The Consequences of
Rule by the Selfish Class

Consequences can be unpleasant...

But now no person before a provincial judge can convict the collectors of the regular tax who are terrible because of the authority of their superior imperial service and who rage against the vitals and to the ruin of the provincials, since the power of the provincial court is subject and subservient to the arrogant apparitors who flatter themselves wholly in regard to the haughtiness of their superior cincture of office and since the person who complains does not dare to come to Our court from the distant regions of the province…. Novel Majorian, II,1, decreed 458.

…what else is the life of all men engaged in business but fraud and perjury? What is the life of the curiales but injustice? What is the life of government officials but slander? What is the life of all connected with the army but pillage? Salvian, The Presbyter

Those whom the enemy did not kill in the city's ruin, disaster overwhelmed…Others were burned…or even suffered the pain of torture….Some died of hunger, some of nakedness…What happened after this? A few nobles who survived destruction demanded circuses from the emperors as the greatest relief for the destroyed city. Salvian, The Presbyter

Rome, Italy, Gaul were all ravaged by invader after invader, especially after the fall of Rome, i.e. the end of the Roman Empire in the west. Visigoths and Franks made attempts to take over Roman forms of law and governance, but stability did not return. The leisured, learned life of the nobility, and the classic age was destroyed, as the letter from the sixth century priest describes:

If our concern were with secular erudition, we think nowadays no one can boast much learning. Here the fury of the barbarians burns daily, now flaring up, now dying down. Our whole life is taken up in cares, and all our efforts go to beating back the war-bands that surround us.

There is no need to cover again the actual event of the fall of Rome, but again it needs to be emphasized: the Senatorial class promoted the destruction of the state and the economy upon which their life was based. Some thought they could simply retire to their country estates, and that it would not matter who controlled the armies, or ruled in Ravenna. Others tried offering their services to the conquerors, and occasionally they were successful in reaching high office with the new king or prince, but over time they and their dependents sank into deeper and deeper misery, or did not survive. When the sixth century eastern emperor, Justinian, temporarily reconquered Italy, there was even more devastation and so many of Rome's people died or fled that it barely survived as a city. These are the real consequences of the short-sightedness of the ruling class, of its venality and rapaciousness. Most of the causes of the collapse were political and economic. Even if there had been no barbarians, it looks as if the Empire would have self-destructed. People were fleeing the cities because they were being driven to desperation, starvation, terror not by the barbarians but by their own government and the unflinching greed of the powerful.

In our contemporary world it is early yet, but the path looks frighteningly familiar. Instead of Senators, we have billionaires and multi-millionaires and corporate leaders, and politicians who get lobbyists to write their bills, so that Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices, so that the food industry does not have to reveal whether its products contain genetically engineered substances, pesticides, or synthetic hormones, and developers can take away your houses, or corporations can export your jobs. These same politicians say they have to cut funding to Medicaid, student loans, Medicare, senior housing, Social Security, community policing and child care among other programs in order to pass permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. Aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina is not fully funded, but the wealthiest corporation in the world (Exxon) gets billions in government subsidies. This isn't just a partisan pattern. This is a course of self-destruction: .

Consequences

When students cannot afford the training for skills needed in modern society, global corporations will hire people elsewhere; when localities or states raise taxes to support schools, corporations move elsewhere; when unions attempt to protect jobs and wages, corporations file for bankruptcy, cancel union contracts, or move operations to China. But where do most corporations sell their goods? The United States. When workers cannot make enough to prevent them from going deeper into debt, who is going to buy all the goods and services offered by the global corporations, corporations which can't afford to employ Americans?

Much of the change has been the result of "globalization" and "free trade." Beginning even before Reagan, American trade policy has concentrated on lowering tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers around the world, so that we can have, in Tom Friedman's phrase, a "flat world." First with NAFTA and then with the WTO, the US abdicated trade policy to extra-national bodies, to facilitate trade, but especially to facilitate investment by large corporations across national borders. While investors can move freely, however, labor cannot, nor can workers push for enforcement of fair labor rules or environmentalists insist environmental rules are binding. In fact, the World Trade Organization can rule against local environmental rules, and against policies designed to protect workers from losing their jobs: both could be considered "trade barriers," and therefore illegal.

