News that the Libyan rebels are now searching for former strongman Mohammar Khadaffy’s subterranean lair has prompted comparisons between his bunker and that of Saddam Hussein’s. From the looks of it, Khadaffy has better taste in hideouts.
The bunker discovered by rebels underneath Qaddafi’s villa in the mountain town of Bayda gives a clue what the tunnels in Tripoli might be like.
According to a report and photos in the Daily Mail newspaper in February, the bunker had three nine-inch-thick blast doors and led to a massage room, seven bedrooms, a kitchen, and caverns full of equipment. Passageways with power generators and an air filtration system led to an escape shaft in the countryside.
AdvertisementThat’s a lot more luxurious than the accommodation Iraq’s Hussein had to resort to. His chamber was six to eight feet deep, with only enough room for one person to lie down, an air vent and an extractor fan.
The good hideout is something a Man Who Has Everything is prone to consider. When you’ve bought that diamond encrusted watch, purchased that destroyer-sized yacht and acquired that outsized bank account the next thing you need is a quality bunker.
Just what kind of bunker a man of discriminating taste should have is the business of HardenedStructures.Com, which specializes in the planning, design and covert construction of fortified homes, underground “Genesis” shelter systems, executive underground bunkers, survival communities, 2012 Shelters, anarchy and Missile Silo Conversions. “These facilities are designed with independent sources of power and water. They can serve as a primary dwelling, vacation home, corporate retreat, long term shelter or expanded multi-function compound.”
But before anyone jumps to the conclusion that such fortresses are the preserve of right-wing paranoid fanatics, it should be noted that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established by the the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen), with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to preserve key genetic material in case of a global catastrophe. Located on the remote island of Spitsbergen, it is dug nearly 400 feet into a sandstone mountain. Time Magazine praised it as one of “ten best inventions of 2008″, which goes to show that underground fortresses are perfectly respectable liberal construction projects.
But it’s not just the Norwegians. The Finns have built Onkalo, a huge system of underground bunkers to store its nuclear waste. It is being built on a scale and reverence that would impress the Pharoahs. “Work on the concept behind the facility commenced in 1970s and the repository is expected to be backfilled and decommissioned in the 2100s. None of the 40 people working on the facility today will live to see it completed. The bunker is based around a spiraling track that will eventually be three miles long, and reach a depth of 500 meters. “We are at final disposal depth now, about 420 meters,” said a company spokesman.
That’s because every human endeavor, irrepective of politics, want to survive. Information, whether stored in human skull, contained in genomes or in electronic storage is the building-block of the modern age. While Khadaffy, or seeds or storage media exist then the phenomena they control can be regenerated. Destroy them and that which spring from them have a hard time coming back. Therefore information is protected and preserved. Even Onkalo can be so regarded. This is the destructor function of the nuclear object.
The Iron Mountain storage facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania is an underground facility that contains Bill Gates‘ Corbis photographic collection and Federal archives. But like the sarcophagi of the pharoahs, these modern tombs attract their share of grave-robbers. The problem with secret underground shelters, as Saddam found and the Duck of Death will discover, is that somebody has to know where it is to send down the supplies. The weakest link in the fortress is the man with the key.
In August 2007, the company began retrofitting its unmarked vans and trucks with a new security and alarm system using chain of custody technology to reduce the exposure of customer data to possible loss. Among other security features, the system uses radio frequency authentication and real-time tracking capabilities to help prevent “mysterious disappearances” of tapes, or their actual removal from the vehicle, during transit.
Ultimately the problem with hiding in a cave is that there are only a few ways in and an equally limited number of ways out. Using them means putting a man in the loop and men are less reliable than stone. Maybe the best place for a person to hide would be far from casual contact with human beings. The contagion of treachery usually proves fatal to the man who has everything.
Yet even if they provide not very much security everyone loves an underground fort. Their attraction is as enduring as Neverland, with its Pirate’s Cove, Skull Rock and Mermaid Lagoon. Many a child imagines them. And it is natural perhaps to think that our enemies would hide there even if such caves never actually existed.
The connection between the subterranean and our spiritual longings seems specially strong in Europe. Werner Herzog recently completed a documentary on the Chauvet caverns, where hundreds of pictures of animals were found deep beneath the earth.
It represents, as Herzog puts it in his unmistakable voice, “the beginnings of the modern human soul” and playfully remarks that the superimposed drawings of animals’ legs in different positions create the sense of movement and the cave drawings are “proto-cinema”.
Maybe to Herzog. Perhaps the cavemen thought of it as a place to ride out the winter and entertained themselves by drawing picture on the walls.
For those to whom the idea of a private underground fortress represents a childhood dream or nightmare, the Underground Fortress Company is in the business of selling Titan Missile bases and AT&T switch centers. “These underground buildings were designed and built to ensure nuclear survivability. They typically have 2 ft. thick concrete walls and ceilings covered with a minimum of 4 feet of earth. For security reasons these underground buildings were constructed at least 20 miles from major cities. Heavy blast doors also add to the security of these facilities. The buildings remain at a constant 58 degrees without any HVAC. They are self-contained with generator power, septic tanks, and deep wells.”
Never mind if you’ll never actually live there. The idea of an actual subterranean fort is just too cool for many people to resist. Finding Osama bin Laden in an ordinary house in Abbotabad was wrong on so many levels. He should have met his end instead as we hope Khadaffy will, in some fabulous fortress deep beneath the earth of a grandeur to match their evil personalities.
The Lair of the Devil
The Ninth Circle Of Hell "Treachery"
Interestingly one of the first things that the New Haven municipal officials did upon feeling the recent earthquake was to the head for the crisis bunker — the command center located in a basement. Of course, basements might not be exactly the right place to ride out a quake, though doubtless they’d be more useful in a cyclone.
Someone may undertake to discover if underground fortresses signify different idea to the different people. To those of a practical bent, the underground is simply somewhere to hide. To other mentalities the darkness beneath the earth is a place of deep religious significance and it is interesting to speculate whether some minds subconsciously sees it so: where we hide our nuclear sins, worship animals in secret or mayhap hide seed which may once again see a future day.
Who knows? One of the interesting insights of the old Testament is the idea of limit to secrecy and the ultimate sterility of the underground. The psalms imply that the impulse to hide, conceal and to store up is ultimately futile. All things come to light in the end, however deep the bunker.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
But it would still be cool to own a former Titan missile base.
“No Way In” print and Kindle edition at Amazon
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The Duck of Death built a super-bunker in a remote location of his country back in the 90′s. It was inside a mountain with a road that weaved up to it in fashion so to make slinging bombs or flying missiles down the entrance very difficult (see the film 633 Squadron for reference; the Duck almost certainly did).
Everybody was wondering what was in the place, and coincidently around that time the USAF started getting very interested in conventionally armed ICBMs. They could be launched from the Cape but not stored there due to arms control treaty requirements. We scouted around Florida looking for places at least 100 KM away to park them. I found a good storage site (a “Secret” AFB in the Middle of Nowhere), but they never proceeded with the program. Maybe we will find out what is in there now, besides the Duck’s Playboy collection.
I like the idea of those bases they supposedly have in Sweden and Switzerland where part of the runway is inside a mountain, and you go blasting down the tunnel, Battlestar Galactica style (obviously those air forces never had F-15′s, with their hard light AB, going BOOM! just before you released the brakes).
Look around the Internet and you will find a guy who has an Atlas F missile silo for sale in western Oklahoma. And at another spot in Western OK there is a high school co-located on an Atlas F site. I’ll bet taking your date down to see the missile base is a popular pastime there.
Paging Geraldo Rivera.
Or maybe Roto-Rooter.
Ducky will probably fly to Venezuela–he has already shipped a lot of gold ingots there.
He will probably fly from West Africa as there is already a buzy clandestine air traffic moving cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa and who knows what– from West Africa to Venezuela.
No doubt his sons will accompany on the flight west.
Once in Venezuela they can all “live happily ever after”.
Chavez will never extradite them.
If things get hot later then they can migrate to area bordering Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay–near to Iguassu Falls.
–that is where the really, really bad guys hide out and have done for many decades–with impunity.
Then of course there is always N Korea as a backup plan.
That’s odd; I always imagined the Duck had an underground tent.
Ducky has many 1000s of MANPAD ground to air weapons.
Where are they now? they are small, light and lethal
If they get out then commercial planes and military helicopters are in big trouble in the Levant, Africa– and potentially elsewhere.
He also has lots of mustard gas and other chemical weapons hidden–he does not have the delivery capability for these poisons–but others do.
If they get out the Levant will be like the– history of the plaque year.
I guess all the camels were bunkered out on the golf course. Oh… THAT’s why Obama plays so much golf – he’s always in a bunker – it’s for National security.
The Duck is the best Bond villan ever!
Five posts and no mention of the granddaddy of the dictatorial Man Cave, the Führerbunker?
Photo of 3-D model here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karte-fuehrerbunker.jpg
Psalm 139 is profound, and profoundly beautiful. “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea” is surely one of the most beautiful lines ever written, ever conceived.
A spiritual comfort, and a solace.
“In March 2008, China’s state-run CCTV network broke the news about a 5,000-kilometre-long network of hardened tunnels built to house the Chinese Second Artillery Corps’s increasingly modern force of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Tunneling evidently commenced in 1995. Located in, or rather under, mountainous districts of Hebei Province, in northern China, the facility is reportedly hundreds of meters deep. That makes it an exceptionally hard target against conventional or nuclear counterstrikes.China Defense Daily, a publication of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), confirmed the CCTV account in December 2009.”
http://the-diplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2011/08/20/chinas-underground-great-wall/
Bunkers are a multi-edged sword.
1. They serve well as your tomb when your whereabouts are determined.
2. Based upon my dad’s experiences in the Pacific in WW2: you will never be near your super-dooper-constructed bunker or bomb shelter when you face incoming shells or bombs. Murphy’s Law.
bast/10; here’s a Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum with a bunch of interesting links on the topic.
Then there’s the current Nyquist essay that asks some questions that sure makes ya wonder.
Sure would suk if the national security top command accidentally dropped the football in the water hazard on the 13th hole
it all comes back, to you – you are your bunker
where were you before you were born?
where will you be after you die?
is it not the same thing?
Bunkers – in any form – are an attempt to control this Infinite quandary –
it cant be done –
yet – we cannot but try
odd
Odd coincidence you should post about underground bunkers tonight. As many of you know, I’m one of those oddballs that believes in gold and silver, and in keeping a deep larder, and I’m convinced that stuff is going to go very, very wrong in my lifetime.
Tonight I got a call from my parents, who are very straight-laced Democrats. I had told them 3 years ago to please take whatever portion of their money was to be my inheritance and buy physical gold and silver with it, and hide it and let me know where it was. They laughed at me.
They were calling me to find out what is the best way to obtain physical gold and silver. There *IS* a god.
My brother-in-law–who is El Salvadoran and lived through the whole Sandanista thing and is a big gun fan and survivalist/prepper–has been telling them for years that we should set up a family compound at their house and begin stocking it. They wanted my ideas on that, too, as far as what all they would need to buy and do to provide off-grid power, septic, heat and so forth.
I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. It’s like a huge load off my shoulders. My family is FINALLY on board. We probably won’t have an underground bunker (though that could happen if we have enough time) but we’ll have a basement and stored food and fuel and weapons and all the stuff you need to ride out very hard times short of nuclear war.
I haven’t felt this good since I was a kid and didn’t know about all the bad stuff that’s out there.
There are various theories about survival in really bad times. One is the fort idea and the other the mobility asset idea. The fort idea has already been the subject of this discussion. How about mobility?
Suppose you had a half a million dollars to burn and a choice between a fort and a sailboat in a cove somewhere and another cove elsewhere in which you had a nice Ma Deuce buried for mounting on the boat? Which would you choose?
You could hole up somewhere for three weeks and fight off the zombie apocalypse or you could sail into the sunset for the same period, maybe tie up in an inlet and fish for food, making land at whiles to see if things have calmed down.
The other concept is the human network idea. In really bad times you may want to organize or hook up with a human network optimized, for dominance. So you’d have in a medical person, someone who knew weapons, another guy a jack of all tradesman, preferably with a background in engineering. Maybe three of each for redundancy, etc. In this case you wouldn’t wait out the trouble so much as either end it or gain a seat in whatever coaltions you find out there. Put enough of these networks together and it could come to something.
All these concepts occur in military history because they are account of people trying to survive in artificially hostile situations. Fortifications, mobility, stay-behind-teams, etc are will feature in narratives of groups trying to survive and dominate.
I guess which you choose depends on one further factor. Are you waiting until things settle down or do you figure on carving out a trajectory for yourself?
#12 buddy larsen
Don’t forget the ultimate hideout of the much put-upon middle-aged male person of pallor: the Archie Bunker (ducks before the pun patrol arrives):
Here’s Archie’s take on Teh Won:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtRbIz-GHo8
Wretchard – But it would still be cool to own a former Titan missile base.
In Topeka, Kansas, a developer has turned an abandoned Cold War era Atlas intercontinental missile base into upscale housing. Missile silos once alive with men and hydrogen bomb tipped missiles are now turned into comfy homes, with control rooms turned into Spiritual Rooms containing spiritual artifacts from around the globe. Word is the silo homes are selling briskly, especially to those who feel threatened by growing confrontations around the world.
I feel so safe when underground
Though it’s taken me a while-o
To get used to the lack of sound
In my new homey silo
Except at night in deepest dark
I seem to hear some ticking
And distantly a watch dog bark
And Geiger counters clicking
Along ‘bout dawn, say three or four
I sometimes hear a rumble
Like opening a far off door
And distant voices mumble
And in my dreams I see the keys
Slide firmly in position
And turn in twain with practiced ease
And then the shout, “Ignition!”
