http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21176
Obama at the UN: The Arrogant Voice of Imperialism
President Barack Obama used his speech at the United Nations General Assembly Thursday to defend US wars and state terror abroad and to proclaim that the economic crisis has been resolved thanks to his Wall Street bailout.
The US president received a noticeably tepid response from the assembled UN delegates. While in his first address to the body last year, he was able to pose as a fresh alternative to the crimes carried out by the Bush administration, by now it has become clear to most on the international stage that his administration’s policies are largely in continuity with those of its predecessor.
In its tone and its content, the Obama speech was the authentic and arrogant voice of US imperialism.
Parroting remarks delivered by George W. Bush from the same podium, Obama began by invoking September 11, 2001, once again exploiting the terrorist attacks of that day to justify the acts of military aggression committed by both US administrations in the intervening nine years.
In the same breath, he referred to Wall Street’s financial meltdown of September 2008, as an event that “devastated American families on Main Street,” while “crippling markets and deferring the dreams of millions on every continent.”
These two events were presented as the source of the core challenges confronting the US administration. Supposedly in response to the first, the Obama administration has continued and escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, while reaffirming Washington’s “right” to carry out unilateral military aggression anywhere on the planet.
In response to the second, the administration continued the massive bailout begun under Bush, committing more than $12 trillion to propping up the US banks and financial institutions, while holding none of those involved responsible for the criminal forms of speculation practiced on Wall Street.
Obama claimed that the so-called Wall Street reform legislation passed by his administration would ensure “that a crisis like this never happens again.” It does nothing of the kind, placing no serious limits on the speculative activities and profitability of the big banks and leaving Wall Street to continue with “business as usual.”
“The global economy has been pulled back from the brink of a depression,” Obama told his UN audience. This statement flies in the face of the grim conditions confronting working people on every continent. This includes the US itself, where the official unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, the unemployed and underemployed account for 17 percent of the workforce, some 30 million people, and one out of every seven Americans is living below the poverty line.
While profits have returned to pre-crisis levels, the reality is that none of the underlying contradictions that have given rise to the deepest world economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s has been resolved. They have only grown in intensity. The response of the ruling classes throughout the world has been to redouble their attacks on the working class in an attempt to force it to pay for this crisis.
Obama followed his assertion about the economy being pulled back from “the brink” with an even more absurd claim that he would not “rest until these seeds of progress grow into a broader prosperity, not only for all Americans, but for peoples around the globe.”
In the US, throughout Europe and in much of the rest of the world, governments are pursuing unprecedented austerity policies that are ripping up basic social rights and dramatically lowering the living standards of working people. Meanwhile, Obama himself spoke before a global poverty summit the day before his speech, warning the world’s poorest that Washington was determined to break their cycle of “dependency.”
The US president’s lies about the economy were followed by the fraudulent claim that the military operations his administration is pursuing abroad are aimed at upholding “our common security.”
Obama said that he is “winding down the war in Iraq” and will pull out all of its occupation troops by the end of next year. At the same time, he declared Washington’s intention to forge “a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people,” by which he means maintaining a US protectorate over the oil-rich country in order to advance the geo-strategic interests of American capitalism.
He said that the drawing down US troops in Iraq had allowed the US military to be “refocused on defeating al Qaeda and denying its affiliates a safe haven” in Afghanistan. This is another lie. US military and intelligence officials acknowledge that there are no more than 100 al Qaeda members in all of Afghanistan. The nearly 100,000 US troops deployed in that country are not combating “terrorism,” but asserting US neo-colonial control in a bid to advance Washington’s quest for hegemony in Central Asia.
In one of the speech’s more chilling passages, Obama bragged that “from South Asia to the Horn of Africa, we are moving toward a more targeted approach” in the war on terror, that did not require “deploying large American armies.” In other words, while constrained in its ability to carry out another major military occupation, US imperialism is pursuing its policies by means of assassinations, drone missile attacks and the deployment of elite killing squads, and has arrogated to itself the right to target and kill its perceived opponents anywhere on the planet.
Obama used the speech to once again threaten Iran. Only days before his appearance at the UN, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech urging elements within the Iranian ruling elite to carry out regime change in the country. He reiterated the vow made in his speech last year that Iran “must be held accountable” for its alleged violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
At least a quarter of Obama’s address was dedicated to the US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian “peace talks” that appear to be on the brink of yet another breakdown in the face of Israeli intransigence and provocation.
For all the hackneyed rhetoric about the “Holy Land” and “our common humanity,” the Obama administration is pursuing these negotiations as a means of solidifying support among the Arab regimes for its escalating threats of aggression against Iran and to further its domination of the Middle East.
The content of the speech made clear the US administration’s unwavering complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Obama urged that a limited moratorium declared by the Israeli government be extended beyond September 26, when it is set to expire. He said Israel should do this because it “improved the atmosphere for talks,” not because the entire settlement activity in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is a violation of international law and multiple UN resolutions. In the same breath, the US president asserted that “talks should press on until completed,” presumably regardless of what Israel does.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has insisted that his government will not extend the moratorium, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had initially insisted that his delegation would be forced to walk out if it does not. An ever-pliant servant of Washington, Abbas has since indicated that he might back down on this threat.
The rest of Obama’s remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian question had an Orwellian flavor, in which Israel was presented as the victim. “The slaughter of innocent Israelis is not resistance—it’s injustice,” Obama declared. He made no mention of the slaughter of 1,400 Palestinians in the US-backed siege of Gaza in 2008-2009 or the criminal attack on the Gaza aid flotilla that killed nine Turkish civilians last May. The day the US president spoke, the UN issued a report charging that Israel’s actions were illegal and employed an “unacceptable level of brutality,” meriting war crimes prosecution.
The US president concluded his speech with an exaltation of “democracy” and “human rights,” which again echoed similar language employed by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
In Bush’s case, this phony democratic rhetoric was employed to justify US imperialism’s drive for dominance in the Middle East, where Washington demonstrated its commitment to “human rights” by carrying out mass killings, the detention of tens of thousands without charges or trial, and the infamous acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.
In Obama’s case, the posturing as the global champion of democratic rights is no less contemptible. The target, however, appears to have shifted.
The Council on Foreign Relations, the establishment thinktank that enjoys close ties to the administration and the State Department, spelled this out. Noting Obama’s “full-throated endorsement of democracy as the best form of government,” it commented: “Yet the appeal of such an idea faces challenges at bodies like the UN. This is not, for example, the future world that Chinese leaders envision.”
Indeed, Obama followed his celebration of democracy by calling attention to his upcoming trip to Asia, ticking off the countries he will visit—India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan—and praising each for having promoted “democratic principles in their own way.” The itinerary includes the four largest countries that US strategists envision as bulwarks against the expansion of Chinese influence.
On the same day that Obama delivered his speech, the New York Times published a front-page article on the increasingly tense US-China relationship that was clearly based on the perspective of the US administration. The Times reported that “rising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself—one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.”
It noted that Washington has inserted itself into territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian countries, organized provocative joint military exercises with South Korea near Chinese waters and has solidified its alliance with Japan, largely in opposition to China’s influence.
Under conditions of rising conflicts between Washington and Beijing over currency and trade relations, Obama’s praise for “democracy” at the UN represents a thinly veiled threat of new and far more catastrophic eruptions of American militarism.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
SC103-11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/climate-change-negotiations-failure
The short, happy life of climate change enlightenment
The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December's climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don't want to be associated with failure, they don't want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancún. The hosts have already made it clear that it's going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still "huge differences between developed and developing countries". Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.
But nobody cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor's certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.
In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It's not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.
Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU's emissions trading system, in 2012; after the hopeless failure of the scheme's first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of 1%.
Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto protocol, the EU's emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.
Plenty of nations – like Britain – have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.
Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK's accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, Britain's emissions would rise by 48%. Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by about 29%. It's the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.
Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn't going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn't pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one accepted that man-made climate change is taking place. Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers. The enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.
What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as "a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen", is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.
Nature won't wait for us. The US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first eight months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded. But there's a crucial difference. In 1998 there was a record El Niño – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Niño was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8C, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years. Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Niña): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record. The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.
Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not to see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.
Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don't want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won't. They weren't ever going to do so. So what do we do now?
I don't know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness.............
The short, happy life of climate change enlightenment
The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December's climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don't want to be associated with failure, they don't want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancún. The hosts have already made it clear that it's going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still "huge differences between developed and developing countries". Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.
But nobody cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor's certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.
In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It's not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.
Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU's emissions trading system, in 2012; after the hopeless failure of the scheme's first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of 1%.
Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto protocol, the EU's emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.
Plenty of nations – like Britain – have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.
Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK's accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, Britain's emissions would rise by 48%. Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by about 29%. It's the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.
Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn't going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn't pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one accepted that man-made climate change is taking place. Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers. The enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.
What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as "a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen", is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.
Nature won't wait for us. The US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first eight months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded. But there's a crucial difference. In 1998 there was a record El Niño – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Niño was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8C, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years. Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Niña): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record. The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.
Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not to see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.
Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don't want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won't. They weren't ever going to do so. So what do we do now?
I don't know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness.............
Sunday, September 19, 2010
SC103-10
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21096
The Global Systemic Crisis: Towards a Serious Breakdown of the World Economic and Financial System, Spring 2011
As anticipated by LEAP/E2020 last February in the GEAB No. 42, the second half of 2010 is really characterized by a sudden worsening of the crisis marked by the end of the illusion of recovery maintained by Western leaders (1) and the thousands of billions swallowed up by the banks and the economic « stimulation » plans of no lasting effect. The coming months will reveal a simple, yet especially painful reality: the Western economy, and in particular that of the United States (2), never really came out of recession (3). The startling statistics recorded since summer 2009 have only been the short-lived consequences of a massive injection of liquidity into a system which had essentially become insolvent just like the US consumer (4). At the heart of the global systemic crisis since its inception, the United States is, in the coming months, going to demonstrate that it is, once again, in the process of leading the economy and global finances into the « heart of darkness » (5) because it can’t get out of this « Very Great US Depression (6) ». Thus, coming out of the political upheavals of the US elections next November, with growth once again negative, the world will have to face the « Very Serious Breakdown » of the global economic and financial system founded over 60 years ago on the absolute necessity of the US economy never being in a lasting recession. Now the first half of 2011 will dictate that the US economy take an unprecedented dose of austerity plunging the planet into new financial, monetary, economic and social chaos.
