Benghazi

I grew up in a U.S. Foreign Service family. My step-father was a career “FSO” (Foreign Service Officer) and a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force Reserve (having served in WWII with the CIA-precursor, the OSS). My mother was a translator/analyst (Eastern Europe) with the Foreign Service’s umbrella agency, the Department of State. While I spent four and a half years as an FSO-brat in Beirut, my parents were stationed all over the world (then-Bombay, Saigon during the Vietnam War, Antwerp, Beirut, etc.). We all knew the rules. We all knew the risks, even little me as teenaged boy. Serve your country or even just be a dependent of a serving U.S. Foreign Services Officers and know that there are those dedicated to inflict harm on you for political reasons. Keep your eyes and ears open.

I hate that four of our embassy personnel were killed in a disastrous attack last September at our diplomatic installation Benghazi, Libya: Ambassador Chris Stevens, computer specialist Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs hired to help protect them, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.  I was most certainly not happy that the administration officials who reported the attack were muddled, misinformed and inconsistent. The situation could most certainly have been handled better. The confusion was not intentional as the recent release of the relevant emails illustrated. “The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.

“Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them… Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying ‘Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,’ adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.” New York Times, May 15^th.

That Congress was in budget-cutting mode, which had a clear impact on maintaining top security at our diplomatic facilities around the world, that in recent times America has increasingly adopted policies that have generated serious opposition from nations and factions everywhere and that the Libya situation was a focal point for armed insurrection during the Arab Spring are issues that all seem to have fallen by the wayside as partisanship has replaced genuine concern among too many members of our Senate and House of Representatives. A thorough review of the above mass of emails failed to produce the anti-Obama/Hillary Clinton linkage that partisan politics seemed to demand. Mishandled, but no smoking gun.

Look at the chart above, prepared and released by Mother Jones on October 3, 2012, shortly after the attack. According to the Global Terrorism Database compiled by the University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, there were “64 attacks on American diplomatic targets during the George W. Bush administration, including car bombs at the US embassy in Yemen and armed attackers assaulting a US consulate in Saudi Arabia.” A lot higher than attacks during the Obama years. So what?! To try and link such attacks to President Bush’s individual failures is as stupid as trying to pin the four deaths on the carelessness of Barrack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

We should deplore efforts to use governmental agencies to abuse their powers. The IRS scandal is deeply troublesome, and I certainly agree that severe punishment is appropriate for all those involved in approving this assault on conservative political non-profits. I am worried about any attempts to muzzle a free press by compelling revealing underlying sources. But any attempt to find deep “impeachable” fault concerning the Benghazi deaths is a slap in the face to those who died nobly in the service of their nation. People like my mom and dad.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the constant need to politicize when we should be joining forces augurs very badly for the sustainability of the American democracy.

Reading the Tea Leaves

By the time the infamous Zhou Dukes ruled the rich and fertile lands in central China (855 to 221 BC), the Chinese psyche had been set. Confucius was the great administrator, moving from one Duke’s court to another, but his essays (literally words – “sayings” – to live by) about Chinese propriety, virtues and moral values – known as the Analects (circa 5^th century BC) codified the expectations of a brutal and strictly hierarchical society that has endured in one form or another over time into the present day.

The Zhou Dukes grew to abhor eye contact from the commoners, a practice that evolved into the bow and even the kowtow heavily practiced in the entire region. They believed that they literally owned everything of value in their dukedoms, planting spies everywhere to discover hidden wealth. If you weren’t in the inner circle, your ability to possess wealth (usually not kept where you lived for obvious reasons) was either a matter of secrecy or tacit approval from the top. Chinese homesteads reflected the architecture of secrecy: a walled compound with no external windows, all turned inward toward the encircled courtyard.

With spies everywhere, you learned to distrust anyone outside of your family (or those non-familial relationships earning a trusted “uncle” or “auntie” affirmation) and never, never to talk about inner feelings or make direct statements that could be challenged later. Anything you said could and would be used against you by the harsh social system. Chinese dialogue evolved into a language of visual metaphor, where you could use the symbolism to make a point or lapse back into the visual metaphor itself to create “plausible deniability.” “I wasn’t talking about a different system of politics; I was talking about flowers!”

