[BrazilianPO]

Capitalism has so many flaws. That is why we have cycles, like in 1930. They are like a "reset" button.

Capitalism encourages building and concentrating wealth. However, that goes against capitalism itself. Take Bill Gates. With all his billions, he has what? 10-20 mansions, 50 cars, 5 jets, perhaps? He can eat a lot and expensive food, but will not eat as much as 1000 people.

All those billions would be of better use (in terms of supporting capitalism), if they were circulating in the economy, being used to build 10000 houses, 10000 cars and 50 jets.

Concentration of capital goes against capitalism in the long term, but paradoxically is encouraged by it. I believe we are on the verge of another shock. A very strong one.

(Edited for typo)

[eric_b]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lawnchair', '
')(...)

But, it's all they have to show for years of long hours and wasted lives.

[Free]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BrazilianPO', 'C')apitalism has so many flaws. That is why we have cycles, like in 1930. They are like a "reset" button.

Capitalism encourages building and concentrating health. However, that goes against capitalism itself. Take Bill Gates. With all his billions, he has what? 10-20 mansions, 50 cars, 5 jets, perhaps? He can eat a lot and expensive food, but will not eat as much as 1000 people.

All those billions would be of better use (in terms of supporting capitalism), if they were circulating in the economy, being used to build 10000 houses, 10000 cars and 50 jets.

Concentration of capital goes against capitalism in the long term, but paradoxically is encouraged by it. I believe we are on the verge of another shock. A very strong one.

[galacticsurfer]

What about Hubbert's idea that Peak oil and modern banking monetary concept of interest cannot exist together?

When the resources available(or any one critical resource) starts to be exhausted, be it water or oil or coal or wheat, then money will be what it is, paper blowing in the wind.

They say "You can't take it with you". Only physical biological life and what sustains it counts in the end. Inherited wealth generally speaking lasts very few generations historically speaking due to war, revolution, incompetence, etc. We pass on our genes and some lessons or experience and in the end our kids have to learn for themselves.

The current level of economic injustice and income inequality happening now is part of an economic historical feedback loop which started in October 1929.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

The people who experienced the last crisis and instituted controls to avoid it are all gone and so we are going through the same crisis again. The younger generations have thrown caution to the wind and do not save like their parents and grandparents. They expect to get rich quick or die trying and respect a winner take all philosophy. This started in the 80s when older guys who fought WWII ("Ask not what your country can do for you...") started giving way to baby boomers("ME, ME, ME , ME") and silent generation("dude am I hip or what") on wall street and in government so that the desire for fairness and social justice dissipated almost entirely. Unions were killed and patriotic committment to Made In USA gave way to robber baron capitalism under Ronnie Raygun.

The final shove has came when the silent generation started departing recently(Cheney, Rumsfeld and some old senators being exceptions but wait a few years) and total egoistic attitudes hold sway with only boomers and GenX in charge of all spheres of public life and their young millenial kids willing to do their bidding in any rabid racist wars soon to be available to defend "The American Way of Life".

So WWIII will probably happen after the current bubble bursts and we have a long term depression scenario, regardless of Peak Oil. Bernanke cannot save us now as it is too late. Even with ten years of zero percent interest rate worldwide like the last ten years in Japan it won't work. How many cars and TVs and houses and computers can everybody get until they are satiated? Somebody has to pay the piper sometime. The Chinese, Japanese and Arabs have been buying US bonds to hold down the interest rates for housing to keep the bubble going so they could keep selling goods and oil but now there is a glut of housing available and no new takers(the last 24 year old multimillion dollar house flipper is already in trouble) and when they drop the Fed rates to 1% this time to support a new bubble somewhare else(commodities anyone?) the Arabs and Chinese (and Russians)will invest in Euros or Yen or gold or oil or just buy up all of African and American and European mineral and industrial assets(already started) and banks and real estate cheap.

[benzoil]

Interestingly, a total liquids peak of around 2010-2015 coincides with the first great wave of retiring Baby Boomers. THIS should be interesting for a variety of reasons. One, the retiring boomers alone may wreak havoc on the market as they move to "safer" investments. Two, peak oil may mean there are no safe investments. Three, faced with retiring on a lot less than they'd planned, many boomers will try to keep working. Four, this might add a generational aspect to class recriminations over PO and the looted economy as GenX and GenY realize they have no jobs, no savings and no prospects.

Oh, to make it a complete triple threat add global climate change to PO and the economy. "Class war" might be the least of the problems!

P.S. Have a nice day!

[mmasters]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('galacticsurfer', '
')The current level of economic injustice and income inequality happening now is part of an economic historical feedback loop which started in October 1929.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

The people who experienced the last crisis and instituted controls to avoid it are all gone and so we are going through the same crisis again. The younger generations have thrown caution to the wind and do not save like their parents and grandparents. They expect to get rich quick or die trying and respect a winner take all philosophy. This started in the 80s when older guys who fought WWII ("Ask not what your country can do for you...") started giving way to baby boomers("ME, ME, ME , ME") and silent generation("dude am I hip or what") on wall street and in government so that the desire for fairness and social justice dissipated almost entirely. Unions were killed and patriotic committment to Made In USA gave way to robber baron capitalism under Ronnie Raygun.