Yes there are ghosts in such a place
The ghosts of time in motion
The missile’s gleam, a shadowed face
A brew of hell’s last potion
Yet they stood guard against the glow
Of grim annihilation
And so to those brave men we owe
The thanks of this great nation
…sooo, thanks for the memory,
and strictlty entre-nous, darling how are you?
and how are all the little dreams that never did come true?
Awfully glad I met you, cheerio and toodle-oo,
and … thank you … so much.
10. bastiches;
Hiding things in tunnels won’t work. I’ve seen the modeling on what happens when a small nuke (<100Kt's) goes off on the tunnel entrance. A supersonic wall of ait at about 30,000 F goes down the tunnel. Anything in it's way gets melted, then cinderized, then pulverised. The tunnel makes the shock wave stronger. That 9" thick steel door gets vaporised.
Kinda reminds me of “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Quakydaffy clearly played way to much Dungeons and Dragons. Everyone knows who can be found at the bottom of the map to the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Give Mallowmar credit though, unlike one narcissist we can think of, when he spent billions on a shovel ready project people actually grabbed shovels.
Let us see:
1. this morning Rasmussen had Obama at minus 26% in the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll,
2. the trend lines of the Presidential Approval Index would have a Wall St Tech Analyst screaming “Sell”,
3. an earthquake struck DC this afternoon and gov’t employees took a 2 hour lunch across 1/3 of the US,
4. a hurricane is bearing down, possibly again aimed at Washington DC.
You do not have to be a religious fanatic to check if locusts or frogs are to be looked for next.
The problem with super bunkers, either personal or imperial, is that real security comes from having a community that supports you. When the troops run away you are left at best with a very fancy hole and expensive target. Franco may have proven himself smarter in this regard also. He satisfied his edifice complex and troglodyte nature with the more tourist friendly Valley of the Fallen.
pac/16, oh, jeeez –that’s an education –all those Archie lines that were so outrageous then –sound a whole lot different about now. And that original ’57 states’ line –video sez, hey, that was no mis-speak –you can see obama thinking it out –he did not know the number of states!
How the hell do we DO it? Where do we FIND these people?
****
PS, Denninger has a hurricane map (& a prayer):
Buddy, A truly frightening series of links.
Once again I’m wondering why aren’t there some Pubs in Congress screaming “bloody murder’! Particularly during Start II.
I know, I know, stupid question.
Buddy/18
Now that’s what I call REAL Bob Hope and Change.
w/24, yep, they threw away the mold, when they made old Bob!
u/23, i hear that. Sure hope the o team is locked out of the fusebox. You can bet your life tho that they came into office knowing precisely where it is. Oh, forgot, you already DID bet your life.
19. stoicheion
Hiding things in tunnels won’t work.
Sounds reasonable to me. I just hope we never have to find out.
Like many reports on China, it does have a touch of missile gap paranoia but, still, I don’t think, even at the high levels of our gov, we really know a) what their goals are, b) and what, if anything, we should do about it.
oh the sailboat, absolutely! If you’re tied to one spot your enemies can always concentrate over time and eventually overwhelm you. Haven’t you watched those zombie movies?
In all seriousness, the only way to survive a catastrophe well is to be part of a small community devoted to not just individual but collective survival. This is how human beings have *always* survived hard times through the millenia; there’s a good reason we always fall back on this model. No single man can ever watch his back 24 hours a day, or build a fortress strong enough to keep all the predators out forever. But a group, probably staying within the range of 30 – 100 individuals, can. That also has the benefit of having enough individuals that your group can support some specialists who are good at specific tasks, such as metal working or medicine.
While living in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1990′s I decided to take a Red Cross 1st Aid course. (I’d been dating a lady with a 5-year-old, and remembered how much trouble I’d caused **MY** parents…) What they had available at the time was a 12-week course in Wilderness Emergency Response, based on the idea that you might be days or even weeks away from a doctor or hospital. It was pretty darn thorough — on completion we each were certified in 8 types of CPR, rescue, patient assessment, basic life support, oxygen administration, dressing wounds, assessing a number of injuries & conditions, reducing and splinting fractures, et cetera.
Afterward, I signed up for the Community Emergency Response Team training (CERT) taught by members of the local Fire Department, another great course extending over 8 weeks.
The first meeting, the guy said “At any time, the East Bay communities in the span between San Jose and Oakland have only 200 emergency people trained to the level of paramedic on duty. That’s ALL law enforcement, fire, ambulance, and emergency room personnel, serving almost two million citizens. In the event of a Mag 7 earthquake, we expect some 20,000 serious injuries in the first 20-30 seconds, failures of bridges, overpasses, buildings including hospitals, failure of the power grid, fuel pipelines and water mains. You can expect to be without services of any kind for as long as two weeks. You MUST be able to take care of yourself and your family.”
Sobering.
He went on to say that because quakes, unlike hurricanes or major fires, occur with ZERO advance warning, you need to have emergency supplies in three locations: your home (enough for the family), your car, and your office.
I just received some activated charcoal I’d bought to use in a large-capacity water filter.
It was VERY odd to feel the building shake in the middle of classes today.
You just never know in the morning what the day will bring.
I don’t think Daffy deserves to live. Still, part of me would like to see him put that tenting chic to work. To be forever wandering the desert without a home, to hide in plain sight with a rejigged appearance, to live as much as possible the de-individuated “character” of the truly humble submitter to the singular truth of the Koran. All he needs is a family/caravan willing to go along. Survival may be possible if you are able to radically reinvent yourself. As with many things, the hardest part may be all in the mind.
Frankly I fail to see the appeal of the bunker, or the present libertarian notion of building “free” towns on oil-rig type platforms in international waters. Sure, maybe do it for a week in a pinch. But longer term, what’s the point of living if you can’t feel the sun, hear the birds, follow the curve of the land, etc. etc.
By the way I don’t think it’s silly to see cave paintings as proto-cinema. Human culture is fundamentally scenic and so many developments in cultural history are attempts to increase the freedom with which we (con)figure screens. A declarative sentence, for example (in contrast to more primitive pointing gestures), is a screen on which endless possibilities for staging what is and isn’t present can be represented.
#12 buddy larsen
Interesting articles, and both are largely true from my limited knowledge. By the way, I’ve done that missile launch drill in an Emulator [training capsule accurate enough that you cannot tell you are not in a real one]. It is … sobering. I’ve also been in on-duty control capsules.
Sure would suk if the national security top command accidentally dropped the football in the water hazard on the 13th hole
To the best of my knowledge, the football has never been misplaced. However, the president always carries a card with the codes to make the football operational when needed. One president, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, lost his card. …. twice.
Now I have absolutely no confidence in the current National Command Authority to be able to find his own fundamental orifice with both hands at high noon in the town square; with the help of a native guide and using a copy of Gray’s Anatomy as a cheat sheet. Do you really think he was listening when he got “the Briefing”? Or that he took it seriously? Or that he always knows where that card is?
#14 Agoraphobic Plumber
Congratulations, my very sensible online acquaintance. I commend the words of Wretchard at #15 and wws at #27 on the nature of the core group.
Subotai Bahadur
Afghanistan was not always a pestilent hell hole. Shortly after Alexander the Great died, his empire broke up into several large pieces. Two commonly known pieces are Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Kingdom (the Syrian Greeks of the Book of Maccabees). A less famous piece of Alexander’s Empire was the Kingdom of Bactria. Bactria was based upon Hellenistic Greek culture and in its day had significant geopolitical and economic significance. The center of ancient Bactria is modern Afghanistan. One can sense some of Bactria’s former significance by looking at their coins, refer to:
http://www.ancient.eu.com/image/258/
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xc3eTUmIwuM/TGjVttglRsI/AAAAAAAAASw/3Fwek-K3Dwc/s1600/Milinda-Coins.jpg
http://www.ancientsculpturegallery.com/bactriancoins.html
One of my hobbies is collecting ancient coins and I have one Bactrian coin in my collection that was struck under King Menander (also known by Buddhists as King Milinda).
The Earth’s climate has changed significantly since ancient times. Ancient Bactria had a much milder climate and supported extensive agriculture. As Bactria’s weather became hotter and drier, the people of Bactria created an extensive system of underground aqueducts and reservoirs. I’ve long suspected that the extensive fortifications in the Tora Bora area were actually Bactrian relics. Taliban society is retrograde and degenerate. Supposedly the Taliban went out of their way to destroy anything they found from the ancient Bactrians because it was considered “unIslamic”. The coin in my collection probably came from a museum collection that was looted by the Talban. It never made sense to me that the Taliban could produce such extensive underground fortifications as those in Tora Bora. It’s actually a bit disturbing to realize that the modern Afghans are the descendants of the formerly proud and sophisticated Bactrians.
I have to agree with Buddy.
Bill Clinton gave away the US Arms Store. 0bama gave away the US Treasury.
The odd thing is that both of them are still in DC! I would guess Bill Clinton still retains his share of influence over DC.
To the Libyan dust-up, I still maintain that British MSM has overstated the “rebel’s” position (and to Americans the 2% of world’s oil that Libya has is a side show and mostly a European economic concern). Further, it appears that there are British troops on the ground. And, I would also guess that the “Rebels” are a bussed in AstroTurf made for TV mob that is mostly political window dressing (or targets to keep the Duck’s snipers busy while SAS forces do the heavy lifting). They will need more “advisers” to win the battle.
Here’s what Debka says [take it with a grain of salt]:
“…military sources report that British, French, Jordanian and Qatari Special Operations forces Tuesday, Aug. 23, spearheaded the rebel “killer strike” …military sources report that the British deployed SAS commandos and France, 2REP (Groupe des commando parachutiste), which is similar to the US Navy DELTA unit, as well as DINOP commandos. Fighting too were Jordan’s Royal Special Forces, specialists in urban combat and capturing fortified installations like the Qaddafi compound in Tripoli, and the Qatari Special Forces, which were transferred from Benghazi where they guarded rebel Transitional National Council leaders… even after getting through into the compound, this combined force faced four obstacles to before reaching its military heart which is largely underground:
“1. [The rebel force]… is too small to carry the two tasks of breaking into the heart of the Bab al-Azaziya complex which covers some 6 square kilometers and at the same time overwhelm Qaddafi’s 12th Tank Division also underground, this force needed to be backed by larger trained contingents armed with anti-tank weapons, which would advance into the labyrinth under close air cover from assault helicopters.
“Britain and France transferred Apaches to Libya two months ago but never used them in Tripoli where they would be vulnerable to Qaddafi’s anti-air missiles.
“2. The main body of the rebels to the rear of the combined foreign force was nowhere near being a unified military force. The rebels who took part in the first major push into Tripoli Sunday, Aug. 21, turned out to be mostly Berber tribal fighters from the Nafusa Mountains in the West, divided into small groups of no more than 100, each representing a different village. They have never trained together or acquired experience… NATO imported better-trained fighters by sea from Benghazi and Misrata.
“3. The great black clouds seen over the compound and caused by NATO jet bombardments and anti-tank fire may look menacing but they are not evidence of heavy fighting in or around the compound… As the rebel forces burst in, there was no sign of Qaddafi himself or his family and commanders. They were presumed to have fled.
“4. NATO was short of specific intelligence about the military nucleus of Bab al-Aziziya. Most of its key facilities are underground and proof against bombardment.
“Western alliance warplanes pummeled the compound month after month from March 19. They flattened the surface residential buildings and command centers, but their ordnance never reached the buried facilities… sources say these chambers are interconnected by a network of corridors, some broad enough to accommodate tanks. The network branches out to the sea and locations outside Tripoli…there is quite a way to go before the war is over.”
http://www.debka.com/article/21234/
30. Subotai Bahadur
I’d sleep more soundly if he didn’t know where his card was.
I keep imagining the Secret Service and Air Force personnel around him saying, “Football? Sorry, sir, it’s in the shop for repairs.”
Roubini in Aljazeera:
Until last year, policymakers could always produce a new rabbit from their hat to reflate asset prices and trigger economic recovery. Fiscal stimulus, near-zero interest rates, two rounds of “quantitative easing”, ring-fencing of bad debt, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and liquidity provision for banks and financial institutions: officials tried them all. Now they have run out of rabbits.
Fiscal policy currently is a drag on economic growth………
Another round of bank bailouts is politically unacceptable and economically unfeasible………
Nor could monetary policy help very much…….
Currency depreciation is not a feasible option for all advanced economies………..
….
So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalisation, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labour to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labour income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.
….
To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.
The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.
ybr @ 34: Roubini sounds like gibberish to me, he doesn’t sound like he has a real theory, he’s just a gloomster, his “right balance” doesn’t even mention globalization, come on.
My question is whether there will be a Bank of America by this afternoon, rumors yesterday that Treasury was going to hand it to JPMorgan for thirty pieces of silver. At this point, if Treasury does not make some statement about supporting BofA, I think there will be an (illegal) bear raid on it, and the stock will be driven to zero same as Bear and Lehman. And then we’ll see about TBTF.
e @ 31: bactrians and later (?) persians may have been big on tunnels, but I think the basic caves of Tora Bora were natural.
Josh@35: Roubini sounds like gibberish to me
Funny response since I was thinking his writing style reminded me of the modern feminists I mentioned awhile back. (I hesitated with the “oligopolistic trusts” – I think “Money Trust” is better.)
Nevertheless. The point I’ve been trying to drive home is the need for short-term stimulus and long-term austerity (Bill Gross, el-Erian, Roubini, Bob Doll – the analysts seem to be lining up in some rare form of unison) – just the opposite of the Tea Party agenda. Technically this country can pull through, but politically I have doubts. Yes, BoA will be interesting.
(The second point, which is much longer term, is the role of central banking which will likely remain inviolate until the Revolution. The money that gets sloshed around among international banks makes the “entitlement” payments in this country look like peanuts.)
