If it doesn’t drop back down, kiss the economy goodbye. Note that while the proximate cause of this is the civil war in Libya, it was made possible by:
1) extremely loose monetary policy on the part of the US Fed.
2) Pushing growth into China and other developing 2nd world countries. Every dollar of GDP growth in China uses twice the energy used by a dollar of growth in the developed world. In exchange for cheap labor you use energy. Labor is in oversupply, oil is bottlenecked. This is moronic. (This is not to say such countries don’t need to grow, just that doing environmental, regulatory and labor arbitrage into them has huge costs that aren’t recognized.)
3) Refusal to do anything about climate change, which has led to very volatile weather which has led to widespread and unpredictable crop failures which makes food price spikes likely. Those food price spikes make it so that the day laboring class in countries like Libya and Egypt and so on can barely afford to eat. That makes revolutions happen.
4) Refusal to move off of oil in a large way. Trillions of dollars for bankers, but hardly any money to refit western economies to a new energy regime.
5) Refusal to bankrupt rich people when they, actually, go bankrupt, leaving them with tons of money for speculation and to spend on activities and items which actually are using oil now.
Until the West gets serious about climate change, refitting their economies, financial regulation and taxing not only their rich but the rich of the oilarchies, there will be no sustained economic recovery that doesn’t feel like a hangover, and every recovery will be fragile and ultimately limited by resource price runups. The world economy is already running as hot as it can. Any hotter and even without a crisis, oil would have spiked.
The power of the rich will have to be broken. Historically that happens in two ways: war (including real revolutions) and massive economic collapse.
Curmudgeon
I think, historically, the precedent is very much against the power of the rich ever being broken at all.
European culture got as far as it did during the (so called) ages of discovery and colonialism because several very tiny slivers of Europe managed to smash the power of the entrenched rich. This, however, was a historical aberration. The Soviet/Russian and Polish (pre 1945) cases are more representative.
The rich run the state into the ground to the point of seeming revolution or destruction by outside forces but the new bosses ultimately turn out to be little different from the old bosses. The USSR’s nomenklatura became Russia’s oligarchs while the Poles went from being oppressed by the Polish nobility to being oppressed by the rich of other countries.
Class warfare is not something that can be won.
anon2525
I think, historically, the precedent is very much against the power of the rich ever being broken at all.
The historical precedent only goes back as far as history–that is, the written record. Climate change is not included in the history because there was no history until the climate changed to allow the current history to start being recorded. But resource depletion is.
Cloud
Every bit of more-or-less pristine land remaining that happens to have oil shale under it, is fucked. Humanity will not stop until ALL the oil is gone, and after that, the coal (steampunk anyone?)
You can in principle change the shape of the curve of consumption per unit time but you can’t change the area under the curve; someone else will use it if you don’t. The “tragedy of the commons” principle rules. This is, I believe, how those elite who are nondelusional but ruthless see it.
Bruce Wilder
@Curmudgeon: European culture got as far as it did, because conflicts and antagonisms developed within and among the elite class, which, sometimes, led one elite faction to appeal for support against a rival faction. Every hierarchical society has an elite; it’s when the elite becomes homogenous and loses its felt dependency on a diversity of mass organization, that human societies get into serious, degeneracy mode.
The long history of the hereditary European landed aristocracy, as a rapacious warrior class, certainly qualifies anyone’s optimism about rational governance, let alone egalitarian and humanitarian values prevailing. The substitution of machines for slaves in the Industrial Revolution gave some hope of moral redemption through technology, but the real history of the Industrial Revolution was that it required the proceeds of world conquest and a massive wastage of the natural world to jumpstart “progress”. If the European world is driving us off the cliff of the earth’s limited carrying capacity, it is from the force of an elite habit of ruthless waste and abuse, acquired in the Dark Ages, and practiced by conservatives for more than a milennium.
Notorious P.A.T.
Cue Austan Goolsbee going on television to say it’s alright to cut home heating subsidies for poor people because oil isn’t as costly as it used to be. I’m so sick of this administration.
josh
Could you explain why $119 is a magic number? Why that benchmark?
Dave Anderson
$119 is not a magic number, but it is part of a “magic zone” where things really start to not make sense to do economically. $100 oil is painful but the old way of doing thing is still cheaper than either not doing things or doing things differently. The $110 to $120 oil makes people reconsider what they want to do as the price of fuel eats up a significant fraction of their truly disposable income.