It is precisely this persistence of speaking indirectly, in a language of “plausible deniability,” that often drives China-watchers bonkers. This indirect expressive structure endures into the present day, so one has to read tea leaves to figure out through “hints” what is really happening. There are no “accidental” frank statements. Everything is carefully considered and filtered, with government officials often floating trial balloons in obscure publications or indirect actions or inactions.

And so it is with China’s new top boss, Xi Jinping, who has spoken about walking carefully across the “stepping stones” across the creek. His prioritization of rooting out corruption is of particular interest to the outside world, where we have watched China’s insiders and “princelings” take their piece out of most large-scale financial transactions in the Peoples Republic. There is some tea brewing, perhaps a signal, perhaps a trial balloon, in accusations of corruption against a top official fomented by an aggressive journalist. “Liu Tienan [pictured above], deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission [a senior economic planning group], is suspected of ‘serious disciplinary violations,’ Xinhua news agency says.

“Allegations against Mr Liu first surfaced in December, when a well-known journalist [Luo Changping, deputy editor of respected Caijing Magazine] accused him of corruption… On entries posted on weibo, China’s version of Twitter, Mr Luo said the official was involved in questionable financial deals, fabricated his academic record and threatened to kill a former mistress.” BBC.co.uk, May 13, 2013.

BBC’s Martin Patience tells us just how significant this little story might be: “What is unusual about this case is how it first came to light. A journalist from the respected Chinese magazine, Caijing, posted the allegations online last December… Normally, allegations against senior officials are censored immediately. When, for example, the foreign media ran reports about wealth accumulated by the families of President Xi Jinping and former Premier Wen Jiabao, they were blocked online.

“But the allegations about Liu Tienan remained online for months, which almost certainly suggests the decision not to remove them was sanctioned by the country’s leadership… Mr Liu is by no means a giant of Chinese politics, but he is senior enough for people to sit up and take note. Since taking power, Xi Jinping has frequently warned about the dangers corruption poses to Communist Party rule.” BBC.co.uk. Is this a tiny step, a test of the system, as Xi begins to make his move? Is this a warning to others, a beginning of a “long march” against corruption or both? Xi Jinping just might be getting serious about one of China’s biggest problems.

I’m Peter Dekom, and these could be some very interesting tea leaves to read.

Measure of Success

The quality of a democracy cannot be measured by the power and treatment of the majority, because that would effectively justify mob rule, the Nazification of post-World War I Germany and that radical imposition of majority religious laws as governance for those who do not share majority beliefs as evidenced by Iran. The measure of success for democratic rule is so much more the power and treatment of those who do not share the majority’s mandate. Our forefathers quested for that compromise, reeling from the treatment of religious minorities seeking sanctuary after decades, if not centuries, of religious persecution and even prosecution in continental Europe. That protection of minorities still had a long way to go, even under our system of government, a path that led to the passage of Thirteenth Amendment (banning slavery) and a spate of Supreme Court decisions that bolstered that protection for minority rights.

Any nation that does not cherish its divergent minority elements cannot claim status as a true democracy, and those nations that claim to be democracies but crush minority rights are nothing more than failed or failing states. And so it is with Pakistan, our very uncomfortable “ally” in our desire to subdue those who, by means of murderous terrorism, seek to destroy true democracy and any semblance of rights to any grouping that does not adhere to their strictest application of repressive religious law.

As local political candidates seek to formalize reversal of that policy which seems to have died a long time ago – Pakistan as America’s partner engaged in eliminating these repressive and violent segments of society – these extremist adherents themselves, the Pakistani Taliban, have made it clear that voting in an election to impose any government other than their own governance-by-God system of crushing rules is a sufficient justification for death to such blasphemous voters. Suicide bombers have taken more than a few victims in these discomfiting elections, the first civilian-to-civilian transition of power in Pakistan’s 66-year history!

In the notorious and seemingly ungovernable Tribal Districts, extremists Sunnis, often Taliban-affiliates, have taken to slaughtering their unpopular minority Shiites. This past February, for example, in Quetta, 84 Shiites were killed in a bombing attack, joining the approximately 1,000 other Pakistani Shiites slaughtered in the last five years. Murders brag of their slaughter, ranging through the countryside without the slightest fear of prosecution, as long as the victims are members of unpopular minority sects. What went wrong in this clearly failing state?

