On my PC, the problem usually shows up on PDF documents, which feature a small Adobe icon on the lower right-hand corner in Tiles view and Medium to Extra Large Icons views.

So instead of looking like this…

… they look like this (your wrong icons may vary)…

No biggie for some people but in my case it goes straight to my brain’s obsessive orderliness compulsion centre.

How to fix the wrong programme overlay

1. Open Control Panel
2. Click on “Default Programs”
3. Click on “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”
4. A list of file extensions opens up. Select the one you’re having trouble with (in my case, .pdf)
5. Click on the extension to highlight it and then click “Change Program” at the top of the window.
6. The “Open with” dialogue opens. Click on the correct programme to highlight it (it’s probably already selected but click on it anyway) then click “OK”.
7. Close Default Programs and Control Panel

Check your folder icons – they should now display the correct programme overlay.

BIG DISCLAIMER: The above information is offered without guarantee or warranty as helpful advice. If you’re not confident about file associations, get someone else to help you. In particular, if you accidentally associate a file extension with the wrong programme, you won’t be able to open those files. If in doubt, set a system restore point before making any changes so you can get back to where you were.

George Monbiot has noticed that Ed Miliband’s holiday reading included Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth. The book was a singular choice: Gordon Brown ignored it; Peter Mandelson responded with a witless piece of official sloganeering about growth, and David Cameron torched its publisher, the Sustainable Development Commission, as one of his first acts as PM.

Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth is just out in print, although I’m still waiting to be able to get hold of a copy in the UK.

Even the BBC, sworn to uphold the idea that everything in the garden is lovely, is broadcasting seditious scuttlebutt on the Today programme, tacitly acknowledging that Permagrowth economics is now pretty much wedged into a cul-de-sac of its own making.

A couple of years ago, the Today presenter Evan Davis predicted that peak oil would be one of the business world’s leading topics of conversation in future. But, like Prosperity without Growth, Davis’s prediction sank without trace. Funny that.

For today’s Today, though, Davis got commodity trader Jim Rogers’ take on what’s going on:

“If the world economy gets better, then commodity prices are going to go through the roof because of the shortages that are developing. If the world economy does not get better, commodity prices will still be firm, (a) because of shortages and (b) because governments will print money

“Throughout history when governments have printed money it’s led to rises in the price of real assets. Whether it’s rice or silver or natural gas or whatever it happens to be, people try to protect themselves when money is being debased.”

That is the peak oil vs. financialisation argument in a nutshell. Growth has been killed by shortages – primarily of energy – while attempts to substitute a kind of ersatz growth based on thin-air money printing for the real thing are self-defeating.

Funnily enough, almost everyone except the banks themselves, together with the national and international institutions they hold captive, has known since 2008 that the only possible outcome of piling debt upon debt via ‘extend and pretend’ bailouts would be GFC II anyway.

So we’re getting the same old softening-up treatment – like this from today’s Times:

We could see a repeat, or worse, of the paralysis in financial markets of 2009, which tipped the western world into deep recession. The confidence of investors and lenders would collapse. Liquidity would dry up. Businesses would fail, jobs would go, asset values would collapse.

Andrew Gavin Marshall over at GlobalResearch finds conspiracy where some might only see collective own-backside-preservation by the big financial players but his article The Great Global Debt Depression: It’s All Greek To Me is a good, well-documented read.

As for liquidity seizing-up because banks are suspicious of one another, read Ellen Brown’s article on the close relationship between the collapse in lending to main street businesses and the Fed’s introduction of interest payments on bank reserves.

Strange that while Governments everywhere are being arm-twisted into burdening their current and future citizens with more debt to save the banks, the self-same banks in the US are apparently sitting on $1.6 trillion of ‘excess reserves’ earning a nice wodge of interest from the Fed.

But if you were a big bank, why would you lend money to small businesses with one hand while the other is busily screwing-up the real economy in which they operate?

Italy and Spain can no more pay off their debts than Greece, and the markets are in no mood to wait for Athens to default before they start driving up Spanish and Italian borrowing costs.

Things are heading for a smash-up. The time-honoured ‘solution’ of inflicting cruel and unusual punishments upon the populace via the IMF won’t work in a world where unsustainable debt and the inability to grow economically are fully-globalised phenomena.

