Perhaps someone can come up with a more favorable scenario wtih respect to how land is treated. I could think of less favorable ones as well - just taking the land without compensation; or trumping up charges to jail the landowner. We take property rights for granted. I hope we can continue to do so in the future.
We take property rights for granted. I hope we can continue to do so in the future.
You are spot on here, Gail. Most of us forget just how fundamental property rights are to our modern way of life. Indeed, it was property rights that were at the center of the foundation of the modern day nation states.
The maintenance of property rights is entirely dependent on the existence of a legitimate authority to enforce them.
I must confess, however, that I am not as big a fan of property rights as they currently exist as you are. I would like to see a collapse in the belief in private property and the rise of communal rights of appropriate use without ownership.
Defining property and property rights will be fundamental to the shape of the world we create post oil.
Imagine going back to hand picking cotton to feel the disconnect.
IMHO Government will not be buying farmland.
And it seems you're implying the Soviet Collective
as well as Stalin making war on the Kulaks over
"hoarding".
There are so many variables here.
Think electric submersible wells-
"We have 12-inch wells with pumps set 80 to 100 feet deep and pump 1,200 gallons per minute."
W/O AC these wells are useless.
How cities react to this year's lack of wheat
and the fight over eliminating US Farm Subsidies
this Winter will go a long way in foretelling.
The International Grains Council reduced its forecasts for global and Australian wheat production substantially on Thurday. The ICG cut its global wheat production forecast from from 607m tonnes to just 601m tonnes and slashed its estimate for Australian output to 13.5m tons. This is 2m tonnes below the most recent forecast from the Australian government and 9m tonnes lower than last month’s estimate by the ICG.
Wheat stocks for the five largest global exporters are forecast to fall to a 34-year low of 25m tonnes.
Pumps are not difficult to keep operating. Diesel engines can be replaced by electric motors. Stationary devices are generally easier to keep working than mobile devices because you can run electric wires to stationary devices.
We in the United States expect the rule of the law to be in effect. Yes, even with the poison from the disloyal Christian Right spreading through the system at high levels we groundlings still have some deeply ingrained expectations.
Reading and responding here is about changing one's expectations and I often see people arguing one point or another, yet holding many other implicit assumptions steady. This is the first time I've seen the long term viability of the rule of the law called into question. I think this going out from under us is going to be as big a change as the end to our expectation of cheap energy. A quarter of the population, those with that authoritarian personality, will simply go along with whatever new system evolves (heh, evolution), but the rest ... we are the descendants of those who wouldn't put up with it, now aren't we?
The possibility of descent into feudalism pops up here and there in conversations, but the mechanics of that are that a landed elite provides a measure of security and stability in a given geographic area. Those who are the financial elite today may have some of the tools in today's terms to set up such a thing, but if they don't have the foresight to do it now don't imagine they'll rise to the top after an implosion. The skills needed to move funny money around to one's advantage don't translate into those needed for ruling a fiefdom from horseback.
Ask this question of those here who dwell in rural areas now - "What structure will your government have when the federal level collapses and the state is constrained by expensive fuel and low revenues?"
"The skills needed to move funny money around to one's advantage don't translate into those needed for ruling a fiefdom from horseback.
Ask this question of those here who dwell in rural areas now - "What structure will your government have when the federal level collapses and the state is constrained by expensive fuel and low revenuues."
Exactly what I've been studying
since '78.
I've got stories of "coupons" issued to the Mercantile.
Panic of '07, Going to Memphis, scavenging Trolley car change
to complete land deals.
Whoever can get the crops grown and out to the mills
will be take over.
What structure? Martial "law". Blackwater. Petraeus' divided communities. Travel restrictions. Probably all sorts of stuff done under misnomer of "public health emergency".
It does seem like Iraq is a good picture of one future possibility for the USA. Lots of angry people with guns just shooting each other without much discernable structure to the mayhem. Worst of all the government!
This is the first time I've seen the long term viability of the rule of the law called into question.
No, its been questioned before. One poster (who never came back) was asking for e-mails so s/he would have a list of names to start a revolution, and the occasional 'I'm gonna go into the woods, forage for food and you all will die' posters.
I have no doubt there will be rule of law - I just doubt what the law will BE. Oh, and how much short brown sticky end of the stick will I be grabb'n.
Sacred: The rule of law usually applies in the USA, but not always. During Katrina, a group of Canadian tourists were staying at an upscale hotel. The hotel hired a bus to transport them out of harm's way. The bus was stopped by local police (at gunpoint) and the tourists were forced off the bus (they didn't know what the local police did with the bus). They huddled together on a street in New Orleans overnight-can't remember what happened to them after that but IMHO this was a preview of what parts of the USA will be like when TSHF.
Perhaps someone can come up with a more favorable scenario wtih respect to how land is treated. I could think of less favorable ones as well - just taking the land without compensation; or trumping up charges to jail the landowner. We take property rights for granted. I hope we can continue to do so in the future.
