James McMurtry at the Freight&Salvage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbWRfBZY-ng

I caught James McMurtry's act at the Freight & Salvage last week in Berkeley. Went by myself, which turned out to be oddly appropriate given that so many of his songs are about the essential loneliness of his own life and that of Americans in general. Songs like "Holiday," a bleak recounting of the hopelessness of forced intimacy and bonhomie of relatives thrown together periodically by red dates on the calendar. James is the son of the famous writer Larry McMurtry, and I don't suppose that's a particularly easy thing to be, scion of the creative force who produced Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment.

James, however, has his father's eye for the naturalistic or emotional detail which captures the essence of a scene or feeling. A few lyrics about a freight train passing in the gloom of twilight out on the Great Plains with "half an inch of snow on the coal cars." Or the rowdy white trash saga about his Uncle Slayton in "Choctaw Bingo," where he sings of a family reunion up somewhere north of Oklahoma, and where one family (presumably his) drives north from Texas after the kids in the back seat are tranquilized with a little vodka in their cherry cola on the way there, and with Benadryl as the additive on the way back.

James brought the house down with a "medley of his hit," the searing "We Can't Make It Here Anymore," all about the hollowing-out of the American economy, the deracinated dispiritedness of a country which had come to rely on modern manufacturing but had had the props kicked out from underneath it by offshoring, and by the resulting joblessness, hopelessness, drug abuse, and reliance on the military to provide "jobs" that the private sector no longer comes up with. So a listless Middle America looks at the shuttered factories, the "For Rent" signs in the city center and at the malls as they drive to Wal-Mart to buy a shirt, "made in Singapore, because we can't make it here anymore."

The Texastentialist is a good guitar player, a good singer, and reminiscent, if I were going to compare him to anybody, to a roughneck cross between Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, but without any of Springsteen's faux-commoner shtick wrapped up in glitzy commercial packaging. Which means, of course, in this day and age, in America, that James, unlike his dad, remains obscure, even after barnstorming around the country and Europe for twenty years. Well hell, 99% of the American population has never read The Last Picture Show, either.

I was glad when the show was over. I'm a little too familiar, personally, with the themes and personalities of the white trash anthems like "Choctaw Bingo" to be entirely comfortable with them, and in general McMurtry just hits a little too close to home for any of us. This is "entertainment" of a particularly difficult kind. Life in modern America is a mess and he gets it all down. What happens, he seems to be asking, when you take away those old folkways down in Texas and elsewhere, when people would sit out on the front porch at night and watch the stars come out as entertainment; and they stop doing that because they've now got satellite TV and jobs in town at the mill or factory; and then you get rid of all the jobs, and the folkways of mutual reliance and comfort are gone, too, and the star-watching is gone in favor of the satellite for as long as you can keep it hooked up? He writes about such things in "Level-land," "Small Town" and in all his songs, really. I suppose you wind up with a country that looks like modern America, where the ethos of extreme financial and emotional independence worked well when the economy was the envy of the world. But kind of a bitch when the bottom falls out.

Trump's Hair Caught in Tuscaloosa Tornado - Film @ 11

That's the picture I actually wanted to run (as opposed to Kapiolani Medical Center to the right), with all respect and affection for my fellow Alabamians, who have been devastated by a series of massive tornadoes in regions I ordinarily thought of as being somewhat south of the usual path of twisters. Oh well, the climate, she is a-changin'. I do know that tornadoes are usually formed along the scrum line between cold fronts from the north and warm fronts from the south, which mix and create an upward spiral or turbulent convection, and so one looks for these a little farther north, say along the Red River area between Texas and Oklahoma, or farther north where Dorothy and Toto lived.

Meanwhile, the nascent presidential aspirations of The Donald have hit a major snag, or split end, since President Obama decided to release the so-called "long form" birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. What the White House released is essentially identical to the "abstract" which was already in the public domain, so one has to wonder why the conspiracy theory, The Donald's "signature issue" as Doonesbury derisively called it, was allowed to fester as long as it was. Which of course will give rise to a new round of conspiracy theorizing centered on the idea that the "long form" is a forgery or computer mock-up (I've already seen some of that stuff on the Net), and the "delay" will be used as the central "proof" of the new cover-up, and so forth, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. There's never any way out of a conspiracy maze once one is entered.