Since the early 1980's, Americans have been borrowing more and more, at the national level, the corporate level and among individuals. Before Reagan, our savings rate was around 10% on average; now our savings rate is negative (-0.5% in 2005): we spend more than we earn. A negative national savings rate has happened only twice before, in 1933 and 1934, the depth of the Depression. Plastic money may have made it easier to go into debt, but the primary reason for falling savings has to be that wages have also risen more slowly than inflation (in other words, have fallen). In terms of the selfish class model it is important to note that wages have also risen much, much more slowly than productivity. Since a rise in productivity is money in the bank for someone, if it is not going to wage earners, then where is it going? It is going to top managers and to the owners of corporations. This is why almost all capital gains have been captured by the top ten percent of income earners, and why over 57% of the wealth created by the productivity gains has been captured by the top 1%.

Yet Americans are continually urged to spend more, since the global economy is sustained by American consumption; if the US slows its hunger for imported goods, because Americans cannot afford to borrow more, then the world economy will collapse: China and Japan first of all.

In 2005 we imported $800 billion more than we exported, which means we borrowed that amount from other countries. It makes sense, if the average American is earning less, but believes he should spend it now (maybe because, deep down, she or he believes things will get worse, not better?) then he and she will go into debt. Since the nation is also making less than it consumes, the nation also goes into debt.

But we shouldn't worry, we are told by conservative economists like Victor Canto, we can just continue spending because…net worth is still rising? What does that mean? It means that our houses are worth more, and therefore buyers can borrow from the Chinese in order to pay us more for them, to return to Krugman's bon mot. Sounds like a pyramid scheme. Net worth is also rising because our corporations are worth more (for similar reasons), so foreign companies awash in dollars can buy them for more. That explains increasing foreign ownership. That's how our deficit can be "covered by the rest of the world."

We have the strongest balance sheet in the world today. With President Bush pushing his second-term initiatives for tax reform and the “ownership society,” we should continue improving our balance sheet both in absolute and relative terms.

Covered by the rest of the world. So, should we be surprised that more and more of the owners of corporations are not American? Random House owned by Bertelsmann, Chrysler owned by Mercedes Benz, Westinghouse owned by British Nuclear Fuels, and so on. In January 2006 it emerged that the management of six major US ports would pass from a British owned firm to Dubai Ports World. It turns out that the management of many if not most US ports is in the hands of various foreign companies. But we shouldn't be surprised by that, either. After all, port managers make tidy profits, and foreigners own more and more dollars; they want to reap those profits, and they have the money to buy the companies. When we run large trade imbalances, we pay for them by giving foreigners dollars, with which they can buy American assets. And why shouldn't they, especially since they don’t spend them on American goods? Many American-made products are simply too expensive, or not competitive with the foreign goods. In fact, it turns out that in a whole range of industries foreign companies own more than half of the US market, or half of the American firms engaged in the market: industries such as sound recording (97%), motion picture and video industries (64%), wineries and distilleries (64%), metal ore mining (65%), book publishers (63%), concrete, lime and gypsum products (62%), engine turbine and power transmission equipment (57%) and plastics and rubber products manufacturing (52%) to name but a sample. Even in broad sectors like industrial machinery, 30% of the US market is foreign-owned.