One problem is that we have become accustomed to thinking of land with a mortgage as 'our' land, and I imagine that most land, both residential and farm, has some kind of lien against it. This
story in the NY Times gives some chilling stories about how lenders can jerk you around and not only take 'your' land but destroy your livelihood.
Even if you own your land free of lender liens, there are always property taxes. At least there is the possibility here of taxpayers joining together and using the ballot box to keep the taxes from going too outrageous.
I don't want to sound insensitive, and I certainly have no love for the giant mortgage corporations, but the people in the article have no one to blame but themselves.
Jane bought her house for $298k in 1998. In 2006 her principal was up to $442k!!! By this time she had an interest rate of 11% with payments of $5200/month. No wonder she couldn't afford the house! Accrued interest and penalties add up really quickly at 11%! Is it Countrywide's fault she didn't pay?
Zena lost her job and had to take a new one paying 50% less. Yet it's Countrywide's fault that she refinanced to an interest only loan at 10.9% and now has only $600/month after she makes her mortgage payment?
I just wanted to point out that on an individual level, you are right, but on a national level you are not. This is a broad observation, not a personal attack against you. I just hear moral recommendations bandied about all the time as if they are a solution. One of my good friends from college used to say "If everyone just behaved like me there wouldn't be any problem." True, so true it isn't even worth mentioning.
It's Jane's problem to the extent that she is going to lose her house and her credit rating.
It's Countrywide's problem to the extent that they aren't getting paid.
Both Jane and the bank should have made better choices. As far a Jane and the bank are concerned the moral: Live within your means. makes a lot of sense.
But, multiply that by millions:
It's the nation's problem to the extent that there are bankrupt people and a collapsed financial system.
Now it is no longer a moral question of individual actions. It is a society wide question of systems and organization.
As an example: Kids in inner city schools.
Growing up on the low end of the financial spectrum in an underfunded inner city school means that little Johnny has to work extra hard to get good grades to get a scholarship in order to afford college. Little Johnny has been told this several times. If he goes to jail in a decade for dealing drugs, it will be because he made a poor choice.
But, the state has to have a prison to put him in. It has to be built before he gets arrested, so the state sends someone to the inner city school. He takes a look around. He makes notes about the average income, quality of education, social cohesion, etc. And he tells the state how many prisons they are going to need in ten years.
The state planner makes this recommendation based on very accurate statistical model (called a bell curve) and it work something like this: Most people are average, some are above and some are below.
Given the circumstances here at this inner city school he expects very little to come of the average person, he expects the below average ones to go to jail and the above average ones to escape to something else.
Little Johnny is going to be average. His children are going to go to the same school he did. One of Johnny's friends is going to Penn State and one of them is going to the state pen.
This pattern will persist as long as the average income, social cohesion, quality of education, etc. remain the same. You can lecture the inner city school kids about morality 'till you are blue in the face and the statistical outcome will remain unchanged. If, however, you change the system, then you can expect different results.
On an individual level it is appropriate to talk about morality and common sense because individuals make specific decisions. On a society wide level it is appropriate to talk about systems and structures because groups have a distribution of outcomes based on incentives and circumstances.
Tim
Edit: changed fault to problem, bank to Countrywide, added summary, and made one paragraph into two.
I blame the teachers. They should drill basic concepts into their students heads, like, "don't sign contracts you don't understand", "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", and "sometimes advertising is misleading". The last one was specifically taught in my early '80s grade 6 home economics class. I suppose it was an echo of the '70's oil crunch.
If home economics--basic budgeting, simple cooking skills, nutrition, comparison shopping--were taught properly, the US would be much better off. Exactly right, ggg71-- live within your means.
Unfortunately, many of us were taught by teachers who grew up when energy was free and there were still opportunities; those teachers never needed to know about thrift, and never taught it.
Property will depend on where you are. Property will be worthless in the cities and large towns. Even small towns may see many die, hence those empty houses and lots can be used by those who remain.
Those in rural areas will have to work on farms, or in garbage dumps reclaiming plastics and metals.
Money would be worthless for some time, until people start to have some faith in it. Problem with money is people with some technology available to them would be able to print it in their basements, and there would be little in the way of knowing what is "real" or fake. Hence there would be little trust of paper money.
Richard
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
Jim- My eyes were opened big time by The Long Emergency. Took a while to get over the shock but I've been busy ever since...made lots of changes. Thanks for the warning.
My reading of The Long Emergency was my swallowing of the Red Pill. My life hasn't been the same. While reading another 10 books on the topic and reading the peak oil websites, we first stocked up on supplies. We paid off our mortgage and all debts. Started a large garden and planted 20 fruit trees. Learned how to can and dry food. Became even more commited to homeschooling our two sons. Volunteered on a start-up 800 acre organic farm not far from where we live. And just bought our own little farm of 13 acres of black dirt (Orange County, NY) with a small barn and well. This winter we'll be studying up on how to farm it. So, yes. We too have made a lot of changes in two years. We've tried to talk to family/friends about it but no one really wants to look at it. It requires too much work to face it.
