wilbur101
6 years ago
Besra receives orders revoking Cease Trade Orders
Auckland, New Zealand: 8 October 2018 – Besra Gold Inc. (the “Company”) is very pleased to announce that the securities regulators (the "Commissions") in the Provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Québec have granted a full revocation (the "Revocation") of the cease trade order imposed by each of them in late 2014 and early 2015 against the securities of the Company. The cease trade orders had been imposed by the Commissions for failure by the Company to file its required filings by the filing deadline as prescribed by applicable securities laws. The Company’s common shares were listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange ("TSX") under the symbol BEZ, but were delisted on 17 October 2014 for failure to maintain minimum TSX listing requirements.
The Company applied in or about January 2018 to each of the Commissions for a revocation of the cease trade orders. In September 2018, the Company filed, among other continuous disclosure documents, annual audited financial statements and related MD&A for the fiscal years ended 30 June 2017 and 2018 (the “Continuous Disclosure Documents”). Consistent with the provisions of National Policy 12-202 Revocation of Compliance-related Cease Trade Order, the Commissions exercised their discretion to not require the Company to file the annual financial reports and related MD&A for financial years ended 30 June 2014, 2015 and 2016, the interim reports for interim periods ending on or before 31 March 2018 and all related CEO and CFO certifications.
As a condition of revoking the Ontario cease trade order, the Ontario Securities Commission requested that the Company undertake not to complete a restructuring transaction, significant acquisition or reverse takeover of a business not located in Canada unless the Company first receives a receipt for a final prospectus in respect of such business. The Company has given such undertaking. The Company intends to hold a meeting of shareholders within 90 days of the date of the Revocation. Although the Company has been largely inactive, following the Revocation, the Company intends to reactivate itself. In the near term, the Company intends to seek financing in order to continue with exploration and development of its interest in the Bau Goldfield in Sarawak, East Malaysia and to seek to have its common shares relisted on a stock exchange.
The Continuous Disclosure Materials can be accessed on SEDAR under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.
Directors and Officers of the Company
John Seton (CEO and Director) has extensive experience in the resources sector and corporate management. He is a former President of Olympus, former chairman of Summit Resources Ltd and past Chairman of the Vietnam/New Zealand Business Council. He also holds or has held a number of directorships in companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, Toronto Stock Exchange and New Zealand Stock Exchange.
John Glen (CFO) has extensive finance experience including originating, marketing, documenting and executing across a broad range of corporate advisory and investment banking mandates in resources and other sectors. John has been involved with project and development finance across many commodities including gold, base metals, bulk materials, diamonds and specialty metals for projects in varied jurisdictions from Australasia and Asia to the Americas and Africa. Prior to co-founding an investment banking firm, Prime Corporate Finance, John spent 13 years with Bankers Trust Australia Limited rising to become Vice President – Industry and Client Sector Group, where he was responsible for investment banking services in Western Australia.
Jocelyn Bennett (Director) is a senior partner and director in InCoR, Holdings PLC, a venture capital company and also a Director of Pangaea Holdings Limited, which holds a controlling interest in the Company. She is also a managing director of a fiduciary services company in Geneva, Switzerland. Ms. Bennett has a strong financial background and extensive accounting and corporate experience through her involvement with a number of private and public companies.
Jon Morda (Director) has over 20 years of experience in the mining industry, having served as Chief Financial Officer for several mineral exploration and gold producing companies including and until he retired in June 2011, Alamos Gold Inc. As a senior executive, Mr. Morda is highly adept in all areas of strategic corporate planning, operations, budgeting, accounting and taxation functions. Mr. Morda has been a Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario, Canada (Chartered Professional Accountants Ontario) since 1980. He currently is a director and a member of the audit committee of Kootenay Silver Inc. (TSX-V).
John Terry (Director) is a fully qualified UK trained accountant with extensive experience in audit, financial control and offshore financial services. He successfully set up and managed a regulated Financial Services Company in the Caribbean for over 12 years and has acted as a professional director and trustee for a large number of clients. Having left the Caribbean, John is currently based in the UK and provides consultancy services to private clients, Swiss and UK Companies.
Other than with respect to the Company and as disclosed above, no director or executive officer of the Company:
(a) is, as at the date hereof, or has been, within the 10 years before the date hereof, a director or executive officer of any corporation that, while that person was acting in such capacity:
(i) was the subject of a cease trade or similar order or an order that denied the relevant corporation access to any exemption under securities legislation for a period of more than 30 consecutive days;
(ii) was subject to an event that resulted, after the director or executive officer ceased to be a director or executive officer, in the corporation being the subject of a cease trade or similar order or an order that denied the relevant corporation access to any exemption under securities legislation, for a period of more than 30 consecutive days;
(iii) or within a year of that person ceasing to act in that capacity, became bankrupt, made a proposal under any legislation relating to bankruptcy or insolvency or was subject to or instituted any proceedings, arrangement or compromise with creditors, or had a receiver, receiver manager or trustee appointed to hold its assets; or
(b) has, within the 10 years before the date hereof, become bankrupt, made a proposal under any legislation relating to the bankruptcy or insolvency, or become subject to or instituted any proceedings, arrangement or compromise with creditors, or had a receiver, receiver manager or trustee appointed to hold the assets of the director, officer or shareholder.
No director or executive officer of the Company has been subject to: (a) any penalties or sanctions imposed by a court relating to securities legislation or by a securities regulatory authority or has entered into a settlement agreement with a securities regulatory authority; or (b) any other penalties or sanctions imposed by a court or regulatory body that would likely be considered important to a reasonable investor in making an investment decision.
Besra CEO John Seton said, “The revocation of these CTOs marks the conclusion of a lengthy and arduous process which we are very pleased to put behind us. We now look forward to taking steps to recapitalise the company and having Besra equities trading again on a recognised bourse.”
Copies of the orders granting the revocation are available online.
… ends …
starboy
10 years ago
Finally some positive news from this beleaguered PM company.
Today : Monday 28 April 2014
Besra Celebrates Repeal of Export Tax Ruling in Vietnam
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Apr 28, 2014) - Besra (TSX:BEZ)(ASX:BEZ)(FRANKFURT:OP6) has received formal notification from the Vietnam Ministry of Finance that export tax assessments totaling $12 million against Bong Mieu Gold Mining Company and Phuoc Son Gold Company have been repealed.
The Ministry of Finance has provided the Company copies of the final resolutions on Besra's second complaint against the General Department of Customs. Decision 754/QÐ-BTC, relating to Bong Mieu Gold Mining Company and Decision 755/QÐ-BTC relating to Phuoc Son Gold Company repeal the tax claim applied for goods exported and imported by Besra's operating companies in Vietnam.
Besra CEO John Seton said, "We are of course delighted by this news that our position on this assessment has been vindicated. Besra has always complied with every aspect of the laws and regulations of Vietnam and we have worked hard to prove this to the authorities in relation to this matter.
"This tax assessment has been hanging over us for more than a year and has caused the company significant hardship. Our ability to import supplies and equipment was suspended for a period, as was our ability to export gold. Additionally, the US$12 million negative assessment kept investors away and limited our access to credit facilities. With the ruling now behind us, we can now rebuild our production in Vietnam.
