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In the absence of my hypothetical fantasy novel that will tie it all together with a ridiculously entertaining frame tale, Kevin Phillips' Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism is about as good as it is going to get when it comes to presenting the present U.S. dilemma in terms the average reader can digest.
I've not read Phillips' earlier screeds about the coming whirlwind, but this one ties together the basics: how American negligence allowed inventive deal-assemblers to bamboozle naive bankers the world over, thereby undercutting the status of the American currency as an internationally accepted reserve, thereby further destabilizing a petroleum market that was being impacted by the imminent arrival of a permanent shortfall of capacity, thereby ensuring the collision between a need for focus on new energy sources and a need for solutions to the crisis of global warming.
And all of the crises are taking place within the human tendency to focus on one thing at a time, to be self-deluding, to shift blame whenever possible, to go for the short term solution and the self-aggrandizing interpretation...you know, all that cool stuff I've been blogging about for a couple of years, plus the topics I haven't mentioned, such as the inability to interpret new information except in terms of the old information.
Phillips doesn't hit on all of this, and he focuses on the implications for Americans of the multiple global crises to which the shortsighted deceptions of a few million urban and rural American mortgage brokers (hell, more likely a few thousand, but let's be expansive and rhetorical like good Americans) have now contributed mightily. Having read contracts written by some such mortgage brokers, I can testify that simple stupidity probably added to outright prevarication. And as someone else said once in a much more noble context, "Whoever thought we would make all this history?"
Phillips reports optimistically that of five crises he identified in 2006, the religious-fundamentalist apocalypticism seems to have receded along with the prospects in Iraq, but "No one can afford to stand down with respect to the other four sequences: the rising near-term possibility of peak oil; the inability of the big U.S. and British oil companies to do more than run in place while state-owned oil companies take charge; the converging financial triangulation of the vulnerable [U.S.] dollar, the housing bubble, and the debt and credit crisis; and the onrush of global climate dangers. A clash between energy-supply worries and climate-change fears seems nearer than ever."
Nearer? even the few weeks' lag time of publication in the twenty-first century means events outstrip prediction. It is here.
I've not read Phillips' earlier screeds about the coming whirlwind, but this one ties together the basics: how American negligence allowed inventive deal-assemblers to bamboozle naive bankers the world over, thereby undercutting the status of the American currency as an internationally accepted reserve, thereby further destabilizing a petroleum market that was being impacted by the imminent arrival of a permanent shortfall of capacity, thereby ensuring the collision between a need for focus on new energy sources and a need for solutions to the crisis of global warming.
And all of the crises are taking place within the human tendency to focus on one thing at a time, to be self-deluding, to shift blame whenever possible, to go for the short term solution and the self-aggrandizing interpretation...you know, all that cool stuff I've been blogging about for a couple of years, plus the topics I haven't mentioned, such as the inability to interpret new information except in terms of the old information.
Phillips doesn't hit on all of this, and he focuses on the implications for Americans of the multiple global crises to which the shortsighted deceptions of a few million urban and rural American mortgage brokers (hell, more likely a few thousand, but let's be expansive and rhetorical like good Americans) have now contributed mightily. Having read contracts written by some such mortgage brokers, I can testify that simple stupidity probably added to outright prevarication. And as someone else said once in a much more noble context, "Whoever thought we would make all this history?"
Phillips reports optimistically that of five crises he identified in 2006, the religious-fundamentalist apocalypticism seems to have receded along with the prospects in Iraq, but "No one can afford to stand down with respect to the other four sequences: the rising near-term possibility of peak oil; the inability of the big U.S. and British oil companies to do more than run in place while state-owned oil companies take charge; the converging financial triangulation of the vulnerable [U.S.] dollar, the housing bubble, and the debt and credit crisis; and the onrush of global climate dangers. A clash between energy-supply worries and climate-change fears seems nearer than ever."
Nearer? even the few weeks' lag time of publication in the twenty-first century means events outstrip prediction. It is here.
