Hey all — I've started a bookmark list at Diigo specifically for Marcellus information: diigo.com/list/rabbitmountain/marcellus-shale.

My goal is not simply to create a datadump, but to see what kinds of patterns emerge. I have a ton of questions and doubts about the whole Marcellus thing which I hope to get to the bottom of with a little datamining.

First question at the top of my list: where the F is all this Marcellus money that's supposed to be flooding PA right now?

Anyway, head on over to Diigo and check it out. Better yet, join up Diigo so we can follow each other and compare notes.

Atomized entrepreneurship is where we're headed as a nation. There's just no way around it — when the government safety net is finally torn asunder, people have no choice.

George's video demonstrates a couple of things. First, this sort of thing delegitimizes government and the rule of law all the way down to the bottom of law-abiding society. It is every bit as illegal to run a restaurant out of one's house as it is to grow and sell marijuana. In other words, granular entrepreneurship is illegal, and that illuminates just how precisely the laws in the U.S. have been designed for the benefit of large businesses — granular competition is not allowed.

Second, because granular entrepreneurship is illegal, it also delegitimizes the American dollar — if no money trades hands, it is much more difficult to bust a lone entrepreneur. Thus barter and alternative currencies not tied to the dollar will almost certainly come to the fore as people attempt to both survive and stay out of jail.

Personally, I think it's awesome the folks in that video have taken matters into their own hands. Comments at YouTube and in the video itself decry such a development because it is too much like Mexico. I think we all need to learn what we can from Mexico because that is our fate as well. Our government is both insolvent and delegitimized; our currency is on the fast track to worthless; our big businesses and industries have relocated overseas. We've been used up and tossed in the trash by Goldman Sachs and their ilk and we all have to do what we can to survive. If ordinary Mexicans have a track record of success with similar circumstances then we should be paying attention.

Yes I know I said light posting for the next couple of weeks, but two articles have crossed my path which bear attention.

The first is an article from a couple weeks ago at Salon: Are The American People Obsolete? The author makes a compelling case that the elites have broken the social contract between themselves and the rest of us, and that they no longer need us:

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.

This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

. . .

If much of America's investor class no longer needs Americans either as workers or consumers, elite Americans might still depend on ordinary Americans to protect them, by serving in the military or police forces. Increasingly, however, America's professional army is being supplemented by contractors — that is, mercenaries. And the elite press periodically publishes proposals to sell citizenship to foreigners who serve as soldiers in an American Foreign Legion. It is probably only a matter of time before some earnest pundit proposes to replace American police officers with foreign guest-worker mercenaries as well.

Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.

The second article comes from the Guardian: Jobless millions signal death of the American dream for many. It is one of the few pieces in any news organ I've seen anywhere that actually considers what happens to people when their unemployment benefits run out. We hear a lot about this happening, but as far as the monopoly media are concerned, these people seem to just disappear into some kind of void where they do not even show up in statistics.

America appears to be a society splitting down the centre, shattering the middle class that long formed the cultural bedrock of the country and dividing it into a country of haves and have-nots. "A once unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal," warned Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times column. Or, as Steven Green, an economics lecturer at Baylor University, put it to the Observer: "We are really in a tough spot right now."

There is a new name for those falling down the black hole of joblessness that has opened up in America's economy. They are the 99ers.

It is a moniker that no one wants. It refers to the 99 weeks of benefits that the jobless can qualify for in America. Government cash helps those laid off keep a tenuous grip on a normal life. It keeps a roof over their heads, pays a phone bill, puts food on a table and petrol in a car. But once the 99 weeks are up the payments stop — as is happening now for millions of people — and they are 99ers.

For many, that moment, which America's politicians have refused to extend, represents the moment of destitution; a sort of modern American version of the old Victorian trip to the workhouse. There are now more than a million 99ers and the number gets bigger each week.

But who are they? Despite Republican attempts to paint them as feckless or job-shy, they are usually anything but. The 99ers are people like Anne Strauss, 58, who spent 35 years working as a PR professional on Long Island. Despite spending every day hunting for work, she has not had a job since June 2008. She and her husband are now living on credit cards watching debts mount as they stare into the abyss. "Looking for a job is the hardest I have ever worked," she said with a smile that conveyed no humour or happiness, only the deep stress that is common to many 99ers.

