Obama’s economic plan will fail, and so will his little war
Game Over.
Empire on the ropes!
Obama’s problems are compounded by the fact that he is surrounded by people, such as Pentagon supremo Robert Gates, that remain locked in “war on terror”/Long War mode. Vice President Joe Biden and special envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater Richard Holbrooke – not to mention General David “I’m positioning myself for 2012″ Petraeus – are certified hawks. They will do everything in their power to steer the conclusions of the Afghanistan strategic policy review Obama is waiting for towards the Long War concept .
For Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, the last hope for sanity is represented by Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
It’s never enough to stress the Bush “war on terror” framework remains in full effect. Leon Panetta, the Obama nominee as CIA director, said that the CIA will basically continue with extraordinary renditions. Elena Kagan, the Obama nominee for solicitor general, said that indefinite detention without trial still rules – wherever the detainee was captured. And acting Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz said that detainees in Bagram air base in Afghanistan remain without legal rights. If Obama is serious about closing Guantanamo, he must be serious about closing Bagram.
The two-fold, “Western alliance” strategy at the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, as it stands, consists of the US and NATO occupying the parts of Afghanistan not occupied by the Taliban while Washington bribes Islamabad to let it attack Pashtun peasants inside Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).
No wonder that after de facto losing a war in Iraq to a bunch of “irregulars” with Kalashnikovs, the Pentagon is now terrified that NATO is about to lose the war in Afghanistan for good, thus proving to the whole world its absolute irrelevancy – and shattering once and for all the shaky pillar of US hegemony over Europe.
NATO is incompetent even at lying. A NATO report in January claimed that “only” 973 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008, and “only 97″ of these by NATO. This month a UN report confirmed that NATO was lying. According to the UN, at least 2,118 Afghan civilians were killed in 2008 – 828 of them by the US or NATO.
Failure will be heaped upon failure in a series of catastrophic cascades.
It is mathematically possible to balance a pencil on its point. Try and actually do it.
Our future is being decided in Balochistan and the Treasury Office.
Woe to us all; and to hell with politicians! They are the golden calves of our epoch.
You best plant you some collards.
Stan:
Michael Klare on “mapping a world at the brink.”
Mike Davis on fractalized cities.
An election that was a historic success will now morph into an epoch of manifold and catastrophic failure. Politicians quite simply cannot understand what goes on outside their goldfish bowls — an infinitude of waterless space in which they would suffocate. The pharaonic architecture of the last two centuries — built on the sands of growth and oil — is coming apart; and they are all trapped in their funding manipulations, their university educations, and their terminal delusion of control. Prepare for another eight years of mythmaking, as decpetive and more destructive than the last. This is not the outcome of any putative leader, but of the expanding angle of the bifurcation between our entire episteme and actual history.
27 February 2009, 7:24 amStan:
Paul Street on Obama’s violin:
FULL
27 February 2009, 4:03 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
I find it funny that Andrew Bacevich finds Senator John Kerry the last hope for sanity. Is this the same John Kerry that refused to contest Busch’s fraudulent win in Ohiio probably because he had cut a deal with the republicans to let Busch stay in charge for another four years.
27 February 2009, 5:40 pmI also found it ironic that the communist Afghan leader was executed in Moscow because he had screwed up so bad the only conclusion that they could reach was that he was really a CIA agent. How history repeats itself in slightly different versions.
Gerry.Agnosia:
‘Ello Stan,
I apologize if this question is out of place in this particular article, but this was the closest I could come to referencing the issue at hand.
Namely: What is your opinion Barack Obama’s insistence on making the Assault Weapon’s Ban permanent?
Thank you.
28 February 2009, 4:30 pmCharles:
The pharaonic architecture of the last two centuries — built on the sands of growth and oil — is coming apart
^^^
I’m not sure pharaonic ( of Pharohs ?) is the analogy wanted here, since that architecture has stood the test of time , no ?(smile)
STAN: What’s left is an artifact from collapse. Big tombs.
1 March 2009, 2:28 pmCharles:
It reflects well on the left black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.’s following description of Obama at the very beginning of the future president’s political career in 1996: “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics.”
^^^^
impeccable credentials like “community organizer and
civil rights lawyer ” ? what is he talking about ?
Gee are we watching the same tv news stories since inaug ?
anti-neoliberal acts in first _thirty_ days:
.Pay equity bill passed, pro women’s economic rights
.stimulus package, not big enough, but not supply-side much
.budget declared by Krugman et al a sharp reversal of Reaganism,i.e. neoliberalism. Rightwing calling it
“socialism” (!) Well, it’s not, but it sure ain’t
neo-liberalism
Also, Bush vicious policy on stemcell research reversed !
Guantanimo closing and torture reversal can’t be made into non-changes by pointing to the other bad stuff not changed, sorry.
All troops out of Iraq by 2011.
Afghanistan is horrendous, but, lets see what comes out of reassessment. O doesn’t give off the vibes (from his violin) that he wants a permanent war anywhere.
Not unrelated to Afghanistan (and Iran) Hamas and PA in talks for gov. of national unity. I know anti-O lefters who said “that can’t be !”
The anti-O left is trying to say “I told you so” when what they told us ain’t so. So, they try to interpret, for us, actuality in terms
of a few 1/5th true, demogogic fractional facts.
We have a long way to go, but the first steps are nothing like the likes of Paul Street are saying they are. What we have so far is so far so good.
* * *
STAN: Apparently your sycophancy and will-to-apologetics know no bounds.
You know as well as I do that the last instantiation of neoliberalism was Clintonism, not Reaganism — and Obama has a Clinton cabinet right down the line. He is a “free trader,” who is busily bailing out Wall Street’s speculative boat, even as the leaks outrun the giveaways.
