our transportation bloodstream because our economy and our society shrivel without it. It is far too late to change course. We do not even know that we need to. What's more we don't want to know, and most of us wouldn't make the hard decisions to begin changing our personal lifestyles if we did know.

     Where I depart from Minter's view is that the takeover of Iraq and its oil may not be an orderly process. The operation itself my turn into a protracted military clusterfuck. Assuming that we eventually conclude it, I am not convinced that we could control either the far-flung terrain of the oil fields or the oil drilling equipment on it, not to mention the extremely vulnurable pipelines, terminals, and refineries. What's more, I'm inclined to believe that our Iraqi adventure will unleash Jihad-o-rama, which may topple the Saudi regime and bring lasting disorder to much of the Middle East.

January 23, 2003,
     In the new era of extreme global turbulence we have entered, it may be impossible for the US to enjoy domestic security without clamping down our borders and severely restricting trade, travel, and immigration. I'm not saying I like the idea or relish the idea of America isolating itself prophylactically from the rest of the world, but it may become necessary, whether we like it or not. All it would take to push us over that line is one more major act of terrorism.
     I don't know how to account for the lack of terrorist activity in the US since the fall of 2001. Perhaps our national security agencies have performed heroically without grandstanding. (I imagine the FBI and CIA have been working sedulously.) Maybe the terroristas are less well-organized than their publicists would like us to believe. Maybe they have been hording their assets for the outbreak of Jihad-o-rama -- which I believe is coming down sooner or later. Maybe we have just been lucky.
     But there are too many genies out of their bottles in the world. Anti-Americanism is growing in South America. Brazil's new leftist president wants to restart that nation's nuclear weapons program. Chemical and bio-warfare agents are much cheaper and easier to make, and many unreliable regimes are working on them. VX nerve gas let loose in a major city could kill a million people in one event. Infected human smallpox "martyrs" can easily enter the US and circulate in public places. Even after 9/11 the number of shipping containers actually inspected by customs agents stands around five percent.
     Sealing the US against these threats would eventually mean opting out of the global economy as we have experienced it in recent decades. It seems to me that many of the relationships that make up that global economy are on the verge of unraveling anyway, and that America is going to have to become a more self-reliant nation. If so, we will be a much less-affluent nation -- and that may be inevitable, too, whether we like it or not.
     In any case, we're going to have to drastically reform and revise the way we live here. If we are not able or willing to decommission suburbia in an orderly way, the US may dissolve in far-reaching economic paralysis and social upheaval. Political leaders have done a poor job of preparing Americans for this future, and I wonder if there has ever been a more complacent public in any great nation.

January 19, 2003
     A correspondent writes interestingly (his views, not necessarily mine):

     "It is doubtful that the rest of the world will passively stand by and watch the gas station holdup planned for February / March in Iraq. I fully expect oil shock repercussions and wobbly derivatives crashing in response to the global economy swooning. Europe is distancing itself from America and Japan is drifting closer to China. The mess in Iraq will benefit China's energy needs enormously. China has emerged as an alternative market for Arab oil. Soon, a Chinese nuclear umbrella will shield Moslem oil from future gas station holdup attempts. America will have to limit itself to oil imports from Nigeria, Venezuela and Colombia, all unstable sources. A year from now I expect gasoline to fetch four-to-five dollars a gallon [in the US].
      "The act of Moslems cozying up to China will set the US and China on a collision course. With US consumer spending collapsing and the dollar cheapening and US imports from China waning as a result, we have a seismic shift in the making. China now has a priceless asset: modern manufacturing know-how, infrastructure, and a huge pool of competent workers. Given a river of oil and a growing partnership with Japan, a revival of the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere looms large -- and the Pacific ceases to be an American lake. A global economic depression also looms large. Germany "snapped out" of the depression in 1933 by opting out of the world economy. What if China / Japan opt out of the global economy also? Japan could afford the 'luxury' of a prolonged slump, but China cannot. When China faces the choice of internal unrest or ceasing to be tied to the global economy, China will opt for autarky. So we have the Muslim nations and China in a mutual marriage of convenience with Japan seeing a way out of depression by joining the club
     "Iraq's oil infrastructure going up in smoke combined with an Arab oil embargo [against the US] will yield a 'Gerald Ford' interim administration by Labor Day 2003. A skittish US overclass will suddenly get the vapors and choose to dump the 'W' agenda in a hurry, since it is headed for even bigger train wrecks which are even less affordable."

