Service sector shrinks

Article from Reuters. That this would be a surprise to anyone defies all common sense.

Entering the 20th century, the vast majority of Americans were employed in food production. Our resources were vast, and required a lot of hands to make the food we eat. Industry came, and with it, both higher paying jobs making cars (and other things). Fortunately, that same technological advance brought automation to the farm, freeing up a lot of those previously food-producing hands to go look for work in the factories in the big cities.

When foreign competition killed our steel and automotive industries, we started using the computers the industrial revolution made possible to create and sell “information.” The ridiculously cheap oil supplies we enjoyed (thanks to our “friendship” with oil sheiks in the ME) allowed us to create huge constellations of suburbs with their accompanying fast food franchises and big box stores, and sell things to each other, soaking up the enormous tidal waves of cash created by an army of manipulators of the economy.

America now has an economy that can be reduced in metaphor to a village of people who pay each other to do each others laundry. As long as some outside entity keeps sending checks to the villagers, it all works. But the many trouble-chickens coming home to roost in the U.S. right now are drying up the resources of that outside entity and the money is stopping.

What you are seeing right now in America, as we celebrate the birthday of this glorious Republic, is that we’re starting to do our own laundry. And so are our former customers, our neighbors.

And that’s a problem.

America has one chance

And his name is Ron Paul

Dr. Paul smells something big happening, and is entering a statement about it into the Congressional Record. When the history of the early 21st century is read a hundred years from now by my descendents, I sincerely hope they are reading the inspirational story of how the ideas of Dr. Ron Paul saved this nation and the liberty of her citizens. I don’t believe those children will be reading about an evil Bush family who plotted to steal those freedoms from us, but rather a greedy and bungling clan who misused the trust a nation placed in them to put us all in a very, very difficult place.

I’d be happy if there were no villains in the story, just heroes and dolts.

On November 4th, please write-in Ron Paul for President.

We cannot afford the inexperience of Obama or the ignorance of McCain. It’s too critical a time for our Republic, and many, including myself, see it coming to bad end if things don’t change for the better very, very soon.

Ron Paul for President. He’s withdrawn from the race, but not from the revolution.

WhatComesNext.net stands with Dr. Paul.

Unstable Food Supplies

There are a number of factors that effect Americans’ daily lives becoming unstable and the near future is becoming more and more unclear. Peak Oil is starting to have its predicted effect on the everyday, and I’m not just talking about $4 plus at the pump.

I’m talking about food.

As many have been lecturing us for a long time, we are a civilization made possible by cheap petroleum. I was listening to the PTB’s apologist/chief spinologist Rush Limbaugh a few days ago as he was attacking Obama’s statement about “failed policies of the past,” translating in the way only el-Rushbo can, saying that the Democrat’s nominee is calling the development of petroleum a “failed policy.” Once again, Limbaugh evades the point. The failed policy isn’t the development of petroleum, but rather the continued reliance on cheap petroleum as the foundation of our civilization. Rush is wrong when he says that America was built on petroleum. It was built on cheap petroleum, and our failure to wean ourselves from the stuff and use our great ingenuity and the wealth that temporarily inexpensive resource made possible, is indeed a “failed policy.” (ed note: I used to be a Rush Limbaugh fan. I’m a basically conservative American who feels that Limbaugh and the Republican Party no longer speaks for me)

Most people think that petroleum only goes in your car’s gas tank and oil reservoir. That’s only the beginning. Cheap petroleum is the very foundation of the cheap consumer culture that is most garish in the Wal-Mart, Costco and Sam’s Club culture. From the packaging to the physical store construction to the semi-trailered transportation system, everything you see stocking the 3 storied Sam’s Club warehouse is made possible at ridiculously low prices by…You guessed it, cheap oil.

But that ship is sailing. Fast.

There have already been spot shortages of staples, and as the long, hot summer continues into fall, I predict we’re going to see more and more of that. Prices are already climbing, and that’s only going to accelerate. It’s going to be along time, if ever, until prices are at the level they were a couple years ago again. Sadly, or maybe predictbly, the biggest factor in this equation working against us, is the fact that the people running things – baby boomers – have never experienced shortages, scarcity or anything resembling what their parents lived through in their younger years. And the generation who lived adult life in the Depression? Those of them left are 100 years old. There aren’t many of those still around and writing of their experiences and sounding warnings about today, which is why even though the smart ones among us can show us charts and equations and historical parallels, few are listening to them.

We’d better start. Shortages are coming. You may experience difficulties in finding food to buy at any price. I can’t repeat this enough. The era of cheap oil, and the bounty it has delivered to us is over. Get used to it, if you can.

The Message Finally Getting Through?

Nine Meals From Anarchy is the article on the website of the Daily Mail today. It’s a look by a mainstream news organization at the many levels of trouble rising oil prices will force on us. Though the article discusses the Britain’s perspective on the problem, the same economic catastrophe is bearing down on us in the U.S. right now. Maybe even more difficult.

Britain is a smaller company geographically, with a well-developed system of public transportation. Americans have no such system. The article on Mail Online however, is about food transportation, not about public transportation. A great bus and rail system doesn’t mean a thing if there’s no food.

If the trucks stopped moving, we’d start to worry and we’d head out to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We’d be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol.

What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn’t stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?

There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won’t go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out.

If only these problems had been taken seriously several years ago, when only the “cranks” and “conspiracy nuts” were talking about Peak Oil and the trouble we’ve created along with our society’s cheap oil foundation.

If only.

The World Faces Food Shortages

If anyone doubts that a shift in the way Americans live is underway, they only have to open up their browser and search, not among the Cassandra-like websites that inhabit the fringes of the net (a region I’m proud to say that WhatComesNext.net lives in, by the way), but the main body of the “respectable” internet.

For instance, searching Google News for “food shortages” leads to a wealth of articles from hundreds of news souces, including Time, US News & World Report, The Telegraph (UK), and on and on. This is a real and fast-developing situation.

The Third World has been battling this issue for a long time, but mainstream America has, for the most part, deemed it a problem “over there” rather than one “right here, right now.” That is changing. Searching Google News for “food shortages in America” leads to a significant package of stories as well.

George Ure’s fine site Urban Survival discusses this again this morning, part of a continuing focus his site’s had recently on food shortages and food riots around the world. Rice shortages at Wal-Mart and Costco are troubling. As Ure notes, even a Wall Street Journal columnist is advising Americans to stock up and store food. It’s one thing when Mormon conservative newsletter publisher Howard Ruff advises stocking up, but another thing entirely when a Wall Street Journal writer suggests it.

Sure, the approaches are different. Sure, the WSJ column is about buying relative ly cheap food today so you don’t have to buy more expensive foodstuffs later and Ruff has been predicting “the coming bad times” since the 70s, evoking imagery that could include violence and some degree of social breakdown

What is especially troubling, is that in the past when writers and analysts who predicted coming economic crashes and severe shortages of important resources, they did so at a time when Peak Oil was coming not here.

And that’s what has changed. The era of cheap oil is over, which means the era of cheap anything is over. It’s time to realize that and take steps to protect yourself and your family.