For my part, I never had any doubt that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in August, 1961. The test I used was Vincent Bugliosi's "in this world" argument from his analyses of the O.J. Simpson trial. "In this world," there is simply no way that Barack Obama was born anywhere other than Honolulu, for the simple reason that there were two contemporary newspaper accounts, from two newspapers I'm personally familiar with (the Honolulu Advertiser being the main rag in the islands, then and now) that published the fact of his birth in August, 1961. Conspiracy theorists, motivated as they really are by blind hatred and racism, have no answer to this simple fact, much as the "O.J. was framed" theorists had no answer for the mountains of blood and DNA evidence admitted at the Juice's trial. (As the joke had it, "take away all the blood and DNA evidence, and what do you really have?" Plenty, actually, such as the cuts all over O.J.'s hands and arms the morning after the murders, supposedly caused by a broken drinking glass in a Chicago hotel room. Funny, O.J. never looked clumsy.)

But the real acid test of the "in this world" argument is simply this, and it is a common sense standard not actually usable in a court room: one cannot prove a single fact, in this world, which is decisively inconsistent with Barack Obama's having been born in Honolulu. There is compelling evidence that he was, of course, such as eyewitnesses, the birth certificate, the doctor's recollections, all kinds of stuff along with the published newspaper accounts giving the home address of Obama's parents in 1961 on the Kalanianaole Highway, and with no explanation why two newspapers of record would falsify vital statistics provided by the Kapiolani Hospital 47 years before Barack Obama was elected.

I doubt, nevertheless, that the production of the "long form" certificate will have much effect on the beliefs of the Birthers. This is actually a window into the declining capacities of critical thought in the American population, and is aligned, in my analysis, with the growth in general religiosity and "enchantment," that is to say, mumbo jumbo. As with Creationism and anti-evolution "theories," the Luddites believe it is enough, to justify their own prejudices, to poke holes in science or to find areas that are not absolutely certain, in order to claim, voila!, that their own viewpoint has been vindicated or even "proved."

Epistemologically, or from the viewpoint of logical positivism, this makes no sense whatsoever. One does not "prove" anything by process of elimination unless one has already proved, positively, through evidence meeting the standards of scientific proof, that the one remaining explanation is the only one possible. And mumbo jumbo advocates, including the Birthers and Creationists (who I suspect are frequently inside a Venn Diagram with one circle), never come close to proving anything as a positive fact. Thus, their arguments run along these lines: "If evolution cannot explain absolutely everything with no questions remaining (such as explaining to our satisfaction the concept of punctuated equilibria), then God must have created the Universe and all the creatures great and small." This is a form of backing into proof and hoping no one notices the trick. For there is another possible explanation for the existence of the Universe or of modern species: we don't know the explanation.

Similarly, with the Birthers, the reluctance of Obama to release the long form was used as "proof" that he was born in Kenya (this being the only possible alternative explanation for a reluctance to release the form), when such a supposition does not meet, in any sense, the probative weight of two contemporary newspaper accounts or the records maintained in the regular course of business by Kapiolani Hospital.

I suppose the beauty of Know-Nothingism is that it frees you up to take the day off and then tune in Dancing With the Stars, with no heavy reading. God's in his Heaven, Barack's birthplace is in Kenya, and all is right with the world. One windfall from Mr. Obama's decision, however, is that it might be enough to get The Donald out of the race. His "college transcript" attack is pretty lightweight stuff next to the Birther junk, and beyond these "signature issues," The Donald is a badly-coiffed joke. When we have the regular staff in Washington, D.C. bankrupting the country for 30 years running, why do we need to bring in a serial bankrupt from New York City?