[mgibbons19]

I dig Strauss and Howe. Just imagine what a post-PO high might look like.

[Denny]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', 'J')on Stewart's guest on The Daily Show tonight was Lou Dobbs of CNN who is touting his new book, War on the Middle Class.

The upshot of the discussion was that our economy no longer values WORK. It values, instead, INVESTMENT, which precludes the vast majority of Americans.

[AgentR]

Whenever you say "law of the land", do recall that any law passed after the law in question, superceeds it, whether by intent or not, and that includes appropriations bills.

[TreebeardsUncle]

Hi.
Took the Slate Green Challenge and got a score of
14,707.75 pounds of Carbon per year compared to the 44,312 pounds
the average America uses. However, the question about the dishwasher doesn't apply since I don't use the dishwasher and I only do the laundry about once every 2 months or so.

g

The following is the letter I sent to one of the guys who work on the Slate site about this test, which estimates the amount of Co2 an individual produces.

Hi.
Took your quiz and got a result of using around 14,300 pounds of carbon per year compared to the average American that uses over 40,000 pounds of carbon per year. Would appreciate if there were more flexibility in the test. For example, I don't use a dishwasher and only do laundry about once per month. The electric bill was about $10/month. A lot of appliances, washers, driers, dish washers, kitchen ovens etc are needless. One can get by just fine with running water, a small (maybe 3 cubic feet) refrigerator, a place to sleep, one form of cooking like a burner or microwave, and someplace in the area to make phone calls. Heating and air conditioning is not needed in much of the country (America). Also by living continguously in apartment blocks, with buildings built partly underground a lot of energy can be saved. Reckless hedonism and resulting indebtedness is one of the drivers for the profligate consumption. Also, the separation of functions of work, housing, shopping, church, school,etc by modern post-WW2 sterile homogenous suburbia is the primary motive force for excessive driving.
Reconsoliding such functions would be the most effective way of reducing automobile-oriented consumption.
However, people are unwilling to make substantive changes to effect positive changes. It will be interesting to see the results of capitalism's inability to measure ecological truths later this century just as it was to see communism's inability to measure economic truths in the end of the last (with the fall of the USSR in 1989).

Lates.
Geoff

[Kristen]

yeah the super rich could nuke the poor, but than the radiation would kill them off too. with everyone dead their wealth will be meaningless. Then they will get sick, but the medication will be outdated. They will die too.

[oilluber]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mmasters', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('galacticsurfer', '
')The current level of economic injustice and income inequality happening now is part of an economic historical feedback loop which started in October 1929.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

The people who experienced the last crisis and instituted controls to avoid it are all gone and so we are going through the same crisis again. The younger generations have thrown caution to the wind and do not save like their parents and grandparents. They expect to get rich quick or die trying and respect a winner take all philosophy. This started in the 80s when older guys who fought WWII ("Ask not what your country can do for you...") started giving way to baby boomers("ME, ME, ME , ME") and silent generation("dude am I hip or what") on wall street and in government so that the desire for fairness and social justice dissipated almost entirely. Unions were killed and patriotic committment to Made In USA gave way to robber baron capitalism under Ronnie Raygun.

[TreebeardsUncle]

Hi.

There was an editorial posted in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning entitled "Supreme Court's boost to the powerful ... Some rulings stray from conservative tenets" by Adam Cohen who writes for the New York Times. I am summarizing (even repeating certain phrases) and discussing its contents below.

At issue is the concern over punitive damages. For example the Supreme Court is hearing arguments this week on the case of Jesse Williams who died of lung cancer at the age of 79. His wife sued Philip Morris and was awared $79.5 million in punitive damages, which was upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court. As Philip Morris has a market capitalization of $166 billion, the punitive damages are around 1/10,000th of its net worth. This would be the equivalent of a person with a net worth of $100,000 paying a fine of $10 for knowingly supplying people for many years with products designed to addict them, lead to their early deaths, and consume $10,000s to $100,000s of expensive medical treatment
which is largely paid for by insurance and the general tax-paying public.

In a similar case in that it involved the Supreme Court making a ruling on punitive damages to be paid for by a negligent corporation, a man sued BMW for failing to inform him that his supposedly new car had been damaged and repainted before he bought it. He was awarded $4,000 in compensatory and $2 million in punitive damages. However, the wise Supreme Court in 1996 ruled that this punitive damage award was "grossly excessive" and violated due process. Similarly, in striking down a punitive damage award of $145 million in a fraud case brought against State Farm Insurance, the Supreme Court ruled that these damages were excessive given that compensatory damages were only $1 million and stated that "due process generally required ... a "single digit ratio" between punitive and compensatory damages." (Cohen's words are within the first set of quotes, the Supreme Court's are within the second.)
In stark contrast to the lenient treatment meted out to corporations, 37-year-old Leandro Andrade, was sentenced to 50 years in prison under California's "three strikes" law for shoplifiting
$153.53-worth of video tapes from K-mart. This means he will most likely, not only have spent the majority of his life in prison for this act, but die in prison as well.
Thus, there you have it, the system of American justice. Corporations are treated as individuals before the law, in so far as they are allowed to accumulate vast assets, but are nearly exempt from any responsibility or liability, as has been stated on this board before. Note that, even when the corporations pay a small nominal fine, almost invariably far below 1% of their net worth regardless of their level of wrong-doing, individual executives and others are almost never held personally responsible. However, individual, life, liberty, and justice outside of corporate and government circles is not valued much at all, especially those of poor young and often minority men. These are the same young men who are also preferentially dispached to be exterminated in various armed conflicts to enrich certain well-connected corporations, such as Exxon and Haliburton in the current Iraq war, Dupont in the Korean War, and the makers of white phosporous incendieries, carpet bombs, and Agent Orange defoliant in the Vietnam War.

