An Order of Chaos Please...,

energyskeptic |  no matter who is elected, we are going to enter hard times as energy and natural resources decline at the same time as population is still growing. If the carrying capacity of the U.S. is about 100 million people without fossil fuels according to several scientists, and half of Americans own guns, millions have military training, 80% of people live within 200 miles of the coasts but 80% of calories come from the corn and wheat belts of the interior: that doesn’t bode well.

 

In a collapse, just about everyone will wish their leaders and culture were more like Fidel Castro and Cuba, because in a collapse, only the most brutal and the most cooperative survive.

There are already three examples of what happens when oil is suddenly cut off:

1. Japan (brutal). This is why they started started WW II
2. North Korea (brutal)
   
3. Cuba (cooperative). Castro helped in many ways, such as preventing middle-men from profiting off of the disaster (i.e. truckers who tried to sell produce in Havana at 10 times what they paid farmers had their trucks confiscated). Oxen were quickly bred to replace tractors, organic farming instigated on a massive basis not only in the country but in cities too, and so on. Yes there was suffering, but not the millions of deaths as happened in North Korea.

Venezuela now seems to be in collapse with their own unique descent from a mix of bad leadership and culture.

Russia also had a downturn, and an article by Dmitry Orlov called “How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union” explains why the Soviet culture was far better prepared than American culture to cope in a collapse.  

If your local and state leaders have been bought and paid for by the right-wing, they are enabling their rich psychopathic selfish libertarian owners achieve their goal of no taxes and no regulations to grow richer. How do you think that will end up? Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot come to mind.

After reading “White Trash” I learned that many of the rich see most of us as disposable white trash (and have since America was founded and on beyond to Europe). And that very few of us have ever had a chance of getting rich, not even the first settlers who came to America. This is because early on, wealthy Americans already owned most of the land and had economies of scale that soon put middle-class and poor farmers out of business, especially if they had free slave labor, and so their property continued to grow.  Now just 3% of Americans own 85% of the land, the true source of wealth, and the 7 million farms that existed in 1920 have dropped to 2 million farms, with just a few percent of them that own thousands of acres producing most of the food using economies of scale industrial techniques and equipment dependent on fossil fuels, and continue to drive smaller farms bankrupt. Care for a feudal society anyone? 

It really will matter who is in power as collapse accelerates. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal of the right-wing rich is to continue to live their lives as before by keeping the lion’s share of energy and natural resources that’s still left, just as North Korean leaders have done. And like Japan, start WW III and invade the Middle East and Central/South America, where 3/4 of the remaining oil reserves are, to steal their remaining oil.