Too Big to Investigate:
This month, Schneiderman accused Bank of New York Mellon, the 11th-largest U.S. bank by assets, of “repeated fraud and illegality” when it came to its actions as a trustee for various mortgage securities, and he accused Bank of America of fabricating missing documents when foreclosing on some homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages.
……….
Schneiderman’s removal will likely make it easier for state and federal officials to reach an accord with the five banks. However, the potential amount of money they’ll be able to extract will likely decrease.
Schneiderman, armed with New York state’s Martin Act, can bring suit against alleged fraudsters without having to prove that they intended to commit fraud, a much more lenient standard than available to federal securities regulators. New York’s top legal officer is investigating whether banks followed the state’s laws when bundling mortgages into securities.
That probe could prove explosive.
“If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever,” Adam J. Levitin, a bankruptcy expert and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told a congressional panel last November. Levitin said the problem could “cloud title to nearly every property in the United States” and could lead to trillions of dollars in losses.
…………………..
MERS Legacy
Subotai@30:
My folks live in a small town of about 450 people who all not only know each other, but know when each other farts if there is a breeze and who did it. One side of the town is a lake, reducing the need for defense on that side or at least making it much easier. Outside of town is prairie on all sides, making for great visibility. The town has 3 doctors and a bunch of nurses, since they have a clinic and an old folks’ home. The town is about as far away from any interstate highways as you can get in the US anymore, so it will be away from the biggest refugee lines of drift. It’s surrounded on all sides by miles and miles of farmland and lots of skilled farmers. Everybody knows how to shoot straight and has at least one rifle in the closet.
It’s ideal. That’s why my brother-in-law and I have been hot on this idea for years. But you and the others are right…you can’t go it alone for very long. You’ve gotta have a community for mutual support and people in various specialties.
Wretchard @ 15 & WWS @ 27:
While it is probably a good idea to have stores and materials to get you through the SHTF situation short term – like 6 months or a year. The long term plan should be to build or integrate yourself into a community because that’s the only way you will probably survive long term and it is also most likely to be the most pleasant way to survive the long term.
I’m not just talking about a large commune – I’m thinking something larger in scale – along the lines of a small city or rural county. Perhaps the best way to “prep” is to become involved in your local government. The local police are not likely to just entirely dissappear when the SHTF. Sure, there would likely be upheaval, but it looks like the most likely type of collapse will be economic which could happen very quickly but would probably still allow a community to prepare. Maintaining at least local law and order is the best way to preserve a marketplace which, in turn, will be the best way to provide for the needs of the community.
YBR @ 36″ The point I’ve been trying to drive home is the need for short-term stimulus and long-term austerity
Respectfully, sir, let me advise you that your analysis is far off the mark. Economists focus on stimulating consumption, on the premise that more consumption will lead to more production (which is where economic value truly is created).
The focus on stimulating consumption may have been OK in the 1930s, when the resulting production would have been mostly local. Today, the US has been stimulating production (and value creation) in China. Hence the huge US Balance of Trade deficit — which is directly linked to high unemployment and inadequate tax revenues.
The way forward today is Regulatory Reform. Cut the cost of doing business in the US (and EUnuch land too). Roll back job-destroying regulations. Encourage business formation & expansion. To paraphrase Senator Rubio, we need more tax payers, not higher tax rates.
Unfortunately, the Tyrant Class will not roll back the Regulatory State. It is their metaphysical bunker. And they are going to have to be blasted out of it, with immense collateral damage to the civilian population.
We have a bunker here at work, to hold the server clusters. It’s massively impractical – requires heavy refrigeration, even in winter, accumulates moisture like no-one’s business, and if the air conditioning goes out, good lord.
Two years ago the air conditioners broke in the depths of winter, and the solution was to prop the door open out into the elements to use the winter cold to cool off the racks. Then they got worried about critters coming in from the nearby woods, and they put a laptop with an embedded camera on a chair pointing out the open door, and asked me to monitor the camera to make sure that racoons or passers-by weren’t breaking into our server bunker. I’ve never felt stupider than that night.
Around the edges of the topic.
As noted, it seems that tyrantocracy requires the creation of a bunker for the end game. This seems counter-intuitive to me. When the bunker is needed the excrement has already contacted the rotating blades of the ventilation system.
If I were a tyrant, my oh s**t plan, in addition to resources sequestered out-country, would be to have a plastic surgeon on stand-by and about a zillion alternate identities, well established.
On the way out the door, all persons with info of my plan would have an accident.
Just saying.
38) AP
SOunds like where my mom is from in North Dakota!
Kinu@40:
Agree with the first two paragraphs, but the Trade Deficit is a long-term structural change – one that will require vision and, a certain degree of “planning” to reverse the consumption being 50% (to 70% incl gov health care spending) of GDP trend-line.
RE:
Tax Reform
SS Reform
Health Care Reform
Regulatory Reform
All being long-term structural reforms.
Unfortunately, the Tyrant Class will not roll back the Regulatory State. It is their metaphysical bunker. And they are going to have to be blasted out of it, with immense collateral damage to the civilian population.
Well, that’s certainly one approach. I think what will happen is that Washington – and the govern ment sector in general – will be handed over to a new “generation”, not strictly in a demographic sense, but more specifically in a ideological a psychological sense. Sen. Rubio is certainly one. There are others. They will clean up. Then they will make new messes of their own.
Speaking directly to the subject of regulatory reform (aside from noting the effect of broke clients and customers on business formation, and aside from noting the financial deregulation that opened the global markets to ‘financial innovation’), what regulatory legislation is burdensome? Sarbanes-Oxley?
Debate continues over the perceived benefits and costs of SOX. Opponents of the bill claim it has reduced America’s international competitive edge against foreign financial service providers, saying SOX has introduced an overly complex regulatory environment into U.S. financial markets.[2] Proponents of the measure say that SOX has been a “godsend” for improving the confidence of fund managers and other investors with regard to the veracity of corporate financial statements.[3]
My only issue with so-called “Regulatory Reform” is the lack of specificity and the lack of short-term impact. While I see considerable consensus of opinion regarding needed long-term reforms, the short-term measures fail to rise above the black boiling cauldron of ideological dispute which presently consumes fully the vacuum of leadership in both the private and the public sector (ref the banking mess I linked above: if the investigation is sufficiently thorough, there will be no public property with legal title left in USA; if the investigation goes ‘skinny’, the banks pay less for their felony misconduct.)
YBR@44: “what regulatory legislation is burdensome?”
How about the Endangered Species Act? Good intentions, but it ends up protecting cockroaches and destroying the lumber industry. No amount of stimulus can create a job when the Tyrant Class is out in force preventing anyone from restarting a sawmill.
How about the Environmental Protection Agency? Again, good intentions — and more industries driven overseas.
How about the regulatory environment which has crippled the US nuclear power industry? Or the steel industry? Or the auto industry? Or airplane manufacturing?
Lots more burdensome regulations out there. The tidal wave of regulatory legislation since the 1970s has created an environment in which it is easier to outsource the jobs (and the wealth creation) to somewhere else. And that is the root of current high US unemployment and inadequate tax revenue.
Lots of opportunities for lawyers and government regulators though. At least until the whole show collapses. Which is round about where we are on history’s track.
Josh @ 35 said:
“Roubini sounds like gibberish to me, he doesn’t sound like he has a real theory, he’s just a gloomster, his “right balance” doesn’t even mention globalization, come on.”
Although I’m extremely bearish, I’ve become a Roubini sceptic. Roubini was saying the right stuff when the markets imploded in autumn 2008 and this brought him into immediate fame. However his being correct was sort of like a stopped clocked being exactly right twice a day, i.e. no useful information.
Josh also said:
“bactrians and later (?) persians may have been big on tunnels, but I think the basic caves of Tora Bora were natural.”
Limestone caves are very stable. It makes sense to start with limestone caves and expand them into something more comfortable. Supposedly the CIA expanded some of those caves for operations against the Soviets during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Marsh Arab @ 39 said:
“While it is probably a good idea to have stores and materials to get you through the SHTF situation short term – like 6 months or a year. The long term plan should be to build or integrate yourself into a community because that’s the only way you will probably survive long term and it is also most likely to be the most pleasant way to survive the long term.”
I strongly agree. Becoming part of an armed and organized community offers the best long term strategy for survival. I would argue that having a really huge stockpile of food and weapons without manpower to protect it is counter-survival. The big stockpile merely acts as “bait” to attract hungry and desperate people who will use violence to seize it. I believe the optimal strategy is to have sufficient food, weapons and precious metals to survive the initial shock and then act as bargaining chips to join some sort of milita/community that is prepared for long term survival. The strategy of initial encounter is I would appear at the perimeter of this milita/community holding a shotgun along with a pistol on my hip and wearing a backpack full of ammo, MREs and silver dollars. My opening pitch is I’ll share everything I have if my family is allowed to join their community. This approach would have more chance for success versus my appearing on my knees, hungry, destitute and unarmed, begging for food.
YBR @ 34 said:
“So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalisation, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labour to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labour income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.”
I believe the current economic situation is analogous to a Matryoshka doll, i.e. one set of problems based upon another set of problems that are nested within each other. The outermost Matryoshka doll is excessive indebtedness. But why is there so much indebtedness? We drop down to the next Matryoshka doll and observe socialism being paid for with fiat money and unskilled workers being paid more than their labor is worth. We ask: Why can’t everyone have access to comfortable housing, a good diet and quality health care? That drops us down to the next Matryoshka doll and we observe too many people chasing after too few natural resources. That’s the innermost doll. There are too many people on this planet. The world’s problems won’t fully correct until the planet’s population is significantly reduced. My guess is the world’s carrying capacity is less than 2 billion. The current world population is 6,775,235,700. This tells me that 4,775,235,700 people need to go “poof”. Included within that unfortunate group of people need to be the criminals, the unskilled, the socialists, the moonbats, the Islamists and all the other people who really have no reason to exist on a world with overextended limited resources.
ybr @ 36: Nevertheless. The point I’ve been trying to drive home is the need for short-term stimulus and long-term austerity (Bill Gross, el-Erian, Roubini, Bob Doll – the analysts seem to be lining up in some rare form of unison) – just the opposite of the Tea Party agenda. Technically this country can pull through, but politically I have doubts. Yes, BoA will be interesting.
(The second point, which is much longer term, is the role of central banking which will likely remain inviolate until the Revolution. The money that gets sloshed around among international banks makes the “entitlement” payments in this country look like peanuts.)
agree on the second point, with the quibble that the entitlements amounts are quite significant even so.
on the first, I’m not so sure that “stimulus” is needed, nor that it will work UNTIL 10m MFG JOBS RETURN FROM CHINA.
e @ 46: In what way do you think the world’s carrying capacity is under stress right now? Rather surprisingly (and we supposedly went over 7b just this month) we seem to be able to feed and bath everyone present, until and unless armed insurrections prevent, and it actually looks surprisingly good for another billion or three, given a few years to continue present development trends. I’m not necessarily fond of every one of those 7b, nor do I envy about 6.5b any aspect of their lives, but they are pretty much being carried as well as most of us featherless bipeds have been carried over the past thousand years or so.
And that’s without building extensive tunnels to hold another 10b people, or floating islands, or undersea habitats.
46/Eggplant:
Egg, I respectfully submit that advocating the mass death of some 5 billion people is, in a word, horrifying. I’m assuming that you don’t really want to kill of that many people–that you’re describing what you believe is a necessary measure to ensure the survival or the human race and, for that matter, the planet itself. If that’s the case, then you must resign yourself to extinction; if not, then you must necessarily be thinking about formulating a plan to murder the 5 billion who need to be eliminated. I don’t believe either course is acceptable, nor required. I don’t buy into your premise. But your post and the points you make (and have made in other threads) reflect the sort of apocalyptic thinking that has increasingly been showing up on Belmont Post threads. I find this very disturbing. There’s a certain dark romanticism to it all. All this talk about building bunkers and fortified compounds and arming and hoarding food against societal collapse is the stuff of clock-cuckoo land. It seems to be a growing strain of conservative thought and I think it has to stop, not least because it contains the seeds of great evil.
I can see it now, Plans for the Ducks bunker for sale on E-Bay by some German kid who got copies from some relative who was a planner for a construction contractor.
Even Job in the depths of his misery and degradation–at the hands of God, mind you–did not express the sort of apocalyptic thinking and the despair attendant to such thinking that one finds in so many Belmont Club posts.
God had seemingly turned against him; nevertheless Job declared: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.”
Indeed.
Forget about building bunkers and compounds. Rather, have courage. Have faith. Fight the good fight. Run the race.
Kinu@45:
Short story (with pardons for hacking the thread but there is not a person, a country, or a region about whom/which I could care less, “fat old schmucks standing in front of the ICC” indeed (ref John previous thread)) is that corporate mismanagement, failure to compete, and plain lack of vision contributed to the decline and export of much of the manufacturing base in this country, as much as regulatory burden and union demands, which were driven during the last decade by sky-rocketing health care costs. (I will not defend private sector unions other than to note that management found it cheaper to accede to their demands rather than negotiate which is a comment on both the spineless leadership and the lack of corporate vision, two failings that characterize many if not all of the capitalist business models of the last quarter century or so.)
Auto Industry: look up the history of GM’s corporate leadership (and recall the GM-spinoff Delphi Corp bankruptcy):
In 1980, J. Patrick Wright wrote a book named On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. This book, which critics acclaimed “blows the lid off the king of carmakers” was about the allegations of corruption, “mismanagement and total irresponsibility” at the top level of the company, as seen by John Z. DeLorean, the Vice-President, who, in 1973, resigned from his position in spite of a brilliant and meteoric rise. He was earning $650,000 per year and was expected to be the next President of GM.