Transcript of The Donald's First Presidential Press Conference

You've probably heard about this mysterious capacity of the iPhone to track your every movement, record the data, store it and then upload it into your computer whenever you "sync up" through iTunes or whatever. Presumably then the data, reflecting the GPS coordinates of everywhere you've been, can piggy-back through file-sharing and wind up on the hard drives of millions of complete strangers who will then have, as Major Strasser said to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," a complete dossier on you. Only in this instance, you will not receive the Major's smarmy reassurance, "Don't worry, we're not going to broadcast it," because in the age of Facebook and Twitter you can guarantee the data will be everywhere faster than you can say Kim Kardashian.

Once I read about this, I stopped taking my iPhone everywhere. Who needs to pack a snitch where your cell phone should be? "Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" the iPhone says in simulated electronic speech as I head out the door. "Oh, just going to the store," I say (wink wink).

It turns out another app running in background can also record events from the future and download them onto your iPhone. Either that, or I'm making this whole thing up as a premise for a blog post. My iPhone, for example, in a very timely move given what I've been writing about lately, just provided me with the transcript of President Donald Trump's first press conference held in January, 2013, the day after his Inauguration. Here it is:

President The Donald (PTD):

Hello journalists. As the warm-up man just told you during his opening routine, I expect this to be a good show and the kickoff for a major presidency. I expect your cooperation in making this happen. Everything I've done in my life has been top-shelf and a very major, successful enterprise, and I expect this presidency to be no different. I won't tolerate mediocrity or anybody giving it less than one hundred percent. You've been warned. So let's start the questions with a major journalist, no second bananas. Where's that Gregory guy, who gets a lot of network time?

David Gregory: President Trump, and let me say how good it sounds to say that...

PTD: No brown nosing, Gregory.

Gregory: Right. How are things proceeding on your cabinet selections?

PTD: Right now we're looking at onyx for the White House kitchen, with gold door pulls...

Gregory: No, I mean State, Defense, Attorney General, like that.

PTD: Sure. Well, for one thing, you can bet that each appointment will be a major figure, someone who's absolute tops in their field. I won't tolerate someone who doesn't have what it takes to really excel. I want tens, major, major successess. I would think of it in the same way as my dating years, when the women were absolutely gorgeous, tens everyone of them, no eights or even nines, just knock-outs and major lookers. I'm looking for the same type of quality in my cabinet appointments, not so much the looks part but the major excellence part. This is going to be a major presidency and fall in line with everything I've ever done, which is top-shelf. The American people deserve no less. Who's next? Chris Matthews? Go ahead.

Matthews: Wow, I'm getting that tingle up my leg again just thinking about a celebrity of your stature actually in the Oval Office. This is huge.

PTD: Thanks, Chris. It feels good to be here, to get this show moving. I want another hit. Every show I've been involved with has hit big and this presidency will be no different. It will be a major success. My businesses are all doing fantastically, I'm really, really rich and a tremendously successful human being. I'm a major player.

Matthews: One slight criticism that I'm hearing is that some people feel you're making the office of the Presidency a little too much about you. Do you think that's fair?

PTD: I don't and I'll tell you why. During the transition period, when I unveiled my plan to redo the Capitol dome in onyx and gold, to match the Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, I heard a lot of this kind of sniping. The onyx design is part of who I am, I really like onyx and I want onyx for the American people. It isn't just about me, unless you think that only an extremely rich, very successful, top player such as myself deserves to use tremendous amounts of onyx in designing buildings and not the American people. And that's not who I am, and those aren't my values.

Thank you very much. I've got to break now. I've got some very major meetings with some top individuals about some huge matters. Keep up the good work and I'll convene another meeting soon to go over some other stuff I want you to be working on.

(End of transcript.)

If it quacks like a Duck, it's The Donald

As a man who strives to believe in the essential goodness of people, I take it as an article of faith that President Obama's decision to disturb the slumber of his Attorney General, Eric Place Holder, and to pursue those "speculators" who are driving our gasoline prices to the moon, is completely unrelated to The Donald's movement of this issue to a position front and center in his presidential non-campaign. Meaning, Mr. Obama has been very concerned about this problem all along but he just didn't want to say anything that would upset our burnoosed friends any more than he absolutely had to.