In this GEAB issue, our team therefore anticipates for the coming months, different aspects of this new development of the crisis, especially the nature of imposed austerity process which will affect the United States, the development of the accursed « inflation / deflation » argument, the actual progress of real US GDP, the strategy of central banks and the direct consequences for Asia and Euroland. As we do every month, we set out our strategic and operational recommendations. And, specially, this GEAB issue offers an excerpt from the new book by Franck Biancheri « The Global Crisis: The Path to the World After - France, Europe and World in the Decade 2010-2020 » : the French version will be published on 7 October next by Editions Anticipolis and the English one later in December. In this issue we have chosen to present an extract of the anticipation concerning the forthcoming austerity which will be imposed on the United States beginning Spring 2011: « Welcome to the United States of Austerity ».
The coming quarters will be particularly dangerous for the world economic and financial system. The Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke passed on the message as diplomatically as possible at the recent meeting of world central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming: even though the policy to revive the US economy has failed, either the rest of the world continues to fund US deficits at a loss and hopes that at some point the bet will pay off, avoiding a collapse of the global system, or the United States will monetize its debt and turn all the Dollars and US Treasury Bonds held by the rest of the planet into funny money. Like any power at bay, the United States and is now forced to introduce the threat of pressure to get what it wants. Barely a year ago the rest of the World’s leaders and financial officials had volunteered to « refloat the USA ship ». However, today things have drastically changed since the noble assurance from Washington (the Fed’s, like that of the Obama administration’s) proved to be only pure arrogance based on the pretense of having understood the nature of the crisis and on the illusion of possessing the means of controlling it. However, US growth evaporates quarter after quarter (8) and turns negative again from the end of 2010. Unemployment hasn’t stopped growing and between the stability shown in official figures and the exit, in six months, of more than two million Americans from the workplace (LEAP/E2020 believes that the real unemployment figure is now at least 20% (9)); the U.S. housing market remains depressed at historically low levels and will resume its fall from the fourth quarter 2010; last but not least, as one can easily imagine in these circumstances, the US consumer is and will be absent on a permanent basis since his insolvency continues and even gets worse (10) for the one American in five without work. Behind these statistical factors hide three realities that will radically change the US and global political, economic and social landscape in future quarters as and when they dawn on the public consciousness.
Broad-based anger will cripple Washington from November 2010
First of all, there is a very depressing widespread reality, a real trip « to the heart of darkness », which is that tens of millions of Americans (nearly sixty million now depend on food stamps) who no longer have a job, no longer have a house, no longer have any savings, are wondering how they will survive in the years to come (11). The young (12), retirees, African-Americans, workers, service employees (13),… they constitute this mass of angry citizens who will speak violently next November and plunge Washington into a tragic political impasse. Supporters of the « Tea Party (14) » and « new secessionist (15) » movements... want to « break the Washington Machine » (and by extension that of Wall Street) without having feasible proposals to solve the country’s myriad problems (16). The November 2010 elections will be the first opportunity for this « suffering America » to express itself on the crisis and its consequences. And, won back by the Republicans or even the extremists, these voters will help to further cripple the Obama administration and Congress (which will probably swing to the Republicans), only pushing the country into a tragic gridlock just when all the signals turn red again. This expression of widespread anger will in addition, from December onwards, collide with the release of the Deficit Commission report set up by President Obama, which will automatically place the issue of deficits at the heart of public debate at the beginning of 2011 (17). For example, we are already seeing a very specific expression of this widespread anger against Wall Street in that Americans have deserted the stock market (18). Each month, an increasing number of « small investors » leave Wall Street and the financial markets (19), today leaving more than 70% of transactions in the hands of major institutions and other « high frequency traders ». If one keeps in mind the traditional image that the stock exchange is today’s temple of modern capitalism, then we are witnessing a phenomenon of loss of faith comparable to people’s disaffection with official demonstrations experienced by the communist system before its fall.
The Federal Reserve now knows that it is powerless
Finally, there is a financial and monetary effect that is particularly tragic since the players are aware of their unenviable situation: the U.S. Federal Reserve now knows that it is powerless. Despite the extraordinary efforts (zero interest rates, quantitative easing, huge support to the real estate mortgage market, massive support to banks, tripling its balance sheet, ...) that it carried out from September 2008, the U.S. economy will not restart. Fed leaders are finding they are only a part in the system, even if it is a vital part and, therefore, can do nothing against a problem that affects the very nature of the system, in this case, the US financial system, designed as the solvent heart of the global financial system since 1945. But the US consumer has become insolvent (20), the consumer who, during the last thirty years, has gradually become the central economic player of this financial heart (with more than 70% of U.S. growth dependant on household spending). It is this insolvency of US households (21) that has broken the Fed’s efforts.
Accustomed to the virtualism and thus to the possibility of manipulating the processes and dynamics of events, US central bankers believed that they could « mislead » households, once again giving them the illusion of wealth and thus pushing them to revive consumption and behind it the whole United States’ economic and financial machine. Until summer 2010, they did not believe in the systemic nature of the crisis or they did not understand that what was causing the problems was out of reach of the tools of a central bank, as powerful as it may be. Only in recent weeks have they discovered two pieces of evidence: their policies have failed and they have neither arms nor ammunition.
Hence the very depressed tone of the discussions at the central banks meeting in Jackson Hole, whence the lack of consensus on future action, whence the endless debates about the nature of the risks to be faced in the coming months (e.g. inflation or deflation, knowing that the system’s internal tools used to measure the economic consequences of these trends are no longer even relevant, as we analyse in this issue (22)), whence increasingly violent clashes between proponents of renewed growth via debt and followers of deficit reduction... and whence Ben Bernanke’s speech full of veiled threats to his central banker colleagues: in ambiguous terms, he passed the following message: « We will try everything and anything to avoid an economic and financial collapse and you will continue to finance this « everything and anything », otherwise we let inflation loose and thus devalue the Dollar whilst US Treasury Bonds will no longer be worth much » (23). When a central banker expresses himself like a common cash extortionist, there is danger in the house (24).
The response of the world’s major central banks will be unveiled in the next two quarters. Already the ECB has made it clear it thought that a new policy of stimulation through an increase in US deficits would be suicidal for the United States. Already China, whilst saying it would do nothing to rush things, spends its time selling US assets to buy Japanese ones (reflected in the historic level of the Yen / Dollar rate of exchange). As regards Japan, it is now forced to align itself simultaneously with Washington and Beijing ... which will probably cancel out all its financial and monetary policies. In future quarters the Fed, like the federal government, will find that when the United States is no longer synonymous with juicy profits and / or shared power, its ability to convince its partners declines quickly and heavily, especially when the latter question the relevance of the chosen policies.
The consequence of these three realities that are gradually making their presence felt in US and global consciousness will, therefore, for the LEAP/E2020 team, come to pass in Spring 2011 by the United States entering an era of austerity unprecedented since the country became the heart of the global economic and financial system. Fhederal political blockages in the context of an electorate sick and tired of Washington and Wall Street, heavy reliance on federal funding of the entire US economy and the Fed's impotence against a backdrop of growing international reluctance to finance US deficits will combine to push the country into austerity. An austerity that has, moreover, already begun to affect at least 20% of the population head-on, and wich directly affects at least one in two Americans worried about joining the ranks of the homeless, those without work and other long-term unemployed. For these tens of millions of Americans austerity is here and it's called lasting impoverishment. What is going to come into play between now and Spring 2011 is, therefore, the shift into official speeches, budgetary policies and international awareness to the idea that the United States is no longer « the land of plenty », but « the land of few ». And beyond the domestic political choices, it is also the discovery of a new limitation for the country: the United States cannot afford a new stimulus (26). Rather than a multidecade collapse like the Japanese situation, many decision makers will be tempted by shock therapy ... this same therapy that, with the IMF, the United States recommended to Latin American, Asian and Eastern European countries.
This is normally a good reason for the rating agencies, always so quick to see the straw in the eye of most countries in the world, to threaten the United States with a strong downside rerating if they not implement a comprehensive austerity plan as quickly as possible. But anyway, for LEAP/E2020, due to the internal and external conditions in the country described above, it is really in spring 2011 that the United States has an appointment with austerity, an appointment that the rest of the world will impose if it is paralyzed politically.
Until then, it is likely that the Fed will try a new series of « unconventional » measures ( a technical term meaning « desperate attempts ») to try and prevent arriving there because, at this stage, one thing is certain concerning the consequences of the United States entering a large-scale programme of austerity: that will be financial and monetary chaos in the markets accustomed for decades to the exact opposite, that’s to say, US waste; and an internal economic and social shock unparalleled since the 1930s.
The Global Systemic Crisis: Towards a Serious Breakdown of the World Economic and Financial System, Spring 2011
As anticipated by LEAP/E2020 last February in the GEAB No. 42, the second half of 2010 is really characterized by a sudden worsening of the crisis marked by the end of the illusion of recovery maintained by Western leaders (1) and the thousands of billions swallowed up by the banks and the economic « stimulation » plans of no lasting effect. The coming months will reveal a simple, yet especially painful reality: the Western economy, and in particular that of the United States (2), never really came out of recession (3). The startling statistics recorded since summer 2009 have only been the short-lived consequences of a massive injection of liquidity into a system which had essentially become insolvent just like the US consumer (4). At the heart of the global systemic crisis since its inception, the United States is, in the coming months, going to demonstrate that it is, once again, in the process of leading the economy and global finances into the « heart of darkness » (5) because it can’t get out of this « Very Great US Depression (6) ». Thus, coming out of the political upheavals of the US elections next November, with growth once again negative, the world will have to face the « Very Serious Breakdown » of the global economic and financial system founded over 60 years ago on the absolute necessity of the US economy never being in a lasting recession. Now the first half of 2011 will dictate that the US economy take an unprecedented dose of austerity plunging the planet into new financial, monetary, economic and social chaos.