Steel Industry: Mixed Bag of Players: The Role of Management in the Decline of the American Steel Industry:
Prior scholarship has generally placed the primary burden of blame for these outcomes on company management. Due to errors in expansion planning, neglect of technological innovation, and perhaps the arrogance of corporate power in relation to price and labor policies, critics find the industry responsible for its own problems. However, we have taken some exception to this rather narrow conventional analysis. While not denying that managerial inefficiencies did exist, we nevertheless found serious shortcomings in the foresight of labor leadership as well as in various public policies that affected steelmakers in the post-war era.
The EPA: I’m not going to defend the EPA other than to repeat what I’ve written before – they did fine until they escalated their reach from protecting land, air and water resources into the ecosystem sciences, which include climatology.
Jobs Exportation: The wage differential for labor was not driven by the regulatory burden alone – and will not be solved by regulatory reform alone. I disagree a little bit with Josh in that the jobs won’t return until corporate leadership decides to reinvest in America. Regulatory reform is part of it but not the major part.
Josh @ 47 asked:
“In what way do you think the world’s carrying capacity is under stress right now?”
I’ve banged on the Peak Oil drum enough times so I won’t repeat myself. Refer to http://www.theoildrum.com/ if you’re interested. Depletion of the world’s fish supply is probably a better indicator that the world has exceeded its carrying capacity (the Earth is an ocean planet). I surfed around the web looking for a decent reference. Lots of references out there but most of them are discredited due to socialist/left-wing agendas, e.g. Green Peace, New York Times, etc. The following link is to a credible reference:
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-overfishing/
Key quote:
“Faced with the collapse of large-fish populations, commercial fleets are going deeper in the ocean and father down the food chain for viable catches. This so-called “fishing down” is triggering a chain reaction that is upsetting the ancient and delicate balance of the sea’s biologic system. A study of catch data published in 2006 in the journal Science grimly predicted that if fishing rates continue apace, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by the year 2048.”
Roughcoat @ 48:
“I respectfully submit that advocating the mass death of some 5 billion people is, in a word, horrifying.”
I strongly agree. I’m not advocating mass death. I’m pointing out that mass death will happen because we’ve exceeded our carrying capacity.
Don’t blame the messenger.
Why do you think the Arab Spring has suddenly happened? Do you think the Arabs have all suddenly developed a yearning for democracy? The reasons are much more prosaic. The cost of food has skyrocketed. The Arabs in Eygpt, Syria, etc. are risking death, protesting against their local tyrants because they are not getting enough to eat.
I’m a parent. I am really bothered about what’s going to happen to my children. I do not want my kids to go “poof” along with the rest of the surplus population. I’m bouncing off the walls trying to figure out how to safeguard my children’s future. As of right now, today, I have no answers and it bothers me considerably.
[#3 of 4]
Egg, peak oil is nonsense. There’s loads of it if only our betters let us go get it.
http://energeopolitics.com/2011/08/23/pre-development-of-huge-utah-oil-shale-block-begins-energy/
Which is not to say we shouldn’t continually be looking for the next-big-thing energy-wise.
Now peak fish is another thing. It may well be the worst of many true ecological disasters we are facing, yet how many billions have we spent in the past decades researching fake global warming nonsense, when we might have been trying to do something that actually helped?
I agree there are too many people in the world, and at some point surely Malthus is right. I despair for the oceans, though, because the Chinese will happily catch the last pair of mating tuna on earth and serve them for dinner. And eventually they will.
Josh: on the first, I’m not so sure that “stimulus” is needed, nor that it will work UNTIL 10m MFG JOBS RETURN FROM CHINA.
The toughest and biggest part of the pickle we’re in is that everything has to happen at once – and preferably, now – by the only ones who can not only do it but make a difference, which is US.
In my view, and it’s a depressing conclusion, the all-powerful markets have to psychologically stabilized, as a first order priority – some loving intervention, if you will. The short-term measures are not the technical/structural fixes, but worse – they’re the psychological fixes that re-inspire, energize, motivate, and instill fear (the healthy kind with about 10% or so of the unhealthy kind).
Dead last on the very short list of things Washington – and business – can do to achieve the kind of confidence in the future that is giving the markets Stella-like vapors is to argue over the debt ceiling and not raising taxes. Dead sofa king last.
The Tea Party is quickly losing the kind of tough credibility and grass roots cache required to change Washington politics in any kind of meaningful and permanent fashion. Leadership is one of those rudderless words where the concept floats somewhere above the hard substrate of what is too often mean human reality. This country must rise up. I can do it as an individual, just not every day, and my stamina isn’t what it used to be. But in Washington, with all that money floating around, that challenge may be a wish too far. Right now, I give 50-50 odds: the recent rhetoric out of Washington and the Republican candidates driving the negative half; and the empirical evidence that the country still retains a critical mass of quiet competence selectively and strategically scattered in hard to locate places driving the positive half.
peterike @ 53 said:
“peak oil is nonsense. There’s loads of it if only our betters let us go get it.”
Peterike then provided a link to an article titled “Pre-development of huge Utah oil shale block begins”. Here’s my counter link about gas from shale:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-23/u-s-to-slash-marcellus-shale-gas-estimate-80-.html
What’s the truth? Here’s the historical record concerning US oil production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png
I grew up in California. I remember as a child in the 1960s driving north on Highway-99 towards Bakersfield. The place literally stank of oil. You could see oil derricks out to the horizon. It looked like a forest of oil derricks. Go there now and all you’ll see are open fields and cattle grazing. The oil derricks are gone.
[#4 of 4] I’m done for this thread.
Roughcoat@50:
Your point is a valid one. I’m actually very optimistic about the future in many ways. My daughter is 2 years old, and she’s adopted. I wouldn’t have adopted if I didn’t think her life would be a good one.
But I’m also an Eagle Scout. Be Prepared. Do everything you can to take care of yourself and your family. Rely only on yourself whenever possible. Keep your eyes and ears open and see what’s coming your way whenever possible. Don’t despair, but neither should you be a pollyanna. I’m doing my best to be realistic…and when I look at the facts and historical trends and political/economic realities and human nature…it all adds up to a Big Crash. When? Don’t know. I would have thought it would have happened already, but my crystal ball is apparently broken. I don’t think they can keep the balls in the air for another 5 or 10 years, but I’ve been wrong before too, so take that with a grain of salt.
I’d bet everything I have that within the next 20 years, though, we’re going to see very hard times. And I’d like to live as comfortably as possible while we go through them. On the other side, things will look up and my daughter’s adulthood will very likely be very fulfilling and wonderful. It’s my job to make sure that her childhood doesn’t turn into a hell.
e/52, boyoboy, well said, and let me sign on to the sentiment. PJM has up a piece by Kyle-Ann Shiver, “The Five Most Hidden Catastrophic Costs of the Obama Presidency” –to which i just added a comment repeating a few of the links above, including one that just occured, re the new ambassador –heck, i’ll copy it:
***
The catastrophic costs? Well, look at this recent news, then relate it to such as this (on the part of he who opened the way for Obama, and whose blushing bride continues the work as secretary of state).
…and then, moving along, note this.
…and then wrap it up by noting that the commerce secretary to whom Obama had two years ago transferred the ‘dual use technology’ (AKA thermonuclear ballistic technology that USA paid Lord Knows to produce, not counting the existential nature of it) that Clinton sold and gave away so much of (search Win Ho Lee, Riady), has just become … your new ambassador … to China.
That ain’t catastrophic enough to make the list?
***
Anyhoo, lighter note, got a laugh out of (#31) the legend on one of those Bactrian coins:
BAΣIΛEYONTOΣ ΔIKAIOY AΓAΘOKΛEOYΣ (=”Agathocles ruling in a rightfull way”)
…reminded me of the motto painted on this middle-ages shield:
“Though I am hated by all birds, I nevertheless rather enjoy that.”
RE: Peak Oil and the scattershot estimates
Bakken Oil Shale Generation Estimates:
1974: 10 BBbls
1982: 92
1983: 132
1999: 413 (USGS)
2000: 32
2006: 300 (NDGS)
technically recoverable oil:
1% to 50%
3.7 BBbls (USGS, 2008)
2.1 BBbls (ND State, 2008)
technically recoverable oil using fracking:
24 BBbls (Continental Resources, Inc, 2011, unpublished)
Jim Cramer is doing a special show tonight from North Dakota. I have been told that the drillers are building housing for the laborers who (I think) get medical as well as wages. But no booze and no women.
56. Agoraphobic Plumber:
Thanks for your note. I too believe in being prepared; but within reason. Nor am I a Pollyanna. But neither am I a pessimist. I am not apocalyptic-minded. To talk in terms of a coming apocalypse is to speak the language of fear, and nihilism. At the least, it is not constructive. It certainly isn’t edifying. And it is by no means predictive. It is a choice. There are no crystal balls. We have no sure knowledge of what good things and bad things are headed our way.
“You can’t know what’s coming. That’s vanity.” — Cormac McCarthy
4/4 and out
50. Roughcoat
I’m not headed for the bunker either. I have figured out how I would try to cope in the short term without electricity, grocery stores, gasoline, oil, liquorice and ice cream, but I can’t shake the feeling that I live on planet plenty, not planet doom. Besides, people adapt to circumstances. Heck, if humans shrunk so we were only 30 inches tall, then we could keep the same human biomass and double the population size. It worked for hobbits – they ate 6 meals per day. Some countries may well starve because of wonky governments/economies/religions and eventually the global human population size will self regulate. But in North America – not yet.
I can’t help thinking that talk of huddling in bunkers directly contradicts “live free or die.”
Roughcoat @ 50
Amen. Apocalyptic thinking is the weakness of the Judeo-Christian tradition which is more fundamentally about forever deferring the final battle that is forever anticipated. Kafka: The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day.
I’m curious why people think that the likely collapse at some point of the financial/fiscal system is sure to engender anarchy and, in much of America, Libya-style road warriors. Why doubt the capacity for people to pick up the pieces and start bartering and new currencies and contracts. Yes, it would be for some time a tough and poor world. But would it be the “frontier” world many seem to want to imagine? you can’t get to a world of small survivalist communities without first a whole lot of horrific warfare reducing the population and the presently available – to those with political will – industrial infrastructure; and why would that be more likely than the leadership to develop a new system of finance for basic industries?
it’s definitely a conundrum –to take counsel of one’s fears is wrong, but history includes story after story of people who didn’t falling to people who did. Paradox is in tomorrow –in today it’s better to enjoy life and let chips fall where they may. But tomorrow comes, and when it does, it will be good if we have been not overly averse to a certain amount of controlled panic –not to be demonstrated in front of the young or helpless, o course. For example, these 1941 Muscovites are definitely preparing, and they did save their city and win the war. But clearly –by the time you’re digging ditches around your town, the ‘best outcome’ of the politics is gone bye-bye. What if years earlier they had been able to steer the whole problem offstage? There’d be no pictures. No heroic story. But but but…
***
truepeers, your question –look into 30 year’s war aftermath. And the mongol invasions –arguably, the front line of europe is STILL showing the effects –
“Will the living envy the dead?”
Herman Kahn, “On Thermonuclear War.”
Most people will not give up the spirit and will struggle to the bitter end to keep themselves and their families alive for a better time. “Tomorrow is another day” – Margaret Mitchell.
I’m with Roughcoat, don’t run and hide when the battle starts. Hang in there, behave responsibly and with good sense, fight chaos while those about you losing their heads.
Sure, bunkers are cool in theory but the best defense is a good offense.
“aftermath” –LOL –what a perfect word!
Roughcoat,
And I will respectfully submit that denying the inevitablility of economic and social collapse is the cloud-cuckoo-land thinking. Believing it will all work out without significant disruption isn’t faith — it’s whistling past the graveyard.
The people with courage and faith are the ones building the bunkers and compounds: they are preparing themselves to run the race.
All that said, I agree with you that Eggplant is way off WRT the Earth’s carrying capacity. It’s not that there is too much population, it’s that too much of the population consists of communists, socialists and other authoritarians concentrated in large cities.
truepeers,
Because too little of our population has the kind of moral and ethical foundation necessary for the path you describe.
I’m curious about why believing that economic and social collapse is coming is “apocalyptic thinking” and why taking potshots at Christians is appropriate? I don’t believe the world is ending or that Jesus Christ’s return is imminent, I just believe North America will see economic collapse, followed shortly by social collapse, probably within the next two years.
Mariner,
To be clear, my potshot targets some Jews and many other non-Christians, especially followers of leftist political religions, nor does it target all Christians.
“I’m curious about why believing that economic and social collapse is coming is “apocalyptic thinking””
-that’s a good question, since I too believe in some coming financial collapse. Apocalypse means unveiling or revelation, usually implying a final truth to which humanity has come. I don’t believe we are about to discover some end-game truth about the final meaning of human history, but then I acknowledge few others here do either. Still, I think there is something relatively more apocalyptic in thinking the present system is going to collapse totally, revealing its total failure, than thinking the crisis will lead not to a return of old ways but to a quick evolution of new rule sets we can’t yet quite imagine.
“Because too little of our population has the kind of moral and ethical foundation necessary for the path you describe.”
-Like I said, I think a collapse of the present system is pretty likely. But for all the lack of moral and ethical foundations I agree are out there, that lack I think would apply to any possible next system, including any (in my view not very) possible return to some agrarian or tribal order. Even tribalism requires a powerful religious/ritual cultural enforcement that would be almost wholly foreign to most Americans today. Some will die, some will be led without knowing much of the reasons why, and some will have to discover piecmeal that the path of survival is most likely to start learning how to reproduce an industrial and market society. The food-producing capabilities of the US and Canada are presently so great; the energy is here for some time yet if we access it and use it intelligently (which might mean a big decline in many people’s consumption); it seems to me there would be sufficient political will in a crisis to develop the necessary coercion and protection and incentives for those who can to do what they can, even if most of the population is not readily able to adapt to new barter or financial realities and has to be commandeered into make-work projects. People today riot and loot when the stores are full and the cops and property owners don’t kill; i imagine rather few of the “chavs” of the Western world would be capable of organizing themselves in viable gangs that had to face a world without easy pickings. Could the Hells Angels or Hispanic gangs even hold together in a world where easy drug money was absent and they had to develop serious martial and organizational discipline tied to hard work? I think most of our thuggish culture would soon wimp out and bow down to those who still know how to get things done.