Out of Iraq by 2011… why not now? It does not take two years to redeploy. I seem to recall Nixon’s promises to do the same thing in Vietnam. Two years after he made that claim, I was trudging around the mountains between Quin Nyon and Cambodia.
The Zionist retrenchments around Hamas and the PA are guided by the principle of US interests, not Palestinian interest; or the US would recognize Hamas’ elected legitimacy over the PA. This is meddling of the usual iimperial variety, tempered by the growing strength of Hamas, and the attempt by the US and its ally Israel to determine outcomes for the Palestinians. Obama remains captive to the outlandish and persistent Zioinism of the Democratic Party.
Guantanamo is not closed, yet; and the idea is not to stop the detentions, but to relocate the detainees. That’s called a shell game where I come from.
Moreover, he has indicated that he will continue to allow the CIA to engage in its “rendition program,” as well as leave most (Army-approved, sans waterboarding) torture methods on the books. At Camp LeJeune last week he repeatedly invoked the “war against al Qaida,” but I suppose you have a parsing, legalistic, evasive answer for that shopworn chicanery as well.
Executives are loathe to relinquish executive power. The “let’s wait and see” attitude on Afghanistan is at least an improvement over your last explicit support for the war because Afghans are “reactionary.”
It’s not my point to trash Obama here; and your celebrity-worship of him, alongside your devotion to the geriatric “center-left” CPUSA playbook, has blinded you to the larger point — though I suspect its at least partially intentional blindness.
Here is the larger point:
Obama is the product of the current socio-political regime. It is one that has hit or will soon hit terminal bifurcations along multiple trendlines. He, and the entire state apparatus, captive as they are to the rapidly-obsolescing paradigm, are uniquely incapacitated to do anything about it. A runaway system is driven largely by inertia; but in our case that inertial momentum is the product of one generation (ours, Charles) of core nation residents (us) who have used approximately half the globe’s extractable resources, and in the process stripmined the soil, aquifers, and oceans. That same expenditure of energy — based entirely on exponential consumption of fossil hydrocarbons, that has also been the physical predicate for a world population in 1950 (2,555,982,611 ) expanding to 6,764,650,308 at midyear this 2009 — has also taken us to the precipitous backside of an extraction curve (for oil, gas, and many “strategic minerals”) that will yank the carpet out from under that heavily-populated world system.
The core nations are the entropic black holes for this system, obliged to import more and more resources simply to maintain that entropic structure, and in turn to export the disorder to the periphery.
This is more than a foundation for social relations, more even than the sandy foundation of property relations, but a social architecture in which the core nations — regardless of which political regime rules at the time — are absolutely dependent on and exquisitely vulnerable to a steady stream of ever-externalizing “inputs” from the global periphery… itself now depleted, with population where more than half are under the age of 20, and increasingly experiencing social collapse with heightening unrest.
We are simultaneously facing anthrogenic climate change that will likely raise ocean levels in our lifetime enough to create over a billion ecological refugees, salinize billions of hectares of now arable land and potable water.
The good news is that as the economy collapses, the carbonization of the atmosphere will abate, but we passed several tipping points already, and the major effects of global warming are already inevitable.
Urbanization has been the corollary of this population expansion, which inccreases the footprint of each resident of the city over that of the country; and we have a food system that provides survival calories for most of those urban residents through the aforementioned chemically-dependent and fossil-energy-based soil-mining that is undermining the very soil which is being mined… as the extractable hydrocarbons begin their backside curve toward non-availability.
This is the background for the imperial end-game, which includes resource wars abroad and social disorder at home.
The most recent politico-economic instance of this system in the US has been debtor-imperialism based on vast and serialized bubbles of of fictional value associated with currency-hegemony in the US, and propped up by an increasingly expensive and unsustainable hi-tech military apparatus — centralized and bureaucratic, joined at the hip with technology-capitalists, and increasingly irrelevant as more local and agile forms (and often highly dangerous and destabilizing) of resistance in the periphery evolve a myriad of countermeasures.
I’m 57; and this system is coming apart in my lifetime (if I reach my statistical expectations), that is, in our kids’ lifetimes; and we’re passing along the delusion that the state can solve this problem. It cannot and will not. The only hope of achieving anything less than global Armageddon in the next two decdes is across-the-board, intentiional, and deep reduction in the use of fossil hydrocarbons.
Alternative energy will not, cannot, and can never replace them. That’s the latest con game, with the subtext being that we will not have to change our “lifestyles.”
The necessary change is not possible with cookie cutter solutions doled out from above. Centralization and strategic planning require authoritarianism and violence, in every case and without exception; and moreover, the solutions we seek to accomplish this one pivotal goal — to abandon our dependence on the energy slaves of geology — will require greater labor-intensity, lower consumption of everything, and diverse, highly localized adaptations.
Obama can’t help us with that. He is the senior captive of that system, even as he is also its captain.
Two dozen civilizations have emerged and collapsed on this planet. We are about to join them. It is dishonest to continue to soft-petal the extreme character of the crisis we have entered into, or to make the tough choices we face more palatable by selling the snake oil of green-capitalism, keynesianism, technological-optimism, and state paternalism. Obama will fail because he is the captain of the Titanic. We’ve already hit the iceberg.
1 March 2009, 3:03 pmjack:
hey stan, what do you think about the new post over on cluborlov- i’ll repost here for those who don’t tread over there often:
This is a guest post from Tim, a city planner from sunny Moncton, NB. Tim has spent some time looking into the viability of local, small scale agriculture, and has come up with some results that give us every reason to be optimistic regarding our ability to feed ourselves through our individual and neighborhood-scale efforts, even as the systems of large-scale, industrial agriculture and food delivery unravel due to a combination of high input costs, epic droughts brought on by accelerating climate change, and a shortage of credit caused by the financial collapse. The remaining challenge is start doing it quickly enough: this summer, that is.
