Global markets plunge on U.S. recession fears

Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that did not undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred years. But despite what we tell ourselves about our specialness, we're not immune to the forces that have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of the Nazis, the Soviet terror, the "cultural revolution," the holocausts and genocides -- these are all things that can happen to any people driven to desperation. - James Kunstler

LONDON (AP) -- European and Asian stock markets plunged Monday following declines on Wall Street last week amid investor pessimism over the U.S. government's stimulus plan to prevent a recession.

The U.K. benchmark FTSE-100 dropped 3.9 percent to 5,673.1; France's CAC-40 Index plunged 4.5 percent to 4,861.2, while Germany's slumped 5.35 percent to 6,922.7.

In Asia, India's benchmark stock index tumbled 7.4 percent, while Hong Kong's blue-chip Hang Seng index plummeted 5.5 percent to 23,818.86, its biggest percentage drop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Investors dumped shares because they were skeptical that an economic stimulus plan President George W. Bush announced Friday would shore up the economy that has been battered by problems in its housing and credit markets. The plan, which requires approval by Congress, calls for about $145 billion worth of tax relief to encourage consumer spending.

"We've taken our lead from the Asian markets who have not been impressed by the U.S. There's debate if there's going to be a recession in the U.S. I don't think there's much chance of that though," said Richard Hunter, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers Ltd. in London.

Concerns about the outlook for the U.S. economy, a major export market for Asian companies, has sent the region's markets sliding in 2008. Just last Wednesday, the Hang Seng index sank 5.4 percent.

"It's another horrible day," said Francis Lun, a general manager at Fulbright Securities in Hong Kong. "Today it's because of disappointment that the U.S. stimulus (package) is too little, too late and investors feel it won't help the economy recover."

NVDL: It's starting... Well, it's starting to manifest. It really started a long way down the track, and now Nature is shaking its big fist in our faces and we're going: Oh. Oh I get it.

Here are more suggestions from James Kunstler:

Here's what we better start doing.
Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.

End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program.)

Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.

In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability. This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment of redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects." Get rid of any parking requirements for property development. Institute "locational taxation" based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network basis.

We'd better begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or desirable to construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons to go forward with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we need to establish it quickly. There may be no other way to keep the lights on in America after 2020.

We need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations that have characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world is about to become wider again as nations get desperate over energy resources. This desperation is certain to generate conflict. We'll have to make things in this country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household products.

We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a "consumer" activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box" operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine.

Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop using semantic ruses like calling illegal immigrants "undocumented."

Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" -- and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you can.

Kunstler: From Osama to Obama

The Iowa caucus set into motion a curious self-reinforcing feedback loop of inspiration -- that an African-American political leader could win an important primary contest in a Wonder Bread state, and that all Americans (especially white Americans) could "feel good" about living in a country where such a thing is possible. This is an understandable sentiment.

Whatever else Americans have been conditioned to be lately -- blubbery, debt-crushed, tattoo-etched, Jesus-haunted, multiply-addicted TV zombies -- a residual kernel of fairness seems to persist underneath all that cellulite and avarice. Catching a glimpse of our formerly better collective selves, we seem moved to discover that it's still there, although the element of self-congratulation gets tiresome quickly.

In any case, it was satisfying to see Barack Obama whip Hillary Clinton's entitled, presumptuous ass in Iowa last week, and by a very healthy margin. All other things aside -- like, what he actually thinks about the state of the nation -- Obama is a more reassuring figure than the Lady Macbeth-like former first lady, with her retinue of policy earls and thanes, and the creepy figure of her Mac-husband ever-grinning upstage.

I could get behind Obama, if it comes to it, but these days another feeling dogs me -- that we live in a nation where a lot more people than just Hillary Clinton need to get their asses whipped (and then some), and I like John Edwards a bit better in the role. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, John Edwards made an appeal to the audience that just seemed more reality-based to me than Obama's platitudes about bringing people together.