The Geography to Nowhere and Cities and the Wealth of Nations
by Jane Jacobs. These two books brought my love of geography
and what really is eco-nomics together for me.
I lost the G to N book. But I still remember the
"widened road/tractor trailer turn arounds" pics.
Gail is describing the landowner as a sharecropper.
Sharecroppers were little more than indentured slaves.
The wheat fields will be burned (before harvest)
before that happens.
Well, my dad was a sharecropper until he was about 42 years old. I was about seven when he, with the help of the bank, finally bought his own 45 acre farm. We were not indentured slaves. Many of my neighbors and friends wera also sharecroppers. They were not slaves either.
People will not commit suicide by burning their only source of food, even if they are slaves. The idea of people getting so pissed off that they will riot and burn their only source of food is not creditable.
I argued with people on another list who said people riot and bring down the grid. Absurd! People do not deliberately commit suicide. If the grid goes down, there will be no power for water plants so no running water.
During riots people loot and burn someone else's property. But they do not burn their own properity nor do they destroy their only sources of food and water.
People may indeed become sharecroppers. You would be surprised as to what people may do before they would die of starvation. The day may come when sharecroppers are the lucky ones. And they will be very glad to be so fortunate.
Sharecroppers would be in a good place to get the food that is available. If the person in charge know what he was doing, there might even be a possibility that there would be some thought that went into getting seeds, getting fresh water, crop rotation, and all of the details that most of us don't know anything about.
I expect the sharecroppers would be a lot better off than people living in the city, waiting for someone to send them surplus food that was grown in the country.
I commented at length below, but one thing that I do see missing in your analysis is the rise in income and wealth inequality, which, combined with a need for people to work the land in a more labor intensive manner, points toward a "new feudal order" or the "refeudalization" of society. While we could imagine a "democratic nation of farmers".... old New England democratic ideals of yeomen farmers... at present the U.S. seems happy to allow great accumulations of wealth that would seem more likely to produce a system dominated by American feudal lords and ladies at the top and sharecropping or peasant farmers tied to the land and dependent on local military/police systems for protection.
"The Middle Class" is, quite possibly, an epiphenomenon of the oil age, and the rising slope of energy consumption. Whether there are any other energic economies that can sustain a broad middle class remains an open question for history to determine and illustrate. I have my doubts.
The wealthy upper class is wealthy on paper, and in holdings of land that are a bit of a booby prize. You don't see too many ranches of the super rich in Ohio or Indiana, and a ranch in Wyoming is going to lose its value pretty quickly.
Those who were not born and raised in the country as just full of it!!!
I have stated many times that I was raised by my grandparents who lived and farmed 100 acres,lots of it woodland. And they raised 14 children.
When I lived with them up til I was 11 yrs old we drank raw cows milk(one of the most healthful foods known), ate homegrown vegetables and farm slaughtered meat(mostly pork) and lots of eggs...
All the above is supposed to be unhealthy..but truth is that its not and at 68 yrs of age I am extremely healthy,,never hospitalized and take no medicine.
Farmers are not going to give up their land, not peacefully, yet they will welcome those who wish to 'work it' , IF they are capable..and people will have to evolve to doing manual labor once more..and living more simple lives....
Back the way it was in my childhood,,,we bartered work(help me get in hay, I help you set tobacco)as well as most of what we got from town(flour , salt and sugar was about it).
There is a huge amount of disinformation and opinion being pasted here just because most of them have not had those experiences...they just don't understand...
And if they think the 'Religious Right' is their enemy ..then they won't hardly get started out here where the community church is where the core leadership exists in small communities..or at least where much of what happens in discussed.
Yep its all coming down...we are now starting to see the happenings..a pity for this country had such promise...where and who did us in?
We will all be hoping to be able to get a small piece of land and actually own it. The only thing I see likely is many 'sqatting' on land where the owners have perished and no one is defending it. I see the rebirth of local law via posse's and other means.
Get caught thieving someone stock and you get hanged from the nearest white oak limb.
I agree with airdale re: the theorizing that goes on here about what will happen in rural areas. There are often sweeping statements about what federal policy will do ... but the federal government isn't going to get much traction with the states when the currency is wrecked and oil is dear ... like many other things receding to 1940 levels federal involvement in our lives will do the same.
As I read here the picture becomes more clear - a destabilized Mexico sloshes over into the American southwest and perhaps we have a racially charged civil war there. The culturally different south, northeast, and west go their separate ways. Hawaii and Alaska come apart without cheap oil to support their populations. The United States breaks down, not into constituent states, but into geographic regions with shared culture.
This came to pass in the Soviet Union with much less of an insult than the three that are going to connect with the United States in very short order. I do not think our tradition of unity will stand, and the unsustainability of the southwest coupled with racial tensions there will be the catalyst for the breakup.