That won’t stop them trying it, of course, if only because the ship of fools is still fully staffed and run by the lunatic cadre of monetarist economists whose attitude to ordinary people resembles that of non-too-bright kids with sticks who’ve managed to tie a kitten to a tree by one of its back legs.

Indeed, things are so bad that it’s conceivable that Dominique Strauss-Khan decided to (almost literally) stiff his own career via a patently flimsy imbroglio in New York rather than preside over the unveiling of the IMF in its new guise as a bulldozer fashioned from wet cardboard.

Courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server, I can reveal exclusively to the blogosphere that Mr Strauss-Khan’s name can be rearranged into the spookily appropriate epithet: ‘Unashamed risk – quit, son’.

The risk in question is nothing to do with hotel chambermaids.

We’ve subscribed to the paper’s voucher scheme for years but I’d been meaning to leave it for some time – bored by its extremely narrow coverage, annoyed by its blatant boosting of short term profit-chasers that would inflict long term harm, like the third runway at Heathrow, and exasperated at its inability to give me access to the online content that is supposedly part of the subscription deal.

The only things that kept me hanging on were inertia and Caitlin Moran. All I needed was a final nudge and the News International phone hacking scandal provided it.

Contagion

It is, of course, the News International phone hacking scandal. NI’s management  pushed the News of the World and its staff under a bus yesterday to save NI’s other interests – notably BSkyB – but culpability for the hacking and the likely buying-off of the first police investigation goes all the way to the top.

‘Contagion’ is what everyone in power dreads these days. Contagion from Greek debt. Contagion from involvement in other countries’ wars. Contagion from the NoW to BSkyB and NI’s other print titles.

Maybe that’s why the Times wrote to its subscribers last month to say their bank accounts would in future be debited by Times Newspapers Limited instead of News International.

After all, you can’t have people reading their statements and realising they’re helping to fund the organisation that ultimately profited from hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone, or the voice mail accounts of the families of 7/7 victims and servicemen killed in Afghanistan.

In vain

NI could have sacked the senior execs and editorial staff  who presided over cash-for-hacking, then identified and compensated all their victims and kept the paper going. But the chances are that the NoW association would have continued to contaminate NI’s other interests, since there’s every chance that hacking stories will soon be coming out of other papers’ woodwork, to keep the issue on the boil for a long time yet.

“They’ve closed down an entire newspaper rather than rooting out the people who caused this to happen in the first place”

Ben Fenton, chief media correspondent, Financial Times

The Times wheeled out the venerable William Rees-Mogg this morning to praise NI with faint damns. He tries to paint the NoW move as a simple commercial decision, as though the management woke up yesterday morning and realised that there was no longer a market for the UK’s biggest-circulation Sunday newspaper.

As he says, the Mail and the Express – the mid-market tabloids – are the only healthy sections of the newspaper business at the moment (not that we’ll be transferring our loyalty to either of those two).  Clearly NI couldn’t afford for the NoW scandal to damage its relatively weak stable-mate the Times, so it had to go.

Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion:

Today’s release of inventory is confirmation that the era of permanently constrained supply is now very much with us. Because industrial economies are simply machines that convert energy inputs into useful work and services, today’s action is also a reminder that the dream of higher growth in conjunction with lower oil prices is now a backward looking view, a nostaglia for a past that’s no longer possible.

Do read the whole post.

Even the London Times has been shocked into partial honesty. Although it’s news item on the event is an hilarious mish-mash of OPEC-bashing and ridiculous refusal to admit that the Saudis are incapable of magically raising production, the paper’s business editor is uncharacteristically open about the real motive for the stock release.

Can’t give the exact quote because I’m blocked by the paywall even though I pay handsomely for a paper subscription but David Wighton points out that most of the release will go to the US in an attempt to mitigate gasoline prices as the summer driving season begins.

With QE3 off the cards, cheaper gas is Obama’s only hope of not losing too badly getting re-elected next year.

That’s the funeral the Greeks are serving up for his pension, most likely. And for yours and for mine.

Sure the banks stand to lose squillions when Greece defaults. But their ‘reckless’ lending wasn’t always completely reckless. They bought insurance on a lot of those loans from gullible institutions desperate for infeasibly large returns on ‘safe’ investments.

Pension funds.

The pension model, which by the way is totally broken, depends on making at least 8% on its investments. But with property values nose diving and stock markets crashing in the wake of the subprime debacle, who could a girl turn to?