“Russian households (inclusive of both urban and rural) collectively grow 92% of country’s potatoes on their garden-plots, the size of which is typically 600 square meters [0.15 acres] for urban households, and typically no more than 2500 square meters [0.62 acres] for rural households,” tells me Dr. Leonid Sharashkin, whose dissertation, “THE SOCIOECONOMIC AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOD GARDENING IN THE VLADIMIR REGION OF RUSSIA” contains a wealth of specifics, based on original field research as well as Russian government data. For instance, he writes:
“In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all households in the country) owned gardening plots (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha) and were involved in growing crops for subsistence (Rosstat 2005b). By 2005, 53% (by value) of the country’s total agricultural output was coming from household plots (which in 2006 occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land), while the remaining 47% (by value — Rosstat 2006) came from the agricultural enterprises (often the former kolkhozes and sovkhozes) and individual farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands (Rosstat 2007b).” [Sharahkin, p.12]
Elsewhere in his disseration, he details how much food was being produced in household plots, and its figures were on the order of 90% of all the potatoes in Russia, 80% of all the vegetables, 50% of the meat and milk etc. In other words, very high proportions of certain products, including at least one calorie staple (potato).
Dr. Sharashkin quotes the previous figures from Russian government publications, but his dissertation also contains the results from his primary field research (and therefore are isolated from the usual concerns one might have about the reliability of government statistics): on page 162, Figure 24 indicates that, of the gardening households in the study area:
* 39% were cultivating under 0.05 hectares (i.e. 500 sq.m.);
* another 36% were cultivating between 0.05 and 0.1 hectares; and
* none of them were cultivating more than half a hectare.
In other words, 3/4 of gardening households were gardening the equivalent of two suburban house lots. (At least based on the typical house lots we have around here, which are 50-60 feet by 100 feet.)
Considering that Russia has just 110 days of growing season per year, while most of America has much longer growing season and significantly more sunshine, this is all quite encouraging from the standpoint of what Americans and Canadians could do with their tiny suburban house lots, assuming they all learn to garden quickly enough.
2 March 2009, 12:07 pmStan:
Great post, Jack. Thanks.
Speaking of potatoes, has anyone got any advice on making potato barrels? I’m hearing different stories of how they fail, yet others say they are a bonanza (40-100 lbs per barrel each year). I have a washtub with drainage holes I want to try. There is a last snow (ojala!) all over the place right now, but I’m all ears for a potato-barrel basic-plan in the next couple of weeks. Sugar snaps sprouts, btw, are thriving in the cold frame, and the garlic I put out a month ago is surviving frost very well (also hatched in the cold frame in the dead of winter). Also in the market for advice on bush beans (I need to put nitrogen fixers where I’ve planted tomatoes and cucmbers the last couple of years).
2 March 2009, 12:43 pmKim Sky:
This thread –> Failure will be heaped upon failure.
I do not recall your analysis of the future to ever have been so bleak as it is now. Perhaps I have been misreading you, or in fact your analysis has changed?
YES. Obama as our president is indeed very distracting, especially after eight long years of the very nasty spiritual environment that was unleashed.
These last years linger everywhere and refuse to depart. Human beings are so fragile, so malleable. Sure, initially there were the odd few resistant to 9-11 propaganda, the resistance was seriously on the rise ever since. National trauma has been postponed, if Obama had not existed, small bombs would have begun to go off in the streets about now.
Ironic — a beautiful man, talented, intelligent, the whole nation is given the opportunity to partake in the redemptive act of voting an African into the most powerful position in the world. If I pause for a moment, I can easily tap back into that very deep spiritual moment — Obama elected president.
As for avoiding Armageddon
I hold on to an old fashioned, wives tale, kind of belief –> 1, properly identify the problem(s). 2, envision solutions. 3, get to work.
As many dreamers as there are out there, inventions in: gardens, farms, intentional communities, community organizing, even a group here in town meeting with the soul purpose of seeking methods for dealing with the coming economic disaster.
None of it seems good enough to me, it seems like we are incapable of seeing the big picture, that if a child arrived from another planet he would immediately state the very obvious solution, a solution not yet identified. Thus far, our efforts seems too small, or that we are not serious enough. A Serbian pointed out to me at a demonstration one time, “Why is everyone one going home? We would not leave, we would protest for days, even months on end.”
Perhaps my blindness is so great, that you and others do see the Bigger Picture. I don’t. I’m now reading Planet of Slums and Getting Ghost, on a hunch that the disenfranchised will discover the way forward.
Thanks so much for your analysis as always.
Chao.
2 March 2009, 1:30 pmjack:
speaking of final bifurcations:
Karzai won’t leave
Afghan President Hamid Karzai discovered the importance of adhering to his country’s constitution at an awfully convenient political moment.
Der Spiegel.
By Matthias Gebauer and Shoib Najafizada
March 2, 2009 | The news that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was considering resignation caused considerable agitation in Western capitals late last week. It was a sudden shift. The Afghan president, once installed by the United States and lauded as a torchbearer, is now identified as the scapegoat for the West’s lack of success in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, no one in the West has any idea how things could proceed without him.
The reports of his departure were more than just another product of the Kabul rumor mill. In their classified reports, intelligence agencies noted that something was cooking in Kabul, and yet they were unable to predict exactly what was about to happen there.
The uncertainty was finally laid to rest on Saturday afternoon, when Karzai issued a decree announcing his intention to hold the presidential elections in the spring, by April 21 at the latest. Always the statesman, the president, who lacks even the power necessary to protect Kabul from the Taliban, explained that he is bound to respect the Afghan constitution. Under Article 61, the election must take place at least one month prior to the end of a sitting president’s term. Karzai’s term ends on May 21.