In the late 1940s, as England released the subcontinent to self-rule, violence between Muslims and Hindus resulted in bifurcation between primarily Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan (later losing East Pakistan, which formed the independent state of Bangladesh). Writing in the May 10^th New York Times, Manan Ahmed Asif reminds us: “The makers of Pakistan were peasants and laborers. In 1940, they passed a resolution in Lahore to demand a separate homeland for Muslims and an end to British colonial occupation. In 1946, their votes brought a political party, the Muslim League, to power. They chose Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a modernist technocrat, as their leader.

“Jinnah asked his party’s legislators to focus on the well-being of the ‘masses and the poor’ and demanded that ‘every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his color, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations.’ Men like Muhammad Zafrulla Khan (an Ahmadi diplomat) and Raja Amir Ahmad Khan (a Shiite noble) had worked alongside Jinnah for decades to fulfill this dream of equality.

“Yet the birth of Pakistan was not auspicious for minorities. The original claim of Pakistan — religious equality — was the first claim proved false. Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, though he became the first foreign minister, was hounded by religious conservatives, who branded him an apostate because of his Ahmadi faith. Ahmadis, followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), consider themselves part of the Muslim tradition but have faced stern resistance from Sunni Muslims, who accused them of following a false prophet…

“Today, tolerance is under siege from all directions. Even Imran Khan, the sports star turned politician — who enjoys a near-divine status among young, urban Pakistanis — has contributed to the marginalization of minorities. On May 4, he said at a rally that he did not regard Ahmadis as Muslims and would not campaign for their votes. Mr. Khan has based his campaign on a message of ‘change’ reminiscent of President Obama’s in 2008. His statement on Ahmadis was therefore particularly damaging and chilling.

“As a candidate marketing himself as a political outsider, he could have opened up a national conversation on equality of citizenship and reached out to all voters, including Ahmadis, Hindus and Christians. Instead he reaffirmed the political exclusion of minorities and legitimized intolerance in the eyes of his millions of idealistic young followers, who quickly echoed his dismissal in online networks.

“Over the last five years, hundreds of Ahmadis have been targeted and killed in Pakistan’s cities. In 2010, 94 were killed in a terrorist attack in Lahore, and since then their burial grounds, mosques and homes have been under assault. There has been no response from the government, which still refuses to grant them equal status as citizens of Pakistan. Christian communities have also been targeted, and prominent Christian leaders, like Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister of minorities, have been assassinated. While the state has done little to punish these acts, various militant organizations have brazenly claimed credit for them.

“The candidates campaigning in this election, rather than arguing for the rights of all Pakistanis, have further marginalized religious minorities and given license to those who attack them… Despite the rise of satellite television and online media that have allowed mass participation in politics outside of old patronage networks, a new form of majoritarian tyranny has taken hold. It is built on the classic anxieties of the rising middle class: the fear of the other, the conspirator among us.”

The violence-marred elections are over in Pakistan, a “new” leader has emerged. Deposed almost a decade and a half ago by the military, the victor (with less than a full majority) – primarily by reason of the votes generated in his population-heavy Punjab – is former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Thus, he will rule only with a coalition that makes effecting major change more than just an ordinary challenge. While the right wing religious parties were effectively diluted and coopted by Imran Khan (whose party came in second) and therefore pulled a much smaller minority vote than anticipated, their willingness to use violence and intimidation augurs badly unless Sharif and his former military opposition are able to join forces to contain the rampant lawlessness. Unless violence is curtailed and tolerance for minority rights becomes re-prioritized, the failing Pakistani experiment in democracy will fall one giant notch to “fully failed state.” Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Pakistan, a nuclear power with a history of spreading that contagion, could easily become the most dangerous country on earth.

Exactly What Do We Do When the Canary Dies?