Morocco Bama
It’s as simple as “demanding” lower oil prices, according to Frederick Douglas. The catch is that your demand for lower oil prices has to be stronger than your demand for the latest gas-guzzling SUV……and the demand for the proverbial carrot of wealth that’s always dangling just out of reach but has always kept the technocratic middle class hoping and pretending.
There is no carrot, or if there is one, it’s only one, and that doesn’t amount to much when it has to be shared amongst millions of people chasing it down, and when they collectively go to wrap their arms around it, they’re hugging nothing but precipitously thinning air, because the carrot was always an illusion.
TomThumb
#6 might be: Indeterminate extremely large amounts of government revenue going to pay for war, the military industrial complex and the national security industrial complex. These expenses are ‘an unfunded liability’ which has to be pressing down on the economy and preventing any funding for infrastructure repairs or innovations.
tBoy
My friend called yesterday all excited – told me I could make a 40 mile round trip to a small town and save 9 cents a gallon on gasoline.
Who says Americans aren’t resourceful?
Morocco Bama
Yep, tBoy, that’s my brother. He will drive, literally, all over town to save $0.50 on Icecream and Hotdogs. The quality of the food doesn’t matter…all that matters is that it’s cheap…or the cheapest he can find. Consequently, or maybe not, he’s a 100 lbs. over weight, has Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, Hodgkins Lymphoma and only one functioning kidney, but no one can ever say he didn’t seize a bargain when there was one to be seized.
Oh, and there’s no talking to him. Been there, done that….for too long. It’s like talking to a wall….but I think a wall is better…it doesn’t smirk in defiance.
David Kowalski
There are two other routes to change. An establishment candidate can be elected who turns out, miracle of miracles, to be a real reformer. That was the case in Mexico in the 1930s with the election of Lazaro Cardenas. Cardenas nationalized the oil companies and gave substantial amounts of land to the peasants. Mexico has not had his like since although Cardenas’ son was elected President and cheated out of the office. The second route is assassination that places a reformer in power. Theodore Roosevelt put the first real clamps on business through anti-trust and health/safety regulations. He also supported unions (the first to do so although Lincoln had spoken in favor of the right to strike) and civil rights. It is noteworthy that Karl Rove wanted to return things to the status when McKinley was President.
We won’t get a pleasant surprise these days. The elite know exactly who they are dealing with. So that leaves us with war, economic collapse and assassination.
Adam Smith
A week ago, gas was $2.64 a gallon. Yesterday, gas at the local station was 2.98 per gallon. Today it was $3.19 per gallon. Last year 26% of all house sales were foreclosures. This is going to get ugly.
Ian Welsh
As David notes $119 is not the magic number. It is, however, in the range beyond which things get really bad. If you want a magic number, try $150 or so. If oil gets there, bend over and kiss you butt goodbye.
jo6pac
If it doesn’t drop back down, kiss the economy goodbye.
I waved good-bye a few years back and now it’s not even on the horizon.
alyosha
Oil is the chokepoint in a couple ways – it’s scarcity or abundance is an immediate throttle on economic activity, and those that control the oil throttle all attempts to unseat their control.
This manifests in countless obvious and not-so-obvious ways. I recently read that the Koch brothers funded a $15 million exhibit at one of America’s top museums, the Smithsonian, to show that humans have always adapted to climate change. Nothing to worry about, in other words. The brazenness of these guys, to preserve their position knows no limit.
The 2006 film, Who Killed The Electric Car? chronicles the intervention of the oil and gas interests to squash the EV-1, GM’s late 90s electric vehicle. As one of the people in the trailer put it, “there’s still a trillion barrels of oil left in the earth’s crust – that’s a 100 trillion dollars worth of business yet to be done”. Promising alternative technologies, such as advanced batteries, were bought and locked up by corporations, in this case GM, who saw it as a threat to their existing product lines.
Beyond the ways that you enumerate how this could change, I’m hopeful (and to some degree confident) that there are inventors out there working on this problem, would could potentially unseat the oil and gas monopolies. Tesla’s Elon Musk is just one example. It probably won’t be Tesla Motors, but eventually somebody is going to succeed at this. Will this really change anything politically – probably not – energy really is the coin of the realm – but it may tone down the consequences of staying with oil. Until EveryMan or Woman can extract the energy they need, locally, to run their lives, we will all be beholden to those that are willing to capture and sell it to us.
