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first uttered his bathtub drowning philosophy of government, he did not imagine that the investor's paradise
would be this grim.
It is funny how when you reach a certain point of excess wealth, the rosy glow of going from multi millionaire to billionaire is not warm enough
to take the frisson you get when you look at where America is right now. In the heartland, the jobs keep going away. The auto industry is folding or just holding its own. Meth is rampent, and violent crime is up. Our oil price is going to follow the direction the middle eastern OPEC states go, and that direction looks incresingly unstable. Saudi Arabia, in particular is looking rather scary, and when they fall into neptocratic dysphoria, don't expect the fundamentalism to decrease.
Further, if we do not do Bush's Saudi master's bidding, and stablize the bloodletting, primarily of Sunni Iraqis, the Saudis will do it for us. When that happens, a defacto state of war will exist between us and Saudi Arabia. Why do you think Harry Reid folded on 'the surge' so fast? When the ambassador/prince left DC, he left to go back to a Royal Family about to have a crisis. If they have a crisis, it cannot help but affect us in ways detrimental to oil prices-- and whither oil prices go, so goes our economy, as it currently constituted.
Our heavy industry is so weighted to transportation (cars) and weapons (from colts 1911's to the latest briefcase nuke) that it reminds me of the quote from Major Barbera by GB Shaw. Barbera's father is a military industrialist of the late Victorian model. When asked his religion, he says he believes in money and gunpowder, for without enough of the latter, you cannot keep the former.
Our weapons are there to secure our oil so we can drive cars. Most of what we do here in the states is either about the structurally un-offshorable jobs like Food Service or Healthcare, or it is a support industry for automobiles. When I watch the local channels, the great preponderance of commercials in prime time are for auto dealerships. Or they are for tires, detailing, etc. Those other remaining industries are either co opted or simply cowed, like auto workers, airline traffic controllers, doctors. Corporate power brooks little criticism. Don't believe me, work for Wally World for a week. Employers like this economy, it's a manager's market. But even middle managment is being outsourced now, and Niemuller's handwriting is on the wall.
This society will not function without cheap oil. And the choice is so apperent to me, we either become the third reich for global oil hegemony, or we grow away from oil. The benefit of the latter is that doing so will create a new paradigm for the world to compete with. Simply funding further research on spherical containment fusion reactors would possibly produce results that make energy monopoly irrelevent.
But that is not the direction we are headed. We have a delusional commander in chief (Cheney), who any day now, I fear is going to provoke some further regional conflict for Straussian philosophy and profit. Considering the prime guiding principle currently driving their policy, I would ask, "What do the Saudis want us to do?" The answer is a surge in forces, the Saudis buying our dollars like mad and pumping their wells into deeper damage, hoping that they will get a share of the as of yet supposedly un-surveyed areas on CHeney's energy group meeting map.
The other half of our Faustian middle east/persia policy, Israel is about to experience a diminishment of American support. I don't think that Jimmy Carter is a voice in the wilderness on this one. And with that, there must be a framework in place for Israel's survival which cannot happen in an unstable region.
Here is my salient point. The global economy, such as it is, cannot really support the expense of all this military conflict. 21st Century warfare is like a hyper virulent disease. It cannot sustain itself in an epidemic-- it kills too quickly, or in the case of warfare, burns capital too quickly for the psychlogical and economic equilibrium global capitalism requires.
So the world economic leadership will be forced to make changes that do not include our continued warfare. They really need to do that without entirely crippling our economy. If we steped up to them with a decent proposal about how we were going to help create a post carbon age world wide, about how we were going to work to minimize resource and sectarian conflicts instead of supporting or even inflaming them, I believe we would not be just talking to ourselves.
But I think that failing that, the global capital community has probably figured that they can just kneecap us with oil, a thing they use comparitively more thriftily, and let our military/automotive economy grind to a halt. That halt could occur in 2007 or 08, when we rebel against the next required 'surge,' or it could come when the Saudis do not think we are doing enough for the former baathists.
The shift to euros by more oil trading nations would also hurt us. I think *that* along with a basic increase in oil price to where goldman sachs feared it would go to would be the perfect storm could send us into full War Corporatism with a command economy and no convertable currency. We could make weapons, fix up cars we have already made, pump domestic oil from everywhere we can stick a dixie straw into mother earth, who knows, we might even get desperate enough in a decade or two to even start looking at renewables again. But by then, by design, there will be a class, not of hyper rich, but of Dukes and Kings of Wealth. Right up the point where America hangs them from light poles, of course.
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