In his decree, Karzai emphasizes that he wants to remain president. Instead of knuckling under to the West, he is provoking the NATO protective force and the United Nations — an approach that has always scored points among Afghans. “Even if I fail,” so goes an old motto of this proud Pashtun, “I will do so with my head held high.”
The United States distanced itself from Karzai’s decision to move up the elections. US State Department spokesman Robert Wood, speaking in Washington on Saturday, said that although the decree is based on the right principles, the US government still considers it advisable to stick to the Afghan Election Commission’s original plan to hold the election in August.
Karzai is driven by various motives. He has been under great pressure in Afghanistan, where he is criticized for having given in to the West. The election commission, paid for and controlled by the U.N., had ruled that the election should not be held until August. The tense security situation and the need to provide Afghanistan with more time to recover from what has been a harsh winter, the commission argued, would preclude an earlier election — and breaching the constitution, though unfortunate, would be necessary.
Experts Rule Out Earlier Election
The decision sparked massive resistance in the country, and Karzai was criticized by his opponents and supporters alike. They also made it clear that they would no longer recognize the president after the end of his regular term in office. Weeks ago, the Taliban warned all Afghans that anyone taking part in the vote, whether as a voter or a candidate, would be a legitimate target of attack. According to Western analysts, this threat makes elections virtually unthinkable, especially in the south.
These concerns remain valid today. The 17,000 U.S. troops and several thousand European ISAF soldiers meant to provide security for the vote will not be available until the summer. Besides, the preparations — voter registration and the compilation of candidate lists — are not yet complete. The U.N. has not even come up with the $200 million it needs to organize the election. It is still collecting donations.
Not surprisingly, reactions to Karzai’s decree were clear. “There will be no election in the spring,” said a U.N. insider in Kabul only hours after the announcement of the presidential decree, “even if that’s what Karzai suddenly wants.”
“The Buck Is Being Passed to the Evil West”
Perhaps Karzai is even hoping for the West’s predictable rejection of his plan. And perhaps Karzai reasons that if the West does not manage to organize a spring election, he will be able to claim that at least he tried to obey the constitution. “The buck is being passed to the evil West,” says an EU diplomat, “which leaves Karzai looking good.” If this happens, an interim regime — led by Karzai as the “father of the nation” — could be installed until a later election date. A key advantage of this option is that Karzai could still be ousted in the election.
The election commission, playing for time, has not commented on the decree yet. Commission officials say that they cannot make a decision until they have received the official letter from the presidential palace. ISAF’s official response has also been scant. Internally, however, Karzai’s announcement has been met with concern.
Karzai confronted the West’s concerns in his decree. In its four articles, he appealed to the Afghan security forces — namely, the military, the police and the NDS intelligence agency — which are still in the process of being assembled, to do everything possible to ensure a safe election. He also called upon the “enemies of Afghanistan” to take part in the elections. However, many in the West doubt whether local authorities will be capable of providing security.
Karzai’s decision is a signal to critics at home and abroad. Under pressure at home for being Washington’s puppet, the president is looking for ways to distinguish himself. After fatal mistakes were made during NATO bombing attacks on supposed Taliban camps, Karzai was quick to level sharp criticism at the West. It was so sharp, in fact, that last fall then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued an unmistakable warning: Unless Karzai’s criticism stopped, the United States would end its cooperative relationship with him.
“There Are Plenty of Qualified Afghans”
“I will not be silent, and I will not stop promoting the interests of my people and their children,” Karzai allegedly fired back — at least according to the version his palace broadcast. But the criticism did not stop when a new administration came into power in Washington. On the contrary, President Barack Obama has, in fact, identified Afghanistan as a priority more clearly than his predecessor did, no matter who is in office in Kabul.
Quantcast
U.S. statements in recent weeks sounded practically like Karzai’s notice of termination. For example, when U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke was asked whether the Obama administration even supports Karzai anymore, he replied: “There are plenty of qualified, impressive Afghans in the country.” Obama had been in office for several weeks before he called his new counterpart in Afghan. Bush, on the other hand, had conferred with Karzai every week.
The opposition is already taking shape in Afghanistan. Former Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali is one of Karzai’s possible challengers in an election. Karzai had removed the 68-year-old politician from his position after Jalali took legal action against the Karzai family for its alleged involvement in the drug trade. Jalali, who was often in the United States in recent months, has strong connections to the conservative camp and is claiming the role of the clean candidate for himself.
There are rumors that another man is the current favorite in the United States. Ashraf Ghani, like Jalali, holds a U.S. passport. He was an adviser at the World Bank and later served in Karzai’s cabinet as finance minister. Even though Ghani himself is suspected of involvement in nepotism, he could become Washington’s new man. Minor flaws haven’t deterred the Americans in the past. Other possible candidates are the governor of Nangahar Province and Interior Minister Mohammed Atmar.
Secret Pacts With Taliban Leaders?
But all of these candidates will not stand much of a chance if Karzai succeeds in his push for early elections. With Karzai’s envisioned election day less than two months away, none of them would have enough time to gain sufficient name recognition in the country, not even with U.S. support. This, too, is likely to have prompted Karzai to issue his decree. Whether or not the elections actually take place in accordance with constitutional rules, Karzai now enjoys an advantage.
Karzai’s sudden fondness for the constitution seems implausible, especially after the many times the president has allowed the constitution to be breached when it suited him. One of the best examples regards Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta. Even though the politician, who lived in Germany for many years, was voted out of office by the parliament several times, Karzai kept him in his position. In Spanta’s case, the constitution was merely an impediment.
