The Yeast People

(The following essay comes from Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free email from Agora Financial. It was written by James Howard Kunstler.)
The Fate of the Yeast People

Every time I do a Q and A after a college lecture, somebody says (with a fanfare of indignation) — so as to reveal their own brilliance in contrast to my foolishness — “You haven’t said anything about overpopulation!”

Right. I usually don’t bother. Their complaint, of course, implies that we would do something about overpopulation if only we would recognize it. Which is absurd. What might we do about overpopulation here in the USA? Legislate a one-child policy? Set up an onerous set of bureaucratic protocols forcing citizens to apply for permission to reproduce? Direct the police to shoot all female babies? Use stimulus money to build crematoria outside of Nashville?

It’s certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We’re way beyond “carrying capacity.” Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.

The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.

I’m fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape — the fiasco of suburbia — to the way we feed ourselves — an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts — along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the NASCAR ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as “an offense in the sight of God” has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it — though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on “TV dinners,” motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their granddaddy’s day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It’s hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

And they were able to express themselves — as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well — in exuberant “taste cultures” of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the “playful” motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking — the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount — and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.

A very close friend of mine calls them “the yeast people.” They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there’s more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.

What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to “policies” and “protocols.” The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We’ve barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we’ll see “the usual suspects” come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.

It’s a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There’s some credible opinion that “this time it’s different” but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.
-end of quote from Whiskey and Gunpowder

I couldn’t keep myself from providing you with another dose of Mr. Kunstler. Even if you don’t agree with him, you have to admit that reading him is definitely entertaining.

Another guest opinion

(The following essay comes from Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free email from Agora Financial. It was written by James Howard Kunstler.)

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual — that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hyper-complex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

There are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.

Within the context of conventional party politics — the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time — we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” — if not hope itself — the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem. Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words, it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution

Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought to interest us. For instance, I have maintained for many years that we are approaching the twilight of the automobile age — and the implications of this for daily life in the USA are pretty large. For a long time, I had assumed that this change of circumstances would proceed from our problems with the oil supply. But reality is sly. It has thrown two new plot twists into the story lately. America’s romance with cars may not founder just on the fuel supply question. It now appears that our problems with capital are so severe that far fewer people will be able to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the rate, and in the way, that the system has been organized to depend on. Our problems with capital are also depriving us of the ability to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of county roads, interstate highways, and even city streets that make motoring possible. What will we do?

For now, a cashless government gives out cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a self-esteem building program designed to make the government feel better about itself because it is ostensibly taking 11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars, thus forestalling scary problems with climate change. It’s dumb of course, but the failure of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are preoccupied with finding new “green” ways to keep all the cars running. They put zero effort into the idea of walkable communities, or restoring the railroad system, which will be the reality-based remedies for the car-dependency problem.

The extreme right is, if anything, even more childishly delusional. For them it comes down to “drill, baby, drill.” They know nothing about the geology of oil — they don’t even believe that the earth is more than six-thousand years old, meaning they don’t believe in geology, period — but they are inflamed with the faith of eight-year-old children that we must have a lot more oil in the ground because this is America and God loves us more than people in other parts of the planet so it must be there. As their disappointment mounts, their childish ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They’ll seek to punish anybody who believes that the earth is more than six thousand years old. The catch is, if they get into power in the election cycles ahead, they’ll be impotent and ineffectual even at persecuting their enemies.
-end of quote from Whiskey and Gunpowder

Although I don’t completely agree with Mr. Kunstler, I do get his point. I probably have the advantage of having read more material from him over time, so I have a framework or context for my understanding. My intention in quoting him in this space was to get across the idea of Reality as the Rock we are being pressed against by the Hard Place of our current circumstances. Reality cares nothing for the political spin that has become a substitute for news of current events. So, dear reader, please take the time to think critically about what you read and hear. Consider what advantage could be gained by the tale teller, if you were to believe the tale as it is told.

Scary Picture

Here’s a scary picture of the job situation. Normalizing to the starting point of each of the most recent recessions you can see that the current recession is dramatically more severe, in terms of job losses on a relative basis, that anything seen in recent times. And we haven’t yet reached a bottom. (The following graph and written commentary come from Casey’s Daily Dispatch, a free email from Casey Research.)

In response, El Presidente told us on Friday that he and his minions are pulling out all the stops to assure that “Americans who want to find work can find work and all Americans can earn enough to raise their families and keep their businesses open.”

Under consideration, we are further told, is a tax break for companies to hire new employees.

While I certainly am in favor of tax breaks of any and all description, I have to wonder just how much of a tax incentive the government would have to offer before businesses would want to run out and hire new employees?

Especially given that virtually every business survey indicates that corporate executives remain concerned about the economic outlook. As such, human nature beckons the executive team to cut all non-essential expenses, shrink inventories, raise cash, and otherwise hunker down. Survival of the fittest pretty well sums it up.

Hiring new employees runs contrary to that mindset. Especially given that, in these United States, hiring an employee requires not just paying the wages but entails a multitude of costs, from those associated with training to a myriad of employment-related payroll taxes, including unemployment taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare, to sundry benefits, furniture, hand soap and tissue in the corporate facilities, periodic outbreaks of employee litigation, and ongoing compliance training for anyone involved in any work involving regulated activities. Also to be paid, of course, are the HR personnel necessary to keep track of the whole tangled ball. And that’s just for starters.

Soon, costs associated with mandatory health care will be demanded and, most likely, a levy to offset your new worker’s “carbon footprint.”

Speaking broadly, the cost of the average employee in the U.S. private sector comes to $29.31 per hour. Whipping out the calculator, we soon discover that the annual tab for having the next desk occupied comes in at $60,964.80. (The wages and benefits of federal employees tally in at about 50% higher, but in honor of their tireless service to the public, we’ll leave them out of the discussion. They are worth every darn penny in lifetime pension benefits, paid holidays, and free insurance they earn! Right?)

At the moment, using the government’s own, somewhat optimistic calculations, there are on the order of 15.7 million Americans unemployed. Of course, no economy enjoys full employment, so we’ll turn the dial only back to December of 2007, the month that the recession officially began. At the time, the unemployment rate was 4.9%, versus 10.2% today. Since that momentous month, 7.3 million jobs have been lost.

Replacing the calculator with a spreadsheet and plugging in the numbers tells us that giving all those folks a job at average wage levels, either through private employers or government work projects, would amount to $445 billion a year. Which, when considering the planned trillion dollars plus annual deficits contemplated by the administration, seems almost reasonable.

Of course, this overlooks the reality that the money used to pay all those workers would ultimately have to come from taxpayers, including the companies themselves, making it essentially a zero-sum game. Worse, it would be a game played against a backdrop of ballooning government debts.
-end of quote from Casey’s Daily Dispatch

Here’s the thing. This is what isn’t getting broadcast on the evening news. This is what you need to understand. The government is not going to do the smart thing, they are going to do the politically expedient thing. They can be counted on to do exactly what will buy the most votes. So even though we are running a $1.4+ trillion budget deficit they will not shy away from adding more spending. The spending is not going to stop, at least not in the near term. Count on it. Plan for it. Take action accordingly.