"With this decision having been considered at all levels of government, including local tax authorities, the Ministry of Finance and the Prime Minister's office, we are heartened that Besra and its operations at Phuoc Son and Bong Mieu in central Vietnam continue to have the full support of the government."
"Whilst this ruling closes an exceptionally difficult 12 months for the company, there is still much work to be done to repair the damage it has caused. Coupled with the severe weather events of November 2013 that resulted in suspension of operations at Bong Mieu, we can safely put 2013 down as our most difficult year to date. With the reversal of the export tax ruling, production at Bong Mieu re-commencing from 1 May, and the persistence and hard work of our team in Vietnam, we are already seeing improvements in Vietnam operations," said Seton.
Besra Gold Inc
John A G Seton
Chief Executive Officer
Besra - www.besra.com
bruderphillip
13 years ago
May 07, 2011 09:38 ET
Olympus Closes the Remaining Private Placement Financing of US$14.6 Million of Four-Year 8% Unsecured Convertible Notes and Warrants
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - May 7, 2011) - Olympus Pacific Minerals Inc. ("Olympus" or the "Company") (TSX:OYM)(ASX:OYM)(OTCBB:OLYMF)(FRANKFURT:OP6) announces that it has closed the remaining private placement financing of US$14.6 million of a four-year 8% unsecured and redeemable notes convertible at US$0.51 per common share (the "Notes") and including warrants exercisable to acquire common shares at CAD$0.55 based on a one share and half warrant equivalent structure (see details below). The conversion of the Notes (and the exercise of the warrants) into shares is subject to shareholder approval
A similar private placement of units consisting of 8% unsecured and redeemable notes convertible at CAD$0.50 per common share and including warrants exercisable to acquire common shares at CAD$0.55, with gross proceeds of CAD$15 million, closed May 5, 2011. (See Olympus Press Release dated May 5, 2011)
Euro Pacific Capital Inc. acted as the exclusive sole placement agent on both private placements. Demand for the Notes proved to be extremely strong particularly in Germany and the United States.
Proceeds of both private placements will provide Olympus with the necessary funds to advance its development, exploration, and acquisition plans in Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines for the foreseeable future.
Olympus issued the Notes instead of pure equity as it enables the Company to complete important exploration and development work on three core projects, allowing the potential for shareholder value to be created and to minimize shareholder dilution.
Detail
The private placement is comprised of 14.6 million units (the "Units"), with each Unit consisting of one Note and two common share purchase warrants, one warrant (subject to shareholder approval) immediately exercisable (the "Vested Warrant") and the second warrant (subject to shareholder approval) (the "Vesting Warrant") only exercisable upon an early redemption of the Notes. Each Note was issued in the principal amount of US$1.00 and, which subject to shareholder approval is convertible at a rate of US$0.51 per share into common shares of the Company, a Vested Warrant for the purchase of 0.9804 common shares of the Company at a price of CAD$0.55 per share until the Maturity Date, and a Vesting Warrant for the purchase of 1.9608 common shares of the Company at a price of CAD$0.50 per share until the Maturity Date, exercisable only in the event of an early redemption of the Note. The warrants may, if and to the extent such right is acceptable to the ASX as being in accordance with the ASX Listing Rules, also be exercised on a cashless or net exercise basis at the option of the holder. The Notes mature on the fourth anniversary of the closing date (the "Maturity Date") and bear interest at 8% per annum payable semi-annually on November 30 and May 31. The net proceeds to the Company are approximately US$13.2 million after deduction of fees and expenses.
The securities sold in the offering have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, or any state securities laws, and have been sold in a private transaction under Regulation D. Unless the securities are registered, they may not be re-offered or re-sold in the United States except pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act and applicable state laws.
The offering is subject to the receipt of all regulatory approvals including the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange, certain shareholder approvals under the ASX Listing Rules and other customary closing conditions.
Olympus Pacific Minerals Inc. is a diversified SE Asia gold production and exploration company with four core properties in Vietnam, East Malaysia, and the northern Philippines. The Company is expanding current gold production and exploring for major discoveries in an area of the world renown for its rich mineral deposits.
OLYMPUS PACIFIC MINERALS INC.
David A. Seton
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
sumisu
15 years ago
World War Three Anybody?
By James Howard Kunstler
on October 5, 2009 7:39 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/10/world-war-three-anybody.html#more
When Alan Greenspan predicted three percent economic growth showing up in the reported figures for the third quarter of 2009, did he mean executive compensation packages? Maybe the lesson here is: don't ask a crackhead to predict the future supply of crack. Greenspan's greatest success may be to drive economics into such disrepute that it will be cut loose from the universities and only be taught by mail order or internet subscription from the same outfits that offer PhD's in astrology. That is, before the universities themselves go broke.
The predicament that the USA finds itself will not be "solved" at the scale of operation that we're accustomed to, and we should just stop wasting precious time and dwindling resources in the idle hope that it will be. The failure to recognize this dynamic is the most impressive part of the meltdown. The only thing that the federal government is likely to prove in the process is the ineffectiveness of its actions as applied to any of the raging current problems from the killing burden of hyper-debt to the brushfires of geopolitics. Congress will only make the health care system more complex. Both congress and President Obama will do everything possible to keep housing prices unaffordable -- in a quixotic effort to protect the collateral of the big banks. Capital will continue to vanish in the black hole of default.
Something's got to give in the remaining three months of 2009. My guess is that attention will shift overseas for a while. This will not be due, as many probably think, to a cynical effort by the government to divert attention from the financial fiasco, but because the intrinsic tensions in the Middle East are reaching the snapping point. Iran is being called out on its nuclear program. If, from the start, it had just maintained the need for electric generating power in the face of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, they might have gone unchallenged. As it happened, though, the elected leader of Iran made too many intemperate remarks about wiping other nations off the face of the earth, and this has only prompted the leaders of other nations to take his remarks at face value and presume that Iran's nuclear program was devoted to armaments, not electric power generation.
So, now the USA has picked up the gauntlet. If Iran doesn't act to demonstrate the de-activation of its bomb-making capacity, then the USA will try to impose sanctions depriving Iran of necessary imported supplies. (Iran actually imports gasoline, due to inadequate refineries.) For sanctions to be effective, support will be required by other nations, including Iran's chief gasoline supplier, China. What a delicate calculus this will be! I rather imagine that China would not like to see the Middle East blow up. I'm not so sure about the nations of the Middle East though, or at least major parties in certain nations. The rulers of Saudi Arabia would probably enjoy seeing Iran get into big trouble, since Iran is Saudi Arabia's most active antagonist, working tirelessly to destabilize the Kingdom. Al Qaeda interests dispersed in many nations would certainly cheer any mayhem. The Taliban would love anything that takes the spotlight off them in Afghanistan. The Russians are conflicted between the wish to enhance their own leverage in world affairs and their need to discipline Islamic maniacs along their own borders. Europe is probably scared to death of anything that might threaten their energy lifeline. Pakistan is too tormented to have a position, but its radical Islamist factions are probably on the side of disorder -- as the best remedy for the status quo. If any of that spills over on India, as in the Mumbai bombing, then that flashpoint could turn to conflagration very quickly. We forget about Turkey, which was the hegemonic player in the region for centuries until its swift decline after 1914, but it has potent military capability and very mixed feelings about the the Jihad to ruin the West (since it is partly of the West). And finally there is Israel, the object of Iran's intemperate public statements.