In this GEAB issue, our team therefore anticipates for the coming months, different aspects of this new development of the crisis, especially the nature of imposed austerity process which will affect the United States, the development of the accursed « inflation / deflation » argument, the actual progress of real US GDP, the strategy of central banks and the direct consequences for Asia and Euroland. As we do every month, we set out our strategic and operational recommendations. And, specially, this GEAB issue offers an excerpt from the new book by Franck Biancheri « The Global Crisis: The Path to the World After - France, Europe and World in the Decade 2010-2020 » : the French version will be published on 7 October next by Editions Anticipolis and the English one later in December. In this issue we have chosen to present an extract of the anticipation concerning the forthcoming austerity which will be imposed on the United States beginning Spring 2011: « Welcome to the United States of Austerity ».
The coming quarters will be particularly dangerous for the world economic and financial system. The Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke passed on the message as diplomatically as possible at the recent meeting of world central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming: even though the policy to revive the US economy has failed, either the rest of the world continues to fund US deficits at a loss and hopes that at some point the bet will pay off, avoiding a collapse of the global system, or the United States will monetize its debt and turn all the Dollars and US Treasury Bonds held by the rest of the planet into funny money. Like any power at bay, the United States and is now forced to introduce the threat of pressure to get what it wants. Barely a year ago the rest of the World’s leaders and financial officials had volunteered to « refloat the USA ship ». However, today things have drastically changed since the noble assurance from Washington (the Fed’s, like that of the Obama administration’s) proved to be only pure arrogance based on the pretense of having understood the nature of the crisis and on the illusion of possessing the means of controlling it. However, US growth evaporates quarter after quarter (8) and turns negative again from the end of 2010. Unemployment hasn’t stopped growing and between the stability shown in official figures and the exit, in six months, of more than two million Americans from the workplace (LEAP/E2020 believes that the real unemployment figure is now at least 20% (9)); the U.S. housing market remains depressed at historically low levels and will resume its fall from the fourth quarter 2010; last but not least, as one can easily imagine in these circumstances, the US consumer is and will be absent on a permanent basis since his insolvency continues and even gets worse (10) for the one American in five without work. Behind these statistical factors hide three realities that will radically change the US and global political, economic and social landscape in future quarters as and when they dawn on the public consciousness.
Broad-based anger will cripple Washington from November 2010
First of all, there is a very depressing widespread reality, a real trip « to the heart of darkness », which is that tens of millions of Americans (nearly sixty million now depend on food stamps) who no longer have a job, no longer have a house, no longer have any savings, are wondering how they will survive in the years to come (11). The young (12), retirees, African-Americans, workers, service employees (13),… they constitute this mass of angry citizens who will speak violently next November and plunge Washington into a tragic political impasse. Supporters of the « Tea Party (14) » and « new secessionist (15) » movements... want to « break the Washington Machine » (and by extension that of Wall Street) without having feasible proposals to solve the country’s myriad problems (16). The November 2010 elections will be the first opportunity for this « suffering America » to express itself on the crisis and its consequences. And, won back by the Republicans or even the extremists, these voters will help to further cripple the Obama administration and Congress (which will probably swing to the Republicans), only pushing the country into a tragic gridlock just when all the signals turn red again. This expression of widespread anger will in addition, from December onwards, collide with the release of the Deficit Commission report set up by President Obama, which will automatically place the issue of deficits at the heart of public debate at the beginning of 2011 (17). For example, we are already seeing a very specific expression of this widespread anger against Wall Street in that Americans have deserted the stock market (18). Each month, an increasing number of « small investors » leave Wall Street and the financial markets (19), today leaving more than 70% of transactions in the hands of major institutions and other « high frequency traders ». If one keeps in mind the traditional image that the stock exchange is today’s temple of modern capitalism, then we are witnessing a phenomenon of loss of faith comparable to people’s disaffection with official demonstrations experienced by the communist system before its fall.
The Federal Reserve now knows that it is powerless
Finally, there is a financial and monetary effect that is particularly tragic since the players are aware of their unenviable situation: the U.S. Federal Reserve now knows that it is powerless. Despite the extraordinary efforts (zero interest rates, quantitative easing, huge support to the real estate mortgage market, massive support to banks, tripling its balance sheet, ...) that it carried out from September 2008, the U.S. economy will not restart. Fed leaders are finding they are only a part in the system, even if it is a vital part and, therefore, can do nothing against a problem that affects the very nature of the system, in this case, the US financial system, designed as the solvent heart of the global financial system since 1945. But the US consumer has become insolvent (20), the consumer who, during the last thirty years, has gradually become the central economic player of this financial heart (with more than 70% of U.S. growth dependant on household spending). It is this insolvency of US households (21) that has broken the Fed’s efforts.
Accustomed to the virtualism and thus to the possibility of manipulating the processes and dynamics of events, US central bankers believed that they could « mislead » households, once again giving them the illusion of wealth and thus pushing them to revive consumption and behind it the whole United States’ economic and financial machine. Until summer 2010, they did not believe in the systemic nature of the crisis or they did not understand that what was causing the problems was out of reach of the tools of a central bank, as powerful as it may be. Only in recent weeks have they discovered two pieces of evidence: their policies have failed and they have neither arms nor ammunition.
Hence the very depressed tone of the discussions at the central banks meeting in Jackson Hole, whence the lack of consensus on future action, whence the endless debates about the nature of the risks to be faced in the coming months (e.g. inflation or deflation, knowing that the system’s internal tools used to measure the economic consequences of these trends are no longer even relevant, as we analyse in this issue (22)), whence increasingly violent clashes between proponents of renewed growth via debt and followers of deficit reduction... and whence Ben Bernanke’s speech full of veiled threats to his central banker colleagues: in ambiguous terms, he passed the following message: « We will try everything and anything to avoid an economic and financial collapse and you will continue to finance this « everything and anything », otherwise we let inflation loose and thus devalue the Dollar whilst US Treasury Bonds will no longer be worth much » (23). When a central banker expresses himself like a common cash extortionist, there is danger in the house (24).
The response of the world’s major central banks will be unveiled in the next two quarters. Already the ECB has made it clear it thought that a new policy of stimulation through an increase in US deficits would be suicidal for the United States. Already China, whilst saying it would do nothing to rush things, spends its time selling US assets to buy Japanese ones (reflected in the historic level of the Yen / Dollar rate of exchange). As regards Japan, it is now forced to align itself simultaneously with Washington and Beijing ... which will probably cancel out all its financial and monetary policies. In future quarters the Fed, like the federal government, will find that when the United States is no longer synonymous with juicy profits and / or shared power, its ability to convince its partners declines quickly and heavily, especially when the latter question the relevance of the chosen policies.
The consequence of these three realities that are gradually making their presence felt in US and global consciousness will, therefore, for the LEAP/E2020 team, come to pass in Spring 2011 by the United States entering an era of austerity unprecedented since the country became the heart of the global economic and financial system. Fhederal political blockages in the context of an electorate sick and tired of Washington and Wall Street, heavy reliance on federal funding of the entire US economy and the Fed's impotence against a backdrop of growing international reluctance to finance US deficits will combine to push the country into austerity. An austerity that has, moreover, already begun to affect at least 20% of the population head-on, and wich directly affects at least one in two Americans worried about joining the ranks of the homeless, those without work and other long-term unemployed. For these tens of millions of Americans austerity is here and it's called lasting impoverishment. What is going to come into play between now and Spring 2011 is, therefore, the shift into official speeches, budgetary policies and international awareness to the idea that the United States is no longer « the land of plenty », but « the land of few ». And beyond the domestic political choices, it is also the discovery of a new limitation for the country: the United States cannot afford a new stimulus (26). Rather than a multidecade collapse like the Japanese situation, many decision makers will be tempted by shock therapy ... this same therapy that, with the IMF, the United States recommended to Latin American, Asian and Eastern European countries.
This is normally a good reason for the rating agencies, always so quick to see the straw in the eye of most countries in the world, to threaten the United States with a strong downside rerating if they not implement a comprehensive austerity plan as quickly as possible. But anyway, for LEAP/E2020, due to the internal and external conditions in the country described above, it is really in spring 2011 that the United States has an appointment with austerity, an appointment that the rest of the world will impose if it is paralyzed politically.
Until then, it is likely that the Fed will try a new series of « unconventional » measures ( a technical term meaning « desperate attempts ») to try and prevent arriving there because, at this stage, one thing is certain concerning the consequences of the United States entering a large-scale programme of austerity: that will be financial and monetary chaos in the markets accustomed for decades to the exact opposite, that’s to say, US waste; and an internal economic and social shock unparalleled since the 1930s.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
SC103-9
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-resilient-community/in-the-face-of-this-truth
"In the Face of This Truth"
It's time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may respond.
We live in the midst of multiple crises—economic and political, cultural and ecological—posing a significant threat to human existence at the level we have become accustomed to. There’s no way to be awake to the depth of these crises without emotional reactions, no way to be aware of the pain caused by these systemic failures without some dread and distress.
Those emotions come from recognizing that we humans with our big brains have disrupted the balance of the living world in disastrous ways that may be causing irreversible ecological destruction, and that drastically different ways of living are not only necessary but inevitable, with no guarantee of a smooth transition.