As I flew home from a conference in Miami recently, the air in and around Los Angeles was thicker with smoke than its normal pre-summer haze. Smog? Actually, LA air has improved a lot in the last couple of decades. It was the ever-earlier beginning of our California fire season, six weeks before historical averages and expected to last well into the end of fall. Riverside and Ventura counties were hit hard, structures burned or in jeopardy, acres of woodland gone. It was in stark contrast to the heavy rain and flooded streets I had just experienced in Florida. My business partners has just returned from a China trip, noting that the unbreatheable air they experienced on arrival gave way to a rare sighting of blue sky as a local holiday closed all the regional factories allowing a desert breeze to “do its thing.” And those are the little signs.

More serious “permanent” flooding has already taken a steep toll: “As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities… [In the late 1990s]… the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.” The Independent (UK). Is the canary in our global environmental coal mine dead or dying?

Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels averaged 280 parts-per-million. Scientists seem to have generated a consensus that 350 PPM is the maximum safe level of such carbon-based pollution. Nature isn’t going to wait while we figure it out… change is here, major very long-term effects are already part of daily life… and getting much, much worse much, much faster than we anticipated. “For the first time in human history,atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will surpass 400 parts per million, according Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has been measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since 1958.

“‘The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake-up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it’s too late for our children and grandchildren,’ said Tim Lueker of the Scripps Institution in a statement…. On its Web site, 350.org compares the planet’s plight and the high level of atmospheric carbon dioxide with an overweight patient with dangerously high levels of cholesterol… ‘He doesn’t die immediately — but until he changes his lifestyle and gets back down to the safe zone, he’s at more risk for heart attack or stroke,’ the Web site says.” International Herald Tribune, May 6^th. Spring is typically a highpoint in the year for CO₂ emissions, because the summer growth has not yet reached a level where green leaves absorb more CO₂. Still, this is an unsettling milestone, one we have just passed.

I remember last year’s fire season in Australia; it looked like the entire country was burning (pictured above). The Western United States is parched, the mid-West is experiencing a weird combination of flooding and the near-term loss of that massive underground water supply (the Ogallala Aquifer), the Great Lakes have water levels so low that large barges have to reduce their cargos by 15% and the Southeast and Atlantic States face a wildly fluctuating Gulf Stream (bringing really cold temperatures and then unexpected warming) as well as a spate of very powerful hurricanes.

China is unwilling to stall projected growth and shut down its burning of low-grade coal to fire its power plants (they burn half the planet’s coal), the U.S. government is unwilling to risk an economic slowdown by setting meaningful emissions requirements for industry and developing nations cry foul when the rich nations want them to stop industrial growth to accommodate the breathing desires of developed countries. Nature just doesn’t care; she started from scratch a long time ago, and she knows she’ll have a bit more to work with next time around.

I’m Peter Dekom, and human beings seem so trivial when they simply choose to ignore the mandates of nature.

Boring and Deadly

Feeling edgy and can’t sleep? Warm milk not bringing you to sleep-mode? Well, then, may I suggest that you read about the issues behind nations’ purposely acting in a manner to increase or decrease the value of the currency vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Feeling those eyelids pulling down yet? No? Well, let me help, but before you nestle into that comfy sleep pouch, may I suggest that whether or not you have a job, how much you earn and the quality of the life you actually live are exceptionally-linked to the value of your home currency versus the rest of the world.

The more valuable your currency compared to the buying power of others, the more you can afford to buy, and if you are like most folks with too much value in your currency, the call of luxury goods – we usually call them “imports” – tends to lure your spending habits. But the more your country imports, the worse the trade balance. Your nation might just be buying more overseas than it is selling overseas, which in time tends to pull down the value of your currency. This is slowly happening to the United States, and if the rest of the world weren’t so screwed up, it would be happening faster than it is. So if you want to sell more to overseas buyers, assuming you have stuff people want to buy, it does help if your currency is worth less than the buyer’s currency, making your goods cheaper and hence more attractive to a mass market.

This all goes FUBAR when the home country doesn’t really make stuff that is a valuable export. This is true of developing countries that supply raw materials, which generate lower aggregate value for the labor involved, but few manufactured goods. This malaise isn’t just inherent in poor Latin American, Asian or African nations; there are European countries where exports are anything but powerful. Take a look around your house. Tell me what you have, for example, that came from Portugal or Greece. Port? Olive oil? Cheese? Yoghurt that probably was made in the United States by ethnic Greeks? Picture a sleek Greek sports car or that high fashion line of women’s apparel or that finely-tuned Portuguese-designed and built kitchen appliance… Oh, there are aren’t any (well….), although some German companies (e.g. Bosch) have taken to using the relatively cheap labor in countries like Spain to manufacture some of their products.