Truepeers & Mariner:
I think the “coming collapse” if there should be one, will manifest itself very differently depending upon your community. I believe this to be true because I have seen it.
In 2005, two very major and significant hurricanes struck Louisiana. Katrina hit near New Orleans and, within a matter of hours, much of the police force deserted their jobs and large portions of the population engaged in all sorts of looting, stealing, murder, rape, and other criminal activity – you guys know the story all too well.
The story that you are probably less familiar with is Hurricane Rita, which struck Southwest Louisiana about 30 days after Hurricane Katrina. The major population center impacted by the storm was Lake Charles, Louisiana. The city was devestated and despite being without power and utilities for more than a week, the society functioned. Looting was virtually non-existent and neighbors helped neighbors without waiting around for government assistance and hand-outs. While there were major disruptions in the supplies of power, food, and water, the people didn’t turn into marauding bands of criminals.
This happened because the culture and people of Southwest Louisiana are vastly different from those of inner-city New Orleans. This was reflected in how the local government was able to continue to operate and the response of the people to the disruption of normal life.
This is why I suggest that your best option for surviving in the SHTF situation is to be integrated into an existing, functioning community. While much of our Federal Government may cease to function, principles of subsidiary and redundancy suggest that our local, and perhaps State, governments in certain places should be able to maintain control.
In effect, we may, by circumstance and necessity, see a return of Federalism.
61. buddy larsen
Those famous trenches scarcely slowed the panzers down. Even as steep as they were, the Mark III went right down — then up and over!
The real purpose of the digging was to focus the civilian population on the illusion of assisting in the defense of the city.
That way they’d come to believe that STAVKA actually knew what it was doing.
( That Stalin did all in his power to vector Guderian’s Panzer Group south towards Kiev — to save Moscow — was not something that he could announce.)
“( That Stalin did all in his power to vector Guderian’s Panzer Group south towards Kiev — to save Moscow — was not something that he could announce.)” I don’t know if this was true, Hitler wanted Ukraine for wheat and winter quarters and perhaps, a more compliant slave labor population, though the deeper the Germans got into Russia proper the more vulnerable their supply situation became. The partisans didn’t have to be terribly effective to make the German supply of rolling stock and almost as importantly conductors willing to risk death from partisan attacks decline while Soviet rolling stock increased thanks to Lend-Lease locomotives. It was understated factor in the Soviet success at Kursk that once the Germans took their big losses at Prokhorovka they had no more reserves to throw in the breach and started losing ground fast in autumn 1943 (all the way up to Kiev, basically) as more trucks became available to the Red Army.
I’ll take Marsh Arab’s post @67 over Malthusian doom anyday. It only takes a remnant of competent people banding together for the incompetents to follow and the pieces could be picked up back together again starting with water, food, natural gas/electricity and basic law and order with a lot of ‘neighborhood watches’. Which would suggest Appalachia, the Rockies and most of the Pacific Northwest could do more or less ok in a U.S.A. collapse scenario.
YBR, The idea that stimulus will stimulate the economy back to normal does not recognize that there are structural problems causing the current depression.
The typical post war recession was usually caused by the Fed ‘taking away the punchbowl”, that is tightening credit and raising interest rates when the economy began to overheat and cause inflation. It was remedied by dropping interest rates and loosening credit, once inflation fears had cleared, particularly mortgage rates, which stimulated Housing construction, which led to jobs that bought us out of recession.
This depression is a credit bust like the Great Depression. The ability of much of the private sector to take on more credit is not there because too many households and businesses are over leveraged. Our debt ratios, both private and public are too high. Two of the main culprits causing this situation were:
• Financial chicanery by Wall Street that heaped on huge amounts of credit to the credit unworthy, in addition to outright fraud and thievery to the tune of trillions.
• A destruction of our manufacturing base due to a granting of overly favorable, one sided trading terms to countries like China, combined with an onslaught of regulations that are nearly impossible to comply with.
Now many, even those conservatives like you, dismiss the idea that regulations are too tough. I can tell you since I permit buildings, manufacturing plants and housing, that much that was permissible as late as the late ’80′s, is no longer possible in places like California where I live. Permitting times have gone from days or weeks to years and that assumes that you will get a permit in the end. Most don’t. Most of my projects over the last fifteen years have died in regulatory hell for no good reason.
To get out of the this depression, we must do several things:
• We must drastically cut regulations or our manufacturing base simply cannot come back. It is not possible.
•We also must clean up the financial institutions of Wall Street because our current banking houses have cutting credit lines to existing businesses and are our very reluctant
Mr. X
Stalin sent bombers onto Ploesti knowing full well that Hitler would have fits.
Hitler had already sent a security force to protect the fields. ( The 1SS — as a brigade — it was still building )
Stalin also used every imaginable gambit to leak that further strikes would follow.
STAVKA intensely debated whether it was better to fight in the South or the Center. His marshals finally persuaded Stalin that it was MUCH wiser to fight in the factory-free zone of Ukraine. ( Stalin never permitted any industrial concentrations there — dams, yes, factories, no.)
Hitler made a strategic error that cost him any chance at staying alive. He went for the wheat and oil instead of the steel and coal. BTW, if Germany had driven a wedge through Tula to the Volga Russian steel production would’ve collapsed. It’s impossible to build a major steel works overnight.
–
57. YBR
The government stats are of little use. It is entirely against one’s economic interest to publish/ expose drilling success.
Which means that normally YEARS go by before the public has accurate information.
Just think upon gold mining: what prospector is ever going to tell the truth?
The fact is that whipstocking and fracking have entirely changed the value of old reservoirs, too.
This effect is profound. It’s entirely destroying the Peak Oil argument.
Time was that only a trivial amount of the oil in the ground could be tapped.
With time ever more oil can be had from the same deposits. Whipstocking coupled to fracking entirely changes the economics — probably for a generation, maybe two.
#60 truepeers
If I may, I would like to come in, in support of #65 mariner above.
1.) Economic disaster is not only of a high order of probability to occur, given the multiple threat axis’ to the world economy, it is approaching an ontological certainty. There is a minuscule chance, truly minuscule, that something will come out of any putative free and fair 2012 elections that might enable us to hold back the Long Night a little while. And in that little while, if we work very hard, and are very lucky, we may be able to hold it back a little longer while we try to fix things so that the Night will fall less heavily on us than elsewhere. [As far as I am concerned, THIS is my country, and my countrymen, and my children's future at stake. That has priority over the fate of the rest of the world, including by the way specifically my ancestral homeland.] While working for that minuscule chance, it would be illogical and counterproductive to assume 100% that the chance will in fact come to pass, and rely on success.
2.) There is a distinct division in the population in this country. I refer to the other side as TWANLOC, which has been explained elsewhere. They refer to us in terms you will find at Democratic Underground and DailyKos. While it is not an absolute, the division is largely urban-suburban/suburban-rural. Most “Blue States” are in reality Leftist urban areas surrounded by more conservative areas.
3.) The most complex, interdependent machine created by man is the human city. The larger the city, the more complex and vulnerable it is. We have the largest urban fraction of our population in human history.
4.) Cities produce many things, but they are totally dependent on complex, vulnerable systems for delivery of the basic necessities of life: water, power, heat, removal of waste [solid and sewage], and food. The average city has a 3 day supply of food in stores and warehouses, depending on constant replenishment. Water supply depends on pumping stations, as does frequently sewage removal. Fuel supplies depend on electric pumps and a constant supply of fuel deliveries from outside. Electricity depends on continuous deliveries of coal or natural gas; unless the supply is hydroelectric or nuclear. In which latter case the reactor depends on off-site electricity to run the cooling pumps to prevent a meltdown, or on an outside supply of diesel fuel for generators on-site.
5.) An economic collapse means that things will not get paid for. Either inflation will make it impossible to afford to pay for goods, or the banks will be shut down for a period of time. It will cascade. Food, fuel, etc. will not be delivered, which means cities will turn into deathtraps; with people starving, dying of thirst, and wallowing in their old effluvia. This does not account for extremes of heat or cold depending on the season.
6.) Leftists, and their dependent class allies like to think of themselves as Stakhanovite brothers in arms, marching cooperatively in Socialist solidarity. In reality, there is a large, feral population in TWANLOC, at all levels. The random mob violence [flash or otherwise] that is a new hallmark of urban life is not going to suddenly disappear. Facing real want, and with no effective means of stopping it; it is going to make all the riots of the 1960′s look like a debutante cotillion. The infrastructure of the city, including the utility systems, cannot be guaranteed to come through unscathed. If the wrong high tension lines or transformers are damaged, there will be NO power, water, etc. There will be waves of refugees, mixed in with waves of looters, pouring out of the cities. Armed locusts.
7.) When TWANLOC encounter those whose situation is not as dire, they are not going to ask politely. They are going to take, and kill to do it. They may have the support of the government in that process. Even if there were not the chasm in world views between TWANLOC and Conservatives; those outside the cities are going to have to defend themselves to survive. I suspect that the rational eventual aim will be to bottle up the urban dwellers into the cities to lessen the threat that they pose to those outside the cities.
8.) Looking at the odds, preparations for both a long hungry time, and forming local bonds with neighbors is not apocalyptic. It is prudence.
Oh, for the record, I am not of the Judeo-Christian faith community; and their Apocalypse is not my inspiration.
Subotai Bahadur
A desperate America is a VERY dangerous entity.
No man, no nation could be safe from it.
Economics, as much as folly, sent France, Japan and Germany upon epic war campaigns.
Should America ever get hyper-nationalistic — the fear would be global.
America as an absolutist aggressor power would make all prior campaigns look trite.
Our civil liberties would be forfeit — and 1984 would be here again.
blert@71: Which means that normally YEARS go by before the public has accurate [oil] information.
I didn’t write as much, but that was the implied query – a lot of dueling numbers out there, especially surrounding what I call the second generation of oil extraction. I’m willing to take your word for it since you actually read the journals. What I thought was interesting about the Bakken numbers was the recent CRI estimate of 24 BBbls for extractable product, which is roughly 6% to 8% of the recent reservoir estimates of 300 to 413 BBbls. (The 32 BBbls estimate from 2000 was based on “unsophisticated models” so possibly it can be excluded from the list, which means that the estimates gradually increased over time, presumably as the models improved. Warning: Models Ahead.)
At any rate, USA consumption is 20 million barrels/day so the Bakken field would satisfy domestic oil consumption for 3 years. Another way of looking at it, USA imports 10 million barrels per day so the Bakken field could replace that for six years (with some multiplier to reflect stimulation of local economy – quite possibly a non-trivial effect relative to oil production.) Net-net, I think it’s a “good thing.”
Unsk@70: YBR, The idea that stimulus will stimulate the economy back to normal does not recognize that there are structural problems causing the current depression.
No, Unsk. That is *not* what I am arguing. I believe you are reading too quickly. This country will *never* ‘get back to normal’ without the structural reforms – tax code, regulations, health care, SS, tort law. But they take time – as well as leadership, vision and statesmanship, all of which are lacking in Washington at present.
A destruction of our manufacturing base due to a granting of overly favorable, one sided trading terms to countries like China, combined with an onslaught of regulations that are nearly impossible to comply with.
Understood, but the “manufacturing base,” as it relates to auto and steel, experienced decades of corporate mismanagement that made the industry sectors vulnerable to exportation under globalized markets.
Most of my projects over the last fifteen years have died in regulatory hell for no good reason.
You need to make that case – with specificity – to your Congressional people and the news media. My problem with the regulatory argument is that I can’t see *specifically* where the problems reside. Are we talking EPA? SOX? OSHA? Financial? Legal? What exactly?
On the subject of the death of manufacturing in the US, some may find this article relevant:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/
72 Subotai,
What you are describing is not merely a financial collapse but a collapse of governing authority, at all levels. I would not say the latter is impossible, but it just strikes me as much less likely than a financial collapse. But I would like to hear others’ scenariors of how a complete political collapse might happen – walk me through an imagined event. In a financial collapse, there will be a period of crisis people will have to survive – how many days I have no idea. I agree there would be hysteria if the stores went empty for even a few days; still i think most homes have enough food in them to keep most people going for a while. In time, new currencies and emergency laws will be issued and those who don’t accept the new terms and supply the cities with fuel etc., will find their businesses taken from them. There will always be some kind of money available where there is a recognized political authority. It would suck if all our present dollars became worthless but would that stop many from trading in the new dollars? A long-term slow erosion of living standards would seem to be a more likely kind of social failure than a sudden and permanent collapse. But really, how can anyone know? I don’t really know how fragile our cities are. We have seen “modern” cities survive, to some extent, warfare from above and in the streets. The capacity of people to carry on should not be taken too lightly. It is actually easier in some respects to just find a way to carry on than it is to quit and sit on your hands. That’s not to say that carrying on won’t have its difficulties, cholera deaths, etc. etc.
Truepeers, I’ve known a lot of young professionals (age mid-20s to early 50s) who don’t keep much food in their homes choosing instead to eat at restaurants most of their meals. Weird, huh?