You know. It's the way the O-Man rolls. But gasoline prices really are a problem, not like they're a problem in Europe, of course, but a problem for a grotesquely spoiled populace such as ours which demands its inalienable right to occupy vehicles at the rate of one person per unit and to define a "High Occupancy Vehicle" as one in which there is one person more in the car than the minimum number physically necessary to drive the damn thing. Thus enters The Donald, the magnificently-tonsured almost-candidate who is aching to declare but can't quite yet (not till May 22, when the last episode of "Celebrity Apprentice" airs), because a candidate cannot have his own hit show because of the "equal time" laws that are never enforced.

But he's going to declare, you know that, and the delicacy of his equivocation is not only The Donald's natural probity at work, but a chance to pump the show for a month while people wait, breathlessly, for Duck Man to make if official. I can barely wait myself, because frankly I just can't blog anymore about the Fed-hallucinated economy. Like boring, man. But a magnificent blowhard like The Donald actually running for office - I think we need this. A lot of other people do too - among Republicans, for example, The Donald has higher name recognition (bigger Buzz Quotient) than Romney, Huckabee and Palin -- combined. You read that right. The Donald clocks in at 39%, while the other three losers add up to 19%.

The man with the High-Tensile Hair-do is on a roll. His campaign strategy is borrowed directly from Germany, 1933. America is teetering on the brink of mediocrity, we're getting pushed around by the Saudis and the Chinese. The Chinese, in particular, manipulate their currency, defy all intellectual property laws, cheat like hell on everything. A country groveling in the dirt loves to hear this kind of stuff -- it's not our fault, dammit! Our jobs were "stolen" (by American companies relocating to Asia, but don't get picky - we're trying to make a point here). The Donald is going to slap a 25% tariff on Chinese imports until they allow their currency to appreciate in line with reality (we reserve the right, however, to keep debasing ours through profligate money printing).

So, no blaming the Jews this time around, which was a dumb call by the Nazis anyway. (The German Jews were leaders of German society in medicine, physics, the arts, the professions. Hitler lost before he got started by kicking the props out from underneath his own society.) No, this time around we've got billions of enemies. No more bowing to them when they come to town, no more deference, no more making nice. And think about it - with his penchant for boorish, self-indulgent, grandiose behavior, who can possibly be better at abrasiveness than The Donald? He's more likely to head slap King Abdullah than to bow and kiss his ring.

I think Barack is beginning to hear footsteps at this point, and thus the rude call to Holder in the middle of the afternoon when Eric normally likes to knock off early and catch a nap before tuning in the NBA playoffs in the evening. We'd better start doing something that looks like protecting ordinary Americans, because this wild-haired maniac is catching the Big Mo'! And he'll say anything! And he can finance his own campaign! He doesn't even have to cut backroom deals with Goldman Sachs and medical insurance companies in order to finance himself. This guy's going to play in Peoria! It's a nightmare. I Hope we can come up with some Change in our approach!

Like I say, The Donald introduces the element of fun so sorely missing in our national political scene. Mark your calendar. May 22: The Day of the Duck.

Why is the punditocracy dissing The Donald?

I just don't get it. Donald Trump (hereinafter "The Donald") uses his constitutional right to express an interest in becoming President of the United States, and after a brief flurry of excitement from the media, the commentariat appears to have settled on the position that his candidacy is a joke, not to be taken seriously, that he is, in some sense, an usurper who has no right to such pretensions.

