The Kids Aren’t All Right …


Unknown Photographer ‘Suburb’ (Al Jazeera)

 

“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 …

16 thoughts on “The Kids Aren’t All Right …

  1. Eeyores Enigma

    Money = A claim on the future.

    1% of the population control money.

    1% controls the future.

    Unless the other 99% say “NOT”.

  2. Ellen Anderson

    Great post. This is why there is no leadership in any of these movements. Anyone who tried to articulate a “solution” would be attacked by the press and by the other protesters.

    There are no “solutions” possible for predicaments – I guess they are doing what JMG calls “management by wandering around.” Still, it is great to watch and I am certain that many of those kids have a greater understanding of what you say than you might imagine.

    Plenty of people understand the relationship between personal cars and social problems. I don’t see anything happening to change things until the economy gets much much worse. But at least more people are becoming “aware” every day.

    Thanks for your good work!

  3. Rob

    I mostly walk these days. As I do I try to imagine a world without cars as they drive past me. It’s going to be quite a dramatic change.

  4. James

    Humans used their newly evolved tool-making system to eat everything on the world’s buffet table. Cars were an essential component for moving people between residences, factories and sundry other destinations. The whole idea, not unexpected from walking, minimally thinking flames like ourselves, was to burn as much as possible as quickly as possible. Our dopaminergic system has no limits, it demands fuel, and pleasure, and the numbing effects of our consumption only increase our requirements.

    The world is burning as you read this and the atmosphere fills with the poisonous products of our combustion, and everyone wants their own flame to be eternal, so they can enjoy more of the techno-carnival. As scarcity works its magic, the flames will migrate to every repository of fuel remaining. Isn’t that what the little flames in NYC want? To get a little more fuel for themselves? To end the ridiculous system where, instead of burning their own fuel, they have to pitch it into the debt Hades of Washington and Wall St.? It all ends badly no matter who burns the world.

  5. rcg1950

    Steve wrote: “the discussion must turn toward what is taken for granted. We must look critically at our technology, our machines.”

    I think the time when the discussion will change is drawing close. Here’s something that, when it doesn’t frighten may give you heart. An extended excerpt, written, amazingly, in 1973. The Entire Book (not very long) is available on line and a must read (along with just about everything else this genius wrote).

    Ivan Illich
    Tools for Conviviality

    “I can only conjecture on how the breakdown of industrial society will ultimately become a critical issue. But I can make rather firm statements about the qualifications for providing guidance within the coming crisis. I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. This expansion is maintained by the illusion that careful systems engineering can stabilize and harmonize present growth, while in fact it pushes all institutions simultaneously toward their second watershed. Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion.

    This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression was touched off by the Wall Street Crash. Some fortuitous coincidence will render publicly obvious the structural contradictions between stated purposes and effective results in our major institutions. People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life. Like other widely shared insights, this one will have the potential of turning public imagination inside out. Large institutions can quite suddenly lose their respectability, their legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good. It happened to the Roman Church in the Reformation, to Royalty in the Revolution. The unthinkable became obvious overnight:

    that people could and would behead their rulers.

    Sudden change is of a different order than feedback or evolution. Observe the whirlpools below a waterfall. For many seasons the eddies stay in the same place no matter whether the water is high or low. Then, suddenly, one more stone falls into the basin, the entire array changes, and the old can never be reconstructed. People who invoke the specter of a hopelessly growth-oriented majority seem incapable of envisaging political behavior in a crash. Business ceases to be as usual when the populace loses confidence in industrial productivity, and not just in paper currency.

    It is still possible to face the breakdown of each of our various systems in a separate perspective. No remedy seems to work, but we can still find resources to support every remedy proposed. Governments think they can deal with the breakdown of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intolerable transportation, the chaos of the judicial process, the violent disaffection of the young. Each is dealt with as a separate phenomenon, each is explained by a different report, each calls for a new tax and a new program. Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility to both: free schools vs. public schools double the demand for education; satellite cities vs. monorails for commuters make the growth of cities seem inexorable; higher professional standards in medicine vs. more paramedical professions further aggrandize the health professions. Since each of the proposed remedies appeals to some, the usual solution is an attempt to try both. The result is a further effort to make the pie grow, and to forget that it is pie in the sky.”

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Thanks for bringing up Ivan Ilyich, rgc. He was (and still is) brilliant, his deconstructions (anti-advertisement) of education factories, health care and auto transport in particular. The car is always marketed as a ‘time saver’: when you add the time spent working to pay for the car plus the gas, etc. plus the time spent driving the total time spent getting places is the same whether in the car or on foot.