As to the wisdom in Subotai’s post72, consider the behavior of urban populations, especially in the NYC and LAarea in any of several power outages (or following the verdict in the first trial of police accused of beating Rodney King in L.A.) in the last three decades. ON several occasions, looting started almost immediately, spread through vast areas, and required strenuous efforts by law enforcement to restore order. Many months to repair damages. Business ruined, homes destroyed, etc. And that’s just from casual rioting by idle people of low ambition and no discipline. An actual crisis, such as empty shelves in the stores they would normally be looting, will result in a vast spill-over.
Unsk, about your #70 — some years ago, maybe here in Belmont, I read that someone had done a years-long study of third-world government policies on land use. The conclusion was that the reason wealth tended to remain concentrated in a tiny fraction of the society was mostly a result of enormous hurdles and delays placed in the way of common citizens’ permit requests. It seemed that the simplest request for permission to build a workshop, store, warehouse, or office building faced a process with scores of steps, with officials looking for bribes and payoffs along the way just to process the things, much less give approval.
The overall effect of the burdensome, arbitrary and capricious permitting process was to very effectively discourage enterprise by any but those already at the top of the economic pyramid.
It appears that this is another way that the USA is being transformed to an impotent third world culture.
De-regulate.
ybr/76,
http://www.bing.com/search?q=small+business+and+the+burden+of+regulations&go=&qs=n&sk=&form=QBRE
24,000,000 hits but the first half dozen will probably do.
***
mf/79, that ‘s one of the technical diffs ‘tween communism & fascism –fascists let you keep your property but you got to use it the way the govt tells you to to. Obama’s regime is emulating the national socialist model of 1930s Germany. You keep your property –they ‘let’ you keep it –but you follow orders. Smart, because as we learn from the housing crisis, maintenance of non-privately-owned property is a huge expense for a state or a bank. I suppose that under fascism –as we are finding out day-by-day, one will maintain his stuff even if regs won’t let you do anything with it –because, maybe, tomorrow will be a better day.
Two links of interest:
This is up on instapundit and it’s a bombshell:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/
***
This is the new Governor of Puerto Rico –embarked on a reform program to deal with an economy utterly wrecked by regulations:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=governor+of+puerto+rico+luis+fortuno&qs=AS&sk=AS2&pq=governor+of+puerto+rico&sp=3&sc=8-23&form=QBRE
(note –this guy –Luis Fortuno –is the model of what we want –in fact he reminds of Marco Rubio. His reforms have made a large fraction of the population hate him –really hate him –and his answer is “Fine, if I lose the next election, I’ll just go back to work at my old job. Meanwhile, I’m going to cut the deficit spending and try to save the economy.” He looks to be about 35 or so. The cohort that will save the west if anybody does)
mf/79, re ‘third world govt policies on land use’ –the go-to book is “The Mystery of Capital” –which you can bet the obama czars have dog-eared, so that they can run it in reverse.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=property+reform+hernando+de+soto&go=&qs=n&sk=&form=QBRE
77. truepeers
I have generally the same opinion as you about the improbability of a collapse of governing authority. I think a financial collapse would result in another Great Depression – very bad but not a Mad Max movie. Even if it turned out to be worse than the Depression and the currency became useless, well just look at the example in our Province of Port Essington at the mouth of the Skeena River in the early 1860′s. There were no banks so Robert Cunningham the founder, made his own trading currency from brass. Because the Indians trusted him, this currency was used all along the Skeena River for years. When the Dominion Government appeared some years later from the East to build a telegraph line they tried to pay wages in paper Canadian dollars. No Indian would accept their currency because they trusted Cunningham’s brass currency, had never seen paper money and had not really heard of Canada. I understand that in England, before King Charles I, private mints and even private individuals issued their own silver and gold money. I think that King Charles only created the Royal Mint because he wanted to devalue the coinage by clipping it and used the clippings for his own use. He couldn’t do that with the private companies money so he had to get rid of them. The Bernanke probably couldn’t print money today if the U.S. currency was produced by two or more private companies instead of the U.S. Government.
I think it’s only in Hollywood movies or in the fond dreams of bureaucrats that people can’t keep going in a disaster without help from some government functionary. In the unlikely event of governing authority collapsing, people would build new ones that didn’t have all those pettifogging regulations we are cursed with today.
As far as short term coping beyond food and other supplies in the house goes – I live in a city and there is fuel on the beach and in the standing trees, fish in the ocean and lakes, water in the creeks, deer in the backyards, rabbits to snare on the golf course and birds to net. Pure water could even be distilled from sea water if you wanted to get fancy. Balsam fir, pine and spruce needles apparently have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But I don’t think it would get bad enough to need all those old timer efforts.
I was recently reading a local county history that recounted the depredations of Ferguson and Cornwallis in the Carolinas. Though the British regulars and the Tory militia were not present in the county except on the briefest of occasions, there was a lot of bushwhacking, robbing, and even a outright battle between local Whigs and Tories.
What seemed to be consistent as far as loyalties went was that individuals and their families tended to side with whichever power seemed to guarantee their continued existence (i.e. perpetuation of land titles, family structure, etc). This was at a time when even state government power was weak to non-existent and people were more self-sufficient, not dependent on regular government intervention in their lives. But, in spite of that, they still looked for order in the chaos. During the Revolution, this took the form of mutual support and, in the aftermath, reconciliation between the sides.
I think this is worth remembering in whatever approach we as individuals take towards coming hardship. Because as tempting as it is to throw in the towel and say, “Well, it’s all beyond fixing anyhow, so I guess it’s time for me to check out,” that abrogation of responsibility is what has corroded a lot of the civic capital of the West and is what I think many of us would roundly condemn. Preparedness is good, but, taken to its ultimate end, it can morph into a lifestyle, a way to assert social or moral superiority because of our choices – “At least I’m not one of the Golden Horde.” That’s not really in keeping with the best traditions of our common civic order, which is egalitarian in spirit, if hierarchical in reality. If we value what we say we do, then let’s not lose sight of our obligations to others because too many Black Rifles and gas masks hanging from the walls have obscured the view.
(Though “too many” Black Rifles would probably have to be a lot in my book)
RE: regulatory burden on small business
From 1995 study:
Yes, there is inequity:
…the answer to the first question, whether the regulatory burden falls more heavily on small firms, is yes: the regulatory cost per employee to small firms is approximately 50 percent more than the cost to large firms. Small businesses employ 53 percent of the work force, but shoulder 63 percent of the total business regulatory costs.
But most of it is in the tax code, which I agree is a needed long term structural reform:
The paperwork burden of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the primary concern because preparing a regular payroll is a constant reminder of the numerous rules and regulations dealing with tax withholding and reporting.
And regulations tend to expand in tandem with the economy:
…the aggregate regulatory burden is still increasing. However, the relative burden, compared with the size of the economy, has been reasonably constant in recent years. In other words, the amount of regulation is growing at the same rate as the overall economy. The significant issue is how these costs are divided among firms of different sizes that compete with one another.
The effectiveness of Clinton’s efforts:
The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) require agencies to review the impact of their regulations on small businesses and consider less costly alternatives for accomplishing public policy objectives.
The report does not, however, factor in the cost savings generated by these initiatives, largely because the data are not available and because the savings are diffused throughout the economy. Also, some of the initiatives are too new to have had any concrete impact on small businesses.
Last, a word on the benefits of regulation:
…it is important to note that this report does not attempt to measure the benefits of regulation, nor to allocate the benefits by firm size. First and foremost, comprehensive research estimating benefits is not available. Second, it is nearly impossible to allocate benefits among the affected persons and businesses.
Benefits are distributed throughout society as a whole. Clean water, for example, benefits the food processing, dairy, and outdoor recreation industries, among others. But the costs are concentrated on those being regulated–in this example, on the firms that must find alternatives to discharging pollutants into the waterways. Such firms may or may not derive direct benefits from clean water regulations to offset their compliance costs. Thus, it is extremely difficult either to estimate total benefits or to allocate those benefits among the affected sectors of society.
RE: land development permitting
As a final definitional comment, land development permitting is a whole different ballgame – crooked as a dog’s hind leg in many/most urban (and possibly more than a few rural) environments. Zoning is where it all happens. And that’s local/state, not federal.
Hidden behind the zoning is insurance, the cost of which is prohibitive for specific enterprises, e.g., day-care for the handicapped. Insurance is a legal issue.
RE: business competition vs size
I expect there’s a study by someone somewhere, which I don’t have, but my experience and my gut tell me that there is an optimum size for any given business enterprise. The world at large is receiving a crash course in the perils of TBTF, but issues attend as well to very small enterprises through the usual route of unchecked avarice, irresponsibility, lack of accountability, failure to service the client base, and overt fraud. Small should not be equated with pristine. Some specific percentage of the current regulatory code derives directly from the public demand that “there ought to be a law” and so there is, because fraud or incompetence left damage in its path.
a/84, sobering reminder, well-taken one hopes. Don’t know how many, but shiploads of Tories took leave for England after the Cornwallis surrender. I’d imagine these were mainly townsmen with liquidity, rather than planters without.
ybr, thanks for the info –but i have to say, fifteen years holding a food manufacturer’s license from FDA and Texas Dept of Health left me a walking keloid on the topic. And no, the experience had not a whit, not one smidgen of effect on the quality or hygiene of the product. The effort was all about the effort, like an engine that needs all its HP just to burn the fuel.
They were of course trying to burn their time. I of course was trying to conserve mine, as it was a principle factor of cash flow. Of course, the time they were able to burn off vamping on me, was time i was forced to donate to their various internal validation and budget fictionalizing schemes –many if not ALL of which actually interfered with the basic mission of the regulatory authority, that is, the protection of the public health. MY ‘public’ was very well protected indeed by my desire to stay in business via customers buying my product.
Long/short, out here in this rural county, classified as ‘poor’ due to lack of jobs, I would’ve grown amd employed more folks every year, except the state wanted me to fail –so i closed down as soon as i had the last kid’s college covered.
PS, my ex employees last i checked were all mainly back to unemployed, which would have been justified if ever my company had begun failing the monthly and spot product safety tests. but we never did, we never failed a single product safety test –the administration and supervision of which was, remember, the entire reason for the existence of that huge downtown FDA/TDH office building packed full of govt employees with nowhere near enough to do to occupy their time.
And me, well, tho the biz put the kids thru college and made me a few bucks –a very few bucks –i certainly did not intend, when i began the venture, to burn off the center years of my working career on an enterprise more or less doomed or not doomed from the get-go by sloppy, redundant, contradictory regulations that in their sheer volume and turgidity guaranteed that a regulator could either thumbs-up or thumbs-down the business viability –based on whether or not the regulators liked you or not.
Meaning, they were in essence ‘king’s men’ –and had to be shown as much deference and fealty as they might want. Or else.
Or else, something will pop up in that 500 page single-spaced book of regulations, and you’re off again devoting great gouts of unaffordable time and money –and ENERGY –chasing down some preposterous chimera.
Does *wonders* for your frame of mind, and sunny disposition.
And this is Texas !
bl: fifteen years holding a food manufacturer’s license from FDA and Texas Dept of Health
What I’m hearing from your story is health/sanitation code – state and federal – as the culprit.
Then of course is the remarkable story of Steve Jobs, and what I consider the equally remarkable stories of any number of mid-sized technical firms started in the 60′s and 70′s and still going strong.
I too have a story, the general outlines of which I’ve shared before, about the auction block mentality perpetrated by Goldman Sachs on many a rural utility industry – probably little more than popcorn revenue to them, but a living to the employees cut loose or deprived of their soon to be bankrupted pension plans. The ‘king’s men’ pollute the private sector as well.
I spent a few years of my career working for public agencies at the state and regional level. I guess I was lucky because my experience was reasonably positive vis a vis professionalism, responsibility and competence.
To return to my original point, it looks like specific business and industry sectors are more susceptible to the problem of regulatory burden. It also appears that the Clinton initiatives are still working their way through the system to the extent that the situation *may* be improving – at the federal level. California is its own deal.
Sorry y’all for the incomplete post @ 70. My wife was rushing me off our computer , so my fat fingers hit the wrong key and before you know it, I thought my post was gone to the ether nether world. But lo and behold I find the dang thing here incomplete this morning.
ybr, granted many survive the regulators. You’ll admit that if none did, the regulators would thereby be rather clownishly exposed –what with no products for sale in the grocery stores.
And i too could’ve survived –i closed down of my own volition, and a large part of that was a that coterie of hostiles nearby, who have the right to storm the facility at any time and throw entire weeks of tight scheduling out the window, is utterly sufficient to utterly crash the animal spirits of enterprise.
Listen closely.
Just west of Austin the beautiful Texas Hill Country opens up, as the terrain climbs from the Balcones Fault, running more or less along I35, climbs up onto the Edwards Plateau.
Austinites, stuck down on the Colorado river bottoms, love to drive out into the hill country, using the wide, capaceous Hwy 290 that LBJ built to whisk hisself from Johnson City to the airport in Austin.
Here let me interject that i indeed made my relations with the regulators worse, by pointing out to the division boss –after some long period of otherwise inexplicable snap inspections creating unbelievably nit-picking problems –that
1) since i was professionally in touch with friendly competitors (tho there were and are only a handful of combined livestock dairy and cheesemakers under their own label with a class A dairy product license) of mine scattered in the far reaches of the state, i knew that they were getting as many inspections in a year as i was getting in a month,
2) since nothing else would explain the differences and frequencies of the comparative ways the inspections were conducted, and since over the years i had learned that Austin field agents, if they had problems with a licensee could check out on their own to proceed to the site and follow up on those ongoing problems,
3) since the agents usually left my site carrying product sample bound for the state lab, and since this is a refrigerated product that heat exposure will create pathogens in,
4) that i’d appreciate it the agents would, when they check out of the office at 9am, for the day, to inspect my site, at which they would arrive, inspect, and depart by noon to (and here is the banal heart of the matter) take the rest of the day off (at taxpayers expense),
5) would they at the very least bother to drop off the product sample –upon which the testing of, my family’s income depended –to the lab’s refrigeration room before they then took the day off in the hill country or went kayaking on Town Lake with my heat-sensitive sample sitting in the parking lot in the sun inside the vehicle, as happened at least once that i know of?
