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"I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster." -- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940

What next for the Anglosphere?

I am a happy resident of the Anglosphere, the phenomenon that has been running the world since at least 1890 and possibly longer. Under the early tutelage of Great Britain, the Anglosphere invented the precursor to today's multinationals (East India Company), gave the English language to India, Hong Kong, Singapore, most of the Caribbean, eastern and southern Africa, inadvertently spawned its later leader (and current World CEO/Sheriff) the United States (inventing guerilla warfare in the process) also creating the much more mild-mannered Canada as well as the likeable bad boy Australia and the bastard child South Africa, went on to draw borders for - and invent - the contemporary Middle East (you can Google "Balfour Declaration" for a primer) and then, under the leadership of the US, turned large parts of the Middle East into a form of enormous energy farm run by quaintly dressed Bedouins. The Anglosphere then gave the world nuclear weapons, rock and roll, denim, the computer, and the notion that just about anything edible can be deep fried. In my humble opinion the finest invention of the Anglosphere was either Monty Python or Jimi Hendrix depending on how I'm feeling at any given time.

And now, with the US at the helm, the Anglosphere rules. In a way that's fine because you have to ask yourself this: If somebody has to rule then who of the would-be rulers would you want in charge? I personally don't believe that the earth should need a ruler, but that's just my naive belief in mankind talking.

The Anglosphere is incredibly cohesive right now. When a British Labour Party Government can be the best friend of an American neocon Administration for years and years, then you know something is up. When the Aussie Prime Minister (who's in DC this week) is treated like a fellow Texan by the President and appears thrilled with it, you know there's more to all this than just a detached handling of self interest by all parties.

The Anglosphere fights together. I would think that if on a whim this US Administration decided to take over Brazil in order to turn it into an enormous grazing ground for genetically enhanced cattle, then Britain and Australia would be right there, ready to claim that it is not only a good idea but absolutely necessary for the future stability of the world.

So what now? It appears that all of this has resulted in the losing of the Cold Peace with Russia obviously deciding how best to begin preparing its next big distastrous experiment with power projection. South America is going socialist....bad! bad South America! Iran is....what the hell IS Iran now? In the late 1990's, they were on their way to becoming friends of the Anglosphere and then somehow in 2002 or so, all of their budding moderates lost influence and the radical mullahs retook primacy. Why was that? Oh well.

End of gratuitous rant.

Chicken Little as Policy Icon

In his 1933 Inaugural Address, Roosevelt said the words, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." He was talking about the recovery from the Depression at the time and was urging people not to be paralyzed by fear and thus prevented from contributing to the rebound from the worst economic debacle of modern times. It was a smart thing to say, especially if you believe in the Rational Expectations School of Economics, which puts confidence at the center of economic behavior.

Roosevelt saw fear as an enemy of sorts, a thing to be overcome. However, he may not have even been aware at the time of the ways in which fear was being nurtured and utilized by governments in Germany and Italy in order to create compliance and malleability in otherwise enlightened populations, and done so for the benefit of a small new order of would-be rulers. Obviously, fascism ultimately failed but not before it had come frighteningly close to succeeding. And once the cat was out of the bag about how you could use fear to basically turn your citizens into sheep, and not to be outdone by right-wingers, the communists made use of fear in their various attempts to promote a "useful" servility among citizens beginning with Stalin's distastrous agrarian reform efforts in Ukraine, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the singularly baffling brutality of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge years.

But all of these places and times are far away from our reality, right? After all, our leaders are elected and thus represent the people. A government that makes use of fear to steer the behavior of the people, i.e. its employer, is hardly behaving like a government of the people. So it is of course anathema that our society even could be manipulated by the smart use of fear, right? And it's a good thing too, 'cause history has shown us how dangerous it is for an entire nation to be driven by fear.

Remember When...

Gas cost next to nothing?

Sometimes it is still hard to believe for some.

This weekend I was doing a little spring cleaning, and I finally decided to toss a bunch of old gas station bills and receipts. Those who know me well know that I can be a bit of a pack rat when it comes to throwing away receipts. Well, I hadn't tossed a single one of these gas receipts since 1988, thinking that one day I might enter the data into a spreadsheet (back then I would have used VisiCalc!) so as to produce an interesting chart.

Well, it was an interesting idea, but fortunately I've had better things to do, and never got around to it. Nevertheless I did scan a couple of the receipts in because I thought it would be fun to see what I was paying for gas back then.

Feb 27, 1989: Regular Unleaded (87 Octane) = $0.969

April 30, 1998: Special Unleaded (89 Octane) = $1.189

Hard to believe I could ever fill up a tank for just 10 bucks. Today I drive a car with only a slightly larger tank and it takes almost $50 to fill up.