This is a dangerous situation. I'm not so sure that Israel could launch an effective attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but it might try anyway, especially if a US-backed sanctions effort fails to coalesce quickly. I'm not sure Israel would seek permission from the US to do this, though the US would certainly be tasked with defending the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. Iran might succeed in sinking more than a couple of US ships-of-the-line with sunburn missles and other toys, and this would lead to the bigger danger of oil supplies being choked off to the rest of the world. The US air response would be impressive, but possibly not effective against hardened targets. The leaders of Iran might exult even if the Iranian people were swept into a maelstrom. I imagine that what followed would be a very extravagant military frenzy amounting to World War Three, with European air forces and navies dragged in, with Hezbollah and Syria striking back at Israel, India and Pakistan possibly incinerating each other, and mayhem galore among the bystanders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.
There could easily be internal mischief in the UK, France, and Germany from angry immigrant populations, and "sleepers" could work some overdue hoodoo in the USA. I don't know what Turkey would do, but it could be the biggest beneficiary of a bad regional meltdown, providing the only effective governance what remains in the region. China and Japan would probably just gape at the spectacle in wonder and nausea from the sidelines as they saw their energy supplies for years-to-come go up in flames.
The G-20 nations would be crippled as global oil supplies were choked off indefinitely. And if anyone -- Iran, or its friends inside the Kingdom -- managed to pull off a stunt such as blowing up the Ras Tanura oil terminal -- then a darkness will spread across places that were used to being lighted and they will stay dark a long time.
I don't know if any of this will come to pass, but as I said, tensions have reached a breaking point, including the greater tensions of history, which seem to require periodic release no matter how poignant the Pete Seegar songs are. It is perhaps, just another prime symptom of "overshoot," the world's way of shedding some of the toxic organisms that are making it so unhappy -- Gaia in a really bad mood.
If nothing develops along these lines on the geopolitical scene, the USA is still stuck in its predicament of trying desperately to maintain an overscaled living arrangement, with no coherent public discussion of downscaling, re-scaling, or re-arranging things. My guess is that this kind of restructuring only occurs when all other options have been exhausted. The last time the USA found itself in an intractable economic morass, World War Two came along and it made things all better here (after considerable sacrifice for us and catastrophe elsewhere). After World War Two, we ruled the world for a couple of generations. The outcome of World War Three would not be so favorable for us. At the very least, it would leave us attempting to run things on about one-quarter of the oil we're used to. That does not suggest a seamless transition between how we behave now and how the future will require us to behave differently.
chevy56
15 years ago
Spain sliding into full-blown deprsseion.
Dear Free-Market Thinker,
To view the Monday, September 28th, 2009 edition of the Daily Bell, click here now.
Spain tips into depression
Spain is sliding into a full-blown economic depression with unemployment approaching levels not seen since the Second Republic of the 1930s and little chance of recovery until well into the next decade, according to a clutch of reports over recent days. The Madrid research group RR de Acuña & Asociados said the collapse of Spain's building industry will cause the economy to contract for the next three years, with a peak to trough loss of over 11% of GDP. The grim forecast is starkly at odds with claims by premier Jose Luis Zapatero (pictured left), who still says Spain's recession will be milder than elsewhere in Europe. RR de Acuña said the overhang of unsold properties on the market, or still being built, has reached 1,623,000 . This dwarfs annual demand of 218,000, and will take six or seven years to clear. The group said Spain's unemployment will peak at around 25%, comparable to the worst chapter of the Great Depression. - Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: More carnage?
Free-Market Analysis: We think that the problems with Spain do presage problems going on elsewhere in the world. We think, eventually, they will visit the United States as well. When we write "eventually" what we mean is that things will get considerably worse. We believe this because the Western world is doing exactly the opposite of what it should do to resolve what is basically a paper money and leveraged-capital crisis.
sumisu
15 years ago
The Labor Day Blues
By James Howard Kunstler
on September 7, 2009 6:55 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/09/-one-national-moment-of-nausea.html#more
One national moment-of-nausea this Labor Day weekend struck Sunday morning, when CNN's John King led off his 10 a.m. State of the Union show with a valentine to ABC's Diane Sawyer, on her becoming anchor of that network's evening news. (This was the most important news of the week???) The old legacy networks have taken on the role of dishing out reassurance to an anxious and insecure public as job number one, and the subtext of the Sawyer lede was that a Mommy figure would soon be in place to soothe the multitudes even as the nation free-falls into bankruptcy and disorder. This is supposed to be a counterpoint to the chorus of smug, braying rabble-rousers who inflame the crowds on Fox News and MSNBC, and CNBC -- the Glen Becks and Keith Olbermans and Dennis Kneales -- who work the anger regions of the brain.
The inherent conflicts arise from a nation that simply cannot bring itself to try getting its house in order. Instead of adult leadership, we prefer good parent / bad parent therapy -- a psychodrama of alternating messages of reassurance and punishment that provides distraction from problems and conundrums too horrible to face. One unfortunate result is the evaporating legitimacy of anyone or anything in authority, and that is extremely dangerous at a time like this because it creates the perfect opportunity for the rise of a corn-pone Hitler who will beat a path straight into a national ordeal-by-fire, and make everybody feel better by telling them clearly what to do.
President Obama rolls out his much-awaited message on health care reform to a joint session of congress this week after a summer of chaotic and often mendacious debate. The system now running is so unjust and ruinous that a citizenry unmedicated by psychotropic drugs would have burned down the insurers by now (and perhaps torched their doctors' BMWs). As a tactical matter, the best Mr. Obama can do about the "public option" is to endorse it while kicking the can down the road, since the stark insolvency of the US treasury obviates any real ability to make it happen.
But I believe the public would be greatly appeased (and helped!) by legislation that achieved a few simple ends: 1.) clearly and absolutely outlaw insurers canceling policy contracts under any circumstances. 2.) outlaw denial-of-care tactics. 3.) outlaw campaign contributions by lobbyists, period. If Obama can present these items front-and-center, he can then point to congress and tell the nation that they can hold them responsible for their plight. Other urgent health care reforms could be subject to regulation rather than legislation. For example, medical care is not "competitive" in any meaningful sense; people with severe problems and illnesses are not comparable to "consumers" comparison shopping for flat-screen TVs. The truth is, they are hostages to their local hospitals and the specialists they are referred to. The ridiculous prices charged for everything from aspirins to tests to cotton swabs to time occupying a hospital room ought to be subject to review, and procedures can be set up to accomplish this, with severe fines for abusers. Personally, I'd charge the FCC with returning to its policy of banning drug advertising on TV.
Polls are reporting a steep slide in President Obama's approval ratings, especially among white voters. I doubt that this is about the health care debate, which obviously remains unresolved at the time the polls were taken. I think it is about Mr. Obama's shoveling of huge sums into Wall Street, and the unabated obscene money-grubbing by the executives there -- while millions of ordinary people get thrown out of their houses, lose jobs that they'll never get back, and slip-slide permanently out of the middle class. His relations with Wall Street are destroying his legitimacy. His failure to demonstrably clean house at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators, or to direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute misdeeds stemming from the swindles and frauds in securitized debt, make him look like a stooge to the bankers.