This talk, in polite company, leads to being labeled hysterical, Chicken Little, apocalyptic. No matter that you are calm, aren’t predicting the sky falling, and have made no reference to rapture. Pointing out that we live in unsustainable systems, that unsustainable systems can’t be sustained, and that no person or institution with power in the dominant culture is talking about this—well, that’s obviously crazy.
Regardless of others' reaction to talking honestly about collapse, it's essential we continue; no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term.
But to many of us, these insights simply seem honest. To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one’s own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse. What to do when such honesty is unwelcome?
In June 2010, I published a short essay online asking people who felt this anguish to report on their emotions and others’ reactions. In less than a month I received more than 300 messages, and while no single comment could sum up the responses, this comes close:
“I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I’m still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I’m not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to.”
I didn’t ask for biographical information, so there’s little data on the age, race, or occupation of the respondents. Nor did I ask specifically about political or community activism, but the letters reinforced a gut feeling that dealing openly with these emotions need not lead to paralysis and inaction. People can confront honestly a frightening question—“What if the unsustainable systems in which we live are beyond the point of no return?”—and stay politically and socially engaged.
One respondent, a longtime community organizer, put it succinctly:
Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that ‘we have 10 years to turn this around.’ They now say clearly that ‘we cannot stop this momentum.’ It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth.
What happens when we tell “exceptional truth”?
First, we often feel drained by it. Another respondent observed:
“My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that’s part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don’t think I am fully alive. I’m not depressed, just weirdly diminished.”
Second, we encounter those who don’t want to face tough truths. Many wrote about isolation from family and friends who deny there are reasons to be concerned:
“I’m a drug addict with over 20 years clean, and I know all about using up my future and farting out lame excuses. I promised myself an honest life to stay clean, and the double-edged sword is that I started seeing just how much our culture swims in denial.”
Sometimes people accuse those who press questions about systemic failure and collapse of being the problem:
Crash Course In Resilience: Building a no-regrets strategy for resilience in your community and life.
“People get angry at me for it and call me ‘dark’ and ‘negative’ and ‘sinful,’ telling me to instead move to the ‘light,’ ‘positive,’ and ‘love.’ Whatever.”
Regardless of others’ reactions to talking honestly about collapse, it’s essential we continue; no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term. We need not have a crystal ball to recognize, as singer/songwriter John Gorka put it, that “the old future’s gone.” The future of endless bounty for all isn’t the future we face.
How can we open an honest conversation about that future? It isn’t easy, but it starts with telling the truth, from our own experience, like this 70-year-old woman who lives in a rural intentional community:
I’ve lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn’t grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won’t understand why. They don’t see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can’t hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can’t imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the ‘collective’ is still in denial.
The work of breaking out of denial is less about specific actions and more about the habits and virtues we must cultivate. Far from that rural community, a 35-year-old woman working in an office in Chicago summed up the task:
“We really need to take it back to the basics and keep it simple. This reminds me of one of my own quotes I thought of a few months ago—‘be humble or be humiliated.’ I think I’m a simple person. I try to avoid making things more complex than they have to be. I try to focus more on what I need versus what I want. ‘Be humble or be humiliated’ is my own personal reminder.”
Her personal reminder is relevant for us all, individually and collectively. Humanity’s last hope may be in embracing a deep humility, recognizing that our cleverness is outstripped by our ignorance. If we become truly humble, we can abandon attempts to dominate the living world and instead find our place in it.
"In the Face of This Truth"
It's time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may respond.
We live in the midst of multiple crises—economic and political, cultural and ecological—posing a significant threat to human existence at the level we have become accustomed to. There’s no way to be awake to the depth of these crises without emotional reactions, no way to be aware of the pain caused by these systemic failures without some dread and distress.
Those emotions come from recognizing that we humans with our big brains have disrupted the balance of the living world in disastrous ways that may be causing irreversible ecological destruction, and that drastically different ways of living are not only necessary but inevitable, with no guarantee of a smooth transition.
This talk, in polite company, leads to being labeled hysterical, Chicken Little, apocalyptic. No matter that you are calm, aren’t predicting the sky falling, and have made no reference to rapture. Pointing out that we live in unsustainable systems, that unsustainable systems can’t be sustained, and that no person or institution with power in the dominant culture is talking about this—well, that’s obviously crazy.
Regardless of others' reaction to talking honestly about collapse, it's essential we continue; no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term.
But to many of us, these insights simply seem honest. To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one’s own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse. What to do when such honesty is unwelcome?
In June 2010, I published a short essay online asking people who felt this anguish to report on their emotions and others’ reactions. In less than a month I received more than 300 messages, and while no single comment could sum up the responses, this comes close:
“I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I’m still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I’m not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to.”
I didn’t ask for biographical information, so there’s little data on the age, race, or occupation of the respondents. Nor did I ask specifically about political or community activism, but the letters reinforced a gut feeling that dealing openly with these emotions need not lead to paralysis and inaction. People can confront honestly a frightening question—“What if the unsustainable systems in which we live are beyond the point of no return?”—and stay politically and socially engaged.
One respondent, a longtime community organizer, put it succinctly:
Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that ‘we have 10 years to turn this around.’ They now say clearly that ‘we cannot stop this momentum.’ It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth.
What happens when we tell “exceptional truth”?
First, we often feel drained by it. Another respondent observed:
“My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that’s part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don’t think I am fully alive. I’m not depressed, just weirdly diminished.”
Second, we encounter those who don’t want to face tough truths. Many wrote about isolation from family and friends who deny there are reasons to be concerned:
“I’m a drug addict with over 20 years clean, and I know all about using up my future and farting out lame excuses. I promised myself an honest life to stay clean, and the double-edged sword is that I started seeing just how much our culture swims in denial.”
Sometimes people accuse those who press questions about systemic failure and collapse of being the problem:
Crash Course In Resilience: Building a no-regrets strategy for resilience in your community and life.
“People get angry at me for it and call me ‘dark’ and ‘negative’ and ‘sinful,’ telling me to instead move to the ‘light,’ ‘positive,’ and ‘love.’ Whatever.”
Regardless of others’ reactions to talking honestly about collapse, it’s essential we continue; no political project based on denying reality can be viable for the long term. We need not have a crystal ball to recognize, as singer/songwriter John Gorka put it, that “the old future’s gone.” The future of endless bounty for all isn’t the future we face.
How can we open an honest conversation about that future? It isn’t easy, but it starts with telling the truth, from our own experience, like this 70-year-old woman who lives in a rural intentional community:
I’ve lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn’t grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won’t understand why. They don’t see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can’t hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can’t imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the ‘collective’ is still in denial.
The work of breaking out of denial is less about specific actions and more about the habits and virtues we must cultivate. Far from that rural community, a 35-year-old woman working in an office in Chicago summed up the task:
“We really need to take it back to the basics and keep it simple. This reminds me of one of my own quotes I thought of a few months ago—‘be humble or be humiliated.’ I think I’m a simple person. I try to avoid making things more complex than they have to be. I try to focus more on what I need versus what I want. ‘Be humble or be humiliated’ is my own personal reminder.”
Her personal reminder is relevant for us all, individually and collectively. Humanity’s last hope may be in embracing a deep humility, recognizing that our cleverness is outstripped by our ignorance. If we become truly humble, we can abandon attempts to dominate the living world and instead find our place in it.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
SC103-8
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-09/politics-great-transition
Politics in the Great Transition
Someday there will be thousands of scholarly books on how political systems coped or failed during the transition from fossil fuel-sustained civilizations to that which is to come. For now, however, there are practically none as only a relative handful of the 6.7 billion on earth today have even a glimmer that the great transition is underway.
Indeed, it will be many years before we begin to appreciate the dimensions of how the various forms of government, (parliamentary democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, "Communism" etc.) that have evolved around the world will cope with the great multi-decadal transition to civilizations that can function with little or no fossil fuel. Some already are predicting anarchy as industries, businesses, and monetary system crumble without their accustomed sources of energy; some talk of the great wars that will be fought over dwindling energy resources; and some foresee a return to pastoral towns akin to life in the 18th and 19th centuries - albeit after much social turmoil.
Here in America, which reached the zenith of the oil age (with an annual consumption of 1000 gallons per capita a few years back) we are already starting to feel the early shockwaves of the great transition - and it is not pretty. The next 5-10 years will likely be divided into two distinct periods, and maybe more. In the first period few will have any understanding of what is happening to them. A good guess would be that 95+ percent of the people living to earth today do not understand that the oil age has started drawing to a close and that massive change stemming there from are already underway. So far the major manifestations of this transition is that the price of oil has moved up from $10 to $20 a barrel at the beginning of the decade to $70 to $80 today, and of course the "Great Recession" which was triggered by an excess of borrowing but with significantly higher oil prices not helping the situation. That the oil price spike of 2008 was almost universally believed to be caused by speculators, greedy oil companies, or OPEC and not supply/demand getting out of balance is evidence of the misinformation which abounds.
The second phase of our great transition will come a few years later when it has become obvious to all that the world's oil supply has started to decline. When this day comes, the political debates should shift to a search for solutions to the reality of surviving without fossil fuels. Concerns about "burdensome" taxes, social issues, creating good jobs, and setting the country to growing again will melt in the face of concerns about national survival and social stability.
No one and no political party can put oil, coal and other minerals back into the ground.
For now however, we are mired in a period when politicians debate and run for office seemingly without an appreciation of serious underlying issues such as resource depletion, overpopulation, and global warming. For now the political debate is shaped in terms of the short vs. long run benefits for the voters - with the short-run beating concerns for future generations hands down. Any action that is perceived to hurt the pocket books of one's current constituents such as increasing the cost of energy or raising taxes is considered a non-starter.
