I read and reviewed Dmitry Orlov's Reinventing Collapse nearly two years ago. I was much impressed by the parallels between the collapse of the Soviet Union and American prospects.
Today's failure of the containment dome on the massive Deepwater Horizon oil leak is another eerie signpost on the road to America's crash and probable dissolution. Our economy flies to bits without cheap oil, as we proved in 2008, when criminal mischief drove the price to $147/barrel. We've just received our second Pearl Harbor like notification that we need to reconsider our place in the world. Let's not blow this one like we did the warning of 9/11/2001.
We have to dramatically redraw how we do things. No GOP starting over, no corporate Democratic hollow gestures. Real, substantial, immediate CHANGE is our only hope.
This is the kind of CHANGE I'm talking: BruceMcF on rail transit
The United States is an old empire. If you know a bit about history you realize that even long running operations, like the Egyptians, were actually flows of dynasties separated by periods of disorder. The United States is 234 years old and we've had just one serious discontinuity 150 years ago. Old empires die due to a variety of maladies; resource depletion, corruption, demographic changes, environmental catastrophe, currency failures, and more. The United States today has all of these issues to one degree or another.
Consider our civil war; a total oddity. Defined nation states, uniformed armies, a clear cut beginning, and a decisive win as the terminus to the conflict? Nobody else does it that way. Today we have an ideologically, racially coherent radical minority, many of whom expect the world to end due to supernatural events within the next thirty months. See the Hutaree militia in Michigan? See Arizona's racist law, apparently drafted by Stormfront? See southern governors openly talking secession? Have a look at what happened to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Misha Glenny's fine book on the Balkans will provide the necessary background.
Bruce Judson's recent book It Could Happen Here describes how stalled reform movements, like the one in this country, can quickly turn to revolution. Our choices would appear to be letting the massive right wing corporate media continue to dither and spin, letting politicians piss away the time and resources we need to prepare for a lower energy world because none of them have the courage to say “We can not do this any more.” Or one of us can say just that, and then we get on with the business of what happens next.
We can not do this any more. – Neal Rauhauser
This being said, what do we actually do about the problem?
Naomi Klein describes disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine. I think we're all ready for a little payback – let the phrase ”Disaster Activism” be forever tied to our collective response to the final insult from the oil industry. All we need is a plan of our own, the right set of events, and the political will to enforce the plan.
We've got our own think tanks now, you realize? The work coming out of The Oil Drum, free of charge, is nearly the equal of the paid analysis from any of the companies that engage in such business. Our own Greenroots provide a solid workforce, capable of taking on analysis and messaging tasks – and if you quizzed them closely you'd find they'd probably agree that they're acting on behalf of the seventh generation. Thinking ninety years ahead is what we need, not the ninety day time frame favored by the sociopathic virtual person corporations our rotten Supreme Court further empowered with the Citizens United decision.
There are systems thinkers in that crowd – our own A.Siegel, non-blogger but serious researcher Alan Drake, and I've made my own tiny contribution to such things as well. There is much, much more out there – Scientific American, Discover, and other periodicals have been laying the groundwork by educating the nation on sustainability issues for the last two years, but without leadership it's all a pipe dream. Some bloggers are leaders, certainly, but we've been so distracted by the glamor of the front page and snippets of media attention that we've forgotten our true power; simple, collective facilitation of the work that needs to be done. This and this alone is why we sweep elections – we are, in many ways, filling the gaps that have come from the relentless assault on our labor movement.
There can be solutions, but they involve dramatic changes.
There is a confluence of interests between the analytical, activist citizen journalists of the blogosphere and our labor movement. Corporations, formerly heavily regulated and run in a more socially conscious fashion, were the means for managing accumulations of capital, both of the financial and intellectual sort, while labor provided the hands and eyes to produce using the assets at hand. As Wall Street metastasized it destroyed going concerns for faux profits. The real assets were offshored or destroyed, but the soft assets in terms of the expertise … well, they collected in the blogosphere. And the former workers, they collected, too.
