The state that almost invented auto mobile living grinds to a halt:

Gas prices shot up nearly 13 cents in some areas overnight Saturday, fueled by what’s being called “a perfect storm of factors” that drove inventories across California to near-record lows.

The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in L.A. County was $4.66, up from $4.58 on Friday.

It’s been a long time coming.  Consider this, from a piece from another website of mine showing one of my family business’ products offshore California before they pulled the plug.  The commentary is nearly ten years old:

Vulcan 3100 hammer installing piles for Exxon’s Hondo platform off of Santa Barbara, California. In 1752 Bishop Erich Pontippidan noted that “The North Sea has a curious property. In addition to its salinity it also possesses oiliness. It is likely that here or there the sea, just as the earth, ejects oil flows, or streams of petroleum, naptha, sulphur, coal tar and other bituminous and oily juices.” Similar things were noted off of California, without the offshore drilling that is supposed to be the sole cause of this.

The fanatical determination of environmentalists to see their vision of purity realised ended offshore oil exploration off of California, something that the state has paid the price for ever since.

And obviously is not getting any better…but such is life in the People’s Republic.

Al-Jazeera takes note of the events across the Gulf:

Iranian riot police have clashed with protesters in the capital Tehran over the collapse of the rial, the country’s currency, which has lost a third of its value against the dollar in a week.

Police on Wednesday reportedly fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators, including currency exchange dealers.

It was the first sign of public unrest over the plunging currency.

The fall of the rial, which has now lost more than 80 per cent of its value compared with a year ago, with 17 per cent of its value shed on Monday alone, has been largely blamed on Western sanctions imposed over the country’s nuclear programme.

The rial slipped another four per cent on Tuesday to close at 36,100 to the dollar, according to exchange tracking websites.

To say that Iranians are shamed over this is an understatement.  To say that the economic sanctions are having an effect is an understatement too.  Hyperinflation, where people’s savings evapourate, is destabilising.  Whether it’s enough to overcome the regime’s security apparatus is another story.  That was the dilemma about Saddam Hussein: his mismanagement of the economy, coupled with sanctions, produced hardships, but his internal security was so strong that the power challengers were stymied from taking action, until George W. Bush showed up with “democracy in the Middle East”.

Recent history re U.S. support of Iranian dissidents isn’t encouraging.

Speaking of power challengers, this is also interesting:

Mohammadi also said holding talks with the US was not an option.

“Past experience shows that speaking of negotiations in these conditions only sends a signal of weakness. The enemy only makes concessions and takes you seriously when you’re strong,” he wrote.

Maybe that’s an admission of weakness in and of itself…

But perhaps there’s something to be proud of here.  Twenty years ago, Russia experienced similar (if not quite this many zeroes) inflation, and I had this exchange with my Russian representative:

Socialist states love to trumpet their own successes, real or just propaganda. The collapse of the rouble left just about everyone in the Russian Federation with more than a million roubles (about US$770 in early 1994) of net worth. So I declared to my representative, “Seventy years of socialism, and everyone’s a millionaire!”

His response: “It was their greatest achievement!”

Ross Perot, the man who messed up the 1992 election, is at it again:

“We’re on the edge of the cliff, and we have got to start fixing it now. Otherwise, we’re leaving a disaster to our children’s and our grandchildren’s future,” he said.

Wolf spoke with Perot as part of an interview for C-SPAN, where additional clips have been posted (the full interview is set to air Monday night).

In it, Perot talks about his fear of the United States being taken over.

“If we are that weak, just think of who wants to come here first and take us over and the last thing I ever want to see is to see this country, our country taken over because we’re so financially weak we can’t do anything and we’re moving in that direct. … We could even lose our country if we don’t get this fixed and straightened out and nobody that’s running really talks about it, about what we have to do and why we have to do it. They would prefer not to have it discussed.