It’s an interesting situation where the force of time – oil is finite, we’re running out, it has many horrifically destablizing consequences that are only getting worse as we reach oil’s end – is opposed to massively powerful entrenched interests. Their resistance to change – feeding the feedback loop from climate change to agricultural instability to political unrest, is of particular interest right now. We’ve moved from the effects of recent years being limited to the damages massive storms or fires cause to property – insurance companies are very aware of climate change – to where agricultural failure is causing greater damage and near-systemic failure, if that’s what you want to call the toppling of despots, at the periphery of empire.
mike
If you think this is bad wait till it hits the Saudis. They’re the elephant in the room, and there’s no way that they can survive much longer.
I saw premium gas for $4.29 in LA yesterday. Seems to be going up daily.
jo6pac
Any one know how many tankers are sitting around the world filled with crude? I understand you couldn’t find one last year empty and even the law was changed to give single hull ships more time at sea, most were just anchored somewere.
beowulf
alyosha,
The phrase that pays is “hybrid retrofit”. It will take decades to replace our existing car and truck fleet (they build them too damn reliably these days) with hybrids or electric vehicles. The missing tool is an affordable method (including throwing tax credits at it) of retrofitting cars.
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-07/hybrid-anything-retrofit-kit-wins-award
http://gas2.org/2010/02/04/utah-law-would-make-natural-gas-conversions-8000-dollars-cheaper/
The govt should also spend some bank to upgrade our rail infrastructure (and shift as much truck cargo as possible to rail).
the Millennium Institute… calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion… It found that such an investment would get 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s carbon emission by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 10 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.
The net present value of the 2030 GDP (est. $33 trillion) is is essentially our current GDP ($14.5 trillion), that’s how the 2030 estimate is derived. So even if there are no environmental, energy security or, for that matter economic benefits prior to 2030 or after 2030, spending $500 billion on our rail infrastructure today would return $1.45 trillion. In reality of course, the benefits would be far larger and would compound year after year. Man, our government really sucks, the politicians debate over the best way to kill the economy (oops, I mean balance the budget) instead of debating the best way to grow the economy.
Formerly T-Bear
A minority view. Presently (26/02) Brent is marked at $112.34/bbl, receding from the aforementioned price. In the meantime, West Texas Intermediate has risen from about $88/bbl to a presently $98.26/bbl whilst the Libyan turmoil is taking place. Libya’s contribution to US oil gluttony is about 5% of its production, the lion’s share (ca 70%) is used in the various European nations, Italy, France and Germany being some of the heaviest users of Libyan petroleum. What needs to be pointed out apparently is the Libyan uncertainty puts upward pressure on the price of North Sea production, both contributing significant fractions of European energy needs (Russia also has a significant fraction of those petroleum and gas supplies as well and benefits directly from raising contractual prices). There is no indication whatsoever that peak oil is in anyway involved in the increase in price although peak oil does put constraints upon future expansion of production without a concurrent rise in baseline price received for the commodity as would be expected from reliance on obtaining more expensive (difficult) oil. This present raise in commodity price can entirely be lain at the causes of speculation and an unforeseen impediment to a normally expected supply availability.
As for the popular pavlovian interchangeable cries of “the sky is falling” or “peak oil”, the danger becomes that of “crying wolf”. Keep it up and credibility becomes seriously eroded, as does the rationality available to address what in the future will be the actual problem. Occam’s razor is your friend. The real oil crunch will appear when it costs a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil. At that point the Age of Oil is over. Until then, cutting back on frivolous use of energy can significantly extend the availability of the commodity but will not prevent a significant rise in price paid to the oil monopoly, whinge as you will.
Celsius 233
Formerly T-Bear
+1
=========================
The quality of the oil is also important;
Brent crude is light sweet as is Libyan. Low sulphur and easily refined into diesel and jet fuel. So there is a connection between them.
“…whinge as you will.” (T-Bear speaking) : Yeah, we bought it (an oil economy), so we need to live with it (an oil economy) or get creative and figure out how to beat it (an oil economy).