    
      On a completely different subject. . . . Did any of you catch the marvelous Rolling Stones live concert from Madison Square Garden on HBO Saturday night?   They were in great condition and the show was technically impeccable. All the Stones together must weigh less than the average single visitor to Walt Disney World.
     Keith Richards summed things up beautifully speaking into the microphone to the audience halfway through the show when he said, "It's great to be here; it's great to be anywhere."

January 16, 2003
       I didn't vote for the guy, but I salute President Dubya's aggressive position on the affirmative action case involving the University of Michigan's admission policies coming before the supreme court. It's enough already -- of pretending that reverse discrimination is an ethical remedy for the low numbers of blacks in colleges and graduate schools (or the professions). Affirmative action blatantly contradicts what should be a fundamental tenet of American law and civil behavior -- that citizens should not be rewarded or punished based on skin color. Period. Bush's aggressive stance puts and end to years of disgraceful temporizing on this issue by national leaders afraid to anger a voting bloc.
       I have never heard an argument in favor of affirmative action that makes sense. Last night, Lou Dobbs had Jesse Jackson on his 6:00 pm CNN show. Dobbs himself was admirably persistent in his questioning of Jackson, and Jackson could not come up with an argument besides the tired canard that black people must be compensated in social preferences for two centuries of slavery. As far as I'm concerned this bogus argument only provides an excuse for further failure, while affirmative action itself only reinforces the stigma of supposed inferiority.
      The remedy for low numbers of blacks in colleges and grad schools? Oppose the rampant anti-intellectualism in contemporary black culture that militates against academic achievement. Support behavioral norms and academic standards in the public schools. Give up the "multiculturalist" campaign that divides Americans by ethnicity and race rather than integrating them into a common culture. Promote the speaking of standard English, even if it requires effort to do so. Affirmative action, along with the broader victim politics that spawned it, have functioned as a self-reinforcing feedback loop for perpetuating racial animosity, division, and failure. It's time to break this vicious cycle.
      
      Pet theory du jour: It seems that we have been in an extraordinary quiescent period in the War on Terror. Why have there been no attacks on American or western interests in recent weeks? I think it is because the jihadistas of the world are waiting for all hell to break loose in late January or February when the US commences military action against Iraq. Why squander your resources now when you will need them to chasten the great Satan in wartime? I expect the world scene to remain eeriliy quiet until the action begins. And we are headed for action.