And the posse thing can not come soon enough out here. When I was a child people would leave their keys in their cars overnight ... and I just returned from visiting my uncle, who is piecing his truck back together from junkyard parts after it was stolen and stripped. Hanging those behind the methamphetamine traffic would do wonders for rural America.
Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randoids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.
-----
Agriculture was the worst mistake humans made.
And it was only made possible by the Holocene.
The Holocene is coming to a close.
By 2100, forget Mars, we'll be lucky to have colonies
on Earth.
I previously tried to edit my post above to indicate that
the 100 acre farm was being sharecropped by my grandparents..
they never did own their own land....and I will note that when sharecropping having several(in this case 7 boys and 7 girls) children makes barter work more worthwhile...if its just a man and his mate...then you got a much harder 'pull'..in fact it could be dammed hard...so having children in this situation is indeed a blesssing..and if you don't? Then who will take care of you as you become unable to do the manual labor?
Farmers are not going to give up their land, not peacefully, yet they will welcome those who wish to 'work it' , IF they are capable..and people will have to evolve to doing manual labor
So long as you look to be the right kinda people eh?
My grandmother and grandfather were share croppers untill the early 1920s when they bought their own farm with a mortgage. There was never a tractor on their farm, but a team of mules. It was a very hard life but they ate well even during the depression. Butter, eggs, and vegetables sold in town on street corners paid the mortgage during the depression...Even when the five kids and parents wore rags. Only one of the kids finished HS, the rest went 6-8 years and then were working full time to help pay off the mortgage untill WW2 came along. The only 'oil' used on the farm was one gallon of kerosene per month, ten cents, to fuel the kerosene lanterns. Lard was used to grease the spindles on the wagon that hauled vegetables to market and the family to church. Travel, recreation, (except for the after church baseball game among the members) college education, retirement, were unknown and only took place in 'the movies' by rich people. Watch the movies of the 1930s. They were moments when the poor could escape from reality and live in a fantasy for a short time...If they had a nickle to get in. My fathers brother and then my grandfather died during the same week in the winter of 1931 of Pneumonia because they could not afford any medical attention or medicine. I worked on that farm some during my HS years and believe me, it was no walk in the park compared to any job in an industrial society. When Henry Ford advertised that he was paying five dollars per day for men that would work hard, half the south moved to Detroit, Chicago and other industrial cities to escape the grinding farm work that paid bed and board. If America returns to the 1920s era farm life style few people are going to survive it. The work is too hard for those not raised doing it. Few people are going to step out of an 8-5 office job and make it on a farm with a team of mules and little else. The learning curve for the skills needed is too steep, the labor is too hard, and the working hours are too long. Can you mend a harness? Stay on the business end of a post hole digger all day when its pushing 100 degrees? Know when a stream can be forded and when the water is too high and too swift (bridges, what bridges?)? Deliver a calf when your best cow is having a hard time...while knowing if that cow dies there goes the butter money and no more milk for the youngsters? Can you build a chicken coop? Can you do any of the thousand and one other chores that go with running a farm? And, what would the 'new farm workers' have to look forward to? More of the same year after year, hoping for decent weather for the crops, hoping that no disease hits the stock, hoping for a decent price for the cash crop...And something always goes wrong. It is not a life that I would want to return to.
Interesting. I have heard some stories like this from my parents and grandparents, but I think they were from the relatively well-off, so escaped the worst of it.
My grandparents have similar memories of farm life from the 1930s to the 50s.
To contrast those memories with a modern picture, I spent a couple weeks of my vacation time working on a organic farm in northern BC two-consecutive springs a few years ago. The couple that owned it left work in a nearby town seven years before I first set foot there. They were both in their mid thirties when they bought their farm. They used three draft horses for cultivation of, and adding fertility (three draft horses create an amazing amount of manure) to, the five acres of their property that they cropped. They had a Bobcat for moving appropriate materials around, but I only saw it used one afternoon of the two weeks I was there. (In fact, I was the one that used it.) There household was heated with wood and their farm provided about one-hundred house-holds with weekly deliveries of fresh produce for about seven months of the year. Their take-home pay was about $30k per annum.
I would not call their work-day grueling. Work it was, but not back-breaking work. They generally
The landed rich can't leave the
US.
We're all in this together.
And about farming.
Gail is describing the landowner as a sharecropper.
Sharecroppers were little more than indentured slaves.
The wheat fields will be burned (before harvest)
before that happens.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Perhaps someone can come up with a more favorable scenario wtih respect to how land is treated. I could think of less favorable ones as well - just taking the land without compensation; or trumping up charges to jail the landowner. We take property rights for granted. I hope we can continue to do so in the future.
You are spot on here, Gail. Most of us forget just how fundamental property rights are to our modern way of life. Indeed, it was property rights that were at the center of the foundation of the modern day nation states.
The maintenance of property rights is entirely dependent on the existence of a legitimate authority to enforce them.