There are so many options; but we seem to lack critical thinking or/and creativity.
Whatever, wake up ya bozos…
Morocco Bama
In order to offset the rising price of crude, you need to invest your wealth in companies like Berkshire Hathaway, because despite the negative economic news of late, they’re tearing it up.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Berkshire-Hathaways-4Q-net-apf-4169778798.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has reported a 43 percent jump in fourth-quarter profit thanks to the strong performance of BNSF railroad and a paper gain of $1.4 billion on the company’s derivative contracts and investments.
I especially like the “paper gain” comment…..as if everything isn’t a “paper gain” these days. On paper, they may be billionaires, or the now unimpressive categorization of millionaires, but in person, they’re defecating meat sacks just like all the rest of us, and yet the rest of us treat the Wealthy Ones as though they deities. That has to change in order for anything else to change. As Chicago Dyke implied/stated, if you’re going to get out on the streets at this point and time, and lay it on the line, it better be for the right reasons with a strategy to see this through to the very bitter end, otherwise, it’s wasted effort.
Morocco Bama
Formerly T-Bear is correct, this hike, and the hike that preceded it, are due to massive speculation, and that doesn’t preclude Peak Oil, it just overshadows it…….for now. It really does show the “going for broke” attitude of the loosely connected Global Plutocratic Oligarchy. Considering what is now public knowledge about Peak Oil and its consequences, a logical and humanitarian response to the impending crisis would be to Nationalize the Oil Industry. The “free” market is not “free,” but rather held captive by huge concentrations of wealth that are speculating in its value. This should not be tolerated…it is irresponsible and immoral, but I guess that never was a deterrent in the past, so one can’t assume it would be a deterrent now.
In the least, at this point, considering what’s on the horizon and fast approaching, oil needs to be taken out of private hands and held in the public trust. Its use, from jet fuel to gasoline to fertilizer to whatever its many derivations have to be regulated, as well as its price, and the price of all its derivations. The stakes are too high to leave this to the foxes in the hen house of the delusion that is oft referred to as the “free market.”
What kills me is that this most recent spike, that is using the crisis in the ME as cover to rampantly speculate, will result in record profits for the oil majors and their bonuses will reflect it, accordingly. It is vampiric, in your face, and yet people are taking it laying down, and rationalizing it as all due to “market” forces. Yeah, right, “market” forces…..gotcha!
Lex
Beowulf,
Retrofitting an existing car to run a hybrid system is not really a realistic possibility. The proposed system you linked is probably the best idea out there, but the writeup doesn’t take into account significant issues with two (or four) separate motors running in concert.
Turning an ICE car into full electric is pretty straightforward. Lots of people have done it/are doing it in their garages. The problem is that modern cars make horrible platforms for the conversion because they’re too bloody fat (safety regs, full of useless doodads and comfort features). The most popular conversion platforms are old Porsche 914’s and 70’s Japanese sedans…google “White Zombie Datsun” and look around because its creator also has a daily driver electric to go with his screaming drag racer. There’s a reason Tesla is using Lotus Elise chassis: they’re super light.
Another issue with conversions is that most cars built today are front-wheel drive. It complicates things when you’re powering the steering wheels. Again, Tesla chose a mid-engine, rear-wheel drive chassis for its platform for good, technical reasons. Your link gets around that with hub motors. And then there’s sacrificing the trunk for a battery pack.
Electrics will gain mass acceptance when range anxiety is overcome. I’d look seriously at an electric but for my climate and how badly electrics do in below freezing conditions (range figures vary significantly when tested in CA as opposed to MI in winter).
The plug-in won’t fix that. An all electric with an onboard generator (similar to the Volt) will. And with the ICE only serving generation duty, it can be tuned for peak efficiency since it will only turn in a specified rpm band, disconnected from driver input.
Lex
Climate change is not the driving force behind food price spikes and agricultural market uncertainties. It plays a part, but we saw major food riots in 2008 and that was a record harvest.
Commodities traders and neo-liberal economic policies are the big problem in this. There’s too much hot money sloshing around staple crop markets. Worse, developing economies have been pushed into neglecting agricultural development for self-sufficiency in favor of producing cash crops for the international market and then buying staple crops. Add all that hot money to any crop failure and serious trouble results.