I personally fault the president for putting no effort into the larger necessary tasks of leading a transition away from suburbanization, failing to promote public transit rather than continued car-dependency, not preparing for re-localized farming, and continuing the unaffordable racket of imperial military over-reach in a mode indistinguishable from G. W. Bush.
Whatever the politics of the moment may be, national attitudes are surely changing. A psychology of hardship is overtaking even the bread-and-circus blandishments of the Cheez Doodle / infotainment / professional sports matrix of idiocy that the sociopathic corporate axis-of-evil operates to take advantage of ordinary human weakness. Soon, the public will lack the resources even for these tawdry comforts, and God knows what they'll turn to for solace then.
A large part of Mr. Obama's appeal as a candidate last year had to with presenting himself as an intelligent adult -- as opposed to a parent figure (or a crazy old uncle in the case of John McCain). But so far, apart from his personal charm and good looks, his adult persona is that of an actuary -- someone who can read charts, parse figures, and report them down the line for other people to draw conclusions . What he lacks at the moment is the very thing that history might foist on him: a sense that life is tragic and history is merciless and that sometimes we have to do the hard things that times require of us.
sumisu
15 years ago
Financial Crisis Called Off
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 24, 2009 7:49 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off.html#more
Whew, what a relief! Everybody from Ben Bernanke and a Who's Who of banking poobahs schmoozing it up in the heady vapors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the dull scribes at The New York Times, toiling in their MC Escher hall of mirrors, to poor dim James Surowiecki over at The New Yorker, to - wonder of wonders! - the Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds, nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund - every man-Jack and woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with glad tidings that the world's capital finance system survived what turned out to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle Bull economy. Our worries over. If you believe their bullshit. Which I don't.
All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds. They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts, to the new car showrooms, and the cul-de-sac model houses, reignite another round of furious sprawl-building, salad-shooter importing, and no-doc liar-lending, not to mention the pawning off of innovative, securitized stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where due diligence has never been heard of, renew the leveraged buying-out of zippy-looking businesses by smoothies who have no idea how to run them (and no real intention of doing it, anyway), resuscitate the construction of additional strip malls, new office park "capacity" and Big Box "power centers," restart the trade in granite countertops and home theaters, and pack the turnstiles of Walt Disney world - all this while turning Afghanistan into a neighborhood that Beaver Cleaver would be proud to call home.
By the way - and please pardon the rather sharp digression - but does anybody know if they buried Michael Jackson yet? It's only been a couple of months. And, if not, is that the stench now wafting across the purple mountains' majesty from sea-to-shining sea? Isn't it a little indecent to keep the poor fellow waiting? Or is a really surprising comeback secretly planned, with product tie-ins and all?
America loves the word "recovery" as only a catastrophically sick society can. "In recovery" is the new universal mantra of loser individuals and loser nations. Everybody in the USA is in recovery. Even Michael Jackson (he may have given up on somatic activity but, on the plus side, as the Rotarians love to say, he's quit using drugs for once and for all, and the magazines have stopped publishing photos of him taken after 1990, when he turned himself into something out of the Hammer Films catalog).
To sum it all up, the US economy is in recovery. Paul Krugman says that we'll soon realize that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing. He actually said that on the Sunday TV chat circuit. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would really like to know what you mean by that Paul, you fatuous wanker. Do you mean that the Atlanta homebuilders are going to open up a new suburban frontier down in Twiggs County so that commuters can enjoy driving Chrysler Crossfires a hundred and sixty miles a day to new jobs as flash traders in the Peachtree Plaza? Do you mean that the Home Equity Fairy is going to wade into the sea of foreclosure and save twenty million mortgage holders currently sojourning in the fathomless depths with the anglerfish? Do you mean that all the bales of deliquescing, toxic "assets" hidden in the vaults of Citibank, JP Morgan, Bank of America, et al, (not to mention on the books of every pension fund in the USA, and not a few elsewhere) will magically turn into Little Debbie Snack Cakes on Labor Day weekend? Do you mean that American Express and Master Card are about to declare a Jubilee on accounts in default everywhere? Do you mean that General Motors will produce a car that a.) anyone really wants to buy and b.) that the company can sell at a profit? Are you saying we get a do-over, going back to, say, 1981? Did we win some cosmic lottery that hasn't been announced yet? What's growing in this country besides unemployment, bankruptcy, repossession, liquidation, gun ownership, and suicidal despair? In short, are you out of your mind, Paul Krugman?
The key to the current madness, of course, is this expectation, this wish, really, that all the rackets, games, dodges, scams, and workarounds that American banking, business, and government devised over the past thirty years - to cover up the dismal fact that we produce so little of real value these days - will just magically return to full throttle, like a machine that has spent a few weeks in the repair shop. This is not going to happen, of course. It is permanently and irredeemably broken - this Rube Goldberg contraption of swindles all based on the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing. And more to the point, we're really doing nothing to reconstruct our economy along lines that are consistent with the realities of energy, geopolitics, or resource scarcity. So far, our notions about a "green" economy amount to little more than blowing green smoke up our collective ass. We think we're going to build "green" skyscrapers! We're too dumb to see what a contradiction in terms this is. The architects are completely uninterested in the one thing that really is "green" - traditional urban design - and most particularly the walkable neighborhood. That's just too conventional, not special enough, lacking in star power, not enough of a statement, boring, tedious, so not cutting edge! We blather about high speed rail, but you can't even get from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train - and what's more amazing, nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to keep all the cars running.
What we've been seeing is nothing more than a massive pump-and-dump operation in the stock markets, most of it executed by programmed robot traders, with the trading nut provided by taxpayers current and future. These shenanigans add up to new risks and fragilities so extreme that the next time a grain of sand catches in the exquisite machinery they will sink the USA as a viable enterprise. We will end up discrediting not just capitalism, but also the idea of capital per se, that is, of deployable acquired wealth. As this occurs, of course, events on-the-ground will give new meaning to the term "reality television."
sumisu
15 years ago
The First Die-off
By James Howard Kunstler
on August 16, 2009 8:44 PM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/the-first-die-off.html#more
Sunday, I got a taste of the oldest established permanent traffic fiasco in America known as Escape From Cape Cod. This is not a regular thing for me. I have no family there and never did. Friends invited us out to an idyllic hidden corner of the place far from the clam bars filled with shrieking babies and other more typical attractions. We arrived in good order at mid-week and had a fine time. Once installed, we didn't get in a car for four days.
Our strategy was to leave for home in upstate New York at 11 o'clock Sunday morning -- a bright, hot day, as chance would have it -- thinking that the masses would elect to remain a few more hours at Vacation Central pointlessly towing the little ones around in circles on plastic inflatables behind motorboats before returning to the real world with all its foreclosure notices, canceled credit cards, re-po men hiding in the foundation plantings, and other woes of the day. The masses must be more massive these days than I ever imagined. Apparently, you can fill Massachusetts Bay from end-to-end with watercraft and still have enough vacationers left to completely overwhelm the main highway off-Cape, Route 6, where we crawled in first gear all the way from Yarmouth to the Sagamore Bridge.