January 13, 2003
      Regular readers may recall that I often catch the NBC Today Show at the YMCA, where the idiot box never sleeps. Katie Couric has been dispatched lately to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where she is conducting public relations exercises -- trying to make friends with the "noble" people of that kingdom. If we could only understand their quaint customs, diverse folkways, and religious practices then the great canker of misunderstanding might heal and peace would reign forever among the multicultural peoples of the world. Scout's honor.
      Of course, the actual impression one gets is of a culture even more fucking crazy than our own. The spectacle of Riyadh itself -- artificial island of air-conditioned towers, malls, freeways, and limousines -- is a chastening lesson on the ephemeral wonders of cheap oil. One can easily imagine it a hundred years hence, with camels lurching among the obsolete towers and skeletons of the Mercedes-Benzes shimmering in 114-degree heat.
      Katie handles all the incongruities like a bewildered kindergarten teacher, unable to comprehend why the class wants to cut her throat. The bottom line is that the Arabs evince nothing but contempt for Americans who have the same relationship with them that a community of heroin addicts has with the Columbian drug lords.
      Meanwhile, holding down the fort back in New York, co-host Matt Lauer is sporting a new "Sluggo" style haircut, a quarter inch buzz-clip. One notices that Americans in many walks of life are affecting a kind of military thug look. Where I live, there are a lot of young Navy men training to operate the nuclear reactor engines on our submarines, and the thug look is very popular among them, including massive tattoos -- like, a whole arm at a time. In the event that America gets its ass kicked or pulls off some heinous atrocity in the upcoming hostilities with Iraq, we are going to look very foolish to the world in our thug get-ups.
      I believe in the social theory that a culture gives itself broad blanket permission to behave a certain way. It is often not a conscious thing. In this case the idea that thuggishness was okay, even cool, percolated up first from prison, then into rap music, into mainstream teen culture, into the military, onto the campuses, and now onto the NBC Today Show. We'll show these towel-head motherfuckers not to mess with thug nation! is the general idea here, I think, only Matt Lauer can't actually say that on the air. The off-gassing carpets and the video games must really be getting to us now.
        On another and perhaps more academical note, I just finished Globalization and Its Discontents by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. It is hard to imagine a shallower discussion of this rich subject. According to Stiglitz, there's nothing wrong with globalization that could not be cured by reforming the International Monetary Fund. Has he gotten out and taken a look at America lately? The other side of the globalism coin is the utter destruction of local economies, social networks, occupational niches, and civic interdependence that add up to civilization. The wreckage is everywhere to be seen in America, a nation running on little more than gasoline fumes and borrowed funds. A much better book on globalism for you e-con mavens out there is Edward Luttwak's Turbo Capitalism. John Gray's False Dawn also should be required reading.

January 6, 2003

      I doubt that there really is such a thing as "the economy." Rather there are economic relations. When commentators speak or write about "the economy," they seem to suggest that it is some extrinsic force like weather that blows hot one day and cold the next, but is otherwise separate from our everyday activities. "The economy" is up or "the economy" is down and we are its passive beneficiaries or victims.
      This allows us to ignore our own cultural behavior.
      Economic relations represent dynamic systems and modes of behavior. In America of 2003, our economic relations are based on incessent motoring, the servicing of motoring infrastructure, and commerce in foreign-made goods bought with hallucinated wealth. This kind of behavior necessarily has an unhappy ending, but we have been postponing it by finding ways to roll over the debt on our hallucinated wealth. This is what the hyper-heated housing market has been about (thanks to the Federal Reserve), but our ability to extend lines of credit at laughablly low interest rates is nearing the end of its cycle and there is nothing else in sight that might avail to keep the credit lines open. Next stop: liquidation.
      Meanwhile, Americans lead frantic lives of anxiety and depression in places that are not worth living in, with all our collective wealth invested in depreciating cars, appliances, gadgets, McHouses, and all our hard-won social capital squandered. We've indentured our work-lives to hyper-mega corporations who have little to no investment in our home places and no concern for our well-being. The social institutions and commercial relations that used to add up to more than the sum of their parts -- that is, living organisms called communities -- lie in wreckage around us under a smokescreen of distracting infotainment. The eventual result will be a race to the bottom in terms of happiness, security, and life expectency.
      Since I am not a conspiratorialist, I don't believe that these conditions were deviously imposed on us by cliques of scheming elitist villains. We're completely responsible for adopting the behaviors that put us in this predicament. We're a people who, for decades, haven't been challenged by anything more serious than what TV channel to select. At least two generations have not moved themselves to rethink the assumptions underlying our economic behavior. Is it a good thing to surrender local networks of trade, and all the occupational niches that go with them, in order to save five dollars on a hair drier? Is it a good thing to live in a place where driving is your only connection to the other organs of daily life? Is it a good thing to trash the public realm in order to optimize parking? Is it a good thing to mortgage the future to keep on living this way?
      We may learn soon that the most potent weapon of mass destruction that Iraq owns is its ability to generate an oil-deprivation jihad. When that happens -- and I believe it's likely to happen -- then all of our economic behavior will be revealed as the suicidal delusion that it is. By then, it may be too late for Americans to adapt different modes of behavior. Certainly, we'll see no rush to leave suburbia, just a desperate effort to preserve its supposed entitlements.
      The saddest part of all this is that there is not one American political figure with the courage to inform our citizens that its about how you live, stupid.