This is one of the things wrong with American politics, in my opinion. The Donald is entitled to his aspirations. I thought it was a joke when George W. Bush ran for President, a travesty when he was actually elected (okay, appointed, after coming close in the popular vote), and two shams of a mockery of a travesty (for fans of "Bananas" - in joke) in the way he governed. We've also had Ronald Reagan as President, a mediocre actor faking his way through the office, George Murphy as a senator, Arnold Schwarzenegger as a governor, Jesse Ventura as a governor, et al. The point being that in the age of pervasive, saturating electronic media as a substitute for Reality, the populace cannot distinguish anymore why "famosity" is not transferable between any two roles requiring high visibility. Once you're famous, you're famous across the board, and the public ceases with any distinction between your public image, carefully crafted by media consultants and PR firms, and your underlying reality, if any. For these reasons, Richard Nixon seriously considered Vince Lombardi as a running mate in 1968 (Vince would have been more satisfactory, come to think of it, than Tricky Dick himself, and certainly a better choice than Spiro Agnew.)

The Donald has taken some heat for seizing the Birther issue and running with it. Exploiting Barack Obama's failure to produce his original birth certificate is mainstream Republican politics. It's a stupid issue leading nowhere, but the same can be said for nearly everything in American politics, including the wars in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, the abortion "issue," gay marriage, gays in the military, and the entire "social issues" agenda. The wars should go away, the "social issues" agenda should disappear entirely from the political scene in favor of simply letting everyone do whatever the hell they want in their private lives, so long as it's not in the street where it might frighten horses or large dogs.

Of course, this would remove about 80-90% of the heat and noise from the political scene, and would leave the Klowns exposed to the awful truth, which is that they have run the country into the ground economically. This is where The Donald "brings" something to the political process. As a serial bankrupt, The Donald knows a little about what it's like to go belly up, as the U.S. of A. has done, and knows how to engineer a comeback. The same cannot be said, for example, of Barack Obama. His life story has been a steady, uninterrupted climb from obscurity to the pinnacle of power. Kind of boring in its American predictability, in fact. Whereas The Donald, as the scion of a real estate magnate who took Dad's empire and first trashed it, then restored it, then branched out into the total cheesiness of Atlantic City gambling and Reality TV nonsense, is far more representative of the historical arc of recent America. With his gravity-defying, marvel-of-engineering hairdo, and his ceaseless bragging and grandiosity, his ill-used, solecism-filled grandiloquence, The Donald is a Man of Our Time. A boor, a braggart, a parvenu, a cheater, a liar, a thoroughly frivolous human being of, by and only about himself.

In short, he's perfect. How can all these political operatives take a cornpone Neanderthal like Mike Huckabee seriously as a candidate and dismiss the candidacy of The Donald? I don't get it. I think it's because the little nerds in politics, and their journalistic acolytes, just don't like the idea that a boast-filled Big Shot like The Donald can simply buy and bully his way onto the national stage without going through them. Yet The Donald did not have to navigate through such vermin in order to establish "The Apprentice" on TV, or memorialize for the ages the phrase, "You're Fired!" He did that on his own, or at least his writers did, leveraging his fame for being famous.

I doubt seriously that The Donald has any particularly strong views on abortion (perhaps this Constitutional right has even come in handy at some point in his checkered love life), gays (he lives in New York, for cryin' out loud), evolution (he's probably for evolution, since he's an infrequent church-goer) or much of anything else, other than his own self-aggrandizement.

I say give The Donald a freaking chance, and don't allow these self-appointed gate keepers to decide the issue before this magnificently-coiffed candidate even has a chance to develop a little Mo'. The punditocracy is scared right now because he's actually leading the pack, not altogether surprising when his competition is clothing store mannequins like Mitt Romney. Maybe he'll win, or buy, the GOP nomination. What fun those debates would be with Barack! Can't you hear it now? At the end of every campaign speech, there's The Donald: "And I have a message for you, Mr. President, from the American people: You're Fired!"

I've got a hundred more like that, Mr. Trump. You know where to find me.

Herzog the Blogger

One of my favorite books from high school years, and my favorite among all of Saul Bellow's novels, was Herzog, about a stressed-out, middle-aged, cuckolded academic who undergoes a nervous breakdown and begins compulsive letter writing. He writes to everyone he knows, then to politicians, then finally to the famous dead, in long, complicated, highly literate language, complaining about the state of the world and his place in it. It is an intellectual tour-de-force.