I must confess, however, that I am not as big a fan of property rights as they currently exist as you are. I would like to see a collapse in the belief in private property and the rise of communal rights of appropriate use without ownership.
Defining property and property rights will be fundamental to the shape of the world we create post oil.
"We take property rights for granted. I hope we can continue to do so in the future."
There's just this huge disconnect.
I just conversed with my family who were out watching
a six row cotton picker traversing a field.
http://www.usfarmer.com/listingimg/1/1/9/0/6/1/content/images/usforg_Bos...
Imagine going back to hand picking cotton to feel the disconnect.
IMHO Government will not be buying farmland.
And it seems you're implying the Soviet Collective
as well as Stalin making war on the Kulaks over
"hoarding".
There are so many variables here.
Think electric submersible wells-
"We have 12-inch wells with pumps set 80 to 100 feet deep and pump 1,200 gallons per minute."
W/O AC these wells are useless.
How cities react to this year's lack of wheat
and the fight over eliminating US Farm Subsidies
this Winter will go a long way in foretelling.
The International Grains Council reduced its forecasts for global and Australian wheat production substantially on Thurday. The ICG cut its global wheat production forecast from from 607m tonnes to just 601m tonnes and slashed its estimate for Australian output to 13.5m tons. This is 2m tonnes below the most recent forecast from the Australian government and 9m tonnes lower than last month’s estimate by the ICG.
Wheat stocks for the five largest global exporters are forecast to fall to a 34-year low of 25m tonnes.
In other words lowest ever.
In terms of actual wheat on hand and per capita.
Sincerely yours,
James
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Pumps are not difficult to keep operating. Diesel engines can be replaced by electric motors. Stationary devices are generally easier to keep working than mobile devices because you can run electric wires to stationary devices.
We in the United States expect the rule of the law to be in effect. Yes, even with the poison from the disloyal Christian Right spreading through the system at high levels we groundlings still have some deeply ingrained expectations.
Reading and responding here is about changing one's expectations and I often see people arguing one point or another, yet holding many other implicit assumptions steady. This is the first time I've seen the long term viability of the rule of the law called into question. I think this going out from under us is going to be as big a change as the end to our expectation of cheap energy. A quarter of the population, those with that authoritarian personality, will simply go along with whatever new system evolves (heh, evolution), but the rest ... we are the descendants of those who wouldn't put up with it, now aren't we?
The possibility of descent into feudalism pops up here and there in conversations, but the mechanics of that are that a landed elite provides a measure of security and stability in a given geographic area. Those who are the financial elite today may have some of the tools in today's terms to set up such a thing, but if they don't have the foresight to do it now don't imagine they'll rise to the top after an implosion. The skills needed to move funny money around to one's advantage don't translate into those needed for ruling a fiefdom from horseback.
Ask this question of those here who dwell in rural areas now - "What structure will your government have when the federal level collapses and the state is constrained by expensive fuel and low revenues?"
Very good.
"The skills needed to move funny money around to one's advantage don't translate into those needed for ruling a fiefdom from horseback.
Ask this question of those here who dwell in rural areas now - "What structure will your government have when the federal level collapses and the state is constrained by expensive fuel and low revenuues."
Exactly what I've been studying
since '78.
I've got stories of "coupons" issued to the Mercantile.
Panic of '07, Going to Memphis, scavenging Trolley car change
to complete land deals.
Whoever can get the crops grown and out to the mills
will be take over.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
What structure? Martial "law". Blackwater. Petraeus' divided communities. Travel restrictions. Probably all sorts of stuff done under misnomer of "public health emergency".
Blackwater is playing games in Iraq compared to what
they'll have to do with my state.
AAMOF, I expect to be meeting/hearing about BW Spec Ops
from my state of AR.
All of a sudden BW mercs will be defending instead of
relocating.
Completely different scenario.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
It does seem like Iraq is a good picture of one future possibility for the USA. Lots of angry people with guns just shooting each other without much discernable structure to the mayhem. Worst of all the government!
This is the first time I've seen the long term viability of the rule of the law called into question.
No, its been questioned before. One poster (who never came back) was asking for e-mails so s/he would have a list of names to start a revolution, and the occasional 'I'm gonna go into the woods, forage for food and you all will die' posters.
I have no doubt there will be rule of law - I just doubt what the law will BE. Oh, and how much short brown sticky end of the stick will I be grabb'n.
Sacred: The rule of law usually applies in the USA, but not always. During Katrina, a group of Canadian tourists were staying at an upscale hotel. The hotel hired a bus to transport them out of harm's way. The bus was stopped by local police (at gunpoint) and the tourists were forced off the bus (they didn't know what the local police did with the bus). They huddled together on a street in New Orleans overnight-can't remember what happened to them after that but IMHO this was a preview of what parts of the USA will be like when TSHF.
