energy < American life = collapse

Peak Oil

There is a great film at http://911busters.com/video/IQ1_20_END_OF_SUBURBIA_VIDEO_24.2_.html.

I heard about it on "Morning Sedition."

Of course, the problem has been explained for at least two decades already, to anybody who is interested, on sources such as Culture Change. Those of us who voted for Barry Commoner, the Constitutional Party candidate in 1980, had the whole story early. Our energy consumption is unsustainable.

George Soros mentions in Chapter 4 of The Bubble of American Supremacy,

The true motives for the Bush administration's determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein remain shrouded in mystery. It is possible to conjecture what these motives were, but it is impossible to identify them with certainty, because they have never been discussed.

... the real motives [for the invasion of Iraq] remain shrouded in mystery but nation building could not have ranked high among them.

Everybody knew it was oil, even though we told them weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, freedom and so on. The point is that we are at peak oil now. Without an increase in our source of energy, we can have no economic growth.

Social Security

So, since the administration never came clean about their true motives for going into Iraq, is there any reasonable expectation of truth behind other public programs, like "saving" Social Security?

Edmund L. Andrews gave us some vivid foresight into what are the Bush administration's lines of credible reasoning and justification for their colossal decisions in his editorial:

White House officials say it is reasonable to treat the expected transition costs separately, because they will eventually be repaid as the government's obligation to pay benefits declines sharply after 30 or 40 years.

"These aren't costs, they are savings," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, at a recent news conference.

This deliberate misleading of the public is a familiar pattern now, but can anyone see where these blind men are leading us?

Privatizing Social Security may get the government off the hook for having to repay the Social Security Trust Fund after our economy collapses due to Bush's energy policy. People won't be able to blame Bush then for not paying out benefits that his friends on Wall Street have blown speculating on phony energy companies with inflated balance sheets. And maybe when the crunch comes he'll be able to raise taxes on the rich in order to keep up the corn dole.

But it may also be that he's trying to prop up the financial services industry in order to shore up ebbing capital in the American global financial marketplace.

As Bob Somerby noted today, discussing Bill Frist's appearance on the Sunday talk shows

But so what? Frist--presented with a mark--just kept misleading the voters.

Yes, Frist was eager to "mislead non-experts" when he played the pimp on This Week. But then, it's something the "press corps" has allowed Bush to do on every sort of budget matter--a fact which explains why he's willing to pimp that ludicrous plan for "halving the deficit."

So, Bush may not be orchestrating a meaningful dialogue on the talk shows and among the press corps, and he may not be planning for solutions to the upcoming energy and financial trainwrecks, but he is working very hard at one thing, at least as important as anything else (from a GOP perspective): avoiding the blame for the collapse!