The modern food web is incredibly unstable. It’s wholly dependent on oil prices too…from cultivation to harvesting to processing to shipping. During the last oil spike, fertilizer became nearly unaffordable even in the States (affordable being measured by ROI). It kills a developing world, subsistence farmer who’s been trapped in the industrial agricultural circle of debt for inputs and cash for crops. Look at corn prices lately, the farmers who grew it already sold their crops. They don’t see a red cent of those higher prices.
It’s also unstable in terms of yield/disaster. There’s no free lunch in farming. Super-high-yield crops tend to be less vigorous without lots of inputs and do not deal with adversity very well. That’s the difference between a bad year and a crop failure.
We will see a collapse of the present agricultural system. I’d say that two decades on the outside is the timeline to expect. And when we do, all our other problems will look like child’s play.
Morocco Bama
The “Green” response to Peak Oil and Anthropogenic Climate Change are just more of the same, from the Usual Suspects, and when you look carefully at it, it’s a farce. Here’s an excellent article analyzing the proposed solutions….which really aren’t solutions at all….just more ways to concentrate wealth and power amongst a very few who are “worthy.”
http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=24628
Its imprimatur provides cover for a Big Tech, growth-is-good, business-as-usual energy strategy that will not work. Worse, the WWF plan would divert resources from a more pressing priority: the creation of truly sustainable ways to organize daily life.
The biggest losers of all, if The Energy Report were to be implemented, would be people in so-called undeveloped societies, mainly in the south, who live without the vast energy throughputs we’ve become addicted to in the north. They should be our models, not our victims.
Morocco Bama
So now the Coppers are in solidarity with the Union protesters in Wisconsin. Isn’t that special. The Cops, our friends, especially of the poor. In fact, they like the poor so much, they turn them into criminals. Just walk down to traffic court and watch poor people turned into criminals…..and that’s just traffic court.
In my neighborhood, like many others across this great land of ours, the home values have plummeted……and guess who’s buying up the foreclosed homes? That’s right, the Coppers…..and some Firemen, too. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that special? We’re paying property taxes on inflated home values that are no longer valid to fund the salaries of these real criminals whose job it is to turn innocent poor people into criminals according to the official criminal code, and they use those salaries to further erode the value of the homes in which we live.
Something’s got to give, and something is going to give, because this is nuts.
The thing in Wisconsin is not about poor people, it’s not about economic justice, and it’s not about worker’s rights. It’s about protecting the vested interests of a special group from the vested interests of another special group, everyone else be damned. That’s not the basis for a Revolution….it is the basis for a Civil War, though, and that’s probably what we’re going to get….when we go dark and the Bread & Circuses evaporate.
S Brennan
Lex,
While I am a all-electric fan and I think “range” anxiety can be handled with a rent able battery pack perhaps in traileresque form, I think this is also an interesting idea:
“…conceding that the turbine engine is “about 20 percent” efficient with its fuel as compared to the low 30s for a piston gas engine. But in the case of a plug-in hybrid, less weight takes precedence because the lighter the car, the longer it can travel on just the batteries. The engine is only meant for occasional use, so the benefits of fewer pounds are more often realized. To increase the efficiency, the turbine engines are presently tuned to run at a constant 80,000 rpm. And Harper noted that the turbines can burn a variety of fuels,—kerosene, diesel, ethanol—without major changes.
Presently, the micro-turbine powertrain is still very much in the testing phase. Harper explained that the engines create a lot of noise and heat that must be managed. But he thinks there’s promise in the design and barring a major setback, we could see a micro-turbine powered plug-in hybrid sometime in the next five years.”
I would think propane fuel could serve a dual function, fuel for turbine & heat source.
skuppers
I work for a small freight forwarder. How small? My boss, and myself – that’s it. Last year we shipped over 55 million tons of beef, pork, and chicken; mostly to Australia and Hong Kong, but several smaller markets too. You pick up the product, stuff the container, and off it goes. At each point in the transport, whether it’s rail from Chicago to Long Beach, or Long Beach to the actual port, or port to destination, fuel is used and it adds to the total price. Never mind the fuel used in the production of the meat.