One problem is that we have become accustomed to thinking of land with a mortgage as 'our' land, and I imagine that most land, both residential and farm, has some kind of lien against it. This
story in the NY Times gives some chilling stories about how lenders can jerk you around and not only take 'your' land but destroy your livelihood.
Even if you own your land free of lender liens, there are always property taxes. At least there is the possibility here of taxpayers joining together and using the ballot box to keep the taxes from going too outrageous.
Get out of debt.
Keep after it like a mantra, until you are.
It's the 80/20 Principle writ large.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
I don't want to sound insensitive, and I certainly have no love for the giant mortgage corporations, but the people in the article have no one to blame but themselves.
Jane bought her house for $298k in 1998. In 2006 her principal was up to $442k!!! By this time she had an interest rate of 11% with payments of $5200/month. No wonder she couldn't afford the house! Accrued interest and penalties add up really quickly at 11%! Is it Countrywide's fault she didn't pay?
Zena lost her job and had to take a new one paying 50% less. Yet it's Countrywide's fault that she refinanced to an interest only loan at 10.9% and now has only $600/month after she makes her mortgage payment?
The moral: Live within your means.
G
ggg71,
I just wanted to point out that on an individual level, you are right, but on a national level you are not. This is a broad observation, not a personal attack against you. I just hear moral recommendations bandied about all the time as if they are a solution. One of my good friends from college used to say "If everyone just behaved like me there wouldn't be any problem." True, so true it isn't even worth mentioning.
It's Jane's problem to the extent that she is going to lose her house and her credit rating.
It's Countrywide's problem to the extent that they aren't getting paid.
Both Jane and the bank should have made better choices. As far a Jane and the bank are concerned the moral: Live within your means. makes a lot of sense.
But, multiply that by millions:
It's the nation's problem to the extent that there are bankrupt people and a collapsed financial system.
Now it is no longer a moral question of individual actions. It is a society wide question of systems and organization.
As an example: Kids in inner city schools.
Growing up on the low end of the financial spectrum in an underfunded inner city school means that little Johnny has to work extra hard to get good grades to get a scholarship in order to afford college. Little Johnny has been told this several times. If he goes to jail in a decade for dealing drugs, it will be because he made a poor choice.
But, the state has to have a prison to put him in. It has to be built before he gets arrested, so the state sends someone to the inner city school. He takes a look around. He makes notes about the average income, quality of education, social cohesion, etc. And he tells the state how many prisons they are going to need in ten years.
The state planner makes this recommendation based on very accurate statistical model (called a bell curve) and it work something like this: Most people are average, some are above and some are below.
Given the circumstances here at this inner city school he expects very little to come of the average person, he expects the below average ones to go to jail and the above average ones to escape to something else.
Little Johnny is going to be average. His children are going to go to the same school he did. One of Johnny's friends is going to Penn State and one of them is going to the state pen.
This pattern will persist as long as the average income, social cohesion, quality of education, etc. remain the same. You can lecture the inner city school kids about morality 'till you are blue in the face and the statistical outcome will remain unchanged. If, however, you change the system, then you can expect different results.
On an individual level it is appropriate to talk about morality and common sense because individuals make specific decisions. On a society wide level it is appropriate to talk about systems and structures because groups have a distribution of outcomes based on incentives and circumstances.
Tim
Edit: changed fault to problem, bank to Countrywide, added summary, and made one paragraph into two.
I blame the teachers. They should drill basic concepts into their students heads, like, "don't sign contracts you don't understand", "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", and "sometimes advertising is misleading". The last one was specifically taught in my early '80s grade 6 home economics class. I suppose it was an echo of the '70's oil crunch.
If home economics--basic budgeting, simple cooking skills, nutrition, comparison shopping--were taught properly, the US would be much better off. Exactly right, ggg71-- live within your means.
Unfortunately, many of us were taught by teachers who grew up when energy was free and there were still opportunities; those teachers never needed to know about thrift, and never taught it.
Property will depend on where you are. Property will be worthless in the cities and large towns. Even small towns may see many die, hence those empty houses and lots can be used by those who remain.
Those in rural areas will have to work on farms, or in garbage dumps reclaiming plastics and metals.
Money would be worthless for some time, until people start to have some faith in it. Problem with money is people with some technology available to them would be able to print it in their basements, and there would be little in the way of knowing what is "real" or fake. Hence there would be little trust of paper money.
Richard
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
Gail (and others)
I think you will appreciate my forthcoming "post-oil" novel, "World Made By Hand," which is pretty consistent with Gail's view here.
Jim Kunstler
Saratoga Springs, NY
I look forward to reading your forthcoming novel. I enjoyed (if that is the right word) "The Long Emergency".
Jim- My eyes were opened big time by The Long Emergency. Took a while to get over the shock but I've been busy ever since...made lots of changes. Thanks for the warning.