In fact, because of the common “euro,” the inability to adjust (downward, of course) the currency of Europe’s severe underperforming economies (Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Greece, etc.) as a way to allow such countries to cope with their relatively lower economic values and higher debt than the rest of Europe is what has given rise to the mandate (by the Nordic) power to effect that adjustment by other means: fire people, cut wages and raise taxes. And that is why those in Europe have come to loathe “austerity.” Currency drops at least allow you to keep your jobs, even if you cannot afford to buy nearly as much as you did before the fall. The actual reaction of those who have been “adjusted”? Think riots, protests and vast pools of unemployed and seriously unhappy citizens!!!

We’ve been battling with China, extolling them to let their currency rise to reflect the value of their super-hot economy. That would reduce the “buyability” of their exports to American buyers and help our trade balance. Centrally-controlled China, on the other hand, has only allowed token increases, since they really like dominating the export marketplace.

Japan has been stagnating since 1991, so when Prime Minister Shinzō Abe launched a campaign to devalue his country’s currency to make his exports more affordable to international buyers, the international financial community cried foul. “Finance ministers from leading global economies on [May 11^th] avoided a public rift with Japan over policies driving down the value of its currency, while keeping up pressure on Germany to help lift growth in Europe.” New York Times, May 11^th. For now, they’re buying his explanation that this is nothing more than a stimulus to the domestic economy, but skeptical international finance ministers are keeping careful tabs on these developments.

Made it this far through my blog? Sleepy? Or just edgy and scared out of your mind? Hey, it works for some folks!

I’m Peter Dekom, and all these little complexities can make your life filled with even more life-altering complexities!

Gerry, Meet Mandy

With all the demographics working against old-world, God-fearing rural voters, what is the party of this traditional segment doing to stem the tsunami of urban cultural diversity and their concomitant values from altering the legal landscape? The goal has to be to dilute and void the votes of the encroaching the new majority. And the Republican Party has found and implemented its path: redistricting (which takes place at the state level), many making blanket and immutable pledges against increasing taxes and adopting an approach of stopping policy vectors emanating from the other side and eschewing any semblance of compromise and cooperation with the other side. While the results threaten the viability of the United States to function, these methods have been wildly successful to accomplish the above goals.

Can you blame them? Many do, but you can hardly question their success. The collateral damage of a $30 million GOP effort to implement (successfully) the redistricting necessary to give them the platform to implement their policies is staggering. But numbers don’t lie. As Timothy Egan points out in his May 2^nd New York Times editorial, although the 2012 House elections generated 1.4 million more aggregate Democratic votes over Republican, the GOP has a 33 vote majority in that Congressional body. And the House is the bastion of the extreme power of the GOP right wing (Tea Party in particular).

The ability to separate and isolate Democrats into a small number of concentrated districts, but making the remaining districts 60% or more percent Republican is one method. In states where there are few representatives, the idea is to define the district boundaries as much as possible to spread and dilute the Democratic constituency so that their numbers cannot sufficiently concentrate to elect a Congressperson. This has effectively created a mass of Congressional districts where the GOP majority is so clear that candidates are effectively elected after the primary; the actual election just doesn’t matter because the Democrats simply do not have enough votes to win anything.

The net impact of such one-sided redistricting is that Republicans have only more conservative Republicans to fear. The Tea Party is waiting in the wings with replacement candidates should the incumbent not represent sufficiently right-wing sentiments.

You can spot the anomalies of this House GOP block in the numbers: “As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record — and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

“Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)” NY Times.

There has been some serious blowback as this structure allows some pretty crazy kooks to gain office. They talk about “legitimate rape,” continue to press the birther mantra that President Obama is not US-born or is a Muslim or is sympathetic to terrorists, that the recent mass shootings are the result of a breakdown of Christian values, that the United States is and should acknowledge that it is a Christian nation… but this doesn’t cost the GOP the relevant office. They simply nominate a different conservative to replace their under-educated and over-the-top mouthpiece in the next election.