Gee, wonder why I liked that novel. It's pretty obvious Herzog was a proto-Blogger. I don't know if one of the ten million blogs out there is called "Herzog," but one ought to be (along with "Impotent Information Overload"). With their limited readership, at least half the point of an amateur blog is self-therapeutic, although things didn't work out that well for Herzog himself.

You can now post comments to columns and blogs, of course, so if in the course of gassing on in your own blog you don't quite pontificate enough, you can do that too. I did, today, on Paul Krugman's blog, which he calls "Conscience of a Liberal" (just the slightest touch sententious, do you think?). Prof. Krugman was writing recently about the august, esteemed title he has in German society because of his degrees and standing, to the effect that he is Herr Doktor Doktor Krugman (he's not actually, because he doesn't understand how those German honorifics work for foreigners). That's where "Dokrugman" comes from.

What's distressing to me, Dokrugman (portmanteau of Herr Doktor Doktor & Krugman) is that (a) you're over-using this "serious" trope (which I think, along with Very Serious Person or VSP, might be an unattributed borrow from Glenn Greenwald; is that possible?) and (b) you're getting involved in "budget-cutting" discussions at all. I don't read "The Conscience of a Liberal" to be reminded of the grim reality that the United States faces in its budget difficulties. I read this blog for its Keynesian hopefulness, where $150 billion in income against $330 billion in expenses (as in March's Treasury Statement) is okay and nothing much to worry about. Maybe the deficit will go to $2 trillion this year (or roughly total income), but it doesn't matter because, as you say, the Treasury is hardly "cash strapped." It can easily borrow as much money as it needs at rock bottom rates. For some strange reason. And only conspiracy theorists think that Treasury auctions are simply a rigged market, and if the PBOC calls the whole thing a "Ponzi scheme" (as they did recently), it only proves that they are not VSPs. Or proves that they are, I'm not sure which way the snark cuts.

So please, do not get bogged down in ways to "cut the deficit." That's for the others. You should be urging the government to spend more, to increase the deficit to $4 trillion per year, to $20 trillion. Whatever we need. Because the Treasury can simply borrow $20 trillion at 1% in perpetuity, with no problems once the Fed adds the bills and bonds to its mounting stash. And the 1% the Fed earns on its $20 trillion per year ($200 billion) can be remitted to the Treasury as income, reducing the deficit, thus...

What was the PBOC saying again? Anyway, please: no more belt tightening. Leave that to the uninformed.

Dokrugman does believe we'll be okay and that we should not be worried about cutting "now now now" (as he says over over over), but should keep spending and stimulating until the economy recovers to its mid-Bubble heights. Of course, I've never understood what economy we are aspiring to return to. The reason we went to Bubblenomics was because (a) Wall Street needed a cash cow, and housing was The Last Frontier, and (b) our so-called "Real Economy" is gone, shipped overseas along with all the middle class jobs it used to provide. So Americans can go "back to work," but it's all crap jobs and completely inadequate to provide a real tax base.

How do such obvious things remain hidden from view when they're lying in plain sight? If housing prices are once again correlated to income, and incomes are stagnant or even losing ground, how can housing prices do anything other than continue to go down? And if housing prices continue to go down (which they are, which they will, with 13 million houses empty in the U.S., with 20% of all real estate in Florida vacant), what is the economic driver of consumer spending, and thus jobs, and thus recovery, and thus federal fiscal solvency? Huh?

My inability to answer such questions explains why I do not have a Nobel Prize in Economics, I suppose. I'm just a lonely Herzog, crying in the wilderness.

Apocalypse fatigue

I have to admit that it was more fun to write this blog (which I've been doing, off & on, since 2006) when the idea of American decadence, of an actual fiscal or resource-based collapse, was more the stuff of dystopian fantasy than present-day reality.