Why the banks, of course. They’d sell you a nice credit default swap on Greek debt (or Irish, or Portuguese, or Spanish, etc.) that paid 8% on the sum insured. Nothing to worry about, Mr Pension fund, because it was inconceivable that the EU would stand by while a member defaulted on its sovereign obligations.

It was as safe as houses, said the banks in muffled voices through the handkerchiefs they’d stuffed in their mouths to stifle their laughter at this brilliant joke.

Now the inconceivable is happening and institutional investors are on the wrong end of billions of euros-worth of misplaced trust in the banks.

Defaults by Greece and the other so-called PIIGs have been on the cards for two years at least. The merry-go-round of bail outs was as much about buying time as preventing defaults.

The longer the EU and ECB could stave off the first default, the more time the banks and bag holders would have to find even bigger mugs on to whom they could offload their obligations on. Pensions funds probably couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to buy their CDSs but they could sit tight in the hope that many would expire before they were called upon to pay up.

It seems the game of pass the hot potato has reached an impasse. The grim reaper has called time on extending and pretending. He’s sharpened his scythe and it’ll soon be haircuts all round.

If you have tears to shed, now’s a good time. Not just for Greece but for yourself too, and everyone you know. We’re all in for years of political and financial instability, and there’s no reason for it to stop at the borders of the defaulting countries.

In the widest sense, the Eurodebt debacle was an all-or-nothing bet that future economic growth could be obtained through financialisation rather than physics. That bet failed. You can print money but you can’t print energy. The former is increasingly valueless, the latter is increasingly scarce.

This isn’t simply a setback. It’s a turning point. I hope that your pension, when you go to collect it, is still there.

There were nearly 40,000 forecourts in 1967. Now there are 8,900 and still falling. 2010 was a good year for fuel sellers; the network only lost 60 sites instead of hundreds.

Back in the swinging Sixties, it took a princely 330 vehicles to keep the average forecourt in business. Now ‘the market’ needs to supply almost 4,000 motors to keep a typical station in the black.

I’ve always wondered whether some people dream of running a little filling station somewhere, like many others dream of running a pub. Apparently the business model is much the same. Two thirds of UK forecourts are run by businesses or families while the rest – the thick slab of royal icing on the petrol retailing cake – are managed by supermarkets and the oil companies themselves.

Anyway, just as aspirant landlords’ dreams frequently turn sour when their naive expectations run headlong into the reality of life as the filling in a brewer/boozer sandwich, life is similarly tough down on the forecourt.

So much so that the Petrol Retailers Association, representing the ‘bottom 6,000’, is trying to drum up support from MPs for a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading about unfair pricing by the big boys on top.

Although one wishes the PRA well, the OFT’s pile of outstanding complaints about  supermarket pricing tactics must be so high by now that it’d stick out in the Himalayas.

Nevertheless, the PRA wants to shop the top 2,000 sites to the OFT for pricing petrol attractively to entice customers. No, make that ‘aggressively’, since the tactic works so well that supermarkets, which account for only one-in-eight fuel sites, supply more than 40% of all retail petrol and diesel.

Gouging

If you’re on the right end of this dynamic (i.e. you’re filling your tank), it’s called ‘nice’. If you’re on the wrong end – running an independent site – it’s called ‘predatory pricing.’ That is the PRA’s argument – implying that the big boys’ long-term objective is to force all the mom and pop forecourts out of business, creating a captive market where they can gouge their customers for all they’re worth.

There are more holes in this theory than there are in the average English trunk road, of course. If the independents need the OFT to protect them because they can’t compete, how exactly will their continued existence make any difference in an open market anyway?

And if you take the story to its logical conclusion, you’d end up with the Big Boys catering for 35 million vehicles from only 2,000 sites. That’s 17,500 motors per forecourt. The queues will be a wonder to behold.

Plight

When one looks beyond the PRA’s chosen issue of price, though, there is cause for concern about the plight of independent forecourts. For many rural communities, the local filling station-cum-post-office-cum-grocers-cum-newsagent-cum-office-licence-cum-cashpoint is as important and as endangered as the village pub.

But what are they principally endangered by? The car, ironically. It takes many of their potential customers away to town to work and shop and, of course, fill up with cheap supermarket fuel.

Here, you’d have thought, was the basis of a positive campaign for the PRA. Instead of fighting its own industry, it could be showing customers how to break free from car slavery and invest their money and energies in building strong, viable local shops.