Strauss, along with about 50 other 99ers, protested on Wall Street last week, demanding an extension of the benefits that could keep them out of poverty. As bankers and financiers strode into the flag-draped Stock Exchange they chanted: "Shame! Shame!" and told their stories. It was a litany of middle-class lives shattered by the recession. There was Connie Kaplan, a corporate librarian who was desperate to resume her career. "We are not bums, we are hardworking," she said. Or Lori Ghavami, a New Jersey financial analyst in her 30s, who had once worked on Wall Street itself and now was staring at landlords' bills she was scared she could not pay. Or New Yorker Steven Bilarbi, 62, who had worked for the same employer for 37 years, until 2007. He has not worked since, despite refusing to spend daytime hours at home and engaging in a permanent job hunt. He is now living off savings and depleting his pension.

"I go to job fairs. I don't feel like staying home. What would I do? Watch game shows and soap operas?" he fumed.

Meeting 99ers is to tap into a deep well of anger at lives that have been knocked off course, shattering the enduring vision of the American dream that many had felt they had achieved. Just take Donna Faiella, a 53-year-old New Yorker who lives alone in Queens. She spent 28 years working in film post-production and video-editing. She was successful and had a career. Now she is desperate for a job, any job. But she cannot find one. "I will do anything. I will sweep floors. You think I look forward to collecting unemployment? It is fucking degrading," she said, almost quivering with anger.

Faiella is in dire trouble. Joblessness has eaten away at her sense of identity. "I feel like we are worthless. We are lost in the world. I don't know what to call myself. I don't have a title any more. What do we do? What do we do?" she implored. Faiella has one week of benefits to go. Then her 99 weeks will be up. She will have a title again. But not one she expected. She will be a 99er. "I am petrified. Do I become homeless?" she said, adding that she has begun making inquiries at local shelters.

Emphasis mine.

The current recession is the continuation of the Reagan-Thatcher "free trade" regime first begun in the early 1980s. "Free trade" is the euphemism that describes the process of hollowing out the United States economy — and this of course is necessary if global wealth is to be further concentrated into the hands of an ever-smaller inner circle.

The Guardian article explains very well the position in which we find ourselves. The Great Recession of the late '00s has been a major step forward for the power elite — it has severed most of the remaining socio-economic contract they had with us by transferring a literally incomprehensible amount of wealth out of the hands of the American middle class and into the hands of the money masters.

There is no longer anything, really, stopping the power elite from seizing global domination. Global domination is always the goal of empire consciousness, but for the first time in history it appears to be logistically do-able through "free trade" zoning.

This global domination power grab is the summit of unsustainability. It is destined to fail, and when it does collapse it has the capacity to bring down civilization the world over along with it. This is the logical conclusion of the Fall, the inevitable outcome of separating ourselves from the natural world and adopting the unmitigated gall to think we are above nature, that is, supernatural. 

For the handful of you who have become regular readers, a quick note: posting will be light for the next couple-few weeks. I've picked up some extra work and am earnestly attempting to pull together enough money to get my car fixed before winter. I have a great little '88 Accord into which I've put a fair amount of money already, but now it has a blown head gasket and needs a new engine, which will cost me about $1200. It's gonna be a tough hurdle but it's got to happen before winter. If you feel so inclined to contribute to this effort, please contact me directly.

In the meantime, you're welcome to follow my recent reading at Diigo. I keep an archive of stuff there that I don't always share with my social network, and I keep it categorized, so you can read what you want and skip what you don't want. It's here: http://www.diigo.com/list/rabbitmountain.

Diigo's the best social bookmarking site on the web, by the way. Just sayin'.

Anyone who knows me knows also that I have been critical of nearly all organized attempts at powerdown since I first became cognizant of collapse. The reasons are myriad, but like physics, these reasons tied together by an underlying thread which I can identify intuitively, but which defies my attempts to communicate.

A couple days ago, Venkat Rao over at Ribbonfarm made a lengthy post that contributes significantly to bringing this thread into sharper focus. Venkat's post is a review of a book called Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott. He writes:

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

. . .

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives.

The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic. The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the people, on the part of governments with a popular, left-of-center mandate. Hence the subtitle (don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a simplistic anti-big-government conservative/libertarian view though; this failure mode is ideology-neutral, since it arises from a flawed pattern of reasoning rather than values).

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.

Emphasis mine.

In a nutshell, Venkat's post exposes the unexamined cognition from which the Transition Towns, Community Solution, and similar powerdown movements are born. All follow the recipe listed above, and all are designed to maintain legibility at the local level while state-level legibility crumbles. Intentionally designed collapse-proof "communities" are like holographic shards of the big broken whole. There is nothing new here — the cognitive state which brought us to collapse is merely being replicated on smaller scales.

I encourage you to head over to Ribbonfarm and check out the post.