In addition to the cost of the space on freight, there is something called FSC – fuel surcharge; on ocean freight it’s called Bunker, or BAF. It was about 18% 2009-2010. Then 21% last quarter of 2010. 23% in January 2011. 26% this month and expected to go up next month from there. So, if your freight rate is 3500 bucks Long Beach to Sydney, you add another 900 bucks for fuel; on every shipment. As the railcars come in to Long Beach, they need to be unloaded and the product transloaded into containers, then dreyed to the ship – that’s about 800 bucks/container – most of that is fuel. So when the P of oil goes from sub-$100 to over $115/bbl (and don’t forget that everyone along the chain is adding their margins), it adds a huge cost. At a certain point the cost of doing business becomes unprofitable to continue doing business – that point is not far off in the shipping world. Have you noticed that the price of a tasty Rib-eye has gone from about $5/lbs to over $10/lbs recently? Most of that is fuel.
In a nut-shell you have the price of product rapidly increasing, resulting in lower demand, resulting in lower quantities ordered/shipped, resulting in product scarcity, resulting in higher prices yet, resulting in lower demand…resulting in lower revenue and therefore workforce reductions…ad naseum… That’s how the price of oil plays out.
Formerly T-Bear
@ skuppers
First, congratulations on being headlined, the quality of your remarks shows.
Your remarks indirectly illuminate many other facets of economics as well. Adam Smith noted in his “The Wealth of Nations” that economic disadvantage fell on the producers of economic goods as a function of their distance from their markets. Today’s “globalization” has not changed that observation, although great efforts are undertaken by the intellectual lions of globalization to hide and camouflage that economic fact mainly through unproven devices like “economics of scale” or “economic efficiency” rationalizations.
Another facet of your observations stands out as well, that is the disparity between economic participants in the control of their market (obversely, the distortions caused in markets by monopolistic factors) as well as the economic advantages of size and scale in creating economic efficiencies and avoiding some economic costs. Historically this has been in evidence since the government created railroad monopolies of the late 19th century and little has fundamentally changed since then. The populist movements of late 19th and early 20th century were a direct result of that transportation monopoly, only the actors have changed, not the economic picture (economic Robber Barons abound in both).
What your observations neither say nor imply but might be alluded to is the disappearance of any ability to find recourse or alleviation of the economic tariffs being imposed on commerce, those tariffs the cost of speculative extortion (appearing as rents) demanded for those commodities. Once only the government had the weight to counter and counterbalance the economic power of monopolistic practices. That has been removed from economic play, compromised, neutered, eviscerated, underfunded, held in abeyance by regulatory capture. What remains is the raw, unrestrained, rampant economic power of accumulated great wealth, before which all other economic interests have been swept aside. Only the chaos of economic revolution or the abyss of economic collapse will tame the powers that now direct the nations (the world’s) commerce. The one institution(government) that once had the ability to modify and control has been corrupted, the process by which relief could be obtained is bought and corrupted, the law itself has been usurped and contravened, the courts of law are hostage to ideological idolatry alien to traditional jurisprudence.
All the best to your enterprise, may it survive and prosper until economic sanity is re-established.
anon2525
Much shorter version:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” — John Kennedy
Morocco Bama
That must be why Kennedy sent “military advisers” to Vietnam….to turn the revolution violent. He was right.
Ian Welsh
Public service unions as the only bastion of unionization is not sustainable. I support the fight in WI, but they’re going to lose it in the end. Unionization has to broad based, and labor unions, not civil service unions, have to be the foundation.
Greg L
>>>Once only the government had the weight to counter and counterbalance the economic power of monopolistic practices. That has been removed from economic play, compromised, neutered, eviscerated, underfunded, held in abeyance by regulatory capture. What remains is the raw, unrestrained, rampant economic power of accumulated great wealth, before which all other economic interests have been swept aside. Only the chaos of economic revolution or the abyss of economic collapse will tame the powers that now direct the nations (the world’s) commerce. The one institution(government) that once had the ability to modify and control has been corrupted, the process by which relief could be obtained is bought and corrupted, the law itself has been usurped and contravened, the courts of law are hostage to ideological idolatry alien to traditional jurisprudence.<<<
Very well said and I can think of a more apt description of the current circumstances in our nation or the world at large. The unfortunate thing is that all of this is rather opaque for most as the capacity to try to understand some of this has been chipped away at by a combination of failure of education institutions, the trite fare offered by the media and the deliberate obfuscations put forth by the political class.