Only a fool would bet on the outcome of this race, but it is already clear that Karzai will not go without a fight. He is believed to have concluded various pacts throughout the winter with high-ranking Taliban officials and tribal leaders in the south to secure him a majority of votes. No matter how big a role U.S. support and U.N. money play, a president still has to be elected, even in Afghanistan.
btw stan – hat tip for the potato barrel concept, nina and i will be trying this out in our community garden plot this spring
2 March 2009, 3:11 pmGlenn Lewis:
In the face of monetary and social turmoil, won’t the powers-that-be need to exercise control. This is their world paradigm and they have demonstrated that they will not give-up their positions, even if it kills the rest of us. They will ramp-up political and martial law over a multitude of disillusioned self-interest groups.
2 March 2009, 7:52 pmThe question I have is to what extent they will go. Will they allow us the freedom to enjoy our cabbage patches and potato barrels? If we don’t have money will the state feel the need to license our alternative means of survival. Will they tithe our goods and barter? Will there be a new vows of allegiance with a greater compulsion to comply?
Jonathan:
Re Stan:
I am looking into trying a potato tower this year as well. I’ve heard that problems can arise if you use manure (which is what is recommended filling the tower with) that is too fresh or in the case of horse manure if it is mixed in with a lot of sawdust. I am hoping that compost from last season’s pile will work as filler. I haven’t delved into actual construction yet.
How big of a plot of beans are you doing? Someone gave me a bunch of bush beans (like 20-25 lbs!) last year that I couldn’t possibly use in the space I have and I’d be happy to send a bunch your way if you are interested. They are Contender and Kentucky Wonder Bush.
Consider getting a pack of legume innoculant to coat any beans or other nitrogen fixers you plant. This will insure that the specific kind of bacteria that form the symbiotic relationship with beans (and other nitrogen fixers) colonize their roots, forming little nodules. Most garden centers seem to carry it now. (it has been shown to increase yields as well)
[For those who aren't familiar its the bacteria that fix the atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can use. They do this in exchange for sugars from the legume roots. Fascinating stuff... a good illustration of how cooperation is more often than not a bigger force in nature than competition.]
Do you transplant your peas from your cold frame to your garden or just grow them in the frame?
2 March 2009, 7:58 pmVJP:
You can grow potatoes on top of the ground; just cover with mulch. [if you have the space]. You can grow another crop on top.
2 March 2009, 8:09 pmI presume you’ve looked into French intensive gardening?
For improving the soil in NC [the absolute worst, of the 4 states I've lived in], nothing beats crimson clover. You have a small window in the fall to plant, in October.
Viv
DeAnander:
I will be trying out the used-tyre theory of potato barrels this year.
you stack used car tyres 3 or 4 deep (starting more like 1 or 2 deep, then adding more as you mound straw and manure over the plants as they grow). the theory is that they stay warm and get an early start in the Spring. I’ll report back later on how well the tyre idea works out in practise.
my favourite beans are favas — hard to kill, good to eat, good flowers for bees, and lots of biomass for compost. they are cold-hardy as well — what’s not to like eh?
we just had a foot of snow in one night, followed by a week of unstable rain/hail/gales weather, which has delayed my own garden plans a bit.
2 March 2009, 11:50 pmStan:
Thanks Jonathan, Viv, and De. I did crimson clover in my cantaloupe patch year vefore last, and last summer had a plot full of yellow-green bowling balls by August. CC is magic; but it’s hard to find. I finally found a farm supply place in Cary that had it.
My sunny space is veeeerrrry small, so I have to think hard on where to plant what. Potatoes interest me because of what cluborlov’s article implies: good staple, stores well, high-density nutrition. Cooked last night’s potatoes by quartering them, sloshing them around in a mix of coarse salt, Texas Pete, cinammon basil, paprika, and olive oil — broiled for 20 minutes cut sides up– rebrushed with olive oil and plastered crumbs of parmesan cheese on — rebroiled until the cheese crisped up. Nice aromatic, salty (I’m a salt-lover) finger food that steams when you bite it open.
Viv, did you say you have to plant them in October? I can’t plant them now? ):
And what’s the best starter… any potato that is growing sprouts, or should I seek out a good variety at a nursery?
3 March 2009, 6:46 amBruce F:
Hi Stan,
I’ve been thinking about doing the same, so I’ve got some links to pass on. Here’s a nice one on how to make a “SPUD” box -
http://ft2garden.powweb.com/sinfonian/?page_id=12
Specifics on what types of seed potatoes to buy –
http://growingtaste.com/vegetables/potato.shtml
Do you know Nance Klehm? I met her recently here in Chicago, and while I only know you from your site, she seems to be of a like mind.
http://spontaneousvegetation.net/projects/
3 March 2009, 2:40 pmMichael Anderson:
Have planted potato(e)s as an experiment just using old potatos from a bag that had sprouted (I believe they were Yuukon Golds). Planted them in a flower planter that was tacked on the front of the house (north side, on a hill) we were living in, and seemed to work just fine. If you’re in an area where deer are, make sure you construct some kind of cover—the buggers will eat anything! We’re thinking about trying the 55 gallon barrels that food oils and sauces come in, cut in half, when we get started down on the coast this summer. Tires are not appealing to me, for the reason that I would wager that by-products of the tire itself (sulphur mixed with other bonding chemicals in the tire-making process) could leach out into the crop. This may be relative, but I think that whatever leaches out of a food oil barrel would be much less.
Watch that salt, Stan….you and I are both of an age where we need to (exercise or not!).
Thanks…
3 March 2009, 4:18 pmSam:
Don’t forget sprouts, people. Adds lots of nutrition to seeds and beans and lentils, as well as volume. One pound of beans gives a lot more sprouts and a lot more nutrition. Just store the beans and seeds properly.
See:
http://www.sproutpeople.com
3 March 2009, 7:31 pmStan:
Back on the depressing thread (no pun intended), Doug Noland’s Credit Bubble Bulletin at AT this week lays out the sheer mind-boggling scope of this disaster. Yesterday the Dow dropped into the 6000′s, from its stratospheric highs a year ago, taking the relative losses in speculative markets past the crash of 1929.