One couldn't help thinking, of course, how nice it would be if there was a choo-choo train that ran from Boston down the length of the Cape, but alas there is no more. If any public official had entertained vagrant thoughts of re-starting it in recent decades, the idea was apparently dismissed as a species of heartburn. Clam rolls, in excess, will do that to you. Then again, the rail service from Boston to Albany no longer exists, amazing as it seems, so the whole thought exercise was a waste of time. But it explains why we drove there in the first place.
Anyway, we broke loose from traffic for a while on the mainland, but the little tie-up on Route 6 proved a mere hors d'oeuvre to the main course where I-495 joined up with the Mass Pike (I-90), and we ramped onto the peristaltic nightmare of a giant throbbing automotive fistula that pulsed 27 miles to I-84 west of Worcester, which drains the entire New England vacation-shed down to the great Moloch of New York City and its teeming outlands. We, fortunately, were well-fueled-up and air cooled in my Toyota Tacoma pickup. But one couldn't help imagining the horrors of those unlucky others who found themselves creeping on empty, in 91-degree heat, riding the clutch the whole way, with bladders expanded to the size of crenshaw melons.
Once we busted through that monumental clusterfuck, it was a straight run home -- except for a strange interlude at a Mass Pike rest stop, where people who looked like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons clutched armfuls of snack bags in their never-ending quest for fulfillment. I began to think of them -- prompted, I'm sure, by some malicious meme on the Web -- as "the yeast people," enormous one-celled creatures multiplying at an astronomical rate, soon to engulf the planet in a tragic reeking foam of yeast, and dooming the Earth to a fate worse than climate change....
All this frightful hyperbole is really mere précis to my real point here, for those of you already acquainted with some of the classic "doomer" themes, which is that the first "die-off" of The Long Emergency will not be one of human beings but of our beloved automobiles. Personally, I think the car die-off will come on with stunning rapidity as a combination of factors merge to make these colossal traffic jams staples of nostalgia in decades to come. As usual, the public is clueless about this, gulled by a cretinous news media into the earnest expectation of endless techno-miracles.
The funniest of these lately are the glad tidings from ("The New" ) General Motors. They came out last week with a laughable hype-fest for their proposed electric car, the "Volt," scheduled to arrive in the showrooms around 2011 (about the same time that all the mortgage-backed-securities sitting in Wall Street's vaults melt into a monumental puddle of radioactive goo). We're told the Volt will get the equivalent of over 200 miles-per-gallon, at less than 25 cents a charge from the plug on your garage wall, blah blah. They estimate that it'll cost about $40,000. Do we detect a little problem right there? Like, the whole adult US population is going to rush out and buy new cars priced the same as today's Mercedes Benz? Good luck with that, GM, especially when money for car loans will be about as easy to get as a royal flush in online poker. And good luck with changing out the battery for ten grand a couple of years down the road, so to speak. And good luck also with your expectation that the roads and bridges will remain drivable in the years ahead, as every municipality, and county, and state slides into bankruptcy and the paving machines sit rusting in the DOT marshaling yards.
What is wrong with our brains? Are they turning to yeast?
And even if it were possible to continue torturing ourselves in three-hour traffic jams, is that something we would want to do?
I'm serenely confident that we're in the twilight of Happy Motoring now. Without debt service there is no auto industry, and we're toast where debt service is concerned. All we can do now is give cars away, or give US citizens free money to buy them -- which we are obviously already doing with "Cash for Clunkers" -- which is additionally hilarious in the same nation that is deeply paranoid about the government giving anybody free health care. What a nation of morons we have become.
Then, of course, there is the political problem that nobody is thinking about, namely, what happens when a substantial portion of the public is permanently foreclosed from motoring because they've lost jobs and incomes and positions and vocations that they will never get back -- ? Do you think they'll just hike down the breakdown lanes with colorful bundles on their heads like the impoverished folk in other lands? Or will they put all those home arsenals to work? I can't wait to find out.
chevy56
15 years ago
Chinese bank announces bombshell
Latest Daily Bell
Issue 343 • Friday, July 10, 2009
"The trouble is, when a country's founding mythos cannot be supported, even in terms of lip-service, by those who purport to lead, then the conversation that binds the electorate begins to fall apart. The corruption begins to become naked instead of hidden."
- Anton Wolfe
Chinese bank announces bombshell
Chris Hondros/Getty ImagesYesterday on their website, the People's Bank of China announced a shocker. New Chinese bank lending for June was 1.53 trillion yuan ($224 billion), double the lending in May. The total already for the year is an astounding 7.4 trillion yuan when the target for the entire year was 5 trillion. Putting this in context, total lending this year so far has amounted to 25% of 2008 GDP. As I wrote earlier this week, Chinese regulators are getting concerned that this lending is going towards poor credit and bleeding into commodity market speculation. As most know, bank lending is high powered monetary stimulus due to its high velocity. This is the key difference between fiscal stimulus vs. monetary stimulus. Actually, monetary stimulus will only work well if the banks receiving the funds lend them out. In the US, this is clearly not happening due to banks loan losses and caution over new lending (expanding balance sheet.) In China, this is not the case and new loans are flowing. - CNBC
Dominant Social Theme: China is heating up.
Free-Market Analysis: We've written about this before. China backed into "capitalism" about 30 years ago and the impetus for where it is now was increased by the problems with Tiananmen Square. The Chinese leaders are not interested in political theory at this point (if they ever were). Their currency is power and the way to maintain power is to create an apolitical system where citizens "can grow rich." Western systems work a good deal better than communist systems in this regard. And thus China has built a facade of a Western system.
Yes, it is really only an imitation of a Western system (from a political and big business perspective anyway) in our opinion, just as its banks are only imitations of Western banks and its stock markets are only imitations as well. In fact, to grow rich by investing in the Chinese stock market one apparently simply has to listen intently to the noises coming from the government as to what companies will grow and what companies will not. As far as the banks go, the system is probably even more basic than in the West. The central bank prints as much money as it can, and the commercial banks disseminate it. These banks may act as independent entities, but they still have a foot in state government as do many large companies in China.
It is all fairly well jury rigged. China has incorporated a façade of Westernism but to cast China as the world's financial engine is to understand how desperate the West has become. China's economy grows by 10 and 15 percent a year, and now appears be heating up even more. This is not normal growth but central banking generated growth. The same clique still runs China, but the economy has been supercharged by additional printing.
China is said to be turning inward now, as Western countries cannot afford to buy its products. But whether China will be able to maintain its growth by using its own huge population as a purchasing pool remains to be seen. What will certainly happen sooner or later is that the supercharged money being used by the Chinese will create the same boom-bust cycle as has happened elsewhere. Only when it ends in China after so many years, it will be the mother-of-all blow-offs.
Conclusion: It is difficult to see what Chinese leaders expect to happen once the bubble busts. Maybe they are gambling that they can control the unrest that will come in its wake. Maybe they assume the bubble will not bust for many years. But articles like the one excerpted above show us that sooner or later China's overheated and pseudo-Western economy will implode, and likely even more violently than Western economies ever have. And here's a thought: The Chinese in the meantime are said to be big buyers of gold on a government level and also personally. Perhaps what is going to eventually happen is better known in China than the West.