My reading of The Long Emergency was my swallowing of the Red Pill. My life hasn't been the same. While reading another 10 books on the topic and reading the peak oil websites, we first stocked up on supplies. We paid off our mortgage and all debts. Started a large garden and planted 20 fruit trees. Learned how to can and dry food. Became even more commited to homeschooling our two sons. Volunteered on a start-up 800 acre organic farm not far from where we live. And just bought our own little farm of 13 acres of black dirt (Orange County, NY) with a small barn and well. This winter we'll be studying up on how to farm it. So, yes. We too have made a lot of changes in two years. We've tried to talk to family/friends about it but no one really wants to look at it. It requires too much work to face it.
The Geography to Nowhere and Cities and the Wealth of Nations
by Jane Jacobs. These two books brought my love of geography
and what really is eco-nomics together for me.
I lost the G to N book. But I still remember the
"widened road/tractor trailer turn arounds" pics.
Thanx.
James
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
I see Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Landscape by James Kuntsler is still available on Amazon.
;}
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Well, my dad was a sharecropper until he was about 42 years old. I was about seven when he, with the help of the bank, finally bought his own 45 acre farm. We were not indentured slaves. Many of my neighbors and friends wera also sharecroppers. They were not slaves either.
People will not commit suicide by burning their only source of food, even if they are slaves. The idea of people getting so pissed off that they will riot and burn their only source of food is not creditable.
I argued with people on another list who said people riot and bring down the grid. Absurd! People do not deliberately commit suicide. If the grid goes down, there will be no power for water plants so no running water.
During riots people loot and burn someone else's property. But they do not burn their own properity nor do they destroy their only sources of food and water.
People may indeed become sharecroppers. You would be surprised as to what people may do before they would die of starvation. The day may come when sharecroppers are the lucky ones. And they will be very glad to be so fortunate.
Ron Patterson
Sharecroppers would be in a good place to get the food that is available. If the person in charge know what he was doing, there might even be a possibility that there would be some thought that went into getting seeds, getting fresh water, crop rotation, and all of the details that most of us don't know anything about.
I expect the sharecroppers would be a lot better off than people living in the city, waiting for someone to send them surplus food that was grown in the country.
I commented at length below, but one thing that I do see missing in your analysis is the rise in income and wealth inequality, which, combined with a need for people to work the land in a more labor intensive manner, points toward a "new feudal order" or the "refeudalization" of society. While we could imagine a "democratic nation of farmers".... old New England democratic ideals of yeomen farmers... at present the U.S. seems happy to allow great accumulations of wealth that would seem more likely to produce a system dominated by American feudal lords and ladies at the top and sharecropping or peasant farmers tied to the land and dependent on local military/police systems for protection.
"The Middle Class" is, quite possibly, an epiphenomenon of the oil age, and the rising slope of energy consumption. Whether there are any other energic economies that can sustain a broad middle class remains an open question for history to determine and illustrate. I have my doubts.
The wealthy upper class is wealthy on paper, and in holdings of land that are a bit of a booby prize. You don't see too many ranches of the super rich in Ohio or Indiana, and a ranch in Wyoming is going to lose its value pretty quickly.
Your absolutely right Ron.(Darwinian)
Those who were not born and raised in the country as just full of it!!!
I have stated many times that I was raised by my grandparents who lived and farmed 100 acres,lots of it woodland. And they raised 14 children.
When I lived with them up til I was 11 yrs old we drank raw cows milk(one of the most healthful foods known), ate homegrown vegetables and farm slaughtered meat(mostly pork) and lots of eggs...
All the above is supposed to be unhealthy..but truth is that its not and at 68 yrs of age I am extremely healthy,,never hospitalized and take no medicine.
Farmers are not going to give up their land, not peacefully, yet they will welcome those who wish to 'work it' , IF they are capable..and people will have to evolve to doing manual labor once more..and living more simple lives....
Back the way it was in my childhood,,,we bartered work(help me get in hay, I help you set tobacco)as well as most of what we got from town(flour , salt and sugar was about it).
There is a huge amount of disinformation and opinion being pasted here just because most of them have not had those experiences...they just don't understand...
And if they think the 'Religious Right' is their enemy ..then they won't hardly get started out here where the community church is where the core leadership exists in small communities..or at least where much of what happens in discussed.
Yep its all coming down...we are now starting to see the happenings..a pity for this country had such promise...where and who did us in?
We will all be hoping to be able to get a small piece of land and actually own it. The only thing I see likely is many 'sqatting' on land where the owners have perished and no one is defending it. I see the rebirth of local law via posse's and other means.
Get caught thieving someone stock and you get hanged from the nearest white oak limb.
Airdale-I could be wrong,I have been wrong before
That would be Alexander Hamilton and friends.
I agree with airdale re: the theorizing that goes on here about what will happen in rural areas. There are often sweeping statements about what federal policy will do ... but the federal government isn't going to get much traction with the states when the currency is wrecked and oil is dear ... like many other things receding to 1940 levels federal involvement in our lives will do the same.