Edwards seems to recognize that there are some people -- like the health care executive he cited who retired from his job with over $100 million in the policy-holders loot -- who don't deserve to come together with anything except a grand jury. Edwards is willing to gaze past the kindergarten emotions of primary politics and see the stupendous ugliness and unfairness of a land that is being sucked dry by corporate vampires. I believe he will righteously kick their asses, and that they need to get their asses kicked, so I'm more inclined to support Edwards. I believe he means it, too.

I was impressed that night by the TV commercial that followed Obama's speech. The commercial promoted a hydrogen car that General Motors is pretending to develop. It was very slick, of course, since GM can get the best TV production talent money can buy. It featured a light-skinned African-American man (not unlike Obama) playing a sort of Mr. Science Teacher role among a flower-strewn meadow full of schoolchildren with a modest GM sedan at the center of the picture. Mr. Science Teacher was telling the kids how this new GM wonder car would run without any nasty gasoline, and out of its tailpipe would come nothing but pure clean water, and wasn't the future-according-to-General-Motors a fabulous thing! It was all very heartwarming, except it was complete mendacious bullshit.

GM will never produce a commercial line of hydrogen-powered cars, and America will never set up a supporting infrastructure of hydrogen production and retail fueling stations. And GM knows all this.

General Motors deserves to have its ass kicked for misleading the public so shamelessly. I think Edwards is the only candidate who would kick their ass. I'm not quite sure how he would do it, or what he would say, but here's how I suggest he should frame the issue. "General Motors, can you take some of the money and human capital that you devote to misleading the public about hydrogen cars, and see if you can apply it instead to producing some decent up-to-date rolling stock for the US railroad system, which we have got to get up-and-running again -- or I WILL KICK YOUR ASS." Something like that.

I can see Edwards dealing effectively with Wall Street, too. As president he would probably find that there are some agencies all saddled up and ready to ride, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and certain offices within the US Department of Justice, which could be motivated to ask some of the questions that various boards of directors have overlooked for some years now -- such as. . . how come Mr. Disgraced Executive is backing up his Lincoln Navigator to the loading dock of Acme Banking and Trust, and piling in sacks of the shareholders' money (after presiding over $10 billion worth of losses in acting as counter-party to an illegal trade in his company's own engineered fraudulent securities. . . ?

So, these are some of my own dark thoughts coming out of Iowa and heading right smack into the New Hampshire primary. I'm reasonably confident that Hillary will stagger out of the Granite State with a stake through her heart. I hope Edwards can stay on his feet long enough to make make a run going into the SuperDuper gauntlet of primaries that follows. He may even condition Obama to toughen up some and realize that bringing people together (to be chumps and saps for the ghouls who sell them Cheesburgers) is not the sovereign remedy for what ails Clusterfuck Nation.

I don't much care for the moment what happens among the Republicans. Their party is doomed. They're the Whigs of the 21st Century, and their grandees will be remembered in the same way that we revere William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore (whose birthday is tomorrow, by the way -- NY State employees take note!). It's been fun following the adventures of Huckabee, but only in the way that it was fun following Elmer Fudd as a six-year-old.

Road Testing BMW's Hydrogen 7

Wired magazine succumbs here to the 'Technology Will Save Us' daydream. While no one can fault a car running on hydrogen as a nice innovation, you can throw a few cream cakes at these guys for failing to think a little further: how to set up hydrogen infrastructure into current service station infrastructure.

It's been said that to transport similar amounts of energy, you'd need 21 tanker sized trucks filled with liquid hydrogen for every gasoline truck . Experts have said that the mere raised rate of having so many fuel tankers on the road (IE mobile bombs) negates the practicality involved. The risk would simply be too great, both politically and otherwise. That's the bottom line here: it's just so far from practical as to be absurd.

The automaker's approach is markedly different than the more familiar concept of
hydrogen-powered fuel cells, where energy is stored before it is converted into
electricity. By contrast, BMW's Hydrogen 7 is powered by pumping hydrogen into a
combustion engine and igniting it. The engine can burn both hydrogen and
gasoline, and switches between the two at the flick of a switch.

Burning hydrogen is more efficient than converting it into electricity, making it the more practical choice for hydrogen-fueled cars now, according to BMW.