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sumisu
15 years ago
This Boomer Isn't Going to Apologize Article
By STEPHEN MOORE
JUNE 19, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124537646251430161.html
Last weekend I attended my niece's high-school graduation from an upscale prep school in Washington, D.C. These are supposed to be events filled with joy, optimism and anticipation of great achievements. But nearly all the kids who stepped to the podium dutifully moaned about how terrified they are of America's future -- yes, even though Barack Obama, whom they all worship and adore, has brought "change they can believe in." A federal judge gave the commencement address and proceeded to denounce the sorry state of the nation that will be handed off to them. The enemy, he said, is the collective narcissism of their parents' generation -- my generation. The judge said that we baby boomers have bequeathed to the "echo boomers," "millennials," or whatever they are to be called, a legacy of "greed, global warming, and growing income inequality."
And everyone of all age groups seemed to nod in agreement. One affluent 40-something woman with lots of jewelry told me she can barely look her teenagers in the eyes, so overcome is she with shame over the miseries we have bestowed upon our children.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that graduation ceremonies have become collective airings of guilt and grief. It's now chic for boomers to apologize for their generation's crimes. It's the only thing conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, told Butler University grads that our generation is "just plain selfish." At Grinnell College in Iowa, author Thomas Friedman compared boomers to "hungry locusts . . . eating through just about everything." Film maker Ken Burns told this year's Boston College grads that those born between 1946 and 1960 have "squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II."
I could go on, but you get the point. We partied like it was 1999, paid for it with Ponzi schemes and left the mess for our kids and grandkids to clean up. We're sorry -- so sorry.
Well, I'm not. I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it's for rearing a generation of pampered kids who've been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known -- until now. Today's high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.
CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year -- more than most nations' GDPs -- and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents' generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation's notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down.
How bad can the legacy of the baby boomers really be? Let's see: We're the generation that spawned Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, ATMs and Gatorade. We defeated the evils of communism and delivered the world from the brink of global thermonuclear war. Now youngsters are telling pollsters that they think socialism may be better than capitalism after all. Do they expect us to apologize for winning the Cold War next?
College students gripe about the price of tuition, and it does cost way too much. But who do these 22-year-old scholars think has been footing the bill for their courses in transgender studies and Che Guevara? The echo boomers complain, rightly, that we have left them holding the federal government's $8 trillion national IOU. But try to cut government aid to colleges or raise tuitions and they act as if they have been forced to actually work for a living.
Yes, the members of this generation will inherit a lot of debts, but a much bigger storehouse of wealth will be theirs in the coming years. When I graduated from college in 1982, the net worth of America -- all our nation's assets minus all our liabilities -- was $16 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Today, even after the meltdown in housing and stocks, the net worth of the country is $45 trillion -- a doubling after inflation. The boomers' children and their children will inherit more wealth and assets than any other in the history of the planet -- that is, unless Mr. Obama taxes it all away. So how about a little gratitude from these trust-fund babies for our multitrillion-dollar going-away gifts?
My generation is accused of being environmental criminals -- of having polluted the water and air and ruined the climate. But no generation in history has done more to clean the environment than mine. Since 1970 pollutants in the air and water have fallen sharply. Since 1960, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh have cut in half the number of days with unsafe levels of smog. The number of Americans who get sick or die from contaminants in our drinking water has plunged for 50 years straight.
Whenever kids ask me why we didn't do more to combat global warming, I explain that when I was young the "scientific consensus" warned of global cooling. Today's teenagers drive around in cars more than any previous generation. My kids have never once handed back the car keys because of some moral problem with their carbon footprint -- and I think they are fairly typical.
The most absurd complaint of all is that the health-care system has been ruined by our generation. Oh, really? Thanks to massive medical progress in the past 30 years, the chances of dying from heart disease and many types of cancer have been cut in half. We found effective treatments for AIDS within a decade. Life expectancy has risen and infant mortality fallen. That doesn't sound so "selfish" to me.
Yes, we are in a deep economic crisis today -- but it's no worse than what we boomers faced in the late 1970s after years of hyperinflation, sky-high tax rates and runaway government spending. We cursed our parents, too. But then we grew up and produced a big leap forward in health, wealth and scientific progress. Let's see what this next generation of over-educated ingrates can do.
Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
sumisu
15 years ago
Part 1: America's sobering future--The Long Emergency
July 1, 6:23 PM
By Frosty Wooldridge
A book review
http://www.examiner.com/x-3515-Denver-Political-Issues-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Part-1-Americas-sobering-futureThe-Long-Emergency
For some strange reason, my critics love hurlilng ad hominem attacks concerning my attempts to educate Americans on our impending water shortages, energy crisis, species extinctions, climate destabilization and a Pandora's Box of forthcoming harsh realities facing America as it inundates itself with relentless immigration. Therefore, this two part series supports everything in my work with more fact and realities we all face no matter what our race, creed, color or political choices.
Even with the election of Barack Obama, we Americans stand in the cross hairs of ominous social and environmental change in the early years of the 21st century. Each day, media reports stream into major networks as they expose ‘symptoms’ erupting across the planet. Water shortages, ozone pollution, species extinction, gridlocked traffic, energy crisis and other calamities dominate the news.
With so many events hammering us from all angles? Who can we believe? What’s really going on? Who gets down to brass tacks to explain it all?
James Howard Kunstler, knuckle-busting author of “The Long Emergency” writes with irreverent humor, sobering clarity and brilliant prose as he explains America’s plight in the 21st century. He hits readers with brutal ‘reality punches’ like a prize fighter in a three rounder. He bridges our understanding by expanding our knowledge. His electrifying style energizes our brains while we ponder his disconcerting realities facing our civilization.
He backpacks us across uncertain terrain as he leads us toward our destination. What do we seek? Short answer: a sustainable civilization! Unfortunately, we forge toward a most unsustainable future.
The eminent historian Arnold Toynbee said, “The U.S. will set a record in the rate of rise—and fall of an empire. Between wide open borders and fall of the dollar and growing population against a declining resource base, the US will be defeated from within. Mobs will rule the streets in the nation that is now the third largest in the world and unable to support its population except by taking resources from other countries.”
Kunstler writes, “How could such a catastrophe be so close at hand, and yet civilized, educated people in free countries with free news media and transparent institutions be so uninformed about it? I do not believe that the general ignorance about the coming catastrophic end of the cheap-oil era is the product of a conspiracy. Mostly it is a matter of cultural inertia, aggravated by collective delusion, and nursed in the growth medium of comfort and complacency. Author Erik Davis referred to this as the ‘consensus trance’.”
No matter what our ‘trance’, we face Hubbert’s Curve I and II whereby the USA peaked its oil production in 1970 and world oil production peaked somewhere around 2007, give or take a few years. Kunstler writes, “The world will be in trouble long before we run out of oil, when we reach peak production. At absolute peak, there will still be plenty of oil left in the ground—in fact, half of all the oil that ever existed—but it will be the half that is deeper down, harder and costlier to extract, sitting under harsh and remote parts of the world, owned in some cases by people with a grudge against the United States, and this remaining oil will be contested by everyone. (Note that China adds 27,000 cars to its highways every week.) At peak and just beyond, there is massive potential for system failure of all kinds, social, economic and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization’s future. In historical memory, the world has never faced such dangerous circumstances as it does early in the 21st century.”
