2nd Wave of Work for Home

Hey all you city-fucks it's a prairies man world

It's wide 0pen

I have a Twilight Zone sense of things these days. A person walking around a world changed, but no one sees it. To this point, the US reaction to Trump's Idiocy has been underwhelming. Take the financial markets as prime example, but it runs through the political establishment and the citizenry at large. After all, what's another American blowup of a country in the Middle East? There's been few previous repercussions for the "Homeland." No price paid accept by a gullible and/or tragic few. The whole 45 years of oil militarism funded with debt.

Susan at Naked Capitalism has a very astute comment on this mindset in finance. She writes,

Now how can that be? Decades of momentum trading being far more lucrative than fundamental analysis, exacerbated by faith in the Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen-Powell put, plus indoctrination that if you hold financial assets long enough, they will work out in the end, seems to have produced cognitive stupor, an inability to recognize the black swan that just landed on your desk.

However, it's not just cognitive stupor in finance, it's across the board. A stupor based in America's complete dependence on oil, yet the almost total ignorance of how the global oil system works.

Far be it for me to recommend the International Energy Agency (IEA) for any oil insights. After all, the IEA acutely represents the failure of the post-WWII global institutional order. Well, it was very unlikely to be gotten right the first time and it wasn't.

The IEA was founded by bloodlusting ghoul Dr. Kissinger in response, most ironically, to our now Arab allies embargoing Gulf oil supplies as part of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The embargo hit the US and western Europe particularly hard. The price of a barrel quickly quadrupled. The mad Doctor found oil an inconvenient fly in his imperial soup, thus founding the IEA.

Without going into detail, the IEA has basically been worthless think-tank for its entire existence. Take for example last week's announcement members would release 400 million barrels of their reserve supplies. In a world that now burns over a hundred million barrels a day, that's four days supply.

Today, in a just released report, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, attempting to break the oil cognitive stupor states,

“The war in the Middle East is creating a major energy crisis, including the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. In the absence of a swift resolution, the impacts on energy markets and economies are set to become more and more severe."

Let me assure you folks, in its fifty years existence, IEA has never said anything like this.

For its first three decades, the IEA's only consideration for oil supply or demand was both would grow. You might think an agency founded on a concern for oil on a finite planet, might be interested in say smarter demand, but you'd be wrong. So, it's shocking to see IEA recommend in response to Trump's Idiocy: reducing highway speeds, encourage public transport, increase car sharing, alternate days for car road use, avoid air travel, and a number of other changes to American life – deja vu all over again.

IEA also recommends work from home. This wasn't possible in the 1970s, only really coming available in last quarter century with the electromagnetic compute revolution. We can remember going back five years, I get it's a stretch, COVID caused the first wave of work for home. It was popular with many, though not so much with mega-corporate CEOs, certainly never with the Wall Street Journal.

I thought it might offer an opportunity to begin rebuilding and building anew local community. Instead, at home people simply buried themselves deeper into the cyber-mindfuck energy sink offered by the Valley's Tech Bro-Overlords.

As they say, this time can be different. It would behoove all to come together and start thinking and acting on how we can start restructuring, from the ground up, America's infrastructure to become less oil dependent.

In 2026, all politics is about reorganization. If you're not talking about reorganization, you're not talking about politics.