Until 1980, the US had a large positive Net International Investment Position (NIIP), meaning that the US, its corporations and individual investors owned more assets abroad than foreigners owned in the US. By 1989 the NIIP had turned negative, and as of 2004 it was minus $2.6 trillion, or a little less than the equivalent of a quarter of GDP. This means that foreigners own that much more of the US than Americans own abroad. Actually, though, Americans own more of direct investment abroad than foreigners own in direct investments in US firms (like Westinghouse or Chrysler). The great bulk of foreign investment in the US is in financial assets, both government and private ($8 trillion vs $5 trillion in comparable US holdings abroad), and although that $8 trillion represents about 74% of GDP, it is a much smaller share of total US financial assets (42%). Not to worry, say orthodox economists, even if the NIIP rises to 40-50% of GDP. All that will happen is that the dollar will eventually have to depreciate, interest rates will surge, we will go through a recession, and afterwards everyone will be happy again, although we will probably end up spending $6.00 for a gallon of gas. Actually, investment in financial assets is more worrying than investment in corporations, because it is much more liquid; it can be withdrawn much more easily; it is much less stable.

The orthodox free-market economics approach misses the point. As more and more US assets are bought up by foreigners, more and more profits will also be exported. At the same time, more and more US jobs are being exported as well. Why do you think that wages fail to rise even in a recovery? The flatlanders like Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) will probably make out well enough--in the short term. They are like the Roman Senators who thought that even when German chieftains took over former parts of the Empire, they would continue to be able to live as they were accustomed, and would even work their social magic in the new emerging royal courts. It didn't happen that way then, and it is unlikely that the selfish classes will be able to survive any better now, if there is a financial collapse. Even if there is not, what the trade imbalance and NIIP accounts show is that the US is increasingly controlled by a global selfish class that is willing to mine the US of its assets, as it used to mine those of the Third World. This is why wages are not rising, why American workers are falling behind, while the one-percent at the top of the economic scale are doing very well indeed: they own parts of the global corporations which seek the lowest wages for work wherever these can be found, like Indian CAT-scan readers who are just as highly skilled as American technicians, but who will work for a tenth the cost.

Isn't there a fallacy here? If Indians and Chinese replace American technicians, and if IBM and Microsoft move significant parts of their research centers to Asia, and if manufacturing can be done in China or the Philippines or Thailand, or Bangladesh, or India, then what will there be left for Americans to do, unless they compete for those jobs at one-tenth prevailing American wages? Farm? It doesn't take many to produce the food surpluses. Lumber and mining? Again, these industries do not employ that many, but they are more typical of Third World countries as extractive raw materials export industries. Design? Indians or Chinese can do that, too. Writing in English? There are significant millions (several hundred million) Indians and South Africans who can do that. And when the above countries just begin to raise wages, global corporations can move on to lower wage countries. Then what happens to the Indians and Chinese? The flat world assumes that someone in Kuala Lumpur or Kampala can do whatever it is just as well as someone in Poughkeepsie, and this may be true. What this idea fails to take into account is the effect of immiseration on the global demand for goods and services.

If Americans can no longer find decent jobs, they will consume less; if they are bankrupted they will consume little at all. Then what will sustain the great global market? The new Chinese and Indian middle classes? But if the logic of the system maintains itself, then they, too, will price themselves out of the labor market. Keep in mind that part of the reason for the tremendous US trade imbalance is that American-based global corporations have out-sourced more and more of their goods (and services) production to low wage countries, but they still sell most of their products in the US. They have also recorded much of their profits in other countries, to avoid taxes, and one of the significant "pro-business" reforms of 2005 was to allow them to repatriate those profits while continuing to avoid most tax liability.

This system is all very fine for the owner of capital, but despite rhetoric to the contrary, "the ownership society," still does not include 90% of the American people. That is why the 90% do not participate in the good times touted by President Bush. For them, wages are stagnant or falling in purchasing power, jobs are insecure, unions are a distant tale of a bygone age, and the profits celebrated on Wall Street simply do not trickle down. In fact, "ownership" looks as if it will increasingly be "foreign," or "global," not something most Americans can realistically aspire to.

A society, even a global one that is based on the prosperity of a small fraction of the population is going to be a fragile society: fragile economically, and fragile in the face of crisis.