How can it get this bad this fast? For starters, China, at its current growth rate, expects to consume 98 million barrels of oil DAILY by 2030. Yet, no one dares look at the flashing red light signifying ‘empty’ on earth’s fuel gauge! Folks! That’s a mere 22 years from now. The U.S. burns 20 million barrels daily in 2008. Ninety-eight million barrels equals five times our current consumption. Humans pump 85 million barrels of oil daily in 2008. Something’s got to give. Kinda’ like the I-35 Bridge in Minneapolis last year!
Kunstler explains why alternative fuels won’t rescue us. Wind, water, coal, solar and bio cannot maintain the per capita power of our 20th century slave: oil.
Yet, leaders stand around hoping our scientists will invent a new technology to save us. In a slide show I attended in Washington DC in October, Kunstler clicked on a power-point whereby a 747 jetliner pulled up to the pumps-- “Fill her up with “technology,” the pilot said.
Coal power may be increased, but, “Coal is implicated in mercury pollution that causes 60,000 cases of brain damage in newborn children every year in the United States. Coal is linked to asthma.”
What if we engage biomass? Corn or anything else for that matter cannot grow THAT fast! Also, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of bio-diesel. Kunstler sobers his readers if we pursued biomass agriculture with, “I think we can expect a fairly massive devastation of forest in those places—such as America east of the Mississippi—where forests had been able to recover during the many decades when coal, oil and natural gas reigned in home heating. The future deforestation of America and Europe could be as rapid and dramatic as the extermination of the American bison in the decades after the Civil War.”
Kunstler does not throw readers a bone in the first half of the book. He refuses bromides and platitudes.
He said, "The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime....so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population...that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it."
In the second half of his book, he startles, alarms and sobers readers. We’re not in for a fun ride at Disney World. We’ll cover what’s coming and what we can do about it. Part 2: First Change—The Long Emergency.
The Long Emergency
By James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4249-8
Grove Press http://www.groveatlantic.com
$14.00
sumisu
15 years ago
A Snake Eating Its Own Tail
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 22, 2009 7:59 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/a-snake-eating-its-own-tail.html
I'd like to know what Barack Obama thinks he's doing with the fiasco we call the US economy. He can't pump it back into the credit-fueled freak show it used to be, of course, but he could steer it in a practical new direction. Even people who have lost a lot, and stand to lose more, can be motivated to behave more self-beneficially. The president doesn't have very long before his economic problems become really awful political problems.
The current mass delusion that will go down in history as the "green shoots fugue" can't possibly bring the credit freak show back because the credit -- i.e. money borrowed from the American future -- was swindled away. Something like $14 trillion worth of nominal dollars is being sucked into a cosmic vortex never to be seen again. It was last seen in the spectral forms of so many collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, so-called structured investment vehicles and other now-obvious frauds. That giant sucking sound we hear means the process is still underway, and the "money" disappearing into yawning oblivion will out-pace any effort orchestrated by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to replace it with new "money" (or credit). Therefore there is no chance between heaven and hell that the pre-2008 suburban homesteading and shopping fiesta can ever come back. The American polity is tapped out in all sectors, personal, corporate, and public.
Notice the two words largely absent from whatever public discussion exists around these matters -- "swindle" and "fraud." The reason they're missing is because if they happened to enter the conversation, something would have to be done about them, namely investigations and prosecutions. The president is the person in the best position to set the terms of this public discussion, and by avoiding these two words he's blowing the chance to begin the process of correcting the tragic course we're on.
These swindles and frauds range from malfeasance at the highest levels to indecency in the lowliest cubicles -- i.e. the collusion of a revolving cast of cabinet-level officials with Wall Street executives to loot the US Treasury, the probable criminal dereliction at the mid-level of agencies like the Federal Reserve's oversight office and the SEC, to certain and outright street grifting in the traffic of securities known to be worthless at their creation. The current fiction that the public seems to be swallowing (for the moment) is along the lines of the old "mistakes were made" locution, which is an easy way to avoid holding individuals responsible for misdeeds.
The competence and hence the legitimacy of the US government is on the line here. The US economic situation is going to get a lot worse. Many more people are going to lose incomes and chattels and will suffer, and the moment will arrive when they will direct their anger outward. They need to be told two things: that the borrowed-against future is now here, requiring very different behavior; and that those who received lavish payment for looting the American future unlawfully will be subject to due process of law. So far, nobody has even been fired, let alone officially investigated.
Meanwhile, the nation is lumbering toward an epochal moment of truth when the non-viability of how we get by day-to-day is exposed for all to see, including those other nations who have been lending us colossal sums of their hard-earned money to keep our operations afloat. This will be the moment when the US renounces its debt -- or just proves unable to continue pretending to service it. This moment is liable to come sometime after the middle of this summer. It will be the moment when all the green shoots babytalk stops and the scope of onrushing hardship becomes self-evident. It will be the moment when all of America finds itself in something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the federal government proves comically impotent and the cold reality hits that we're now all on our own.
If it comes to that, I will be sorry to see Barack Obama in the goat-leader role formally occupied by George W. Bush. I voted for Mr. Obama mainly because I thought he had the capacity to tell the public the truth and inspire them to move forward out of childish indulgence into a more rigorous and challenging way of life consistent with the mandates of reality. I'm still not convinced that he'll fail at this, but time is growing awfully short.
The dreadful moment may arrive with the functional bankruptcy of California, which is on-schedule, as it happens, for July. Governor Schwarzenegger, who really seems to have tried introducing fiscal reality out there, and just plain failed, will surely come to the White House begging for a bail-out. It would be hard for President Obama to turn him down, but then forty-nine other governors will line up behind Arnold and everybody in the world will see what a farce our governance has turned into: a snake eating its own tail.
__________________________________
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers. I am at work on the sequel.
sumisu
15 years ago
The Death of Common Sense
© Lori Borgman | Sunday, March 15, 1998
http://www.loriborgman.com/The_Death_of_Common_Sense.html
Three yards of black fabric enshroud my computer terminal. I am mourning the passing of an old friend by the name of Common Sense. His obituary reads as follows: Common Sense, aka C.S., lived a long life, but died from heart failure at the brink of the millennium. No one really knows how old he was, his birth records were long ago entangled in miles and miles of bureaucratic red tape. Known affectionately to close friends as Horse Sense and Sound Thinking, he selflessly devoted himself to a life of service in homes, schools, hospitals and offices, helping folks get jobs done without a lot of fanfare, whooping and hollering.
Rules and regulations and petty, frivolous lawsuits held no power over C.S. A most reliable sage, he was credited with cultivating the ability to know when to come in out of the rain, the discovery that the early bird gets the worm and how to take the bitter with the sweet.
C.S. also developed sound financial policies (don't spend more than you earn), reliable parenting strategies (the adult is in charge, not the kid) and prudent dietary plans (offset eggs and bacon with a little fiber and orange juice).
