“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”

So says the New York City police department justifying the arrest of more than 700 people Saturday as a part of the ongoing ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations. Even as public attention is directed toward finance industry malfeasance, modernity’s annihilating dilemma about its transportation ‘choices’ is illuminated in high relief.

Ironic: that people who dare to interfere — even inadvertently — with precious driving convenience face greater sanctions than do the ‘Malefactors of Great Wealth’ on Wall Street, (wise)guys who cannot get arrested!

Good thing the New York protesters were not riding bicycles.

In the face of ongoing economic gridlock, the world’s children are in an uproar. They want theirs and they want it now!

It is unclear whether the NYPD directed the people onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway in the first place. Maybe there won’t be any terrorism charges, just a mass dismissal of charges and counter-actions as ‘The Proletariats’ parents’ lawyers file false arrest and entrapment claims against the police. The entire business is as conflicted (farcical) as the ‘Great Debt Ceiling Debacle Slash Sellout’ that just took place in Washington.

Notice how the police are conspiring with protest movement ‘non-leaders’ to promote more protests. Arresting children adds drama to lives filled with unpayable debts and pointless ‘info-tainment’. Macing young girls on the sidewalks in front of tourists adds a frisson of ‘grit’ to the high-end shopping mall that New York City has become.

Nest step in the carefully scripted ‘spontaneous series of events’ will be a handful of new police cars left in provocative locations, with ‘please burn me’ signs attached.

Why are the protesters going to Brooklyn, anyway? Are they looking for Ebbett’s Field?

The fact the protesters aren’t systematically burning every car they can find is a Big Business public relations triumph. Stresses on the credit system would be relieved if the protesters were to unravel the auto related enterprises before turning attention to the banks. The banks and credit have always been supporting players in the grand automotive drama, ‘A World On Wheels, Going Nowhere In Particular’. Credit is necessary but ‘this’ or ‘that’ credit from ‘this’ or ‘that’ bank is not, any credit will do. Credit is a necessary industrial product, as are steel and rubber: manufacturers emit credit because they always have more products to sell than customers ready to buy at any given time.

Unraveling the auto enterprise will never happen because the protesters all want cars for themselves. This is why the protesters around the world are protesting: they represent unacknowledged demand for cars, flat-screens and prestigious ‘luxury jobs’ that don’t require hard labor! These economic bottom-dwellers have little to sell other than their willingness to behave themselves for a fee. In this ongoing minuet, the sellers offer their product while the buyers … indicate their bid by way of beatings, water cannon, tear gas, mace and ultimately with live ammunition fired into crowds.

Funds that are diverted toward the extraction of more expensive resources such as crude oil cannot be used to service the debts taken on to make use of these resources. They can’t be directed toward jobs, education, health care or pensions, either. Meanwhile, the added costs of resources along with the galloping costs of debt financing are considered to be a natural part of the economic landscape. Non-finance costs are hardly ever mentioned by economists or policy makers.

Economists fixate on sovereign interest costs, opportunity costs, depreciation, capital costs, management overheads and marginal returns: the hair is split over and over while the corpse the hair is attached to is never examined! It’s like Christmas without the baby Jesus: an endless whining about debt but never a word about what the debt is taken on to gain.

The Matrix discusses mortgages out of context: bad loans on Planet Jupiter. There is little discussion about the unsupportable costs of far flung tract house developments, strip shopping, highway ‘lanes’ that are obsolete before they are put into service.

The reason for credit stress is decades of valuable resources shoveled into the fire: waste never earns a return. That’s why it’s called ‘waste’: consumption cannot pay for itself, it must be supported by an ongoing stream of subsidies in the form of cheap inputs! This subsidy dynamic is never questioned. Hunt high or low across the Internet, in business journals, economic papers, public policy statements: it is hard to find anything but vague critiques of the status quo. Even sustainability advocates cannot bring themselves to repudiate the waste-based economy, calling for microscopic adjustments to it rather than its outright elimination.

No wonder the people are protesting! They don’t have any ideas, either.

The end of auto-related enterprises would be inconvenient to those who own the enterprises: it is better for their bottom line to keep the status quo limping along for a little while longer even as the industrialized world in its entirety goes bankrupt.

New York’s police aren’t as dumb as the public and media make them out to be. Police are looking at budget cuts and elimination of collective bargaining rights. Police pensions are held hostage by the Wall Street barons, the police have more reason to hate them then the protesters. They are all in the same box, like the protesters, they want more.

The problem isn’t on Wall Street but at the end of the collective driveway. The world has brainwashed itself that care-free waste is a part of nature, something that can be taken for granted until the end of time. Americanites world-wide believe that waste is ‘progress’ and that more waste at increasing levels isn’t only desirable but necessary. One must get rich by selling/renting the instruments of waste before one can be wealthy enough to mitigate the costs that are consequent to the wasting-producing processes!

