"Power concedes nothing without a demand"

Thus spake Frederick Douglass who, while he wrote that in 1857, lived until 1895, well into the perversely-named Gilded Age of American capitalism.

It is a little hard to miss the parallels between the period we are entering and that period of a little over a century ago.

It's not just the obscene and increasing disparities of wealth distribution that should concern us. The real problem is that wealth buys power. It buys influence in all levels of government (accelerated by the Citizens United decision), and public opinion via ownership of media and think tanks. An unequal distribution of yachts does not imperil democracy, but an unequal distribution of power most certainly does.

The conventional overview of U.S. history holds that the excesses of the Gilded Age led to financial collapse in 1993, which opened the door to the reforms of the Progressive Era, which in turn ended amid the nationalism and repression of World War I. Then another period of unrestrained capitalism leading another crash in 1929 and the reforms of the New Deal. Then another pendulum swing back to unfettered capitalism (called "neo-liberalism" internationally) starting around 1980, and accelerating the present day.

What is missing from that simplified overview is the organized Left as a historical actor.

I am not a historian, but I am aware of the struggles of organized labor in the late 19th century, and the prominence of anarchists, socialists and groups such as the IWW around the turn of that century. How significant was it that these forces were ready to take advantage of the political upheaval caused by economic downturn, and achieve reforms from the power structure, who may have viewed them as an alternative to revolution?

Similarly, in the 1930s, the Left we very active and organized, both in reformist and revolutionary sectors, with the Soviet Union as a model, for many, of a tangible alternative to capitalism.

(Indeed, one might argue that the approximately 75-year experiment in Soviet-style Communism represents a deviant tendency in the historic arc of democratic socialism, but that will be the topic of another blog post.)

What this historical overview suggests to me is that capitalism inexorably evolves toward plutocracy (and repression) until it is arrested and reformed by popular Left organization following economic downturn.

Plutocracy? Check. Repression? Check. Economic collapse? Check. Popular Left organization? [crickets]

What happens when there is no check on capitalism's sociopathic tendencies?

Would you care to answer that question for the class, Frederick?

Most distressful country

"...the biggest Irish joke of them all, which underpinned the bank guarantee in the first place: that if we wanted investors to retain confidence in the creditworthiness of the Irish State, we needed to make sure that nobody who invested in our (private sector) banks ever lost a penny?
The latter decision is the one that sank the country."

That excerpt is from an excellent article by Kevin O'Rourke at Euro Intelligence about the Irish financial disaster.

Misguided government loots the middle and working classes in an unending attempt to bail out a corrupt financial sector. It really is the U.S., and the world, financial crisis in microcosm.

Who coined the term "the Big Shitpile" for the unimaginably huge mountain of derivative debt built on a rotten foundation of bad mortgages? It might have been Atrios at Eschaton. Who gets to eat the Big Shitpile?, asks Atrios, knowing full well the answer, in the minds of our bankster overlords, is you and me. Anybody but them.

Every Irish American knows the Great Famine folk history of starved corpses with mouths stained green from eating grass. What color are their mouths now?

And where is James Connolly (pictured above) now that we so desperately need him? I know, I know, the same place as Eugene Debs -- in his pajamas, blogging anonymously.

Antidote to peak delusion

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic
growth as we have known it is over and done with.

That's the beginning of an article by Richard Heinberg introducing his upcoming book with the working title, The End of Growth. It does a nice job of summarizing the connections between fossil fuel depletion/peak energy, financial crisis, and the end of sustained economic growth -- the jumping off point for this blog.

Heinberg introduced me to the concept of peak oil, in a talk he gave at New College in Santa Rosa around 2002. It pretty much changed the way I look at everything. So, thanks, Richard -- I think!

Dept. of Horrifically Mixed Metaphors

I get the fishing thing and that metaphor's long association with Christianity. But within that fishing context, "clean 'em" can only mean ... eviscerate them. Ugh.

Governor

That's not "governor" in the usual sense for political blogs. I'm referring to one of these:

A centrifugal governor is a mechanical device that regulates speed. As the engine gains speed, the balls rise and the throttle closes, reducing the speed.

Since at least 2005, the decreasing availability of cheap oil and other energy sources have acted as a governor on worldwide economic growth.

This is not going to change, and in fact is the best scenario we can hope for in upcoming years (the worst being various degrees of decline or collapse). The phenomenon is described in this Oil Drum article by David Murphy as "peak era" economics.

Remember how the markets and the eonomy see-sawed more or less opposite of the astromical oil prices throughout 2008? And since? The image above describes the feedback loop.

I'll be exploring these topics in further posts. I envision this blog as a place to discuss, not so much whether peak energy is upon us (see TheOilDrum and EnergyBulletin.net for that), but rather, assuming it is, how are our political and social institutions reacting and adapting?

Or not.

The Great Unraveling

My old friend Mark just reminded me of an email I wrote in November of 2007:

We've just returned from our stay in Yorba Linda. As I pointed out to [my wife and daughters], take a good look at the absolute high-water mark of cheap-oil-fueled suburban sprawl and materialistic obscenity. My brother-in-law lives in a neighborhood of 3000+ sq. ft. McMansions with four (!) car garages. Sometimes even a 4-car garage is not enough -- my brother-in-law's family of three owns FIVE cars, so the largest of them, a hulking SUV, has to squat in the driveway. Paging Jim Kunstler!

Already, Orange and Riverside Counties have some of the highest levels of foreclosures and stress real estate sales in the nation. On a drive out to Chino we saw, literally, thousands of acres of former farm and dairy land recently cleared for sprawl housing. But there has been no further building activity on that land in the past few months. The big earth moving machines have been taken away. Whole tracts of houses sit half finished. The biggest building companies in the county are going under. There have been housing slowdowns before, but this feels different.

This the beginning of the great unraveling.

On Friday I hiked along a ridge in the Chino Hills. A lot of it looked like it had been bombed. Charred chaparral roots from recent fires, and hundreds of small locust trees sawed in half by the worst Santa Ana winds in decades. Almost December and not a damn green thing growing but occasional patches of Curcurbita Foetidissima, leaving bright yellow "stinking gourds" littering the ground like cluster bomblets.

Rainfall declines and gasoline prices increase inexorably. Neither trend will reverse in our lifetimes. Some say the world will end in fire (climate change), others say in ice (fossil fuel depletion). I have to say I'm rooting for ice, because if it comes hard and fast enough, it could put out the worst of the fire. That might be our only shot.

But either way, the McMansions and four car garages of Yorba Linda will soon become like the vomitoria of Pompeii, an embarrassing relic of sinful excess.

Mark felt this email was prescient, and he encouraged me to share my thoughts on such issues on a more regular basis. And so, the Shrinking Pie blog is launched. My intention is to explore the political and social ramifications of an end to global economic growth, due to a global peak in cheap energy output. I'll explore that assumption in upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, thanks, Mark, for the encouragement.