A veteran of the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the Technological Revolution and the Smoking Crusades, C.S. survived sundry cultural and educational trends including disco, the men's movement, body piercing, whole language and new math. C.S.'s health began declining in the late 1960s when he became infected with the If-It-Feels-Good, Do-It virus.
In the following decades, his waning strength proved no match for the ravages of overbearing federal and state rules and regulations and an oppressive tax code. C.S. was sapped of strength and the will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband, criminals received better treatment than victims and judges stuck their noses in everything from Boy Scouts to professional baseball and golf.
His deterioration accelerated as schools implemented zero-tolerance policies. Reports of 6-year-old boys charged with sexual harassment for kissing classmates, a teen suspended for taking a swig of Scope mouthwash after lunch, girls suspended for possessing Midol and an honor student expelled for having a table knife in her school lunch were more than his heart could endure.
As the end neared, doctors say C.S. drifted in and out of logic but was kept informed of developments regarding regulations on low-flow toilets and mandatory air bags. Finally, upon hearing about a government plan to ban inhalers from 14 million asthmatics due to a trace of a pollutant that may be harmful to the environment, C.S. breathed his last.
Services will be at Whispering Pines Cemetery. C.S. was preceded in death by his wife, Discretion; one daughter, Responsibility; and one son, Reason. He is survived by two step-brothers, Half-Wit and Dim-Wit.
Memorial Contributions may be sent to the Institute for Rational Thought. Farewell, Common Sense. May you rest in peace.
sumisu
15 years ago
Lagging Recognition
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 8, 2009 6:37 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/lagging-recognition.html
Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing. It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.
Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China's late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history's garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.
Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going -- in fact, we're already doing it -- but it will fail just as surely as two (so far) of the "big three" automakers have failed. It will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger network of systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap energy economy.
Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it boils down to now is that we can't service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government -- and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.
The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover up the "non-performing" debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility. I'm not saying this to be a "pessimistic" grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion.
Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won't be able to maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work. The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as "level-of-service." They've learned that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we're pretending that the "stimulus" program will carry us over long enough to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on bonding (that is, debt).
The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too.
You can already see it being baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis. In places like the American south, the old Dixie states, motoring lifted more than half the population out of the dust, and became the basis of the New South economy. The sons and grandsons of starving sharecroppers became Chevy dealers and developers of suburban housing tracts, malls, and strip malls. They don't have any nostalgia for the historical reality of hookworm and 14-hour-days of serf labor in hundred-degree heat. Theirs is a nostalgia for the present, for air-conditioned comfort and convenience and the groaning all-you-can-eat Shoney's breakfast buffet off the freeway ramp. When it is withdrawn from them by the mandate of events, they will be furious.
Given the history of the region and the predilections of its dominant ethnic group, one might imagine that they will want to take out their gall and grievance on the half-African politician who presides over the situation. Among the ever-expanding classes dis-entitled from the so-called American Dream, the crisis is only marginally different in other regions of the nation. Mr. Obama faces a range of awful dilemmas, and it is painful to see them go unrecognized and unacknowledged by his White House. It's hard to imagine that the president and his elite advisors are blind to these equations, but as the weeks tick by they seem stuck in a box of limited perception.
We're in a strange hiatus for now. "Hope" levitates the legitimacy of the dollar, the stock markets, and the authority of leadership. In the background, implosion continues, debt goes unpaid, banks ignore bad loans to keep them off their books, jobs and incomes vanish, cars and other things go unsold, and a tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the unsustainable. Our expectations are inconsistent with what is happening to us.
It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with it. There will be no easy way out for them, whatever they chose to do politically, whatever noise they make, whomever they scapegoat, whatever fantasies they cultivate about what the world owes them, or who they think they are.
Mr. Obama should not waste another week pretending that we can keep this old system going. The public needs to know that we will be making our livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and spending our days and nights differently -- even while we suffer our losses. The public needs to hear this from more figures than Mr. Obama, too, from leaders in the state capitals, and the agencies, and business and education and what remains of the clergy. But somebody has to set in motion the chain of recognition, or events will soon do it for us.
_______________________________
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
sumisu
15 years ago
Shattered and Shuttered
By James Howard Kunstler
on June 1, 2009 7:21 AM
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/shattered-and-shuttered.html#more
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, what's good for General Motors really is good for the USA, then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free -- while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they're supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers.... Even though I've seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country -- the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock -- I've never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
The most striking feature is how all the things once so "modern," all the roadside business enterprises designed along "space age" motifs -- the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations -- all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at. Much of what existed before the space age is not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say, our arch-enemy, the Soviets. I've wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date -- and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill.
The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a short hop shy of the Canadian border.
Named after the many falls located on the Black River, the city developed early in the 19th century as a manufacturing center. From years of generating industrial wealth, in the early 20th century the city was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. Residents of Watertown built a rich public and private architectural legacy. It is the smallest city to have a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect who created Central Park in New York City. -- Wikipedia
All that industry is gone now, apparently, and all that's left of the town's economy is whatever it gets from nearby Fort Drum, the giant US Army installation. Nineteen year old soldiers-in-training are not so impressed by Olmsted parks and the civic embellishments dreamed up by timber magnates, bankers, and the owners of piano factories. The humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot -- semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville's Pequod. You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make sure the car's doors were locked.
At the heart of the old town, everything possible had been done to erase the vestiges of pre-automobile living. I suppose this is because the first thing many young army recruits did until fairly recently was buy a car. If having to join the army (because there are so few other jobs) buys you a ticket to The American Dream, then getting a car is the consolation prize -- even if you have to make four years of "easy monthly payments" on it. Very little of the town's physical history was left standing, and most of it stood in isolation, devoid of context, awaiting the next parade of the front-end-loaders. What was left of "the action" had shifted to a ghastly franchise strip along the Route 3 connector to I-81. This stretch of highway was clearly where all the money had gone since, say 1976, though mostly to the pavement itself and its heroic furnishings of signage, light poles, multiple turning lanes, and curb cuts. The buildings were little more than packing crates with a few plastic doo-dads stuck on. You had to wonder if all this stuff would ever see another iteration of repair and restoration. I doubt it.
Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed -- I swear to God -- "Ask us about our Angry Burger." WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?
It was, I'm sad to say, a relief to cross the border out of my own country. Once you got off the main highway of Canada, 401, along the north side of Lake Ontario, the landscape presented a disturbing contrast to what you saw on the American side. Unlike the slovenly, failing farms of New York State, the farms of Ontario looked successful and prosperous. The barns did not tilt at weird angles and the roofs were intact. The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of plentitude. You wondered: how did all the IQ points below the Great Lakes somehow migrate over to the Canadian side? Had they invented some kind of quantum spirit vacuum, run perhaps on dark matter, that sucked all the vitality out of their neighbor-to-the-south? (If so, maybe Canada should take over our dreary duties in Central Asia.)
All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the cliff Thelma and Louise style. We were heading there anyway, so why not make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little ones. In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US government's pretense that the company can return to health in just a little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed to be sucked into its black hole of losses.
My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way. The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place. Maybe Mr. Lovecraft had it right.
____________________________________
My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
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