To hark back to the model with which I began, a selfish class, whether national or global, protects itself and its resources. The "ownership society" will not include most of us, nor will government step in to help those in extremis, because that would require tapping the increasing wealth accumulated by the only class that still has some. Some ideas of the "ownership society" may not reach fruition, such as President Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security so that Wall Street finance can profit from it, but there may be other ways to at least subvert it, like indexing benefits to skewed measures of inflation, while offering "financial instruments" to workers instead. And there are other schemes afoot, like the Medical Savings Accounts that would be to Medicare what private accounts would be to Social Security.

But dominance by the selfish class does not mean just an inequitable distribution of wealth; it means a radical restructuring of the polity; it is taking place right now. The greater the inequality, the more the "have-mores" will have to fear from those who "have-less." The selfish class had a solution to this "security problem" in the fourth and fifth centuries: the bureaucratic imperial autocracy. A similar solution appears to be growing in the 21st.

I have tried to demonstrate in the chapter on the autocracy, that we are headed inexorably in the same direction, unless the unlikely happens and genuine populist movements like those of Evo and Chavez in Latin America emerge in the US to challenge prevailing trends. Autocracy, by definition, is unfriendly to civil liberties, and to democracy and responsive government. If the current administration were able to continue its monopoly of power indefinitely, then it would not need to respond to anyone opposed to it. Since autocracy tends to cater to the interests of the selfish class, however, it will also tend to support their views of the world.

This is where the changes in our political system will make us less and less likely to be able to cope with the certain crises looming over the horizon. Here is where the "Hummer effect" that I outlined in chapter one comes into play: the very wealthy will usually be the last to feel the effects of conditions like the fifth century's breakdown of Roman roads and the decline in trade due to piracy and banditry. In the current case, the wealthy will be the last to feel the pinch of higher gas prices, the last to be alarmed by pollution or the loss of natural habitats, and the last to think that something might, in fact, need to be done about global warming, even if it crimps their expansive lifestyles. They will also be the last to feel the pain from most financial disasters.

Why? A substantial portion of the contemporary selfish class gains daily from the current non-renewables-based war economy: by owning parts of oil, gas and coal companies, by profiting from the defense industry, from defense contracts and by holding substantial shares in industries dependent on oil or coal, or nuclear power. It is therefore not surprising that a scientific novelist like Michael Crichton is invited to the White House: his book, State of Fear, argues that global warming is a hoax, that any warming is part of a natural trend, and therefore that we do not need to do anything about it. President Bush stated that he was in "100% agreement" with Crichton, ergo his refusal to sign on to any mandatory controls of CO2 emissions (to curb global warming) proposed by the G8 ministers. His position on global warming is comparable to his position on the war in Iraq: he speaks about the war only to select audiences; ones that will accept his position to "stay the course," which includes continued military control of Iraq and oversight of any government that is able to emerge there. Remember, as I pointed out in the last chapter: it is the winners of the election who gain from the contracts and privatization foisted on Iraq and on the Pentagon. If we withdraw, then they lose.

As long as an autocrat like Bush resides at the White House, responses to crises like global warming, or financial meltdown will probably be confined to voluntary measures and ineffective jaw-boning, because anything more would be costly to his constituents, "the have-mores." Actually, that is not quite true: Roosevelt's New Deal was a response to the very real pain that the elite experienced as the Depression deepened, and some comparable Rooseveltian response could emerge if there were a financial collapse. Let us hope that it would also be populist and democratic.

There is a mythology that dictatorship is more efficient than democracy; after all, a dictator can just decide what is needed and order it done. He does not have to have his proposals or orders considered and possibly rejected by a legislature. On the other hand, he can be incompetent, and then nothing will get done, or crazy, or out of touch with reality and then what will get done will be more damaging than no action at all. Honorius and Valentinian III were both incompetents. Caligula, long before, was crazy. Even in modern times, with all the efficiency of modern bureaucracies, modern dictatorships can make extremely damaging decisions, in part because they have closed off open sources of information. For example, the USSR spent untold billions in developing wheat lands in the arid steppes of Kazakhstan, because no one dared tell Chairman Khrushchev that the program was a failure; there simply was not enough water available to grow wheat. It is likely that the USSR failed precisely because it was an inefficient autocracy.