      We had better skeptics in the 1970s, when Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth’ was published. E. F. Schumacher published ‘Small is Beautiful’ in 1973. ‘The Peter Principle’ was published in 1969. One reason for this in my opinion was a reaction to America’s Verdun, the (endless) war in Vietnam. Smart people were wondering WTF?

      Now that the gas gauge sez ‘E’ these ideas are being dusted off. We are becoming skeptical again …

  6. Reverse Engineer

    Have any of you actually watched the Livestream from “Liberty Park”? Its almost touching in its Innocence. It’s the Anti-War, Non-Violence, Civil Disobedience meme of the 60s, basically both young and middle age people who have in one way or another already fallen off the economic cliff.

    For the most part these folks do not really understand the vagaries of economics, they just know enough to understand that Da Goobermint is functioning to save the TBTF Banks at their expense. Living in NYC, I’d bet half of them at least do not OWN a car.

    They are for the most part just typical people who have done as they were told, went (or are going) to College with the expectation they would be able to get a good job and become part of the AmeriKan Dream. Most of the population doesn’t understand the ramifications of Peak Oil quite yet, but once they are educated to understand it more than most people in our society they would be on board with the idea of ditching the Carz.

    Its the responsibility of people who DO understand the economics and Peak Oil to go out there into these incipient protests and start SPEAKING. The Politicians and Union Organizers who go out there are not going to be speaking on these topics.

    We Jawbone these topics endlessly here on the Net, but what we must now do is go and join up with these people who have the GUTS to go out and face down the Gestapo in the effort to get more people to WAKE UP on the economic circumstances they already understand.

    At this moment I am somewhat sad I no longer live in the Big Shity of NY, nor can I leave my school at this time to join with these people. I know though that others of you live closer to the center of civilization than I do and COULD spend a day or two walking around these Occupations and TALK to real people about what is really coming down the pipe here. If you really have some guts and the courage of your convictions, you might even pick up a Microphone and SPEAK.

    Pissing on this group of protesters because they are ignorant of the real issues and still expect our society to fuction to provide them with Jobs and Health care and a decent standard of living is just appalling to me. Get out there and EDUCATE them, I guarantee you they are ready to listen.

    RE

  7. Rob

    RE,
    The protesters want a bigger more fair share of the pie. They want more stuff. Just like the 60’s hippies who ended up wanting more stuff and living in suburbia. They don’t want to hear a PO message that the future is less and they are too late to the table. They want more stuff.

  8. steve from virginia Post author

    The protests are important because the Americans have not been protesting very much at all. Madison, Wisconsin was important for the same reason. People have been content to leave matters to ‘the markets’.

    Now?

  9. Mr. Roboto

    I just thought I would say that I have a certain appreciation for blogs such as this where the comments are fewer in number but of very high quality. 🙂 Nearly every post contributes a little bit more to my understanding of collapse, but I don’t always comment because I don’t want to ruin the effect by commenting for the sake of commenting (with the exception of this one occasion, obviously).

  10. iguanaisland

    Probably there is no solution but just wait for the oil to recede and become unattainable by the weak economies that will be full of people just struggling to grow a single radish all day long. For me this means an end to all agitation—I used to be agitated about all the things I saw, but no more. It seems like our material beings were just conjured up by the magic of oil and when the oil goes, why should we stay, unbidden? Why fight or worry or dwell on it? We can take many forms, perhaps we reflect only what is available in the cosmos and when other things become differently available, “we” will reflect the new things and new conditions. We might be spirits of the air, the mountains, the oceans, creatures, seaweed, stones, wood, so why be limited by a self that you define through senses whose functioning and conditions are merely predicated on oil’s existence in the first place? In a sense I am oil. I am made of the stuff, it is clear to me from the mountains of plastic I use, the buses I ride, the taxis I use. So when oil goes, I will go….Someday perhaps there will not be the plastic, the taxis, the buses….Through the eyes of another creature “I”—or a creature very nearly me—-will appreciate the new world as “I” now feel sad for this one. In other words, dissolve your sense of self and unite a bit with your enemies, bankers oil cartels, auto makers, and such. They are also part of the unique whole crafted at this moment. It isn’t a time for regret, just recognition, together, that we all participated in a unique and inevitable project to suck out goopy black stuff out of the ground for as many years as we could. What other species can say that—or would want to? But we did. We did it together, cooperating, fighting, yes, in every way. Through love, through war. Now that project is coming to an end. We can keep that bit of history—it defines us, after all—-we can’t repudiate it utterly, though the cosmos may forget it entirely a few centuries from now.

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