Some 30 years ago the major political parties in the US stopped worrying about federal deficits when it became apparent that the voters neither knew or cared much about the subject, and certainly were not interested in punishing politicians at the polls for excessive federal spending. As real wages stopped growing in the 1970s, Americans switched to massive borrowing to satisfy their endless quest for steadily improving lifestyles. Three years ago however, it became time to pay the piper, when the US financial system nearly collapsed from speculation and excessive credit extension. The Bush and the Obama administration both believed that the possibility of a collapse of the major financial institutions was intolerable and spent trillions on various prop-up schemes and bailouts. Whether this was necessary or did little by temporarily stem the problem will have to wait the judgment of history.
The election of 2008 removed the Republicans from the White House and much of the Congress replacing them with Democrats who in the main followed the Bush administration's policies on bailing out the financial institutions. The Democrats, however, also spent hundreds of billions in an effort to restore economic growth, save failing automobile companies, and attempting to "stabilize" the housing market.
Today's American voter clearly is demanding instant results from whomever it puts into office. While we may or may not ever know if the trillions allocated to financial and other bailouts really did save us permanently or temporarily from a global financial collapse, it is becoming clear that that the $800 billion spent on stimulus does not seem to be enough to revive economic growth solve the growing unemployment problem. Election campaigns are now based on challengers not being the incumbents - and little else of substance.
We currently seem about to embark on another round of throwing the rascals out. If as seems likely the economy continues to slide, we could be seeing a pattern developing in which the voters throw out one party and then the other in a vain search for somebody who can return the American dream of ever expanding prosperity.
This of course is not possible. No one and no political party can put oil, coal, and other minerals back in the ground. Not the Democrats, or Republicans, or Greens, or Tea Partiers, or Communists, or Social Democrats, or Fascists, or Monarchists can quickly stop the glaciers and ice caps from melting, the seas from rising, and droughts and floods from reducing the food supply.
For the foreseeable future, America seems destined for political gridlock while politicians argue issues that were appropriate for a bygone era. The only solution to this is likely to be a great shock that gets everyone's attention. As debilitating consequences from global warming are likely decades away, a permanent oil price spike seems like the way we will get everyone's attention. Such a shock may be one, three, or five years away, but it will come and with it radical changes in the political landscape.
Politics in the Great Transition
Someday there will be thousands of scholarly books on how political systems coped or failed during the transition from fossil fuel-sustained civilizations to that which is to come. For now, however, there are practically none as only a relative handful of the 6.7 billion on earth today have even a glimmer that the great transition is underway.
Indeed, it will be many years before we begin to appreciate the dimensions of how the various forms of government, (parliamentary democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, "Communism" etc.) that have evolved around the world will cope with the great multi-decadal transition to civilizations that can function with little or no fossil fuel. Some already are predicting anarchy as industries, businesses, and monetary system crumble without their accustomed sources of energy; some talk of the great wars that will be fought over dwindling energy resources; and some foresee a return to pastoral towns akin to life in the 18th and 19th centuries - albeit after much social turmoil.
Here in America, which reached the zenith of the oil age (with an annual consumption of 1000 gallons per capita a few years back) we are already starting to feel the early shockwaves of the great transition - and it is not pretty. The next 5-10 years will likely be divided into two distinct periods, and maybe more. In the first period few will have any understanding of what is happening to them. A good guess would be that 95+ percent of the people living to earth today do not understand that the oil age has started drawing to a close and that massive change stemming there from are already underway. So far the major manifestations of this transition is that the price of oil has moved up from $10 to $20 a barrel at the beginning of the decade to $70 to $80 today, and of course the "Great Recession" which was triggered by an excess of borrowing but with significantly higher oil prices not helping the situation. That the oil price spike of 2008 was almost universally believed to be caused by speculators, greedy oil companies, or OPEC and not supply/demand getting out of balance is evidence of the misinformation which abounds.
The second phase of our great transition will come a few years later when it has become obvious to all that the world's oil supply has started to decline. When this day comes, the political debates should shift to a search for solutions to the reality of surviving without fossil fuels. Concerns about "burdensome" taxes, social issues, creating good jobs, and setting the country to growing again will melt in the face of concerns about national survival and social stability.
No one and no political party can put oil, coal and other minerals back into the ground.
For now however, we are mired in a period when politicians debate and run for office seemingly without an appreciation of serious underlying issues such as resource depletion, overpopulation, and global warming. For now the political debate is shaped in terms of the short vs. long run benefits for the voters - with the short-run beating concerns for future generations hands down. Any action that is perceived to hurt the pocket books of one's current constituents such as increasing the cost of energy or raising taxes is considered a non-starter.
Some 30 years ago the major political parties in the US stopped worrying about federal deficits when it became apparent that the voters neither knew or cared much about the subject, and certainly were not interested in punishing politicians at the polls for excessive federal spending. As real wages stopped growing in the 1970s, Americans switched to massive borrowing to satisfy their endless quest for steadily improving lifestyles. Three years ago however, it became time to pay the piper, when the US financial system nearly collapsed from speculation and excessive credit extension. The Bush and the Obama administration both believed that the possibility of a collapse of the major financial institutions was intolerable and spent trillions on various prop-up schemes and bailouts. Whether this was necessary or did little by temporarily stem the problem will have to wait the judgment of history.
The election of 2008 removed the Republicans from the White House and much of the Congress replacing them with Democrats who in the main followed the Bush administration's policies on bailing out the financial institutions. The Democrats, however, also spent hundreds of billions in an effort to restore economic growth, save failing automobile companies, and attempting to "stabilize" the housing market.
Today's American voter clearly is demanding instant results from whomever it puts into office. While we may or may not ever know if the trillions allocated to financial and other bailouts really did save us permanently or temporarily from a global financial collapse, it is becoming clear that that the $800 billion spent on stimulus does not seem to be enough to revive economic growth solve the growing unemployment problem. Election campaigns are now based on challengers not being the incumbents - and little else of substance.
We currently seem about to embark on another round of throwing the rascals out. If as seems likely the economy continues to slide, we could be seeing a pattern developing in which the voters throw out one party and then the other in a vain search for somebody who can return the American dream of ever expanding prosperity.
This of course is not possible. No one and no political party can put oil, coal, and other minerals back in the ground. Not the Democrats, or Republicans, or Greens, or Tea Partiers, or Communists, or Social Democrats, or Fascists, or Monarchists can quickly stop the glaciers and ice caps from melting, the seas from rising, and droughts and floods from reducing the food supply.
For the foreseeable future, America seems destined for political gridlock while politicians argue issues that were appropriate for a bygone era. The only solution to this is likely to be a great shock that gets everyone's attention. As debilitating consequences from global warming are likely decades away, a permanent oil price spike seems like the way we will get everyone's attention. Such a shock may be one, three, or five years away, but it will come and with it radical changes in the political landscape.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/08/understanding-america.html
Understanding America's Class System
Honk if you love caviar
How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.
Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite's behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation's most privileged and ambitious young moths.
They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires -- probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi's net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.
Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.
Screw the proles, just count the money
This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.
On the other hand, you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect -- or not to expect. The track record of the political class is an open book. As the layer of millionaires buffering the elites who pay for their campaigns, they've done their jobs. They approved the Bush administration's massive tax cut for the rich. They dropped the per-child tax credit for families with incomes less than $20,000. They "reformed" prescription drugs right out of Medicare. They reformed health care into hundreds of billions of increased profits for the insurance industry.
However, the American political class' finest moment came in September 2008 when the financial greed machinery of American investment houses went tits up. The Republican and Democratic parties, major corporations, and manufacturers of US opinion came together in one of the greater bipartisan efforts in modern US history. There was nothing to do, they all agreed, but buy up $700 billion in "toxic asset" investments. "Otherwise," they prophesied, the world would end. Meaning that the ongoing national Ponzi scheme they have always sold to the American people as the US economy, would finally crash.
And in case there were any skeptics out there among the unwashed, the public was reminded just how much they stood to lose -- which was everything. Deep in the boiler room, the Goldman Sachs black bag crew had wired up the "economy" with enough explosive "financial instruments" to take out every working mook's home, or retirement savings, which the medical industry was already sucking up at an alarming rate. Something had to be done before the health care industry got it all, and repo the family ride.
Yessiree, it was gonna be a "systemic collapse," by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this "rescue" was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike -- a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?
In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said "Bullshit," by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?
Then, in midstream, the political and economic owning classes switched horses, after realizing there was more gravy for the kingpins in buying up banks and big industries. It was unconstitutional, but what the hell, that's what Supreme Courts are for. The proles mumbled and peered into their TV sets for explanations that never came.
Of course, partisan opposition being what it is these days -- a blood-soaked ditch of snarling hyenas -- Obama's election meant the GOP needed to denounce the new Democratic president for display purposes. Or at least shit in the Oval Office, and then blame him. So most Republicans holding office in 2008 were forced to argue publicly against "troubled asset relief," "stimulus packages," and the huge bailouts. Besides, somebody had to unfurl the motley banner of a "self balancing free market," at least widely enough for the GOP to hide behind in the back room where the real deals are always cut. The place where the weapons companies propose systems, using congressional representatives and generals as sales reps. Where it is understood that, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out near the end of his life, when it was safe to tell the truth, "stockholders are just appendages, someone to hold the bag for the corporations, and stocks are just gambling chips for hedge funds and Wall Street," and for the suckers who think they can actually outwit High Frequency Trading -- a.k.a. High Speed Fraud. (Thanks to reader Brent B. for sending me that one).
Ah, but I have digressed. What else is new? The main thing is that the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years. Public burnings in the national town square of media always draw a crowd.
Bwaaaaaa! Obama won't let us play
Fortunately, for both parties, there is no such thing as an American political memory. That Lindsay Lohan dated fellow rehab client, snowboarder Riley Giles, yes, that can be remembered. That the Republicans signed off on similar, if smaller giveaways under Pappy Bush and Clinton -- well, that may as well be ancient Egyptian history. So is the fact that the both parties forced banks to make high rate home loans to people who people who did not qualify, because the inflated home values during the expanding bubble would make billions for big investors who knew when to get out. Should they stay too long at the fair and go bust, they would set up the howl of "too big to fail." The administration, which has no more a clue to what makes the economy tick, would then rush them pallets of money. That's what a banker calls a win-win situation: when the banker holds both ends of a winning deal.