The same thing can happen in the US, as its government becomes more and more autocratic. This will be especially critical as it faces global crises. There is that in an autocracy that makes it ineffective: closing off all but positive information about the world it confronts. What autocrat wants to hear that his policies are not working? Who is going to tell him? What autocrat wants to hear that his ideas might be wrong? No, instead, George Bush will insist: Global warming is a chimera; Iraqis will welcome Americans with open arms; al Qaeda and Saddam were collaborators; elections will establish stable democracies; reconstruction is a success.

Even without reducing available information, autocracy is inherently ineffective when it comes to dealing with major crises: the reason is that it doesn't have to answer to anyone so its mistakes and failures can be covered up, until it is too late. It is like a monopoly business; it gets fat and bloated very fast. And yet an autocratic form of government is a common response to security crises, like the twin evils of civil war and barbarian invasions in the 4th century, and to the manufactured crisis of Krystalnacht in 1938. Yes, and to 9/11.

People expect the autocrat to take control, to protect them, but while he happily takes control, he rarely protects them. Instead, he usually makes people less secure, through warfare, and through oppression and "security," but if he doesn't pay attention, as Bush didn't when practically everyone from FEMA begged him to do something before Hurricane Katrina, why then that was just a little human mistake and we'll overlook it because the President is a great good man who does not get blow-jobs in the oval office, or, more simply, because his party controls both houses of Congress and doesn't want to lose its one-way road to riches and power.

There was a time when Congress would hold a President to account even if he was from the same political party as the majority, but that no longer seems to be the case. When the Congressional majority was held by the other party from the President's, the President was more strictly limited, but the opposition party would work with him, as they did with Eisenhower and Reagan, for example. Beginning with the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, however, a new paradigm appeared: partisan opposition to a President of the other party on almost all issues, and almost slavish partisan support for anything a President of their own party did. While this has been true of Republicans since 1994, the Democrats' role appeared to be governed by the old Congressional mantra: go along to get along. If a Democratic majority were elected to Congress and the President were still a Republican, it takes a leap of faith to expect the Democrats to muster real opposition, real oversight and to limit or reverse the march towards autocracy.

There is a real question, however, whether we still have enough of a democratic system to allow the voters to vote out the party in power. HAVA (Help American Vote Act) requires states to replace their old voting machines with electronic ones. The manufacturers of voting machines are promoting their DRE's, voting machines that record the vote electronically, directly on computer screens, probably because they cost more and will cost more to maintain, handing them greater profits, but not coincidentally, they are also much more vulnerable to manipulation. The machines look very sophisticated, and they are, which means that they are controlled, and the tabulations are done by secret proprietary software owned by the companies: Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S and Triad. Paper back ups are only optional; when paper back ups are not present there is no way to recount the vote, no way to determine if computer coding may have changed the outcome. That is why recounts were not even demanded by losing candidates in 2004: recounts were impossible. All of these companies are owned by committed Republicans, and since the tabulation systems of these machines are controlled by the companies, it is not too far a stretch to suppose that the election results could be manipulated. In fact, recent history seems to indicate that the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections could ALL have been stolen. Gore would have won Florida and the election, except that a computer changed 16,000 votes from Gore to Bush. Exit polls had predicted a Gore win. In 2002 long-shot Republican Senate candidates won, although the exit polls predicted they would lose. In 2004, exit polls predicted that Kerry would win all but one of the swing states, but Bush won all but one. Since exit polls were always accurate predictors of elections until 2000, and have been used since, around the world to ferret out fraudulent elections, the election outcomes appear very strange.