Except that the PRA is the fuel arm of the Retail Motor Industry Federation. And it’s the RMIF’s job to sell as many cars as possible. What could do more to hasten the demise of independent forecourts everywhere?

Chart of the day

The following chart may have bearing on why the PRA and RMIF are in this heads-we-lose, tails-we-can’t-win situation. It tracks annual growth in UK car sales from 1968 to 2010, while the number of petrol outlets was sliding inexorably from 40,000 to 9,000.

It’s pretty clear that that the UK vehicle parc only has a few more years’ growth left in it. Yet each forecourt needs ever more vehicles to make a profit – 10 times as many today as  40 years ago – despite today’s vastly slicker and more varied roadside retailing environment.

When the number of vehicles levels off (or more likely starts shrinking), things will presumably get even more interesting. Empires and corporations traditionally turn on themselves as they teeter over into decline. It looks as though car and fuel retailing could be about to go down that road.

He was the author of two books about America’s white underclass, Deer Hunting with Jesus and Rainbow Pie – the latter a memoir of growing up in the dirt-poor backwoods of West Virginia in the 1950s.

His books and other writings are essential guides to the dynamics and demographics of  the US today: class-ridden, exploitative and non-egalitarian. Bageant’s warm, funny writing chronicles the multi-generational tragedy of America’s poor, for whom hard work and patriotism have increasingly become a pathway to marginalisation and debt peonage, rather than to the American dream.

Materially, Bageant escaped from the underclass – only to find that America’s middle class is just as enthusiastically voting for presidents, parties and policies dedicated to transferring its wealth upwards to what, in pre-Revolutionary France, would be called the rentier class: the finance economy that creates virtually no real wealth (unlike the millions of small farms and thousands of factories that America has let go since WWII).

He said in an interview:

“Deer Hunting with Jesus is about why working class people vote against their own interests.  I didn’t want to write a political book, I wanted to write a human book about people I knew and grew up with. But at the end, I had to tie it together someway, and why would anybody behave this way, against their own interests. So I discussed what I call the American Hologram. It’s a self-referential bubble. The people inside of it are directly wired, particularly to television and movies and media. It’s like a snow globe, and a bloody war killing children and disemboweling people, and hundreds of thousands of dead, is reduced to “our boys” and the flag, and America, a place of church spires, and freedom, and opportunity.

“The Hologram gives us that message as if we were inside a snow globe and the only thing we have to refer to is the language and the images that we’re fed, practically directly to the brain stem, from all of our media. It’s a uniform message, there’s really no big evil guy controlling it. We manifest it in ourselves.

“A good example: I saw this ad for an electric car, driving along in front of wheat fields, Rocky Mountains in the background. In the clouds, a faint American flag is waving. The message is, of course, go green, buy a car with a poisonous battery. It’s very American, it’s patriotic. The flag is in the sky. God approves.

“We’re bombarded by this stuff, and we don’t think anything of it. I tell you what, it goes right past logic, and right past critical thinking, no matter what anybody says. It goes right past it, because those images get stamped there, the same way that they did when we were an upright hominid, glancing around the savanna land for fear.

“Anyway, these images, these sounds, this veneer of commerciality over everything, everything comes covered with clear plastic, and we live inside this holographic world that is nothing like the other two-thirds of the world. It certainly isn’t connected with nature.”

The US is the most highly-developed iteration of the hologram but facets of it can be seen in most Western countries including the UK, land of the Freeview and home of the Bravo. People who only dimly perceive what Bageant articulates so fluently enjoy sky high salaries as hologram monkeys on Madison Avenue and Canary Wharf. And for a while Bageant did too, working on magazines writing, to support his family, what he later described with unfailing honesty as ‘horrible lying pieces of shit that helped drive the empire’s worst aspects’.

A few years ago he moved to Mexico, where he was able to live more cheaply and write as he saw things. In 2009, in a conversation with one of the readers of his blog, he said:

“I ain’t never going back and that’s about all I really know. Everything I do stems from that simple premise. That I can do and be something better than I have been. No matter where I am at the moment.

“And I know for sure you cannot have it both ways. Half measures never accomplished anything.”

Deer Hunting with Jesus and Rainbow Pie are available from Amazon in the UK. Rainbow Pie will be published in the US four days after Joe Bageant passed away.