One major challenge is how to keep the hydrogen cooled to minus 253 degrees Celsius (minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit) so it remains in liquid form without boiling off. Despite the double-walled, stainless-steel tank that stores the liquid in high-vacuum conditions with aluminum reflective foil, the liquid hydrogen in the 8-kilogram fuel tank begins to boil after 17 hours if the car remains parked. The tank empties completely after 10 to 12 days.

Hydrogen ain't an energy source. Sorry. You've got to get it (as in extract it) out of the atmosphere. Generally electricity is used in this process, and the amount of energy required to separate the atoms is just way to energy intensive. Guys, please stop wasting your time on hydrogen. Rather apply energies to developing a plu and play car, or better yet, resuscitate railway and streetcar networks.

Read also: The Hydrogen Hoax

The Long Emergency

The Walls Move In

Gold is at a 28 year high. Oil prices are in constant flux; nudging all time records. The JSE has blasted through the 30 000 level, food prices are on the march - some of them doubling since last year. Car sales in South Africa have shrunk year on year for the sixth consecutive month. Banks are issuing alerts. Did you ever stop to think: could something be awry*?


Remember the clamour of voices a long time ago about oil prices? Now we're seeing oil remain comfortably in the $70 range. It's a matter of time before that mad dog goes yelping beyond $100. Some of us thought it would be last year or this year. Every month this doesn't happen, means an even sharper crash. People who say this sort of thing are typically called 'doomsayers'.


Unfortunately, the message has been lost in noise and hysteria. The message (once again) is this: We are at a Peak, a global peak, the likes of which we will never see again. Never before and never again will so many people - so many individuals - enjoy so much lavish and luxurious wealth and power as they are now. This exceptional period of surplus and abundance has been unleashed courtesy of the legacy of fossil fuels. These fuels take millions of years of sunlight bathed forests to shore up. We've pissed half of it into the atmosphere in less than 100 years.


Until now, this fantastic We should say cheap and abundant, because from here on out, with the human population of this planet having absorbed all the capacity that such artificial energy abundance created - we are now moving towards scarcity.


The implications of this are scary. Try not to panic. I spoke recently to a wealthy private game farm owner, an intelligent doctor. He was saying that ecosystems that are out of balance don't correct themselves neatly and seamlessly. They do so in chronic and destabilising crashes. So if a certain species breaches capacity, it doesn't just slowly reduce itself until it fits into a newer and better and more balanced efficiency. Instead, it crashes.


Logic indicates that the same fate awaits us. By us I mean you and all the human beings around you, and every human being you have ever met. I know it sounds dramatic. In fact, it's impossible to overdrammatize. In our lifetimes we are going to see Big Shit. We'll see the human population crash from over 6 billion, and if we're lucky, we'll have 1 billion left over. The doctor I spoke to reckoned on less - a few hundred million perhaps.


I'm sorry if that sounds pessimistic. It's really just a logical and realistic assessment. Meanwhile, the newspapers are starting to notice that something - they're not sure what - is awry. Meanwhile, while the stock exchanges celebrate and crash through new records, so too does worldwide weather, reducing crops to debris and dust. The walls move in on a world that thinks it can continue moving on towards happily ever after. I wish it was a happy ending folks, but unfortunately, it isn't.


The major challenge in the future will be agriculture. Translation: the jobs of the future will be farming, as we attempt to feed ourselves. It's a grim and austere future that right now seems impossible. That is the extent of our common delusion.


Awry: Adj. 1. awry - turned or twisted toward one side; "a...youth with a gorgeous red necktie all awry"- G.K.Chesterton; "his wig was, as the British say, skew-whiff"
askew, cockeyed, skew-whiff, wonky, lopsided
crooked - having or marked by bends or angles; not straight or aligned; "crooked country roads"; "crooked teeth"
2. awry - not functioning properly; "something is amiss"; "has gone completely haywire"; "something is wrong with the engine"
amiss, haywire, wrong
malfunctioning, nonfunctional - not performing or able to perform its regular function; "a malfunctioning valve"
Adv. 1. awry - away from the correct or expected course; "something has gone awry in our plans"; "something went badly amiss in the preparations"
amiss
2. awry - turned or twisted to one side; "rugs lying askew"; "with his necktie twisted awry"
askew, skew-whiff