Geoff

[mmasters]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('oilluber', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mmasters', ' ')

That's true, most the people from the last depression are gone, most everyone is oblivious to another one coming or knowing to prepare. The feedback loop you refer to is just a severe form of the business cycle which can be initiated by reeling back the money supply drastically. The FED (like all central banks) is a pure catylyst for this and has near absolute control over it.

It's an old game that started 300-400 years ago. Introduce extra paper money into the system, prosperity follows, borrowing increases. Then later on remove the extra money and seize assets from those that can't service their debts. The game has evolved over time and became integrated into the form of what is called a "central bank". The FED is the pinnacle of all central banks. The "controls" initiated to avoid another depression simply gave greater power to the FED. The introduction of the FOMC in the 30's made it look more governmental by having an elected goverance board created to set policy for the private regional reserve banks. Make no mistake though they can initiate a recession or depression at any instant, but they best have a good reason for it though that the public can sit on. The last one was a great stock market crash. Perhaps the next one will be a great stock market crash, this time from oil supply outstripping demand - a "peak oil" depression. Greenspan earlier in the year forecast a global depression from the oil supply outstripping demand. Perhaps that was a "we were warned" statement.

[grink1tt3n]

Something like this button?



:)

[oil_girl]

I have to admit, I signed up here thinking that it was about oil and energy... but this is starting to look like a doomsday cult!

Nobody can predict how anything will unwind.

What has usually thinned the herd has been war and pestilence. We are overdue for some pestilence.

Unfortunately, some of our silly scientists have been experimenting with some really deadly diseases and viruses. In Australia, they were able to genetically modify mousepox to be 100% fatal and exterminate mice - including vaccinated populations. Mousepox is just one gene away from smallpox.

Then there are the nutcase scientists who go up into the permafrost to find graveyards which have been frozen for eons to dig up corpses of people who died of things such as smallpox and/or Spanish flu (1918) or any number of things.

The worst thing, is that they then go out and tell everyone where they found these viruses. Most of these old frozen graveyards are remote and unguarded. A terrorist doesn't even need to dig up the body... all he has to do is drill a core and pull out the frozen tissue... then we are all in trouble.

Plagues have followed humans for centuries. Already new ones are emerging to thin the herd.

The whole class warfare scenario is so passe as to be absurd. Our society is not going to kill each other because some of us have bigger houses than others.

If it ever does come down to open internecine warfare it will more likely be along the lines of race or religion.

[oil_girl]

Since we are (yet again) on a doomsday scenario subject, I should include the Howard Ruff book list. It looks rather silly as he was writing books such as "Famine and Survival in America" back in 1975, and the famous "How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years", where he advised everyone who would listen to buy gold - and they proceeded to lose their shirts and miss out on the greatest bull market since the Great Depression.

I can't believe that people still buy this idiot's books!

If you want to see something funny, go here:
Howard Ruff's idiotic books on Amazon

I won't even get into Global Cooling - from my father's generation. Newswe<B>a</b>k (not a typo) even had a whole feature on global cooling in the 70's and how we were all supposed to be frozen like Siberian Mammoths by now. Ho-hum.

For our generation there is Jared Diamond, who is not selling financial advice, but is actually a learned anthropologist and professor, as well as an excellent writer on human history.

His first book, "Guns, Germs and Steel - A History of the first 13,000 Years of Human Civilization" is essential reading. He later explained the denouement of the Easter Island civilization and most recently spun this seminal yarn into his latest bestseller, "Collapse". (IMHO not as good as Guns, Germs & Steel.)

He has some good observations concerning how societies tend to spiral downward, sparing really nobody.

For those of you who feel our society is approaching its twilight, his books are a must. (Jared Diamond's books)
It would be nice if we could figure out a way that the guys who run this site got a commission on his books if you buy any of them, since you learned about them here. I don't know how or if you can do this. :-/

I'm heading back over to the Petroleum Club, all this doomsday talk is depressing.

[oil_girl]

Before I log off, here's the Newswe<B>a</b>k (not a typo) article I mentioned:

Newsweak article on global cooling from 1975

[coyote]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('oil_girl', 'I') won't even get into Global Cooling - from my father's generation. Newswe<B>a</b>k (not a typo) even had a whole feature on global cooling in the 70's and how we were all supposed to be frozen like Siberian Mammoths by now. Ho-hum.

[mmasters]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('grink1tt3n', 'S')omething like this button?