(Note, tho that sample, and very likely others similarly treated that i just never accidentally happened to know about, did not ‘fail’, the sub-threshhold pre-pathogenic levels HAD to’ve been higher after the heat/time exposure than before –meaning if the guy had been enjoying his kayaking more, or had met a girl out on the water, my company could have been in real trouble)
Complain? Of course. Result? Revenge. Remedy? i suppose, a lobbyi$t –which the goat-cheesemakers of Texas, a nascent industry, had nonesuch.
IOW, knowing my proximity to HQ, in a natural outdoor fun area only an hour’s drive distant, just far enough to make it a day trip, a day trip the frequency of depended entirely on the number of problems needing follow-up that had been discovered at my site just off the aforementioned Hwy 290, my respect for nationwide complaints about regulation distortions does not proceed from as academic nor sanguine a perspective as does yours.
My story is everyman’s story, if he/she sticks his/her enterprise head up over the trench parapet in the democrat’s-victory USSA.
bl: my respect for nationwide complaints about regulation distortions does not proceed from as academic nor sanguine a perspective as does yours.
I haven’t been within spitting distance of a sanguine attitude for decades; in fact now that I think back, never had the luxury, but informally I trace it back to the month we spent living on hot dogs when the union struck which implies of course a very different background.
My story is everyman’s story
So is mine.
“so is mine”
so you agree that it’s one thing if all you are is reduced to a smear on a state specimen slide, but a whole nuther thing if the state can’t even bother to slide you under the microscope because the microscope is in use as some bureaucrat’s bass boat anchor?
I agree that I know your story in surprisingly exact terms, different players. Did you ever consider legal action or moving the dialogue upstairs?
oh, yes, for sure. but procrastination ate my homework. Just too unpleasant, and remedy against agency as you know is through the legislature –meaning, endless, and pointless in that if you do win some remuneration, it’s your neighbors’ tax money. Best remedy would be the Duel, if that was still legal. Raising four kids means staying outta jail, alas.
Naw, seriously, it was the first situation for me in my lifetime that i couldn’t win over by being friendly and likeable –a good ole boy, treating everyone the same and with respect. These guys weren’t native Texans –i don’t mean that in a chauvinistic way, but there was no tradition to form guidelines or context –the worst was no kidding from Illinois iirc –and they were cold hard lightweight thugs with no compunctions as to lying to you and then denying it. After a little of that, your power to turn on that old reliable likeability light just dims out and you’re down there in the muck, taping the conferences and such with a recorder on the table between you. Heart of darkness, in the most banal silly way imaginable. To appeal to higher authority, you have to have a smile and some warmth, or nobody wants to deal with you. so you quit, and say ‘pisson the whole damn thing’.
But don’t let me whine –so many many many have had so much worse experiences –i just brought it up to lend veracity to my complaints about the topic of ‘regulation’.
#77 truepeers
Sorry about taking so long to reply. I saw your message at zero-dark-30 and was too tired to answer.
What you are describing is not merely a financial collapse but a collapse of governing authority, at all levels. I would not say the latter is impossible, but it just strikes me as much less likely than a financial collapse.
Actually I think that the two will go hand in hand. Others have already already commented on the tendencies of our society to riot at the slightest hint of a restriction of their view of what they deserve. Most people I know of do NOT have a week’s or more worth of food in the house. And I know more people who do than most, because here, state employees and retirees get paid once a month whether they need it or not. But most people hit the store every day or two. It is worse in the dependent class. Planning and forethought are not their strong points.
IF it is a large urban area, these dependent types tend to be concentrated in certain areas, and the stores there tend to be smaller, not corporate affiliated, and will be left sucking hind teat on the supply chain. They will run out first and be the last to be restocked if that ever becomes possible. Riots will start in these areas first, and spread. Once they start, it is Katy bar the door.
In a recent report, discussing what would happen if the New Madrid fault moves again, a Pentagon official noted:
This is in the New Madrid zone, and the damage is caused by earthquake. But the shut down can easily be caused by a collapse of the economy. Any such collapse will surely be accompanied by a “Bank Holiday” similar to the one declared by Roosevelt on March 6, 1933 which closed every financial institution in the country to prevent runs on the banks. They weren’t allowed to re-open until audited and declared sound by the government. Given that banks are now far more leveraged than in the 1930′s, their balance sheets are deliberately fuzzy to hide the fact that most are insolvent when you account for the bogus mortgage derivatives masquerading as assets, and the Federal government helped create the insolvent conditions; they are not going to re-open soon. And to be honest, unlike in the 1930′s, who today is going to believe a Federal audit giving a clean bill of health.
Banks shut down. No checks, no debit cards, no credit cards. Cash only. How much cash do you have in your wallet right now? Stores, vendors, and suppliers will not deliver if they have no assurance of getting paid.
Desperate people, functionally broke, shrinking supplies [the country runs on "Just In Time" supply chains]; even outside the “dependent class” there is going to be disorder.
We are over-governed. “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” still applies, but the source is not London but DC. But almost all of them are paper pushing bureaucrats who are only tough when backed by the State’s monopoly on force. Absent that, when things get kinetic, they will hide in a corner in a fetal position.
The actual percentage of those charged with maintaining public order and life safety functions is small, especially relative to the population they are responsible for. In cities like LA, it is my understanding that the doctrine now is for the police’s first priority to be self-protection over the maintenance of order. Probably like that in many other cities.
In cities run by Democrats for generations, there is a significant chance that the police response will be more akin to New Orleans during Katrina.
There are many urban-rural differences in culture. One that I would recommend for investigating is the difference between what is called a “Trust Culture” [rural/small town, some suburban] and a “Tribal Culture” [urban]. The concepts apply worldwide, but those are some of our manifestations. To be honest, within a few days of an economic collapse urban areas will be deathtraps. And there is very little that local law enforcement will be able to do about it.
State law enforcement is spread even thinner. I know. I worked there. That leaves the Federal government, the military and the National Guard. Once again, spread thin, not in position to respond in a timely manner, and likely to be resisted. Rasmussen has been running a series of surveys, asking if the Federal government now has the consent of the governed. As of a week or so ago, nationwide 17% believe it does, 69% believe that it does not.
Compelling Americans to submit to force majeure after making them hungry and poor with no real hope for the future is not going to improve those numbers.
And that assumes that behind the force, there is something approximating a competent plan for recovery. I don’t know about you, but I think that it is stretching things to assume that the current administration has either good intent or competence. I suspect that I am not alone in that view, and the poll numbers above reinforce that.
I do not think that it is unreasonable at all to have a working assumption that an economic collapse will in fact lead to a breakdown in government authority, where not enforced by coercion. And the range of action that they have to use that coercion has narrow limits.
In the 1930′s, we were a very different country, both to the good and the bad. But we were functionally one country. And even then, if you go deeper than the limited amount of sanitized history taught about pre-1940 US history; we faced serious political movements to overthrow our constitutional system from both forms of Socialism, Communism in the labor movement and its allies [IWW, et. al.] and Fascism/National Socialism.
Today, we are as culturally and socially divided as widely as we were in the lead up to the Civil War; albeit along very different lines. We are a supersaturated solution waiting for the one speck of dust that will start the sudden precipitation.
Thus, preparations for hard times are reasonable, and in addition to physical preparations, the creation of communities, of “circles of trust” is the most rational approach. Hollywood notwithstanding, the lone wolf will soon be a dead wolf in a time of civil disturbances. And while urban areas large enough to be dominated by a tribal over a trust culture are going to be deathtraps, the mythic “run away to hide and survive in the mountains” is going to kill a bunch of people. It is not something that a lot of people can do; both due to lack of training and ability, and due to a lack of ability of the land to support any large number of people.
Granting that it is fiction, with all the drawbacks that implies, I recommend the book The Last Centurion by John Ringo for a NON-Pshrink/sociologist jargon explanation of the differences between a “Trust” culture and a “Tribal” culture. That alone is worth the price of the book, but the projection of how a government of lop-eared duds like ours would respond to an internal emergency gives certain valuable insights.
#82 westerncanadian
As far as short term coping beyond food and other supplies in the house goes – I live in a city and there is fuel on the beach and in the standing trees, fish in the ocean and lakes, water in the creeks, deer in the backyards, rabbits to snare on the golf course and birds to net. Pure water could even be distilled from sea water if you wanted to get fancy. Balsam fir, pine and spruce needles apparently have enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But I don’t think it would get bad enough to need all those old timer efforts.
From your handle, I am guessing that you live in British Columbia; which by my lights is one of the most beautiful places in the world [Vancouver Island, being THE most beautiful, and Vancouver City being where I would live if I had to live in a city.] I wish you well for the above, but do have one concern.
Surviving as you describe is possible, and has been done. But it has been done at a far lower population density than in a city. There are going to be a lot of people competing for those same resources, and they will be used up quick. Here at home, I have two herds of deer that cross my yard several times a day, and sometimes base in the woods around us. Since I have kept them out of my garden I don’t mind at all, in part because I hope that if it gets hungry out, I may get one of them. Just one. Once hunting pressure goes up, they are going to be gone; either in someone’s stewpot, or fleeing the area. Similar things will happen across the board. Thus, a stocked larder of preservable food is a good thing.
Subotai Bahadur
bl: they were cold hard lightweight thugs with no compunctions as to lying to you and then denying it.
That’s a profile known all too well. The versions we encountered came with smiley faces.
I think the point of departure is that I see them in the private sector as well. The failures of corporate governance – Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, GM, etc – doesn’t mean the model is discarded. As I said, behavior is less obvious, more polished, but either way, they’re tough critters. Enough said.
This is what it is: at some point, in the march of the regulatory state, the mist burns away and there it stands starkly, that to go into business, even after your lifelong struggle to bring forth that Big Idea, you need to risk all the time money effort energy willpower brains and luck you can possibly possibly draw together, from your past present AND future, as well as the past present and futures of your dependents, and then submit that supreme personal value package to … the arbitrary and fickle –and probably envious and vengeful –whims, and bureaucratic hidden games and agendae, of the worst sort of people on the planet this side of federal and state prison.
In fact, it’s LIKE a prison.
There’s your ‘unemployment problem’.
Otherwise, as Milton Friedman famously answered to a student’s question about the source of confidence and optimism, “Trees grow.”
***
and to your point about that point of departure, the difference between them in the public vs the private sectors is that in the one, the power of the state is behind them –meaning they cannot simply be avoided, as they can be otherwise.
bl: they cannot simply be avoided, as they can be otherwise.
Well, we’re not in Mayberry RFD anymore, the corporate jungle being a crash course in ‘anything goes’, ‘whatever it takes’ competitive reality. Moving on and along is not the easy panacea when home and hearth are being left behind. Coercion is not a patent owned by the State.
But I will agree with the general assessment that the balance is out of whack. Start with the tax code. See what happens.
The painful irony is, if we were destined to die of constipation, it would have been better had right as stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock. That way, we would have all stayed in Massachusetts trying to get permits to buy a wagon, and the mighty Sioux and Cheyenne, and the brave Comanche and Apache, would still be riding the laughing wind across the face of the Great Spirit
96. Subotai Bahadur
Yes, you are right about “back to the land” tactics only working for a short while in a city. I don’t believe it would ever come to that but I guess my point is that whatever happens people wouldn’t just sit there doing nothing. I’m pretty sure that on our block people would quickly organize. But again, I really don’t believe that it would come to that.
westerncanadian (82),
“..fuel on the beach”? Could you elaborate a bit? Or describe your car that will run on this fuel?
What Subotai in #72 is describing is mostly the effects have having huge population concentrations (say anything 100k or more) dependent on near-real-time delivery of necessities of life. There isn’t much bridge between food-and-fuel deliveries being halted, and the residents self-organizing to change their energy supply to wood harvested from the nearby forests, or so it seems to me.
westerncanadian, in 101 you say “back to the land” tactics would work for only a a short time in the city, but my contention is that’s the least likely time for them to work, as there is simply zero infrastructure to support that.
YBR; “Did you ever consider legal action or moving the dialogue upstairs?”
I am not an attorney, but on several occasions I have queried an attorney regarding whether an attempt to sue the government for what appeared to an unlawful or unconstitutional regulatory ruling or judgement would be worth it. In every case, the answer was no. The answer was always that you could sue the government to overturn the ruling against you, but not for damages. And no matter how good and clear cut was your case, suing the government is always a crap shoot. The bottom line was that unless you could afford to and it was possibly profitable to risk several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to win only a regulatory ruling that you would probably lose, then you had better not sue. The odds are stacked way in the favor of the regulatory system and against the you, the Average Joe.
And because of that reality, government agencies have over time been much more willing to abuse their discretionary powers because there really is no downside for that agency abusing it’s power. Unless, one is dealing with a small jurisdiction where political pressure can be brought to bear on the abusive agency, and those in power in that agency have political capital or more to lose, there is little for the average Joe to do except to take the abuse.
“…the aggregate regulatory burden is still increasing. However, the relative burden, compared with the size of the economy, has been reasonably constant in recent years. ”
Absolute hogwash. When was the last time any regulation you knew of ( with the possible exception of regulation affecting powerful industries like the Airline industry or Banking industry) ever been reduced? Regulation is just piled upon existing regulation after existing regulation, with little concern for consequence at the Local, State and Federal Level. And you must comply with them all. Conflicts are not considered. The combinations, permutations, complexities, and complications arising from highly restrictive codes emanating from entirely different disciplines competing over the same turf makes compliance a nightmare. And because of the withering of legal rights ( see above), compliance has gone from complying with the consensus intent of a ruling to negotiating the interpretation of a ruling. Often you are complying with a moving target.