Obama told people to “look for bargains” in the stock market.
The scale of cluelessness by the powers about what is happening right now in nearly incomprehensible; and the prescience of the Kassandras like Mark Jones and Peter Gowan and Susan Strange appears almost eerie.
We have no theory of money that takes into account its fragility as a mere sign… we see it as some constant, not paper backed by arms and blind faith. I said several years ago that the left’s idotic phrasemongering about “money for people and not for war” was every bit as manipulative, dishonest, and bewildering of the masses as the capitalist hoodoo that “money grows.” The dollar is now being terminally evacuated at great risk of hyperinflation in a hapless attempt to reflate a bubble.
Buckle your seatbelts. And tell your children that their lives will be harder and harsher than they ever imagined.
4 March 2009, 6:11 amMichael Anderson:
Addressing this topic, specifically the last line….I think that those of us who can, should encourage and help to facilitate our kids to emigrate. It may not ensure them a prosperous future, relative to what we have known here, but it may give them a more peaceful one. My daughter is an Australian citizen now (her Mum was), and I think that they may have a better go of it Down Under—Nouriel Roubini has a better prognosis for them, which concurred with my own intuition.
I felt this way back before I knew about Peak Oil or FTW—-the handwriting was on the wall when Reagan was elected, although I couldn’t discern too many specifics at the time, due to my ignorance and willingness to believe that somehow, it might be alright. And, hey, we still had cheap gas! In any case, geography will have the last laugh, as far as commerce and energy flows. Not to say that there won’t be problems wherever you are, but I think that here in North America, as Dylan put it, “…a hard rain’s gonna fall.”
4 March 2009, 3:44 pmld:
Stan, it is interesting to witness your returning to some of the big themes that have been missing, or to put it perhaps more accurately, submerged in your more recent writing. That you have indeed effaced these themes is proven by the fact that many newer recruits to Feral Scholar are now expressing their surprise at the depths of your (for lack of a better term) apocalypticism. But as is sometimes your wont, you engage in theoretical overreach and get some basic facts wrong.
Yes, the US stock market, artifically pumped to grotesque excess by financial engineering, is now in deflationary free fall. But so are stock markets all around the world, in other core and upstart capitalist centers, since they too were locked into the globe-encircling system of US debtor imperialism. The ongoing crash of the Dow Jones is just part and parcel of a much larger devaluation of fictitious values, and (for the time being at least) does not represent the end of dollar hegemony or US primacy or any of that, not just yet. After all, in the wake of the systemic crisis the greenback has actually appreciated, since the other metropoles and would-be metropoles are equally contaminated by the crisis, with failing banks and collapsing export markets and no propensity to act concertedly to erect an alternative to dollar hegemony.
Now, you might rejoin that none of this is really that germane, in the face of the biospheric limits to continued accumulation that you outline here, and by gosh I’m not inclined to disagree with you on that score. But that does not excuse shoehorning others into the role of fellow travelers when the shoe really doesn’t fit. Take your calling Gowan a “Kassandra,” for example. He has dissected the modes of US financial power very effectively but not once have I understood him to say that US geo-primacy is on its last legs or that the global capitalist order is unraveling. Moreover, I have met Gowan, he is a pleasant enough chap but essentially a left parlor intellectual
4 March 2009, 11:25 pmwith elbow patches on his tweed jacket, hardly the sort of guy who has a long range plan for permaculture lifeboats. Sometimes you just play too loose and fast with words and concepts, which may make for colorful reading but in fact does more harm than good because it muddles clear thought.
Stan:
Gowan’s work is available as a link on this site for anyone who wants to read it. But your logic is unshakable… anyone who dressed funny and a “parlor intellectual” sure enough means that we needn’t take him very seriously.
Gowan’s (and Strange’s) description of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, laid out in The Globalization Gamble, may not be explicit in projecting consequences (this would not be consistent with the tone of the work), but its extrapolation from the description of the Asian fianancial crisis onto the global stage (in the title, I might add) is pretty unmistakable. His subtitle includes the word “Faustian,” after all; and his core thesis is that there is a political power game being played out by Washington using a venomous snake named “economics” as a costume. His whole point is that the snake will by-and-by bite the poseurs who are wearing it.
In his NLR article last month, Gowan said:
“Blow-out.” “Faustian.” “Gamble.”
He also points out that these dynamics are “overdetermined,” as we parlor intellectuals like to say. That is, dollar hegemony (Henry Liu’s term) will not fail or succeed on its own; but will be part of the larger dynamic within which it is imbricated (a global dynamic that includes everything from French trucker strikes to firefights along the border with Balochistan to Chinese investment in Africa. And as Hudon points out in the article Charles linked, the Washington pony only knows one trick.
Big themes, indeed, and none of that girlie-girl preoccupation with relationships, community, or gardens… those couldn’t possibly be connected to any of this. Gowan might be more to some’s liking, because he is clearly still committed to the idea that the “primary contradiction” is labor-capital (which has always been a fertile standpoint, but one that remains myopic about its own fetishism of the industrial… that doesn’t mean he can’t be right as far as he goes).
As to your second paragraph, I don’t disagree with what you’ve said there… and don’t think I have in the past. Quite the ocntrary. I’d simply echo your own words with regard to this transient appreciation of the dollar (as the Dow-index dips into the 6000s… a fever is not malaria, but it is one of the symptoms); those words being “not yet.”
Still overreaching.
5 March 2009, 6:39 amld:
Stan, thanks for making the strenuous effort to engage with my post. I discern that your time is scarce, so I really appreciate your sacrifice. Perhaps I goaded you a bit with an overly aggressive and snide commentary, but let me preface this follow-up message by saying that over the years I have found your analyses to be incredibly thought-provoking and influential, especially your insights about the social thermodynamics of imperialism… so when I provoke you to defend or extend upon your ideas, it is with tremendous respect and appreciation for all you have taught me, going way back to the ancient days of the A-List. (Oh, for the days of the A-List, what a resource that would be now.)