On both sides of the political spectrum, we have the idea that representative government (usually but not precisely characterised as democracy) is the best for ourselves and everyone else.  We overlook, however, the simple fact that a functioning representative government requires a citizenry responsible enough to sustain it.  Our Founding Fathers were well aware of this but we have forgotten it, to our peril.  (That was, as I’ve said before, George W. Bush’s key error in Iraq: trying to bring “democracy” to a people totally unprepared for it).

Perot, perhaps without meaning to, brings up a key question this time around: are we capable of sustaining the form of government we have?  Given the way we’ve run up our unsustainable debt and the other irresponsible things we have done, that’s a legitimate question.  If we are not, as he warns, there are plenty of others who would like a crack at running this country in our place.

And there are some of us who would, depending upon who ends up doing it, come out ahead with someone else doing the governing.  Would you?

And they certainly have one:

“He’s got to continue to concentrate on jobs,” Rep. Bill Pascrell said last week as the House was leaving town for a long, pre-election recess.

“I’m hoping he’ll do immigration reform,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).

“We should get back to an energy policy – one that acknowledges that climate change is real,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

“The critical issues will be revenue generation … and … a concerted push on immigration reform,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

“I think he’d want his administration to start on healthcare,” said Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.).

The really laughable part of this is the juxtaposition on jobs and the economy with environmental legislation.  Reducing emissions of all kinds is impossible without contracting the economy and lowering living standards, and that’s what’s been going on the last four years.

The same problem exists with the debt issue and revenue generation.  Repayment of the debt we have without serious inflation is only possible with a stronger economy, which again goes against the environmental considerations.  If we inflate our way out of this debt, however, our credit–to say nothing of our currency–won’t be worth much.

Raising taxes to solve this problem will only put the economy in a downward spiral, which will again make the environmentalists happy but will make debt repayment even more problematic.

The blunt truth is, however, that if Obama is re-elected he doesn’t need Congress to do much of anything.  Taxes go up automatically at the end of the year, health care marches on (why any Democrat is stupid enough to revisit that monstrosity is beyond me) and he can always use his extra-legal legerdemain on an executive basis to deal with his enemies.

Of all people, Rachel Maddow, on of all networks, MSNBC, calls this one-speech volte-face by Barack Obama for what it is:

This country is, in many ways, in the course of a long revolution that started with the 1960’s.  (For a country always in a hurry, we can’t even get a revolution resolved in 40-50 years)!  But in this respect, all revolutions are the same: they start with a cry for freedom and end up destroying that freedom in the name of their own self-righteous view.  That’s what happened in France, it’s what happened in Russia and China, and it’s what’s happening now in this country.

The Guantanamo inmates should have been put in a military tribunal and processed.  It was the serious mistake of George W. Bush that he did not.  Barack Obama started out by promising to close Guantanamo, but he did not.  Then he wanted to try certain people in civilian court in, of all places, New York.  I think he wanted to do that to expose them to the technicalities of American civilian process, get them acquitted or off on one of those technicalities, and then use that as a justification to release the rest of them.

That didn’t work either.  In the meanwhile Barack Obama has found his “inner Lenin”, a person that the American left has, at no small cost to itself, tried to keep out.  Now he wants indefinite prolonged detention of those not to our government’s taste, and supposing that’s restricted to Muslim radicals is naïve.

We still have an electoral process to fix problems like this.  For the moment.  But revolutions have a way of getting rid of those also, don’t they?

And neither would most people who are already there:

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

Much of the blame is heaped on Barack Obama, but let’s be fair: this mess has been a long time coming.  It’s been thirty years since Chuck Schumer got the bright idea of making environmental violators criminals.  Sarbanes-Oxley was passed under George W. Bush.  And we’ve had NIMBY and the insane tax code as long as I’ve been around.

Barack Obama is just the current darling of a Luddite élite who not only has no idea how to manage a productive economy, but has a real horror of one ever arising, for both environmental and personal reasons.  They’ve been working on making it impossible to legally operate a viable business in the United States and they’ve just about succeeded.

When you combine that with our financial “wizards of Bubbleland” who have created a credit allocation and monetary system increasingly divorced from economic reality, you have the makings of what we have: stagnation.  And the prospects of that changing in the foreseeable future are slim.