“The crisis deepens. Everyday life is plundered as much as the physical environment. Our predicament points us toward a solution. The voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return.”
I caught a lot of flak from readers on this blog when I pointed out, six months ago, that we have become a neocon nation. I even pointed out the apparent neoconservative tendencies of our newly elected president, much to the chagrin of readers across the political spectrum (meaning, I suppose, Democrats and Republicans, the spectrum for which is about as broad as that from indigo to violet on the electromagnetic spectrum).
I wasn’t born a doomer, nor a social critic. The path was long and imperial, albeit dotted with few indulgences, as least by “civilized” standards.
As I indicated in my previous post, we’ve reached the end of economic growth. I pointed to the Financial Times article that leaked the results of the International Energy Agency’s long-awaited study of the depletion rates of the world’s 400 largest oil fields. The bottom line: “Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent.”
The blogosphere is ripe with discussion of this country’s unfolding financial collapse. The collapse of the big banks has begun in earnest, and there’s nothing you, me, or the federal government can do about it. Over at Clusterfuck Nation, James Howard Kunstler is asking us to place blame squarely on Republican shoulders, asking us to re-brand the Grand Old Party as “the party that wrecked America.” I’ve got no problem blaming BushCo and his Republican predecessors for putting us in these dire straits. But I think there’s plenty of blame to go around.