General Motors seeks US$30b to avoid failure.

Have the Governments of the world forgotten how economics works?

If you can't sell enough product to survive then you have no right to be here. What the Governments of the world are doing is allowing business to believe they have rights outside of operating in a market. OK, there is an economic downturn. But ask yourself why? I'm not going to answer that but what I will say is this.

The post-war project of endless economic growth and the resultant suburban dream is over. We won't be resuming revolving credit anytime soon. The growth cycle is over. And I'm not talking about the supposed 7 year residential property cycle. I'm talking the industrial/information age in its current disguise, is over.

Ok, lets assume the US Govt prop up General Motors with a $30b bail out. Then what? Who's buying cars?

Remember how much oil was per barrel before this fiasco all started? I'll ask again, what do you think caused this "economic collapse" in the first place.

A couple of post-scripts

Seems like nobody needs or wants Tamiflu anymore - " Thousands of doses of bird-flu medication languish on pharmacy shelves after the public ordered them in a state of pandemic hysteria – but never bothered picking them up."

Doh, wasn't this supposed to be the pandemic that wiped the fucking earth clean? Rush out guys, tamiflu on special at your local pharmacy.

Oil is almost $100 a barrel. Um... I think I mentioned a couple of years ago that by 2007 we'd be looking at $100 a barrel oil. Interestingly mainstream media are still oblivious to the issue, fascinated with pop-gun terrorists in the far north and Heathrow hotel All Black shennanigans. Before long NZ's answer to exburban redneck bogans and their soccer mom wives, "Straight Outa Riverstone Terraces" will be whinging and moaning about the cost of filling up the VW toe rag. The cost of transporting the kids to school 2 blocks away suddenly went postal. How the hell will mum with her 2 hour daily commute to her $35,000 pa job on the Terrace afford the weekly petrol bill?

And to think everyone thought Robert Atack (http://www.oilcrash.com/) was a fruitloop. He told us years ago to expect this... and there is more to come soon - stay tuned folks.

Joe Bennett and Asian Knickers

I've always like Joe Bennetts humour, ironic, satirical and kiwish. This article suggests, him and I, we're on the same team - on ya Joe.

Closing the Collapse Gap
by Dimtry Orlov

Article Sourced from Energy Bulletin

Highly recommended compelling reading !

Wednesday Morning Ramble, 29 Nov.

Seeking my muse, or in order to find inspiration to write about this I browsed PCs blog - the fatuous nature of a lot of his content usually irritates me enough to write, for that I guess he deserves thanks. Sure enough I found inspiration in footnotes titled Saturday Morning Ramble, 25 Nov. The informal blog begins with this rather facile truisim (paraphrased).

As the world becomes more technologically, scientifically and economically advanced ... what?

The overweening gleeful pride in this statement almost made me gag. And so an inspired rant begins.

I was reminded of my drive from Canberra to Sydney after meeting with my PhD supervisors in late August this year. Scrub and Australian gum trees skirt the road for hundreds of kilometres until you hit the hideous chain store corridors and seemingly endless "nappy valley" subdivision developments that is Sydneys 1.5 hour commute exurban sprawl. At one point, during the drive, I glanced at the road shoulder. The verge was littered with empty plastic and glass bottles, plastic bags, confectionary and fast food wrappings, all manner of trash. Kilometre after kilometre this continued. People (Australians), with absent regard, simply toss their rubbish out of their vehicles as they speed along at 110k towards Sydney, creating a roadside rubbish tip.

It makes me think this unrelenting march towards technological, scientific and economic utopia is ultimately a race to process as much natural resource turning it into eventual landfill (or highway verge) fodder as quickly and efficiently as possible - and this is supposed to be a good thing. I notice Walmart is entering the Indian market - in a bizzare kind of uroborian feedback cycle - the west sells the same shit back to those that produce it and steel the profit from the exercise.

Technological, scientific and economic advance blurs the senses, it distorts our sense of place within the world. It separates us and socialises away our connection with nature. The ultimately doomed project, apollonian idealism, is the driver of technological, scientific and economic advance - the re-birth of tragedy, hedonistic out of control desire surrenders to technological gadgets and the faux status symbols that fill the chain stores. It has turned us into clowns, made a circus of civil society, it dresses us like babys.

Western society knows by seeing. This perceptual vice is at the heart of our culture responsible for producing everything from monstrocities of titanic proportions to the electronic baubles and trinkets that consume us. Our attempts to distance ourselves from Darwinian waste and squalor drive us toward clown-like idiotic ritualised behaviour overtly emphasised in late-capitalisms consumptive society. Browsing with serious concern the endless array of crap we consume which don't actually meet or satisfy any actual need but indeed create the need they claim to satisfy.

The great irony of Capitalism, predicated on freedom is that its most adherent proponents compulsively re-enslave themselves to its spoils. (So much so that the US are now entrenched in a war against the "theft of enjoyment"). One can't help but wonder at the intellectual moralising of those that worship this fiasco. It's called freedom people, and it has you in chains.

Stuck at Home in Suburbia

I have a friend, currently living in a great house Central City, Wellington. You can walk anywhere in town and the Midnight Expresso is just a stones throw away. My friend is going through a combo-crisis. She is approaching 40. And she is about to move to suburbia.

This frightening tension says a lot about the mid-life mystery. When multiple bathrooms, double garages, lawns that need to be mowed and room to park the Stabicraft replaces the urban alco-club induced hedonism of our 30s. Symbolically she is faced with letting go of her youth in two short punches.

People don't choose suburbia, it chooses them.

Not only has the hyper-suburbanisation of the cattle-class over the last 20 years essentially propped up the New Zealand economy but you can accurately measure the suburban fiasco by the number of other happy motorists interfering with your commuting pleasure. Suburban life isn't much fun in Auckland if you work in the city.

Our entire fucking economy is based on continued creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and all the insidious bullshit (recreational shopping at the local Warehouse) that it entails - we're at the end of the civilisation cul-de-sac. The far flung exburbian outreaches of society will be the first to implode in the severe vacuum that will accompany disruptions to the oil markets that they depend upon thereby seriously impeding the 80k a day commute. All the morbidly obese brain-dead infotainment zombies and desparate soccer mum housewives who live in their three bathroom "internal access" McHouses will find themselves cut off from work and midweek tennis dates.

The suburbs are the slums of the future. Some won't have to wait that long. The story goes something like this. Gross devaluation accompanied by wholesale denial - what Kunstler terms the pyschology of previous investment will be dictate behaviour. Default, foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy. And for some, attempts to fly out of office block windows as the reality dawns.

Cheap oil subsidised our way into sprawl, but cheap oil is gone. My advice to those not currently comatose, make plans to get out now. By the time you're spending a third of your weekly wages filling the Ford Explorer it will be too late.

Postscript
For my friend worried about the suburban choice - the intuition is right. However, suburbia has a knack of quickly dulling the senses.

...but don't take my word for it