…a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in, the vote count mysteriously turns and the election is called for Bush. The odds on one state switching the next morning from Kerry to Bush "are about one in one hundred. For four, it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm of, well, a stolen election." <>10/18/05, Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008

In all of the states that shifted from the Kerry to the Bush column, electronic voting machines were used by large portions of the state electorates. Since HAVA requires that all states replace their older election machines with new computerized ones, and since the companies making these machines, and controlling their software, are all owned by committed Republicans, it seems unlikely that ensuing elections will be free of computer manipulation, and bear in mind: ALL of the apparent shifts in election totals favored Republicans, also a statistical impossibility. If it could happen in 2000, in 2002, and in 2004, it could happen in 2006, 2008, 2010…. Enter the entrenched autocracy, answerable to only a very narrow constituency.

So, what about those disasters I keep on hinting at, just around the corner, the ones that the entrenched autocracy will prove incapable of handling, even more inept than it was when it dealt with Hurricane Katrina?

Yes, there is global warming and the peak of oil, both of which may come sooner than even the scientists studying these phenomena thought possible only a few years ago. There is also the possibility of an even nearer term financial meltdown.

To look first at global warming: almost every day there are new reports of findings that the process is accelerating and that the effects could be more dramatic and destructive than even the doomsayers thought. It is not only the arctic ice and that of Greenland that is melting, but now it appears the Antarctic is melting at the edges as well. The flow of the "heat conveyor," the Gulf Stream, responsible for the moderate climates in Europe and on the east coast of North America has already been slowed by 30%, according to a report in Nature. Even the moderately conservative mainstream and free-market Economist magazine now subscribes to the idea that we are faced with catastrophic "anthropogenic forced" global warming and that governments (shudder) must do something about it before it is too late. A moderate Democrat, Senator Biden, has also noticed; he wrote in the Financial Times before the meetings in Montreal in December, 2005 to urge that the US re-enter the global negotiations and the Kyoto Protocol process before it was too late. Of course, the US, under Bush, sent only observers.

The reasons for the government's minimal response, and even attempts to gag government scientists talking about global warming, have much to do with the interests of the selfish class, at least as Bush and his cohorts perceive them. To "get serious about climate change," and not just dither with voluntary initiatives like the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development (partners include all the Kyoto hold-outs, including the US, Australia, India, China, Japan and South Korea), would require major challenges to the people who hold power (and especially the power producers), because the most promising approaches to clean energy and the reduction of greenhouse gases would probably be small, household-sized solar energy units, and relatively low-capital intensive wind farms. If people in the future could get their energy, heating and transportation fuel needs met by the kind of small, household solar units that Honda has built in prototype (transportation fuel would be produced in the form of hydrogen), and from wind farms, then what place would there be for the huge power companies, the huge oil companies, the leviathan auto companies (the latter would have to do major retooling)? And what can they do in response to demands to radically reduce their CO2 emissions? As long as the world, or at least the US and its Asian partners, do not mandate radical restructuring, then Exxon will continue to make record profits (over $36 billion in 2005). But what would happen to it if we really did "get serious" about global warming?

This brings us to the related topic of energy, and the likelihood of reaching "peak oil" sooner rather than later: It appeared, as of March, 2005, that oil companies were having difficulty replacing the oil they had already pumped, that is they had proven fewer reserves than the oil they had taken out of the ground during the preceding year. The same appears true for 2005, but part of the problem may be the increasing role of government owned or controlled oil companies in India, China and Russia. Russia is avoided by the oil majors because of the political opacity of its oil ownership, but India and China are bidding against the private companies for reserves, because of the tremendous growth of demand in their countries. It is this new development, the economic takeoff of the Asian nations, which will probably bring peak oil sooner than the optimists predicted. (Some pessimists predicted its arrival in 2005). Its imminence is also probably why there is an apparent disinclination of oil industry companies to invest more in oil exploration and discovery, despite the fact that they are awash in tremendous profits, and despite the high price of oil that underlies those profits. Instead, they are buying each other up in mergers, or in the case of Exxon, buying back stock. Only one of them, BP, is also making significant investments in alternative energies. Oil company behavior, in other words, would seem to indicate that we have already reached, or are about to reach peak oil, otherwise wouldn't they be using their billions to lease potential fields for exploration all over the world, since the prospects are that their product will only become more valuable? That they are not doing so, but indulging in financial manipulation instead, would indicate that they don't think there are many more reserves out there to discover. They are rational economic institutions, after all.