Meanwhile, elite Republicans still needed a beef with the new black guy on the block who had just kicked their ass and was still very popular at the time. The best they could come up with on the bailouts was that they had been allowed too little input. "Obama won't let us play with him. Bwaaaaaa!" A smokescreen of course, since he was doing exactly what they would have done, handing Republican bankers every bit of money the people had and a helluva lot they didn't have, but could make payments on for the next, oh, 100 years or until the final miserable, smoking collapse, whichever comes first.
In the end though, nobody in Washington disputed the ruling class's right to dictate policy. After all, the political class agreed with the ruling class's major premise: The public does not know shit, never has, never will. Also that it is best not to get the public too riled up, not because the public has any power (power is money in America and the elites have it all now), but because elected officials would have to answer brainless questions from people such as Tea Partiers. Or Ron Paul cultists. Gawd!
Howard, won't you please come home
America has always had a ruling class, and it has always bullshitted the world that it doesn't. But at least the ruling class of the past was interesting and varied, because diverse sorts of Americans were getting rich.
You had Texas wildcatters in the "oil bidness." You had Southern cotton and tobacco aristocrats guzzling bourbon, fondling their stock portfolios and their black maids. You had industrialists and California and Florida real estate hotwires, Boston Brahmins and New York financiers. There was the bootlegginç g inside stock trader Joseph P. Kennedy, not to mention Prescott Bush moving financial assets around for the Nazis during WW II. They were products of varied educations, or in some cases, no education. They came from many regions, back when America still had distinct cultural regions, before it was completely homogenized and stratified for maximum capitalist efficiency.
Whatever they may have been, they were seldom dull. I would love to have known Howard Hughes, a man who could direct a film, and build the largest aircraft ever built, the 200-ton, all-wood Spruce Goose, not to mention the busty Jane Russell's underwire bra. Stop and consider Bill Gates and the other colorless puds of today. Almost makes you miss the robber barons.
Think Tony Hayward gives a shit?
You hear it all the time these days: The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 45% of the rest of Americans combined.
I have seldom met an American who thought this is a good thing, and seldom met one who understood how the ruling class got so rich. Simply put, it was through constant cultivation of bigger and more labyrinthine government, creating legal and technical complexities to sluice money nationally and globally in their direction, and to cover their asses in the process. The results are such things as 3,000 page health care bills (defining which corporate elites get which parts of the cake), or the 2,000-page NAFTA and its 9,000 tariff product codes.
Once the public was buried in such a maelstrom of legal paperwork, computer transactions, modeling, etc., it was easy to argue that the world had become so complex that the skills and brains to operate it were extremely rare and those who had them were fucking geniuses. These are people who dwell in such airy realms that we should pay them vast amounts of money and never question their decisions. That's how we got such oblivious duds as Timothy Geithner (who never held a nongovernment related job in his life) running the Treasury, and tens of thousands of the Empire's pud whackers, ranging from petty legal commissars, on up to the Alan Greenspans of this world -- a bumbling arrogant old fart who never had a clue but understood the rules: Look enigmatic and blow whichever administration is in power.
In fact, capitalist natural selection for mediocrity is how British Petroleum got Tony Hayward, who was unfortunate enough to be tossed out of the boat onto the media beaches of public awareness in his briefs. If ever there was a specimen of the slimy corporate salamander, we saw it in sniveling nakedness right there. Reportedly, the salamander will receive $18 million, plus annual pension payments totaling $1 million per year, the possible forfeiture of which makes good news copy to cover BP's ongoing negligence, theft and intimidation. So the public howls and throws eggs at the straw man, who has been making $1.6 million a year and is now sitting on his yacht "trying to get his life back." Does anybody really believe Tony Hayward gives a shit? Oh, there may be some news of BP's demise, its "absorption" by another corporation or something similar to Enron, sold off piecemeal to other massive corporations at a bargain prices, while everyone was watching the saga of the mediocre white collar criminal, Ken Lay. You'd think we'd learn. Corporations do not go away; they just morph along, sucking up generation after generation's money.
The rabble at the gates
You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds. They must look pious and sound right while lying through their teeth and picking our pockets. In other words, they have an astute grasp of American politics and business -- which are the same thing, of course.
Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation's saviors -- morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.
So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.
Immediately they conclude that it is the American people's fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard. (I've been plenty guilty of this myself over the years, and am now a recovering American liberal, well on my way not to conservatism, but toward a strumpetocracy, government by strumpets. It's a real word, Google it.) Not that the progressive flag was actually flying; American liberals threw down their standard 40 years ago in the rush for comfortable technical, teaching and administrative jobs in government, universities and non-profits. "Ah yes," they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!" liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.
Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama's characterization of American heartlanders "clinging to God and guns." Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, "what everybody knows is true." Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class. Hard to believe their predecessors were the point men and women for the Scopes trial, the eight-hour day, unions, anti-McCarthyism, Cesar Chavez, Negro civil rights.
Big dogs eat first
The ruling elite stays in power through the patronage both parties offer their supporters. They hang onto or follow their party's leaders much the same as remoras cling to big sharks, and pilot fish accompany sharks, happy to get the leftovers. Both parties provide their activists and followers with livelihoods, through programs or legislation that just happen to make the rich richer.
One good example is the psychologists, doctors and social workers who initiate the process of getting half the country on anti-depressants or mood stabilizers, a term that should scare the hell out of anyone who grasps the concept of the corporate state. They get their jobs through government funding, or research that defines behaviors as illnesses requiring powerful psychoactive drugs.
One new favorite is ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, in which children act like -- surprise, surprise -- the young assholes that children can sometimes be. Teenage rebellion becomes a psychological disorder. Diagnostic manual symptoms include "often argues with adults," an unheard of behavior of teenagers calling for antipsychotics such as Risperidone. Side effects of Risperidone include a mild speed like buzz, a super erection lasting hours, lactation and suicidal tendencies. Phew!
Big Pharma makes billions more in the name of alleviating the people's suffering. Obviously many millions are indeed suffering, but if that is the case, then American society is suffering. Never will it be asked publicly just what psychic anguish our society is suffering from. Because the answer is capitalist industrial commodity disease, and the psychic pathology of Americaness. That would mean consulting Mr. Marx, who predicted much of it, or Arthur Barsky, who brought the definition up to date.
For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government.
In the process, the already rich get richer and the rest of the middle class commissariat becomes more dependent upon the rich. As conservative editor and writer Angelo M. Codevilla, pointed out in a July 2010 article: "By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty." A third is more than enough to tip the scales at their will.
Keep ‘em dazzled with foot work
Meanwhile, there are the rest of us. That great throng of squawking, family loving folks, professionals and peasants alike, libertarians, patriots, people who worship god and those who loath religion -- people who still believe that hard work is the road to success despite the evidence, people who know differently because they sell used cars or work for the US Post Office -- citizens who rightfully suspect that government taxes merely feed the beast, or who believe, again rightly, that no politician truly represents their interests, and that the government is now in the business of social engineering for economic purposes. Fundamentalist Christians, gays, small businessmen, Hispanic Americans, organic farmers, pro-lifers and abortion supporters, union workers in the North and Southern anti-unionists, school teachers and stump preachers -- we all feel threatened by our government.
At the same time, in order to keep revolution at bay, and the military in cannon fodder and defense industry in contracts, we have been heavily indoctrinated to believe America leads the world in all things, and that the rest of mankind lives less prosperous, less free lives, coveting our "lifestyle." In short, they are lesser people.
Still though, we have in common that none of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do -- become a uniformly pliant mass.
Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country's economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class. Look at the sorry assed "Tea Party Revolution," which will have to be allied with the GOP (which its backstage leadership has been anyway) in 2012 if it wants to be even a small factor. Media noise about the Tea Party doth not a revolution make, and it certainly does not overthrow the ruling class, who do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.
And besides, the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority, not to mention the machinery of both parties to grant itself more authority.
In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks. That's not gutlessness. It's common sense.
Therefore, you are left with a rigged game called legislative action. This is an invisible power process, masked by another process called public relations strategy, which feeds it into yet another process called media, that makes "news decisions," as to what you need to hear or see. And there's plenty you don't need to hear. For instance, NPR, the New York Times and thousands of other outlets refuse to use the word torture to describe waterboarding, preferring instead "aggressive interrogation methods," unencumbered interrogation, free interrogation, or similar euphemisms. NPR's justification for sugarcoating US torture is, ""the word torture is loaded with political and social implications."
Ya think?
Truth is a hard road to travel
After decades of hyper-militant consumerism and its attending alienation, and a national consciousness spun from pure capitalist bullshit and mirrors, it is testimony to the American people that they can still see to piss straight, much less recognize any sort of truth whatsoever. Yet, a portion of Americans are beginning to grasp the truth about what has happened to their country -- that it has been bought and paid for by an elite class in a nation that is supposed to be classless. They are beginning to realize that, when it comes to actually governing our country, we are powerless as individuals -- even members of the political class -- and serve the overall will of its true owners. It's been that way so long we've become conditioned to accept it as a natural state, something we cannot change, and do not even know how to question, because, like the atmosphere, it's just there.
The higher truth is something we recognize when we encounter it. We may not have the right words, or all the facts, but we can feel it in our bones. Intuition is the first glimmer in the distance. It goes unsaid that we always have the choice of not looking in truth's direction, or not looking for it at all. Seldom is it a pleasant sight, which is the chief sign that it is truth. Even the best of it arrives to the sound of ominous bells.