Now, let me clarify my intentions, lest you continue to misinterpret me. I was decidedly NOT trying to undermine the force of Gowan’s claims by implying that he is an “out of touch” mandarin, as you seem to think. I AGREE entirely that his ruminations on the Dollar Wall Street Regime were and are incredibly useful, and nothing in my initial post should have indicated otherwise. Rather, I was taking issue with your breathless style of narrative, whereby you invoke his name in a stream of consciousness exercise, implying that there is a direct line between his insights and your eco-localist program, with some kind of shared sense of apocalyptic necessity being the common link. But as far as I am concerned it is preposterous to make a passing reference to his authority in service of a political line he would barely recognize, much less support. Believe me, he is not the sort of person who is bothered by a nagging voice inside his head which
intones, “global disaccumulation PLUS peak hydrocarbons PLUS climate forcing PLUS metropolitan decay EQUALS giving up my precarious middle class comforts for the risky venture of local self-sufficiency,” nor is there anything in his oeuvre which reasonably leads to such conclusions. Yes, I realize that you just pointed out that Gowan does not have to be completely on the same page as you for you or anyone else to critically appropriate his valuable insights. I suppose what I was trying to do (and apparently failing to do) was to object to this tendency of yours to let shorthand metaphors and alarmist rhetoric stand in for intellectual rigor. But given the constraints of time-pressed blogging, perhaps I demand too much. It’s just that you set a very high standard in the past and I’m aching for more of that good stuff.
As far as my deployment of the “big theme” phrase goes, perhaps it contains an unfortunately gendered element, but in no way was I hinting in a big swaggering male way that Feral Scholar’s ongoing concern with the micropolitics of building small-scale networks, working toward community self-provisioning, and so on was sissy stuff unworthy of a rrrrrrreal rrrrrrrevolutionary preoccupied with massive structures. Far from it, I am a long-time anarcho-commie and I share your conviction that evolving material realities will necessitate this direction, and in fact your own passionate observations and philosophizing have played no small role in reinforcing this conviction.
Finally, turning to more substantive matters, I concur with your echoing of my “not yet” remark. Yes, US dominance, in other words US financial-military dominance, is inevitably on its way out, the question is how quickly and with what to follow. Right now, for better or worse, there is no immediate replacement on the horizon. The class reproduction of capitalist elites in the secondary powers has been so wedded to US debtor imperialism, they are now simply coping with the collateral damage of the catastrophic unwinding of this system, with no alternative hegemonic project in the works. Just to moot a thought, it is a total pipe dream to propose that the Chinese and Japanese ruling classes, so enslaved to subsidizing US primacy, can bury the hatchet and orchestrate genuine cooperation. (In the NLR piece you reference, Gowan says as much!)
But I believe you and I agree on one thing, if nothing else – the issue of hegemonic succession, in the end, is irrelevant. The geo-historical epoch of capitalist growth is nearing its finality. And that’s why you correctly recommend tending gardens.
5 March 2009, 12:54 pmStan:
Apologies for any misinterpretation, and your assessment of my time is correct… moreover, I am coming down with some flu-like nastiness. Marx to Gowan and all points in between… having an good analysis does not seem to have a one-to-one correspondence to divinations of the future, eg, a Japanese-Chinese condominium or the generalized liberatory role of the international proletariat. The crash prediction (the A-List was preceded by the Crashlist) was not a matter of guesswork, however, as you know. It was fourth-grade mathematics, as is the energy-peak thesis. As we say down this way, you can’t make chicken-salad out of chicken-shit… even though economists and technological optimists seem to believe we still can.
5 March 2009, 5:20 pmVJP:
Stan, crimson clover is available at Southern States. It won’t grow in our hot summers, but I believe you can plant rye grass right now. I’m rather rusty on the gardening–I live in the woods, beautiful but no sun and as dependent as if I lived in the city.
If you have room, asparagus is a *perennial* and tolerates some shade. You can plant edible pod peas or greens on top. I do this, and have mustard greens in planters on the deck.
Italian dandelion is a short lived perennial here too, and French sorrel is a very hardy perennial. I’ve learned to love the greens.
Don’t forget flowers for the pollinators. I have some to share if you’d like.
I always have 20lb. of rice in my refrigerator, after watching “End of Suburbia” years ago. I watched it again recently and thought “oh, we’re *there*”.
Btw, I’m first generation American–my mother was a “war bride”– and am in the process of applying for dual citizenship, for my adult children’s sake. They’ll have to come up with their own courage/wisdom.
6 March 2009, 10:36 amStan:
Hey Viv. Thanks. I had success last year with CC, which I finally buried in sheet mulch as green manure. It got to be about three feet tall, and was actually decorative. Hope to bump into you soon. Have you (or anyone) heard of an Australian nitrogen-fixer (peas, or pea flowers, or something like that) that is ground cover… and salad greens? There are canning, freezing, and drying workshops in Raleigh this summer, and Bountiful Backyards in Durham continues to put on great self-suffficiency workshops. Sherry just hauled back three well-injected mushrooom logs this past weekend…. shitake omelets all next year! (I just have to get chickens.)
On another note:
FULL
17 March 2009, 5:05 amJim:
Five Reasons Why Americans Won’t Resist
By Mickey Z.
March 24, 2009 “Information Clearing House” — Protest (American, definitely not a verb): Wait for UFPJ or ANSWER to stage a parade (I mean, demonstration) on a weekend afternoon so no one misses work or school or in any way disrupts the flow of commerce. Don’t make a sign; the organizers will make one for you. March in an orderly fashion, be polite to the occupying army (I mean, cops), and be sure to stay in designated free speech zones. Blame the Republicans. Wear costumes. Make puppets. Exclude anarchists. Hold a candlelight vigil. Sign a petition. Chant. Vote for a Democrat and hope for change. Need I continue?