I just looked at the latest Monthly Statement from the Treasury and it's a true horror show. About $150 billion in revenue against $330 billion in expenses. The figures are so far out of whack that they would make more sense if one of them, say revenue, was from Angola or Belize or somewhere, and the second was from the combined budgets of the entire European Union. They just don't belong on the same balance sheet. It raises a serious question: who are we trying to fool with this nonsense? A $180 billion deficit in one month.

I do not consider myself a deficit hawk or a deficit dove or a deficit anything in particular. I think I can understand, in broad outline, how this absurd situation came about. I have watched it happen over my lifetime. The largest whole number divisor of my age, other than the age itself, is 21. To give a further clue, I am not 21, 42 or 84. If my life is divided in thirds, then the first segment belongs in the period of American Triumphalism, 1948 to 1969. The second occurred during the beginning of the Descent Phase, 1969 to 1990. And the third happened during the period of American Decadence, 1990 to 2011.

It is fashionable now to engage in Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative analyses and to begin American history in 2007 or slightly later, at the Fall of the House of Lehman. This is convenient for political polemics because it enables both groups to analyze America's current predicament from the viewpoint of innocent victims. The Commoners are the victims of a sell-out political system and Big Business. The fat cats themselves are the victims of Socialism and excessive government regulation.

Having observed this slow-motion train wreck, however, I am more inclined to see American decadence as a broad-based social enterprise. America was once very rich and worked very hard. After we stopped working hard, or shipped all of the jobs where hard work was productive, to nations where slave labor is allowed, we lost our competitiveness and assigned all of the benefits of Globalization to an elite managerial class which could leverage foreign low wages to domestic profitability. This process was enabled by the federal government through tax laws and free trade agreements. It never made any sense that it could redound to the benefit of the American commoner, but it was sold to the American public as if it could by its many champions, including stalwart "Liberals" such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. The Conservatives never bothered with the populist cover story; they were just in it for the money.

The Commoner was not left totally out of the picture. The flow of the world's reserve currency, the dollar, between the United States and mostly Asian producers (of consumer goods and oil), allowed America to keep interest rates low and to produce serial bubbles in, first, the dot.com field and then in housing. This produced a "wealth effect" despite wages which stagnated and which by themselves were incapable of supporting the actual standard of living which the country pretended to. This "system" of recycled dollars worked until the actual wage structure of the American middle class was inadequate to the demands of the debt service assumed in order to keep the consumer society functioning.

The whole thing, at long last, finally crashed. The political class, such as the feckless President Obama, are left with a smoldering pile of debris where a Borrower's Shangri-la used to be. Since the political class cannot explain to the American people how this came to be without admitting their complicity in the ruination of America, this End Stage must be treated as a temporary blip, a "Recession," which will be cleared up with adequate money-printing, fiscal stimuli or some other gimmick.

As I say, however, an uninformed American electorate permitted all of this by continuously electing politicians who allowed it to happen, or even encouraged it to happen. Freed from hard work and encouraged in the belief that prosperity consisted in the accumulation of gaudy toys and distractions, Americans began to believe that their privileged lifestyle was a matter of "Exceptionalism" separated from the Laws of Thermodynamics or even common sense, and that we would continue to prosper in the Information Economy or some other arrant foolhardiness.

It's not going to happen that way. What happens when such thinking continues too long is that a country pretends that it has a $330 billion lifestyle based on $150 billion worth of income, and fights tooth and nail over cutting so much as a dime from the sum of expenditures (the vaunted $38 billion in "cuts" represents in point of fact a reduction in planned increases in the budget).

Under such circumstances, I think it is ludicrous to discuss seriously Paul Ryan's idea to balance the budget in 2040 or President Obama's plans to cut expenses long after he's already left office. It's not going to happen like that. This is not a country that is going to engage in an orderly process of sorting things out. It will lurch and careen from side to side with both sides continuing to blame the other for what was, at base, a failure of the democratic process. Where it ends up will be based on the dictates of Reality, which has a well known Realistic Bias.