As I read here the picture becomes more clear - a destabilized Mexico sloshes over into the American southwest and perhaps we have a racially charged civil war there. The culturally different south, northeast, and west go their separate ways. Hawaii and Alaska come apart without cheap oil to support their populations. The United States breaks down, not into constituent states, but into geographic regions with shared culture.
This came to pass in the Soviet Union with much less of an insult than the three that are going to connect with the United States in very short order. I do not think our tradition of unity will stand, and the unsustainability of the southwest coupled with racial tensions there will be the catalyst for the breakup.
And the posse thing can not come soon enough out here. When I was a child people would leave their keys in their cars overnight ... and I just returned from visiting my uncle, who is piecing his truck back together from junkyard parts after it was stolen and stripped. Hanging those behind the methamphetamine traffic would do wonders for rural America.
Here's a guy from Arkansas that I just discovered
(looking for sharecropper info).
The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand
Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege
by Kevin A. Carson
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/iron_fist.html
INTRODUCTION
Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randoids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.
-----
Agriculture was the worst mistake humans made.
And it was only made possible by the Holocene.
The Holocene is coming to a close.
By 2100, forget Mars, we'll be lucky to have colonies
on Earth.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
I previously tried to edit my post above to indicate that
the 100 acre farm was being sharecropped by my grandparents..
they never did own their own land....and I will note that when sharecropping having several(in this case 7 boys and 7 girls) children makes barter work more worthwhile...if its just a man and his mate...then you got a much harder 'pull'..in fact it could be dammed hard...so having children in this situation is indeed a blesssing..and if you don't? Then who will take care of you as you become unable to do the manual labor?
Airdale....
Farmers are not going to give up their land, not peacefully, yet they will welcome those who wish to 'work it' , IF they are capable..and people will have to evolve to doing manual labor
So long as you look to be the right kinda people eh?
Airdale-I have been wrong before
.
deleted double post
My grandmother and grandfather were share croppers untill the early 1920s when they bought their own farm with a mortgage. There was never a tractor on their farm, but a team of mules. It was a very hard life but they ate well even during the depression. Butter, eggs, and vegetables sold in town on street corners paid the mortgage during the depression...Even when the five kids and parents wore rags. Only one of the kids finished HS, the rest went 6-8 years and then were working full time to help pay off the mortgage untill WW2 came along. The only 'oil' used on the farm was one gallon of kerosene per month, ten cents, to fuel the kerosene lanterns. Lard was used to grease the spindles on the wagon that hauled vegetables to market and the family to church. Travel, recreation, (except for the after church baseball game among the members) college education, retirement, were unknown and only took place in 'the movies' by rich people. Watch the movies of the 1930s. They were moments when the poor could escape from reality and live in a fantasy for a short time...If they had a nickle to get in. My fathers brother and then my grandfather died during the same week in the winter of 1931 of Pneumonia because they could not afford any medical attention or medicine. I worked on that farm some during my HS years and believe me, it was no walk in the park compared to any job in an industrial society. When Henry Ford advertised that he was paying five dollars per day for men that would work hard, half the south moved to Detroit, Chicago and other industrial cities to escape the grinding farm work that paid bed and board. If America returns to the 1920s era farm life style few people are going to survive it. The work is too hard for those not raised doing it. Few people are going to step out of an 8-5 office job and make it on a farm with a team of mules and little else. The learning curve for the skills needed is too steep, the labor is too hard, and the working hours are too long. Can you mend a harness? Stay on the business end of a post hole digger all day when its pushing 100 degrees? Know when a stream can be forded and when the water is too high and too swift (bridges, what bridges?)? Deliver a calf when your best cow is having a hard time...while knowing if that cow dies there goes the butter money and no more milk for the youngsters? Can you build a chicken coop? Can you do any of the thousand and one other chores that go with running a farm? And, what would the 'new farm workers' have to look forward to? More of the same year after year, hoping for decent weather for the crops, hoping that no disease hits the stock, hoping for a decent price for the cash crop...And something always goes wrong. It is not a life that I would want to return to.
Interesting. I have heard some stories like this from my parents and grandparents, but I think they were from the relatively well-off, so escaped the worst of it.
My grandparents have similar memories of farm life from the 1930s to the 50s.
To contrast those memories with a modern picture, I spent a couple weeks of my vacation time working on a organic farm in northern BC two-consecutive springs a few years ago. The couple that owned it left work in a nearby town seven years before I first set foot there. They were both in their mid thirties when they bought their farm. They used three draft horses for cultivation of, and adding fertility (three draft horses create an amazing amount of manure) to, the five acres of their property that they cropped. They had a Bobcat for moving appropriate materials around, but I only saw it used one afternoon of the two weeks I was there. (In fact, I was the one that used it.) There household was heated with wood and their farm provided about one-hundred house-holds with weekly deliveries of fresh produce for about seven months of the year. Their take-home pay was about $30k per annum.
I would not call their work-day grueling. Work it was, but not back-breaking work. They generally