Last December our unemployment roll cost exceeded the federal payroll. Some forty million Americans are on food stamps. There are thirty one million unemployed. You don't have to read Bruce Judson's book just this minute, but trust me on this point: GOP foot dragging facilitated by blue dog collusion won't lead to a reprise of the 1994 Republican Revolution, it's more likely to reset our national clock to 1859. If we don't take forceful steps to fix the unemployment and income inequality in this country we might skip from the Wall Street dominated banana republic we are now straight to some messy racial, religious imbroglio like the Balkans saw in the 1990s.
A national jobs bill, call it WPA 2.0, is the beginnings of remaking America for a world where the remaining oil is further away, deeper, dirtier, and very soon simply uneconomical to land and refine. Trains and buses. Gardens and bikes. Food grown and goods made for fair wages by people you pass on the street. A tried, true solution from the last depression the Republican party brought upon this country, dusted off and updated for our new circumstances.
The human energy to do this is available. 1,400 unions represented by the AFLCIO recently agreed to use Salsa Labs organizing tools. United Steel Workers President Leo Gerard attended a blogging panel at the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit a few months ago and look at the shiny new Kossack we got from that.
I'm going to suggest that all of you take a very close look at the project instigated by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The Union of the Unemployed web site lacks some of the bells and whistles that we've come to expect from online systems, but this growing effort is carefully managed to fix just one problem: unemployment. It's up to us to ensure that the underlying assumptions behind a federal direct jobs bill are based on objective reality rather than the fever dreams of the legion of oil industry lobbyists swarming around Capitol Hill.
The Deepwater Horizon blowout is a gruesome mess even if British Petroleum had managed to cap the well today. They failed. We're thirty days shy of the start of hurricane season, the relief well will take ninety days, and global warming fueled storms come earlier, run harder, and if this season proves energetic we may still be dealing with an active oil gusher during the 2010 midterms. We'll certainly be dealing with the political energy from this fossil energy disaster, and it's up to us to shape what the results are.
(CODA: You're reading this today because it's apparent to you we need to act NOW. This is a personal moment for each of us; mine built up over the last half of 2007. That awareness led to the creation of the Stranded Wind Initiative, the publication of the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture, and when I saw no forward action on energy policy I turned my attention to organizing.
The Blog Workers Industrial Union was formed at the end of Netroots Nation 2009 and has become involved in many Democratic races and various Progressive causes. I recently got involved with the rapidly expanding Coffee Party, a social movement that is shaping up to having its own broad, deep media reach without any concern for how corporate America perceives the message.
Every road story has an arc; this one is far from over. You want in? Go poke around a bit on Twitter and pretty soon you'll find the source of the excitement.
This just in - competent government response sighted! Attorney General Eric Holder has taken an interest in British Petroleum's conduct. Details are found on The Oil Drum.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Sunday said he had dispatched Justice Department officials to the Gulf Coast to determine whether there had been any "misfeasance" or "malfeasance" related to the leaking oil rig off the Gulf of Mexico.
Mr. Holder, speaking on ABC's "This Week," said he sent the officials to the area to advise him on "what our options are." He said the government's primary focus was on preventing the leaking oil from devastating the coast when it reaches land.
The Oil Drum provided a detailed analysis of what happened to the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. This is cold, hard fact from people who either work in the field now or have retired and have the time to provide us their expert assistance.
SOLUTION: I don't think it's a great big secret that I'm a fan of Alan Drake's rail electrification work. Alan doesn't blog so here on DailyKos the very best source of information on this sort of thing is our own BruceMcF and his regular flow of diaries on rail transportation. Drake's studies indicate we can cut oil usage 10% and expand our economy 25% by simply rebuilding the same sort of rail network we had a hundred years ago. This is a positive, executable solution that will put a stop to messes like the one British Petroleum just made of the Gulf of Mexico.
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