If this is true, if peak oil is coming soon, what does it mean for our world?

Since our economy, and increasingly the world economy, is based upon cheap oil (even at $3.00 a gallon, it is cheaper than almost any other substance), and since this kind of price is not going to last much longer, the world is going to face a major upheaval, when oil production begins to decline, since demand for it will continue to rise. This will be a time when the world could be faced with resource wars much more dangerous and widespread than the war in Iraq, unless nations are able to sit down and peacefully re-allocate the oil that is left, and cooperate on replacing it with alternative energy as quickly as possible.

Bush's March, 2006 agreement with India, to help build and supply nuclear power plants is a tentative (if unfortunate) step in this direction, i.e. the rationale for the agreement is to reduce Indian dependence on oil. The solution may be worse than no agreement, since it will gut the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and enable India to become a more significant military nuclear power, but the idea of reallocating energy is sound.

The interests of the selfish class make the real reallocation of energy unlikely, except in the way President Bush has attempted to do with India: nuclear energy can be profitable for large corporations, but it is highly polluting and dangerous, especially with terrorism on the rise; solar and wind energy, on the other hand, would be more difficult for large corporations to control. Using significantly less energy through conservation would profit few of George's friends, and would cost the oil companies a lot of money. This really may be the reason why Bush and Congress have been unable or unwilling to put new CAFÉ standards into place; sipping gas instead of guzzling it would cut into oil industry profits.

Just to point this out, however, is to show how destructive rule by the selfish class can be. The rational economic response to looming shortages is to conserve and to seek out alternatives. The technological innovations required by this could provide tremendous stimulus to the economy and increase its competitiveness in the world. The failure to even consider CAFÉ standards, on the other hand, dooms the US to fall behind, and to produce less and less of what the rest of the world wants; no wonder GM is almost bankrupt.

Failure to develop alternative energies would also make the US more desperate to secure all the sources of oil it can, wherever they can be found. That means even higher defense expenditures, because the US would have to control larger and larger portions of the globe in order to insure its oil fix--so that the wealthy can continue to drive their Hummers. Given the inability even to control the Iraqi oil fields, such a course would be bloody, terribly expensive and doomed to failure.

That prospect leads us back to the financial problem: how much longer will the rest of the world agree to finance American world domination?

What are the alternatives?

Global corporations might see the writing on the wall and abandon the US; Europe and Asia might welcome a shift to the Euro for oil trading and for currency reserves, but they would both have to survive a massive depression--the loss of the American market of last resort: whether modern society would survive is a real question. The economic downturn might also slow global warming, since it is industrial prosperity that accelerates it. Other powers might come to the fore, like the barbarian kingdoms of the 6th century, but there are also other possibilities.

Really, there are two different, more revolutionary paths. One is the kind of obscurantist reaction that Osama bin Laden and the Christian Crazies both promote. Phenomena like them have happened before. After the first flush of the Muslim Conquest in the 700's, there were Arab fanatics in the 800's who took over North Africa and did their best to drive it back to the Stone Age, especially by destroying the aqueducts that made any large-scale agriculture possible there. That part of the world has still not recovered.

The more positive possibilities are some form of populist revolution like the ones taking place in Latin America: Chavez and Evo come to mind, or rather the movements that are associated with them, in which the people are empowered, in which local production and comfortable subsistence for all is the goal. Couple that political goal with small-scale power generation, local renewable sources of energy, fair trade in necessities, and you might have a survival strategy that would be equitable, humane, and environmentally benign.

Let us hope.