From the mid 80's, through the new millennium, gas prices barely budged. The two receipts above, although nine years apart, show only a modest increase. However, since 2002 during the run up to Bush's war in Iraq, prices have doubled, and almost tripled. These days the savvy consumer can benefit from identifying which gas stations have the lowest prices, as such a site as GasBuddy.com help you to do. On my daily commute I see prices differ by as much as 20 to 30 cents depending on the station. Invariably, ARCO has the cheapest gas in this area.

While I take note of all these things I, like so many, am a creature of habit, not always logical - as much as I consider myself a person who does much based on logic. For example, I will drive by the cheaper ARCO station and fill up a few blocks away at a more expensive Chevron station. Why? Well I have a Chevron card, and I haven't bothered to get an ARCO card, and I like putting gas purchases on a gas card rather than my credit card. No good reason, I just do. I'm also still putting premium gas into my car. That's what the spec suggests, and despite the fact that you can read everywhere that premium gas isn't necessary, I still buy it, paying 20 cents a gallon more for it.

The point I'm getting at is that I have not altered my habits, as costly as they are, and that means I'm not feeling the bite of the higher prices yet. I don't drive as much, but I'm not sure that is not just a matter of circumstance, rather than a concerted effort to conserve fuel.

I've always felt that as a nation we've been on a free ride. The price of gas in America has been vastly cheaper than overseas. In Europe gas taxes are considerable. The Dutch are paying over $7 per gallon, with 66% of that in taxes. The Brits pay 75% in tax on their "petrol". That's $4 of tax for a $6 gallon of gas. By comparison, we pay only about 15% tax on the overall price.

Back when Ross Perot was running for President, part of his platform included a $1 gas tax, which was a big reason I voted for him - twice. At the time that would have been a considerable tax, even if it were far less than what European nations were enforcing, but when you consider how much gas we consume as a nation in a year (133 billion gallons), that's a lot of tax dollars that could have been captured.

Yes, yes, I know, you're probably thinking I'm just a bleeding heart, tax and spend liberal. Whatever. The fact of the matter is that pretty soon we will be paying European gas prices and very little of that money will be going into financing programs that could benefit society, and instead it will be going into padding the already stuffed pockets of Big Oil executives. Any chances that we could have encouraged the development of cheaper fuel alternatives, or more fuel efficient cars, while at the same time funding better transportation alternatives, education, you name it, on gas tax dollars is literally a pipe dream these days. Quite the opposite is happening, Frist and his friends are proposing a typically idiotic tax giveaway of $100, and yes, Democratic suggestions for a larger rebate are just as idiotic.

These are just band-aid responses to an issue that we cannot wish will just go away.

On Friday I watched "The End of Suburbia" on DVD. It was a sobering look at a way of life, driven by cheap oil, that we've come to take for granted, but which is destined to end within my lifetime. The issue of Peak Oil is one that governments have to take seriously. We ignore it at our own peril. Even if you dismiss the Doomsday scenarios it is clear that our reliance on oil for so many of the products we buy and use, not just the gas for our cars, means that we will be seriously hurting when the price for all these becomes too high because the resource is scarce in face of the demand. What alternatives will we develop? What compromises to out lifestyles will we be willing to make - or have to make, whether we like to or not?

President Bush is pushing a hydrogen car solution. This is such a joke, but it isn't a funny one. Simply put, it will take more energy to produce the necessary hydrogen, than that hydrogen will ever produce in energy. Hydrogen is a net loss energy solution. Bio-fuels are no better. We simply wouldn't have enough land to grow the crops needed, and finite water issues alone would cause other problems that our oil-bitten nation just isn't prepared to talk about. A good discussion about why a sugarcane fuel might work in Brazil, but not in the U.S. can be found here.

None of these are easy problems to solve. For the modern world that is beholden to a lifestyle based on oil there will be withdrawal pains like we've not seen in many a year. We need to do the things that we can, be it driving a Smart Car, riding mass transit, taking less trips or buying fewer products. As Thomas Friedman likes to write (and I guessing he will do so in detail in an upcoming book), Green is the New Red, White and Blue. We need to make environmentally sound choices, and we will find that so many of them will have huge economic benefits. As a nation we need to become a leader in the "green" market place. If we don't do it we know China will, out of pure necessity. We cannot afford to take a back seat in the innovations and fortunes to be found in this scientific race for a solution to our present and future energy needs. If we fall behind, we will surely be thinking many years from now, "Remember when..." regretfully all over again.

Cross-posted at On The Road To 2008.