I think about that young reader, Brent B., who takes time to email me now and then. Today he wrote, summarizing the only thing of which I am certain:
" It's a hard thing to know the truth in this world, it's like something inside of you dies, but sometimes you still have to know it. "
Understanding America's Class System
Honk if you love caviar
How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.
Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite's behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation's most privileged and ambitious young moths.
They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires -- probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi's net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.
Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.
Screw the proles, just count the money
This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.
On the other hand, you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect -- or not to expect. The track record of the political class is an open book. As the layer of millionaires buffering the elites who pay for their campaigns, they've done their jobs. They approved the Bush administration's massive tax cut for the rich. They dropped the per-child tax credit for families with incomes less than $20,000. They "reformed" prescription drugs right out of Medicare. They reformed health care into hundreds of billions of increased profits for the insurance industry.
However, the American political class' finest moment came in September 2008 when the financial greed machinery of American investment houses went tits up. The Republican and Democratic parties, major corporations, and manufacturers of US opinion came together in one of the greater bipartisan efforts in modern US history. There was nothing to do, they all agreed, but buy up $700 billion in "toxic asset" investments. "Otherwise," they prophesied, the world would end. Meaning that the ongoing national Ponzi scheme they have always sold to the American people as the US economy, would finally crash.
And in case there were any skeptics out there among the unwashed, the public was reminded just how much they stood to lose -- which was everything. Deep in the boiler room, the Goldman Sachs black bag crew had wired up the "economy" with enough explosive "financial instruments" to take out every working mook's home, or retirement savings, which the medical industry was already sucking up at an alarming rate. Something had to be done before the health care industry got it all, and repo the family ride.
Yessiree, it was gonna be a "systemic collapse," by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this "rescue" was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike -- a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?
In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said "Bullshit," by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?
Then, in midstream, the political and economic owning classes switched horses, after realizing there was more gravy for the kingpins in buying up banks and big industries. It was unconstitutional, but what the hell, that's what Supreme Courts are for. The proles mumbled and peered into their TV sets for explanations that never came.
Of course, partisan opposition being what it is these days -- a blood-soaked ditch of snarling hyenas -- Obama's election meant the GOP needed to denounce the new Democratic president for display purposes. Or at least shit in the Oval Office, and then blame him. So most Republicans holding office in 2008 were forced to argue publicly against "troubled asset relief," "stimulus packages," and the huge bailouts. Besides, somebody had to unfurl the motley banner of a "self balancing free market," at least widely enough for the GOP to hide behind in the back room where the real deals are always cut. The place where the weapons companies propose systems, using congressional representatives and generals as sales reps. Where it is understood that, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out near the end of his life, when it was safe to tell the truth, "stockholders are just appendages, someone to hold the bag for the corporations, and stocks are just gambling chips for hedge funds and Wall Street," and for the suckers who think they can actually outwit High Frequency Trading -- a.k.a. High Speed Fraud. (Thanks to reader Brent B. for sending me that one).
Ah, but I have digressed. What else is new? The main thing is that the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years. Public burnings in the national town square of media always draw a crowd.
Bwaaaaaa! Obama won't let us play
Fortunately, for both parties, there is no such thing as an American political memory. That Lindsay Lohan dated fellow rehab client, snowboarder Riley Giles, yes, that can be remembered. That the Republicans signed off on similar, if smaller giveaways under Pappy Bush and Clinton -- well, that may as well be ancient Egyptian history. So is the fact that the both parties forced banks to make high rate home loans to people who people who did not qualify, because the inflated home values during the expanding bubble would make billions for big investors who knew when to get out. Should they stay too long at the fair and go bust, they would set up the howl of "too big to fail." The administration, which has no more a clue to what makes the economy tick, would then rush them pallets of money. That's what a banker calls a win-win situation: when the banker holds both ends of a winning deal.
Meanwhile, elite Republicans still needed a beef with the new black guy on the block who had just kicked their ass and was still very popular at the time. The best they could come up with on the bailouts was that they had been allowed too little input. "Obama won't let us play with him. Bwaaaaaa!" A smokescreen of course, since he was doing exactly what they would have done, handing Republican bankers every bit of money the people had and a helluva lot they didn't have, but could make payments on for the next, oh, 100 years or until the final miserable, smoking collapse, whichever comes first.
In the end though, nobody in Washington disputed the ruling class's right to dictate policy. After all, the political class agreed with the ruling class's major premise: The public does not know shit, never has, never will. Also that it is best not to get the public too riled up, not because the public has any power (power is money in America and the elites have it all now), but because elected officials would have to answer brainless questions from people such as Tea Partiers. Or Ron Paul cultists. Gawd!
Howard, won't you please come home
America has always had a ruling class, and it has always bullshitted the world that it doesn't. But at least the ruling class of the past was interesting and varied, because diverse sorts of Americans were getting rich.
You had Texas wildcatters in the "oil bidness." You had Southern cotton and tobacco aristocrats guzzling bourbon, fondling their stock portfolios and their black maids. You had industrialists and California and Florida real estate hotwires, Boston Brahmins and New York financiers. There was the bootlegginç g inside stock trader Joseph P. Kennedy, not to mention Prescott Bush moving financial assets around for the Nazis during WW II. They were products of varied educations, or in some cases, no education. They came from many regions, back when America still had distinct cultural regions, before it was completely homogenized and stratified for maximum capitalist efficiency.
Whatever they may have been, they were seldom dull. I would love to have known Howard Hughes, a man who could direct a film, and build the largest aircraft ever built, the 200-ton, all-wood Spruce Goose, not to mention the busty Jane Russell's underwire bra. Stop and consider Bill Gates and the other colorless puds of today. Almost makes you miss the robber barons.
Think Tony Hayward gives a shit?
You hear it all the time these days: The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 45% of the rest of Americans combined.
I have seldom met an American who thought this is a good thing, and seldom met one who understood how the ruling class got so rich. Simply put, it was through constant cultivation of bigger and more labyrinthine government, creating legal and technical complexities to sluice money nationally and globally in their direction, and to cover their asses in the process. The results are such things as 3,000 page health care bills (defining which corporate elites get which parts of the cake), or the 2,000-page NAFTA and its 9,000 tariff product codes.
Once the public was buried in such a maelstrom of legal paperwork, computer transactions, modeling, etc., it was easy to argue that the world had become so complex that the skills and brains to operate it were extremely rare and those who had them were fucking geniuses. These are people who dwell in such airy realms that we should pay them vast amounts of money and never question their decisions. That's how we got such oblivious duds as Timothy Geithner (who never held a nongovernment related job in his life) running the Treasury, and tens of thousands of the Empire's pud whackers, ranging from petty legal commissars, on up to the Alan Greenspans of this world -- a bumbling arrogant old fart who never had a clue but understood the rules: Look enigmatic and blow whichever administration is in power.
In fact, capitalist natural selection for mediocrity is how British Petroleum got Tony Hayward, who was unfortunate enough to be tossed out of the boat onto the media beaches of public awareness in his briefs. If ever there was a specimen of the slimy corporate salamander, we saw it in sniveling nakedness right there. Reportedly, the salamander will receive $18 million, plus annual pension payments totaling $1 million per year, the possible forfeiture of which makes good news copy to cover BP's ongoing negligence, theft and intimidation. So the public howls and throws eggs at the straw man, who has been making $1.6 million a year and is now sitting on his yacht "trying to get his life back." Does anybody really believe Tony Hayward gives a shit? Oh, there may be some news of BP's demise, its "absorption" by another corporation or something similar to Enron, sold off piecemeal to other massive corporations at a bargain prices, while everyone was watching the saga of the mediocre white collar criminal, Ken Lay. You'd think we'd learn. Corporations do not go away; they just morph along, sucking up generation after generation's money.
The rabble at the gates
You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds. They must look pious and sound right while lying through their teeth and picking our pockets. In other words, they have an astute grasp of American politics and business -- which are the same thing, of course.
Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation's saviors -- morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.
So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.
Immediately they conclude that it is the American people's fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard. (I've been plenty guilty of this myself over the years, and am now a recovering American liberal, well on my way not to conservatism, but toward a strumpetocracy, government by strumpets. It's a real word, Google it.) Not that the progressive flag was actually flying; American liberals threw down their standard 40 years ago in the rush for comfortable technical, teaching and administrative jobs in government, universities and non-profits. "Ah yes," they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!" liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.
Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama's characterization of American heartlanders "clinging to God and guns." Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, "what everybody knows is true." Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class. Hard to believe their predecessors were the point men and women for the Scopes trial, the eight-hour day, unions, anti-McCarthyism, Cesar Chavez, Negro civil rights.
Big dogs eat first
The ruling elite stays in power through the patronage both parties offer their supporters. They hang onto or follow their party's leaders much the same as remoras cling to big sharks, and pilot fish accompany sharks, happy to get the leftovers. Both parties provide their activists and followers with livelihoods, through programs or legislation that just happen to make the rich richer.
One good example is the psychologists, doctors and social workers who initiate the process of getting half the country on anti-depressants or mood stabilizers, a term that should scare the hell out of anyone who grasps the concept of the corporate state. They get their jobs through government funding, or research that defines behaviors as illnesses requiring powerful psychoactive drugs.
One new favorite is ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, in which children act like -- surprise, surprise -- the young assholes that children can sometimes be. Teenage rebellion becomes a psychological disorder. Diagnostic manual symptoms include "often argues with adults," an unheard of behavior of teenagers calling for antipsychotics such as Risperidone. Side effects of Risperidone include a mild speed like buzz, a super erection lasting hours, lactation and suicidal tendencies. Phew!
Big Pharma makes billions more in the name of alleviating the people's suffering. Obviously many millions are indeed suffering, but if that is the case, then American society is suffering. Never will it be asked publicly just what psychic anguish our society is suffering from. Because the answer is capitalist industrial commodity disease, and the psychic pathology of Americaness. That would mean consulting Mr. Marx, who predicted much of it, or Arthur Barsky, who brought the definition up to date.