The protests undermine themselves; the demand is for the right to waste, the right to destroy. This is absurdity’s absurdity: the joke the human race plays on itself. It is a demand for more war:

Because of the internal contradiction, the issue is avoided. Excluded from the dialog is energy, cars first transports, the various population explosions. Instead, there are petit grievances of the professionally disenfranchised. At bottom is the the luxe- life out of reach despite the endless barrages of television advertisements to the contrary. The conversation needs to expand past finance unfairness to include the consequences of self-amplifying shortages of inexpensive energy, the exponential increase in human-plus-machine demand on resources and the dominion over the world by the so-called ‘culture’ of consumption and banality.

The world assumes there are more modern ideas that can be pulled like magic rabbits out of hats. The more things change, the more they stay the same: during the 1930s the German government had the idea to put its army on wheels. This was not so different from today’s German government idea, today’s USA government idea, the Chinese government’s idea, France and Russia and Brazil governments’ ideas: to have the autos fan out across the defenseless countryside, ruining everything within reach. Having fanned out already, what next? The Germans don’t know and neither do their progressive American instructors. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of cars never earned anything for the customers, modernity as a consequence is tapped out. The next step is for the entire enterprise to fall apart under its own weight.

The kids themselves represent a volatile mass, a form of energy that can be molded out of ennui and vacuous ‘beliefs’ into a projectile. It is not too hard to look at the children of the Now and see shadows of 1914 and 1939, of Iraq and Vietnam. Nobody had answers then, either.

Turning to mass application of machines to solve problems that people must solve for themselves on their own accounts has proven to be a failure. Starting in the 20th century, humans turned the great machines to wage war against other humans, now the war is directed against ‘defenseless’ and ‘bountiful’ nature.

Bountiful is turning out to be a bad joke on us: the protestors’ demand is for the establishment to do what economies are supposed to do and allocate scarce goods to themselves; to coordinate increased demand. The protesters represent demand, they call for more credit for themselves. They don’t understand more credit does not exist for them, there is no net increase in credit to be had! The protesters are the source of the same credit they are demanding. At some point the present catches up to the future: the kids were the ones borrowed from during the Reagan years of boom and ‘progress’, they were tapped-out before they were born.

The cupboard is bare. Protesters demand jobs that can pay down the current price of gas to that mythical $2/gallon level! It can be but only at the price of their own unemployment.

The establishment is incapable of coordinating, it has been stranded by its own internal contradictions and high costs. Individual economic actors have the greatest difficulty earning on their own. If for some reason the establishment coordinates successfully, input costs bolt out of reach. ‘Failure of the collective’ is what is taking place right now! People are confused: the world is past the point where consequences can be pushed into the future onto others. Failure, like Peak Oil does not occur in 2030 or after twenty years any more, failure is yesterday’s news. Collective, credit- enabled demand pushes resource costs to higher levels of unaffordability! The inflection point is reached where the cost of inputs determines productivity rather than the level of investment. Think output of crude divided by the cost of new oil wells: even when resource prices decline, the ability of demand to meet the prices declines faster.

The West and its wannabes have borrowed from the future, now it’s broke, too. The shortcomings of bankers are not particularly relevant. Bankers and businessmen need to be held accountable but doing so will not revive the waste-based economy. The protests in Greece are against ‘austerity’. Protests in China are against government corruption and a lack of access to a heavily advertised-for middle class. So are demonstrators on Brooklyn Bridge. Protesters in Madrid are against unemployment, protesters in Syria are against the privilege of the few, so are the protesters in Lower Manhattan. All of them may as well protest against gravity. The future of the world is less, the pie in the sky that is set to be divided into finer increments is diminished. The world’s economy has stopped growing. The banks, finance, Wall Street, the ECB, the intransigent Germans, the Worker’s World Party and Tim Geithner along with the rest have become inadvertent instruments of energy conservation.

The frustrated youths demand the system work as promised, and deliver the goods to them. The youths refuse to understand the system is designed to deliver goods to the oligarchs with the leftovers distributed in the form of lottery winnings. The winners are the sainted ‘innovators’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. Nobody wants to know that modernity itself is bankrupt and cannot deliver goods to anyone without removing equal amounts of goods elsewhere, that demonstrators in New York can only succeed if those in Cairo fail.

The discussion must turn toward what we take for granted. We must look critically at our machines. It is time to consider getting rid of the cars: it’s us or them. The kids are not alright, they stand on the precipice, looking down, they become dizzy and wobble … the past does not offer encouragements, the future is ominous …