… U.S. Oil-a-garchy.

As your comments are enjoyed as well.

The experience whilst growing up of listening to father, family and friends discuss ‘important’ matters of current public affairs is a treasury of memory and a model to pattern one’s life after. I’ve suspicions today’s children have no such exposure and are missing a valuable gift one generation gives another.

That said, little evidence presents that the public discussion about economic matters is founded upon theoconomics, a belief system allowed to prosper and thrive in order to keep the public discourse in ignorance and therefore without effect. The antidote is public discourse on economics, much like we’ve just had, that shows there are other answers than the given choices. It is far too late in the day to try to overcome the corruption of the present system, the special interests of wealth have loosened the constraints of governance upon themselves and will now do as they will, they see not their feet of clay. These interests are ‘too big to fail’ but they are not ‘too big to fall’ and that is the only option available. Maybe if discussion of public affairs had been on the public agenda things would have been different; now the course is into uncharted territory, unless there is a memory of history, this has happened before.

Appreciate your situation there; my frypan to fire launch place is Spain. The ignorance of public officials is not an amusing sight. No one without a doctorate or postdoctorate in public administration or economics should be let into public office. Political ignorance, however appealing, should be eliminated (as Iranian wisdom suggests) from the pages of history.

All the best……..

…cut the money in your pocket. That simple…
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That gave me a bit of a chuckle; here in LOS I live a comfortable, but far from extravagant, lifestyle. Thanks to our illustrious government and their war on the elderly, I’ll rarely have a baht more than I need. Inflation is outstripping income by a wide margin and by intention will continue to do so.
As the time passes I see less and less reason to even discuss a system so broken and corrupt; the late, great U.S. Oligarchy.
Always enjoy your comments…

How about removing whatever obstructed the sewage to the ceiling, sending the bill for attorneys, damages and cleanup to whomever constructed the obstruction with a court order to cease and desist.

Actually that is a piss-poor way to look at the debt ceiling which is nothing more than a leftover from the prior commodity based monetary system Nixon ended 1972 (IIRC). Its purpose was to prevent more dollars being created than could be covered by the backing gold supply. That debt now only reflects the total amount of money in circulation. Cut the debt, cut the money in your pocket. That simple.

Reagan’s engineered recession lifted unemployment over 10% for 10 months but that was a real number that counted all discouraged workers. Using the current method (introduced by Reagan in 1986) would have given a number closer to 7% or less. The effect was to reduce inflation to 3.8%.

Obama currently has an inflation rate below Reagan’s and a real unemployment rate higher than Reagan’s. Further crushing the economy is certainly not called for.

This time really will be different. Not “different” as in a “new plateau” that prevents the crash from coming — I am not endorsing an end to human folly; only a continuation by other means. There may be a rocky plateau for a while, but a different sequence, a different teleology drawing the cycle forward will emerge. We are about to discover a new pattern, in the coming end of this resource boom, a pattern that will contrast with what we have known for decades, if not for centuries.

The Hollywood hack script writer’s fantasy of fantastically high prices for oil driving the apocalypse is, of course, completely unrealistically. Oil prices are capped, ultimately, by usefulness of oil in transporation. The transporation net is the foundation for an economy of extreme specialization, huge economies of scale in production, and vast networks of information flows and trade. Movements across the net have to be cheap, cheap, cheap, and the net will morph to make those movements cheap, no matter what, because the net only “works” (is productive, has scale) to the extent that transaction movements from node to node, are cheap. And, there’s plenty of scope, for that morphing, that the morphing, itself — the capital investments — will entail demand for oil, and investment demand may be better able to pay.

No, the apocalypse comes from congestion costs and depletion, particularly depletion of opportunities to externalize costs. Congestion costs means that crowding-in of resources, seeking increased output, can be self-defeating. Where additional investment, through most of the industrial revolution, could surf on the curl of a virtuous wave of additional economies coming from increasing scale, experience, and the frisson of the first use of virgin resources, the ground will be sinking away, through most of the 21st century. And, this, this end of the first resource boom on the lee side of peak oil, sets the new pattern. [It is one of the bitter ironies of the fight over the Keystone Pipeline that the pipeline be re-routed away from the Sand Hills, to supposedly protect the Ogallala Aquifer of fossil water, which may well be gone in 20 years, leaving Great Plains to become, as it was in the great heat wave of the 1930s, a vast desert.]

Funny, I was thinking about the addiction aspect myself last night – same level of denial and same prospective problem (albeit on a global scale) as to how low your “bottom” might get.

I remember this one guy that came to talk to us. He’d been addicted to crack. His method of predilection was smoking it in a glass pipe. And I vividly remember him explaining how the need for a hit was so powerful, so overwhelming, that he couldn’t even wait for the pipe to cool down before smoking the hit. It would burn his lips and hurt like hell, but that wouldn’t matter to him. He needed that hit so much and it overwhelmed every other instinct.

When I see tar sands, ultra-deep oil, shale oil, shale gas… When I hear people salivating at the prospect of arctic oil… I can’t help but to think back to that man, and that burning pipe.

Ground water pollution? Lake-sized ponds of untreatable waste water? Massive oceanic oil spills? Burned lips that don’t have time to heal? Doesn’t matter man, I just need that next hit, just one more, man, and it’s going to be alright.