For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government.
In the process, the already rich get richer and the rest of the middle class commissariat becomes more dependent upon the rich. As conservative editor and writer Angelo M. Codevilla, pointed out in a July 2010 article: "By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty." A third is more than enough to tip the scales at their will.
Keep ‘em dazzled with foot work
Meanwhile, there are the rest of us. That great throng of squawking, family loving folks, professionals and peasants alike, libertarians, patriots, people who worship god and those who loath religion -- people who still believe that hard work is the road to success despite the evidence, people who know differently because they sell used cars or work for the US Post Office -- citizens who rightfully suspect that government taxes merely feed the beast, or who believe, again rightly, that no politician truly represents their interests, and that the government is now in the business of social engineering for economic purposes. Fundamentalist Christians, gays, small businessmen, Hispanic Americans, organic farmers, pro-lifers and abortion supporters, union workers in the North and Southern anti-unionists, school teachers and stump preachers -- we all feel threatened by our government.
At the same time, in order to keep revolution at bay, and the military in cannon fodder and defense industry in contracts, we have been heavily indoctrinated to believe America leads the world in all things, and that the rest of mankind lives less prosperous, less free lives, coveting our "lifestyle." In short, they are lesser people.
Still though, we have in common that none of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do -- become a uniformly pliant mass.
Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country's economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class. Look at the sorry assed "Tea Party Revolution," which will have to be allied with the GOP (which its backstage leadership has been anyway) in 2012 if it wants to be even a small factor. Media noise about the Tea Party doth not a revolution make, and it certainly does not overthrow the ruling class, who do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.
And besides, the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority, not to mention the machinery of both parties to grant itself more authority.
In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks. That's not gutlessness. It's common sense.
Therefore, you are left with a rigged game called legislative action. This is an invisible power process, masked by another process called public relations strategy, which feeds it into yet another process called media, that makes "news decisions," as to what you need to hear or see. And there's plenty you don't need to hear. For instance, NPR, the New York Times and thousands of other outlets refuse to use the word torture to describe waterboarding, preferring instead "aggressive interrogation methods," unencumbered interrogation, free interrogation, or similar euphemisms. NPR's justification for sugarcoating US torture is, ""the word torture is loaded with political and social implications."
Ya think?
Truth is a hard road to travel
After decades of hyper-militant consumerism and its attending alienation, and a national consciousness spun from pure capitalist bullshit and mirrors, it is testimony to the American people that they can still see to piss straight, much less recognize any sort of truth whatsoever. Yet, a portion of Americans are beginning to grasp the truth about what has happened to their country -- that it has been bought and paid for by an elite class in a nation that is supposed to be classless. They are beginning to realize that, when it comes to actually governing our country, we are powerless as individuals -- even members of the political class -- and serve the overall will of its true owners. It's been that way so long we've become conditioned to accept it as a natural state, something we cannot change, and do not even know how to question, because, like the atmosphere, it's just there.
The higher truth is something we recognize when we encounter it. We may not have the right words, or all the facts, but we can feel it in our bones. Intuition is the first glimmer in the distance. It goes unsaid that we always have the choice of not looking in truth's direction, or not looking for it at all. Seldom is it a pleasant sight, which is the chief sign that it is truth. Even the best of it arrives to the sound of ominous bells.
I think about that young reader, Brent B., who takes time to email me now and then. Today he wrote, summarizing the only thing of which I am certain:
" It's a hard thing to know the truth in this world, it's like something inside of you dies, but sometimes you still have to know it. "
Sunday, August 15, 2010
SC103-6
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/the-queasy-season.html
The Queasy Season
A scarlet tinge colors the Virginia creeper, the Canada geese grow restless out on the fairways, an ominous canapé fatigue spreads through the Hamptons, and cyclonic weather blobs march west across the Atlantic - you know that time of the year has arrived. Fall approaches on busy feet. The name itself suggests slippage. Though many government numbers lie, a dark reality still penetrates the fog of econometrics. Visions of tumbling indexes wither the spinal fluxes of nervous day traders praying to their little effigies of Jim Cramer that it's all just in their heads. Sometimes it seems as though the universe itself grows tired of suspense and yields to the zeitgeist. A cosmic groan fills the air from sea to shining sea as all eyes turn skyward. Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?
Peak pretending now joins peak oil, peak credit, peak rare earths, and all the other peaks visible to us humble valley dwellers. Pretending bought America two years of respite from the ravages of fraud and mismanagement, but now the true condition of this society reveals itself like the disfigured ghoul in the sewer lowering his mask. Further pretending is unnecessary now. We're even beyond the "modified limited hang-out" stance, as a long-ago presidential counselor once put his PR strategy in the face of crumbling public credulity. When nothing is believable, what's the point in even pretending?
Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century. That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears. That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy - which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong. That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us. That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters. That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.
The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for its own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down.
The comprehensive failure of leadership deepens every week, as does the gulf between what people like Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell say and what is really happening on-the-ground in the arena of everyday life. Storyline: last week, Mr. Obama hailed the revival of the automobile industry with the debut of Chevrolet's new electric car, the Volt. Reality: at $41,000 retail, nobody outside lower Manhattan, Hollywood, or K Street will have enough money to buy one. Storyline: Mitch McConnell inveighs against a bill to require corporations to take responsibility on camera for their political advertisements; he says it will lead to job losses. Reality: the Senate Minority Leader is shilling for corporations that want to run massive, unlimited ad campaigns in support of corporate agendas - such as off-shoring jobs.
The failure of leadership extends through government to the news media to business to the universities to the courts. All authorities are suspect. All are dishonest and cowardly. When the attempt to enforce some basic rules of decency in banking ends up in legislation that runs two-thousand pages, the rule of law is dishonored. Anyway, adding that much unneeded complexity to a system that is already too excessively complex to function anymore must be an obviously bad move. The Glass-Steagall act was under forty pages. Why not just correct the mistake we made eleven years ago and vote it back into existence? Somebody must know where it is - in some back filing cabinet of the Library of Congress.
In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality. The public becomes a mob and democracy turns into a kangaroo court, which is to say: a mockery of the rule of law. I suspect we'll see a correlation of turbulence in politics and markets as the weeks pound forward toward Halloween. By election day, democracy itself will be in disrepute and the streets will run with mad dogs. When this sucker goes down (to paraphrase a past president) it's going to be like a fire in a circus tent. Don't expect much from the clowns' bucket brigade. We'll be lucky if they don't toss gasoline into the grandstands.
I doubt I'm the only one who senses something in the air - and not just the impressive heat and humidity. Anyway, I'm going off for a few days' vacation this week to do no more than walk around in the salt air beside the ghost-filled ocean.
The Queasy Season
A scarlet tinge colors the Virginia creeper, the Canada geese grow restless out on the fairways, an ominous canapé fatigue spreads through the Hamptons, and cyclonic weather blobs march west across the Atlantic - you know that time of the year has arrived. Fall approaches on busy feet. The name itself suggests slippage. Though many government numbers lie, a dark reality still penetrates the fog of econometrics. Visions of tumbling indexes wither the spinal fluxes of nervous day traders praying to their little effigies of Jim Cramer that it's all just in their heads. Sometimes it seems as though the universe itself grows tired of suspense and yields to the zeitgeist. A cosmic groan fills the air from sea to shining sea as all eyes turn skyward. Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?
Peak pretending now joins peak oil, peak credit, peak rare earths, and all the other peaks visible to us humble valley dwellers. Pretending bought America two years of respite from the ravages of fraud and mismanagement, but now the true condition of this society reveals itself like the disfigured ghoul in the sewer lowering his mask. Further pretending is unnecessary now. We're even beyond the "modified limited hang-out" stance, as a long-ago presidential counselor once put his PR strategy in the face of crumbling public credulity. When nothing is believable, what's the point in even pretending?
Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century. That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears. That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy - which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong. That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us. That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters. That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.
The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for its own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down.
The comprehensive failure of leadership deepens every week, as does the gulf between what people like Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell say and what is really happening on-the-ground in the arena of everyday life. Storyline: last week, Mr. Obama hailed the revival of the automobile industry with the debut of Chevrolet's new electric car, the Volt. Reality: at $41,000 retail, nobody outside lower Manhattan, Hollywood, or K Street will have enough money to buy one. Storyline: Mitch McConnell inveighs against a bill to require corporations to take responsibility on camera for their political advertisements; he says it will lead to job losses. Reality: the Senate Minority Leader is shilling for corporations that want to run massive, unlimited ad campaigns in support of corporate agendas - such as off-shoring jobs.
The failure of leadership extends through government to the news media to business to the universities to the courts. All authorities are suspect. All are dishonest and cowardly. When the attempt to enforce some basic rules of decency in banking ends up in legislation that runs two-thousand pages, the rule of law is dishonored. Anyway, adding that much unneeded complexity to a system that is already too excessively complex to function anymore must be an obviously bad move. The Glass-Steagall act was under forty pages. Why not just correct the mistake we made eleven years ago and vote it back into existence? Somebody must know where it is - in some back filing cabinet of the Library of Congress.
In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality. The public becomes a mob and democracy turns into a kangaroo court, which is to say: a mockery of the rule of law. I suspect we'll see a correlation of turbulence in politics and markets as the weeks pound forward toward Halloween. By election day, democracy itself will be in disrepute and the streets will run with mad dogs. When this sucker goes down (to paraphrase a past president) it's going to be like a fire in a circus tent. Don't expect much from the clowns' bucket brigade. We'll be lucky if they don't toss gasoline into the grandstands.
I doubt I'm the only one who senses something in the air - and not just the impressive heat and humidity. Anyway, I'm going off for a few days' vacation this week to do no more than walk around in the salt air beside the ghost-filled ocean.
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