Since Bush I took office, there has been no national figure in power, either Dem or Pub, that has fought to restrict regulation for small business. Regulation and regulatory abuse have exploded. Back in the day before the environmental nazi’s, even the Democrats fought against regulation because they understood that new regulation often drives up costs and it eventually hurts the little guy. No mas. A booming cottage industry since the early 90′s has arisen to write new codes, interpret them, and of course hold seminars and classes how to comply with them. The more codes, the larger the enforcement bureaucracy and associated quangos. Nimbyism has spread far and wide. The enviro-nazi’s have attacked growth in a multitude of ways and have usually succeeded because the Media has largely indoctrinated the populace into the notion that more regulation is always a good thing.
From experience, I have seen the difference between lesser and greater regulatory regimes over the decades in Southern California, and the difference between California and places in the rural midwest. The difference is striking.
Southern California until the late 80′s was a manufacturing powerhouse, and then the regulators took hold. Before thousands of small entrepreneurs set up shop in scores of incubator industrial parks all over Southern California. Now those guys are a very rare breed, even before the depression. Too many regulations. The AQMD all by itself essentially banned many industries, declaring many essential industrial substances verboten. Local codes began to permit only “clean” industries. Heavy manufacturing became a No-No. And the State codes governing personnel employment, safety, handicap, energy, and health issues only multiplied.
There are still rural areas in America where entrepreneurs can flourish. I have been associated with some such developments, but they must be far away from the prying eyes of big government. In rural areas, new businesses are either left alone or even encouraged. What a concept! The necessary cost of capital for start up can be as less as one tenth that required for the big city. The risk of failure from regulatory abuse is far less. Payroll costs are far less. Regulations managing employees are far reduced. New ideas can be acted upon right away instead of waiting eternally for a decision from Big Brother.( The time necessary to bring a new product is often key) The cost of construction can be a third the cost of a big city. There is room to grow and expand. And heavy manufacturing processes and substances can actually be used. That does not mean it is a free for all. The EPA and other Federal Agencies still will enforce their rules, and sometime even rightly so. And the FEDs if Obama has his way will quickly shut down these opportunities.
The point is that cost differentials are now substantial between those areas regulated to death and those regulated reasonably. The problem is that most manufacturing and most of population cannot move to these rural areas easily. Many are just stuck in heavily regulated urban areas. And today most regulatory regimes in urban areas made made American manufacturing noncompetitive in today’s global environment, effectively helping to reduce the manufacturing of durable goods per capita by approximately a third since the late 90′s.
Unsk: Thanks for taking the time to expand on the theme. I have a much better idea where you’re coming from.
First, as you note, California is its own game. It is a mistake to extrapolate the California experience to other parts of this country, particularly those parts where the regulatory ‘balance’ is still within an acceptable range – one that offers reasonable protection of ‘the commons’ while allowing enterprise to engage. As per your experience, the divide is urban vs rural, which leads me to a second observation.
You are focused on manufacturing, which is fine, but that is a crucial piece of information. Manufacturing has unique issues – quite distinct from other business sectors such as agriculture, the Apple “ecosystem’, finance, to name a few.
And heavy manufacturing processes and substances can actually be used [in rural areas as opposed to urban].
That’s a sticky subject – where risk management meets epidemiology meets statistical thresholds. My view is that the ‘processes and substances’ have to be monitored and properly disposed. I am aware of the ‘wild west cowboy’ mentality that infused many a State Fish & Game Dept at the inception of EPA, especially but not limited to California where the excesses have been documented, but my understanding is that the level of science and general understanding of societally appropriate risk-management protocols is upgrading the regulatory demands.
I return to a subject I have touched upon several times in the past, which is risk management. The ‘failures’ of public regulation – aside from overt criminality (and one must in fairness attempt to gauge the relative proportions) – seem to point to failures of defining ‘appropriate’ risk management criteria and thresholds.
This is very difficult. As someone asked me recently (about dynamic scoring for accounting) – just because it’s difficult and hard to make accurate means it shouldn’t be done?
Globalization made a righteous mess of ‘the commons’ issues – because China et al can and do – do what they please whereas this country has moved to the next level. China et al will eventually get there (my understanding is that the air pollution is already getting local attention from the population, which is hardly surprising) but until a global consensus emerges, USA is stuck with moral hazard: fight dirty or find a better way forward?
YBR – Ya know YBR, as far as ‘risk management is concerned” I agree with you.
We must go from the battle between deregulation and over-regulation to one of appropriate and reasonable regulation. The poisoning of the political arena has made the process of coming to the appropriate level of regulation very difficult. People need to be much better informed, and the “alinskyite” methods the Left uses to shut down debate discourages the necessary flow of information the populace needs to make a decision.
RE: risk management
Did you ever wonder how the 100-yr flood became the standard?
In 1973, when the National Flood Insurance Program was
setting its standards for mapping the flood hazard areas and for
issuing regulations for development standards in those
floodprone areas, the 100 year flood standard was established as
a compromise. It fell between what the Corps of Engineers had
used as the protection level when they built dams and levees and
what most communities used when they designed their
stormwater systems.
The Corps of Engineers has traditionally used what is called the
Standard Project Flood (SPF) as its design event whenever a
floodwater control structure was designed. This SPF did not
have a uniform frequency such as 100 year or 200 year, but was
a site specific determination made on the basis of flood
frequency, damage potential, and cost of construction. It is
generally understood that the SPF ranged in the vicinity of a
200 to 500 year event. Because the SPF for any particular
location required a detailed site flood frequency analysis, it did
not lend itself easily to being used as a national standard for
mapping 17,000 communities. In addition, the SPF was
determined to be overkill for requiring the purchase of flood
insurance or building development.
Most communities in recent history have used a design
frequency of 5 to 20 years for their stormwater systems. This
level of protection takes care of the vast majority of surface
water problems that are experienced. It also provides a
reasonable balance between protection and cost.
It can be seen that the 100 year flood frequency falls between the
two ends of the spectrum discussed above. Since the 100 year
standard was adopted, it has become quite universally used to
describe a reasonable flood protection level. It is now used
throughout the U.S. and in many other countries as well.
……………………
The Army Corps is moving away from the traditional n-yr event into “risk of flooding” metrics but the engineering community is slow to follow.
Point being, toxicity thresholds are not quite as capricious. Operative word being ‘quite.’
We’re barking up the wrong tree, worrying about end results.
Change the process.
Submit every regulation to congress, where a committee hammers out two ratio analyses, cost/benefit and risk/reward, then submits to the floor for an up or down. Yes it will be arduous and time-consuming, but it will get done, and the people will be sovereign as per designated ‘best practice’.
It’s the stunning lack of any mandated nod toward cost/benefit, any need to produce text on the topic that will bear any signature, that is enabling this Mussolini-style consolidation –using the tax and regulatory codes –of every industrial sector (SP uses ten Ind. Sector classifications) into few enough organizations that all the CEOs will fit around a table so that Il Duce can confidentially direct and play them off for the greater glory of the blah blah blah.
Not to drag this out, but two quick points, which I should have made last night.
Speaking to the legal recourse for overt fraud:
Unsk: The odds are stacked way in the favor of the regulatory system and against the you, the Average Joe.
Unsk: government agencies have over time been much more willing to abuse their discretionary powers because there really is no downside for that agency abusing it’s power
The failures of the legal system are unconscionable. “Rule of law” indeed. The legal critique is complicated but it extends far beyond agency prosecution to the nature of how we practice law as a means of administering justice in this country (not to start a diversionary debate but I am not referring to DSK.) The distinction between legal misconduct and non-progressive cost structures vs the ‘regulatory burden’ is fair and legitimate. The ‘thuggery’ should be amenable within a court of law (or informally through recourse to someone farther up which occasionally, not always, provides some relief, depending on negotiating skills and the structure of the hierarchy) – without bankrupting the prosecution- justice having too high a cost for the Average Joe. That must change as part of a long-term successful capitalist business model.
Second issue is the CBA:
bl: It’s the stunning lack of any mandated nod toward cost/benefit
Easier said than done – refer to the last paragraph @85:
Benefits are distributed throughout society as a whole. Clean water, for example, benefits the food processing, dairy, and outdoor recreation industries, among others. But the costs are concentrated on those being regulated–in this example, on the firms that must find alternatives to discharging pollutants into the waterways. Such firms may or may not derive direct benefits from clean water regulations to offset their compliance costs. Thus, it is extremely difficult either to estimate total benefits or to allocate those benefits among the affected sectors of society.
Contingency Valuation is one method but results are mixed.
bl: compliance has gone from complying with the consensus intent of a ruling to negotiating the interpretation of a ruling. Often you are complying with a moving target.
Yes. The Moving Targets. I concede that point. Agencies have a responsibility to be consistent which means in a practical sense following the ‘no surprises’ rule as much as possible. Problem being that the foundational sciences (risk management, toxicology, epidemiology, etc) are in a state of dynamic flux, which means incredible levels of human judgment are required. I can’t emphasize that too much, which doesn’t excuse sub-optimal performance – and certainly doesn’t substitute for the viability of legal recourse – but it does paint a different (less intent-driven) context.
ybr/111; ‘moving target’ –much as i’d like to’ve said it, was unsk. And you bring up a long-lost halcyon notion that the agencies –executive arms of the executive branch, operating under administrative law –were supposed to try to adhere to a not-only non-ideological ideal, but furthermore to a non-political ideal.
Clinton the Bill, come due.
‘War Room of the Permanent Campaign’ –designed to ‘rip out the lungs’ of opponents.
Now beloved elder statesman, husband of Secretary of State. And we wonder what happened to the state of the State.
Mea culpa on the misattribution.
RE: ‘rip out the lungs’
That Bill, what a competitor. Bet he could go one-on-one with The Palinator.
Well it’s not my intent to be pointlessly antagonistic. I do not agree that government is *broken* (some specific fixes would help) so much as I acknowledge the persistence and the intractability of human reality. Stubborn incorrigible critters, thuggery being but one of our many masks. Government can be no better than we are – not the other way around.
I am unhappy with this and that but I am not hysterical. The Republicans left the Washington party way too early, thinking that the money channels needed to keep the necessary pipelines of access were open and running full steam. (The GWB team made a mockery of the concept of government – Cheney’s stovepiping was no different from the Obama administration’s Super Committees – as clear and overt an acknowledgement as any needed that conflict resolution declines in direct proportion to the number of participants – perhaps I should say the number of participants who refuse to negotiate, or what we used to call compromise.) That was a long-term strategic error in judgment, leaving no counterpoint to the Dems in government. This guy is typical.
Hmmm? Public service vs private wealth? Hmmm. That’s a tough one, which it *is* as you noted with family and kids demanding some form of functional attention.
I am repeating myself multiple times: a power shift back to the states is fine, but Washington cannot be fixed through neglect and abandonment. A power vacuum at the core is no more viable than the fat sassy stuff we have now. Long-term incremental trend-lines have to move, preferably incrementally.
agree with your theme, that there is simply no choice but accommodation, if peace and the geographical integrity are to survive. And this is where your (maddening) equanimity may be right. It’s very hard to compromise with your object of demonization. Many wise aphorisms over 3,000 years attest to how to meet the devil halfway –most refer to a temporary crisis management rather than a decision to morally lapse.
H/T Kamerad Bunker.
…-
“A Warm Grave in a Cold War”
“East German Nuclear Bunker Opens to Tourists”
“A massive bunker built in the late 1960s to house East German naval operations in the event of nuclear attack has opened to visitors for the first time this summer. The Cold War time capsule reveals volumes about how the communists planned for nuclear Armageddon.”
“Warning signals wailed throughout the city, their strange rise and fall bringing bad tidings. For civilians, it was a sign to turn on their radios, but that wasn’t an option for soldiers, since the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) armed forces, the National People’s Army, didn’t allow private receivers. Instead, the naval sergeant’s whistle sounded before he commanded: “Retrieve your weapons!”
Still in their underwear, the sailors, currently stationed on land, hurried to the armory then back to the barracks, where they pulled on their uniforms and boots, grabbed packs from their lockers, jammed steel helmets on their heads, reached for their protective gear and ran to the waiting fleet of vehicles. After waiting 10 minutes, the driver declared the troops ready to march. The next commands came: “Drive! Put on full protective gear!” That’s when things got uncomfortable, as the sailors had six seconds to slip on gas masks and two minutes for their complete protective gear. Seconds later, a column of camouflage vehicles set into motion carrying over 200 rubber-suited apparitions.
From their command center in the Gehlsdorf district of Rostock, a city near the Baltic Sea in what was then East Germany, the People’s Navy headed down the 110 motorway, through the village of Sanitz and the small town of Tessin. In a patch of woods, the vehicles turned toward the town of Laage. A road made of concrete slabs began a few kilometers later, followed by a double line of fencing and a keep out sign. Behind this came a boom gate, a watch building, three-story barracks and other auxiliary buildings.
A Classified Matter
“Disembark!” an officer commanded as the column of vehicles halted some 70 minutes since the battle alarm sounded. Other apparitions in rubber protective suits showed the way into the woods, revealing a flight of stairs leading 12 meters (40 feet) into the ground. Beneath a heavy steel door a hallway opened up, revealing an airlock and four additional steel doors. In the space of 20 more minutes, the reputedly nuclear fallout-proof bunker had swallowed up 300 leaders of East Germany’s People’s Navy. The entire operation took 90 minutes. “Remove protective gear!” came the next command as the doors were locked. The sailors, drenched in sweat, helped each other out of their suits, setting down their weapons and assigning tasks.
All that, at least, was the plan.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,782755,00.html