With the stakes never higher than they are now, why aren’t activists ramping up the pressure and looking beyond tactics that are allowed by those in power?
Here are my five guesses:
1. We are trained to believe that nothing major is wrong. Global warming? Economic meltdown? Epidemics of preventable diseases? Slavery, genocide, ecocide? You name it and we’re ready to downplay it. We’re Americans, goddammit, we’ll figure out a way to fix it. When the going gets tough, we’ll call the experts.
2. We are trained to leave it to experts. Rather than worry our little heads over why more than 100 plant and animal species go extinct each day, we rely on experts. Instead of learning what a “collateralized-debt obligation” is and how it contributed to the current economic depression, just let the professionals handle the mess. Besides, such delegation frees up much more time to watch TV and update our Facebook pages.
3. We are trained to embrace non-violence. All the real heroes would never raise a fist in anger: Jesus, MLK, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc. Sure, the government and its corporate owners are taking away all our rights and all our money. They’re poisoning our air, water, and food while crafting laws that make prison a looming possibility, but the moment we contemplate anything more than a non-violent response, we become worse than any of them. Ain’t that right?
4. We feel too damn privileged to risk prison (or worse). The average Gaza resident doesn’t have the luxury of wondering if their resistance could result in arrest and thus perhaps ruin their reputation. The average American? Well, that’s a different story. I can’t defy insane laws designed to squash protest. I might get arrested and that means close proximity to all those scary criminals and it also means hurting my chances of landing a good job and maybe even losing all my respectable friends. I mean, I’m an activist and all but that’s asking way too much. Who do you think I am, Mandela?
5. We’re fuckin’ cowards. Our acquiescence in a disturbingly broad range of areas—access to health care, tolerance for voting irregularities, directly funding the Israeli war machine, stomaching the groupthink behind saluting a flag, etc. etc. etc.—appears to have no limits. Americans love to talk the talk about being fearless and tough but when ordered to remove our shoes before going through airport security, it’s “yes sir” all the way.
We know things have passed the proverbial tipping point and that immediate action is 100% needed and justified, but we’re far too spineless to do anything that might get us in trouble. Somehow, it’s more terrifying for any of us to face down a cop than it is to contemplate the total destruction of our earthly eco-system.
If it’s true that action expresses priorities, we American activists aren’t overly concerned about the future.
24 March 2009, 3:19 pmld:
On the one hand Mickey D has a point. Yes, USians are embalmed in a soporific stupor. On the other hand what he recommends is just macho more-radical-than-thou-ism, and it’s ultra-voluntarist as well. There are embedded historical reasons why a million French “man” (sorry, gendered verb) the barricades, and why USians sigh and plunk down before the boob tube. It is wishful thinking to expect bold USians to overcome the “collective action” problem (sorry, mainstream sociology speak) when no one else is and pay the costs for it. Frankly, this is why Feral Scholar/Insurgent American’s long-range plan of action makes a lot of sense. Not only does it recognize that industrial accumulation/centralized state instituions are going down, although in fits and starts and trans-generationally, it also recognizes that the self-sufficiency vibe actually speaks to some long-suppressed aspects of the USian credo, wheres frontal attacks on capital and government bureaucracies don’t, with the expection of a few, glorious, but fleeting episodes in US history (that have as much to so with the lifeworlds of relatively unassimilated European radicals as anything else).
25 March 2009, 8:13 amld:
Sorry, typos galore…
instituions=institutions
wheres=whereas
expection=exception
as much to so=as much to do
One glass of cabernet too many!
25 March 2009, 9:12 amOmahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Hi Stan,
I hope you are well and keeping on keeping on. I’ll be going back to China to the 16th Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Kunming in July with eight Indigenous scholars to do a workshop entitled “Indigenous Epistemology and Scientific Method: Some Parallels and Contrasts With Neoclassical Theory, Complexity Theory and Dialectical-Historical Materialism.” We will be discussing how the conventional paradigms like Neoclassical Economics, still taught in the universities and textbooks, that focus on ultimate independent and dependent variables and linear/unidirectional causality, and significantly involved in the current global crises, were efffectively challenged, as they are being challenged now by Complexity Theory and the like, by Indigenous approaches to science and epistemology; in short, a lot of what is new ain’t true and a lot of what is true ain’t new. A new Archeological find in southern Alberta near my Rez is a 5000 year old Stonehenge and advanced astronomical system as reliable as the Mayan Calendar that had an error rate of 2 hours every 500 years;
See http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/front/article/556218
I hope you are finding some peace after all the dues you have paid.
keep the faith,
Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
27 March 2009, 9:01 amMichael Anderson:
Obmma’s war(s) and economic programs may fail, but it seems that “perception management” may be working, according to WaPo this A.M. I also realize that the Post is heavily involved in this campaign, too.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033003415.html
The process of affixing blame will be cathartic for many Americans on hard times. Obama’s boyz are definitely pros at this. The more history I read about the Democrats since Roosevelt (Teddy), the more (grudging) respect I have for their powers of manipulation.
But…I’ll love to see what happens when March’s unemployment figures come out…
31 March 2009, 4:02 pmJim:
“…just macho more-radical-than-thou-ism, and it’s ultra-voluntarist as well.”
Any other cutting edge, politically correct, sociological, rationalized cop-outs you’d care to add? I think you just made Mickey’s point brilliantly.
“It is wishful thinking to expect bold USians to overcome the “collective action” problem (sorry, mainstream sociology speak) when no one else is and pay the costs for it.”
I don’t think he expect Americans (“USians?”…please!) to do anything other than bleat. That’s partly his point.
1 April 2009, 2:15 pm