Jim Kuntsler contrasts the collapse of the USSR vs. the collapse he sees coming here, and thinks maybe Russians were better prepared than we will be.

The comparison with the American situation is chilling. For all its gross faults, the Russians were ironically better prepared for economic collapse and political turmoil than we will be. For one thing, all housing there was owned by the state, and allocated under bare nominal rents, so when the economy collapsed, people just stayed in their apartments. Nobody got evicted.

The biggest difference, though, between Soviet Russia and America today is the psychology of the people. Soviet citizens were prepared for trouble by lifetimes of comparative hardship.

His post mentions the soon to published book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov, who lived through much of the Russian implosion.

From the Amazon review.

Rather than focusing on doom and gloom, Reinventing Collapse suggests that there is room for optimism if we focus our efforts on personal and cultural transformation.

He argues that by examining maladaptive parts of our common cultural baggage, we can survive, thrive, and discover more meaningful and fulfilling lives, in spite of steadily deteriorating circumstances.

Technology may be able to invent ways out of the worst of this by developing new, inexpensive forms of energy. (At least I hope so.) But how Russians survived the collapse of their economy may certainly be a guide for us if and when our economy starts to wobble too.

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And it’s on an Air Force base.

Hey, the military played a major role in the funding and development of the early Internet. Let’s hope they can help do the same for renewable energy too. The more development that is done, the cheaper and more efficiently generated the power will be.

More on the installation from the Nellis Air Force base.

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From Zmag, talking about how the major presidential candidates represent pro-war positions.

Where does this leave those of us who still see the occupation of Iraq as empire’s most vulnerable point—a key part in the puzzle to build a more just and sustainable world for future generations?

While I understand what they mean, that a collapse of the US war effort could mean an end to the occupation and maybe even US imperialism, it also implies that a) something seriously bad needs to happen before the Left can become ascendant and b) it cedes initiative and waits for the Bad Event to happen. You see this attitude in the global warming movement too, waiting for calamity to strike, so then people will understand and act.

When the US war effort falls apart in Iraq (and it will), the result rather than being a Glorious Victory for the people is more likely to be a bloodbath followed by lawlessness that will destabilize the area. The Left needs a coherent strategy and position for when the war ends. Right now it doesn’t have one, except for saying that it is morally correct.

Part of this phenomenon is that certain segments within the left are still convinced that, as Mao famously said, “the correctness or incorrectness of the ideological and political line decides everything.”

Mao couldn’t have been more wrong, but that’s what you get when true believers become convinced of their inerrancy. But people will not magically convert to your cause simply because you believe it to be true.

Another problem, especially in the antiwar movement, is looking back to the 60’s and expecting the same tactics to work again. If the populace is increasingly antiwar yet antiwar protests are getting smaller, then new tactics are needed. 60’s antiwar organizers pulled off protests that were at least as large as any during the Iraq War, and did so without the Internet and cell phones. So, given modern technology, the protests should be bigger now. But they aren’t. So maybe mass protests simply aren’t as effective now, given a 21st century where information flows effortlessly across the planet and counter-attacks happen almost instantaneously.

On the far left there’s what I call WWLD. When confronted with a quandry, some leftists will retreat into Marxist texts to determine What Would Lenin Do. This can result in deeply exciting and ferocious arguments (How many Marxists can dance on the head of a pin) but too often not much real action outside of the little group of squabbling comrades.

The Right packages their story well, stick with us, they say, and you’ll prosper. It matters not if it’s true, only that many believe it. The Left needs a story like that too. Something optimistic, something that will convince people to join because they want to, because they like the message.

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The plan to offload all those sinking SIVs into a a special fund where they could be hidden (AKA The Save Citi plan) is dead. No investors could be found for the estimated $350 billion of now toxic SIVs. So the banks were forced to take them back on their books, much as it pains them to act responsibly and ethically.

SIVs borrow short term money and “invest” it at higher rates, making money on the spread. This only works if what you buy retains its value and if lenders can be found to roll over your short-term debt. Neither is true any more for SIVs, and starting in January, many medium term notes come due and if a SIV can’t find new lenders suckers, it will become insolvent.

A bunch of clueless and incompetent regulators blinded by a free markets fundamentalist ideology - that ignores that financial markets without appropriate rules and regulations behave according to the law of the jungle - allowed these monsters to be created in the first place; these are the same folks that allowed the Enron’s SPVs – a close cousins of the SIVs – to be created and create a cancer that destroyed Enron. It is a scandal that after the Enron affair these SIV were allowed to mushroom without any supervision and regulation.

Now their schemes of greed are exploding in their faces. The financial carnage has just started and I expect more than a few of them will be going to prison.

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