The net impact has been effectively to dilute votes such that on average a Democratic voter has 5/8 of the vote of a Republican constituent. In time, the rising culturally diverse and overwhelmingly urban majority will overtake this Republic blocking movement. In time, but the damage to American democracy might leave negative and lasting scars on the nation’s ability to survive.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we hate the roadblocks in Congress, we have only ourselves to blame for the system we just tolerate without change.

Wheely ?

Total and Per-Capita Vehicle-Miles Traveled, U.S

 

.

 *2012 data from U.S. Department of Transportation’s (U.S. DOT)

Traffic Volume Trends series of reports; data from previous

years from U.S. DOT’s Highway Statistics series of reports.

For six consecutive decades, year-by-year, Americans have been driving more per capita than the preceding year. As you can see from the above chart, that trend has just ended. Some say we have reached such a level of urban versus rural growth, a movement of people away from suburbs back to the city center, that these numbers are nothing more than a reflection of that statistic. The high cost of gasoline, the recession and earning contractions that have plagued us consistently since 2002, and our generally lowered expectations seem to be significant contributing factors.

But particular group, younger, employment-age workers, has been hit harder than most of the rest. “While the unemployment rate fell to 7.5 percent in April, a five-year low, unemployment among 18-29 year olds remained at 11.1 percent. Adjusting for labor participation and those who have given up looking for work, the effective rate is 16.1 percent…‘It is a rough time to be a young person in America,’ Evan Feinberg, president of Generation Opportunity, a youth-based grassroots group, said in a statement.” DailyCaller.com, May 3^rd.

A May 14^th report from U.S. PRIG (the federation of state public interest research groups) drills down on exactly how these statistics reflect younger American drivers:

·         The Millennials (people born between 1983 and 2000) are now the largest generation in the United States. By 2030, Millennials will be far and away the largest group in the peak driving age 35-to-54 year old demographic, and will continue as such through 2040.
 

·         Young people aged 16 to 34 drove 23 percent fewer miles on average in 2009 than they did in 2001—a greater decline in driving than any other age group. The severe economic recession was likely responsible for some of the decline, but not all.

·         Millennials are more likely to want to live in urban and walkable neigh­borhoods and are more open to non-driving forms of transportation than older Americans. They are also the first generation to fully embrace mobile Internet-connected technolo­gies, which are rapidly spawning new transportation options and shifting the way young Americans relate to one another, creating new avenues for living connected, vibrant lives that are less reliant on driving.
 

·         If the Millennial-led decline in per-capita driving continues for another dozen years, even at half the annual rate of the 2001-2009 period total vehicle travel in the United States could remain well below its 2007 peak through at least 2040—despite a 21 percent increase in population. If Millennials retain their current pro­pensity to drive less as they age and future generations follow (Enduring Shift), driving could increase by only 7 percent by 2040. If, unexpectedly, Millennials were to revert to the driv­ing patterns of previous generations (Back to the Future), total driving could grow by as much as 24 percent by 2040.

The statistics are filled with questions. How does this impact our budget allocations to streets, highways and transportation in general? How will these trends affect the future design of cars, the economics of car manufacturing and the future viability of the automotive industry? How will cities be redesigned and reprioritized to accommodate lowered expectations and more mass transit? For European, these questions were answered a long time ago. Most urban dwellers rely heavily on public transportation, using cars (when they even have them) for weekend travel and recreation. Gasoline prices are a multiple of those in the United States and parking, particularly in cities designed centuries ago, is seriously expensive. China is grappling with “car issues” ranging from congestion and parking to some of the worst pollution issues on earth.

Whatever else is said and done, the experience of “driving” itself is likely to change. Computer-controlled vehicular movement seems inevitable; you might not be allowed to control your own car in many circumstances. The overall downward buying power plaguing most Americans will definitely change the way we look at cars, garages and fuel systems. For those who think “Americans will never change their attitude about their cars,” it’s time to look at the numbers that contradict that assumption.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our entire lifestyle is simply an aggregation of all of these rapidly accelerating trending changes.