I gave up Hope long before it was fashionable to give up Hope

I don't mean to pull rank or anything, but these Cassandras-come-lately such as Drew Westen in the Sunday New York Times need to respect their elders in the disillusionment game. Westen wrote a long jeremiad about the strange inability of Barack Obama to fight for anything - well, at all, but in particular for any of the progressive values which an enraptured nation thought they might have a shot at only three years ago.

I don't like it but I guess things happen that way.

I became alarmed way back in 2009 when it became apparent that Barack Obama had no respect whatsoever for the Bill of Rights. What this now "controversial" charter was all about, what engendered its inclusion with the Constitution way back in the late 18th century, was the concern of these recently liberated colonial subjects that tyrannical powers must be held in check, and the best way (the only way, as John Stuart Mill made clear in On Liberty) was a system which guaranteed the rights of the individual against the majority, and which did not permit rule by mob in matters of justice and civil liberties. When Barack Obama came out squarely against the use of military tribunals for civilian trials when he was a candidate, I thought he endorsed this principle. And then, as in so many subsequent reversals on absolutely fundamental issues of fairness, transparency, and due process, Obama just blew the whole thing off. Guantanamo is still open for business, all important criminal trials against anyone vaguely associated with "terrorism" will be conducted by military kangaroo courts where tainted evidence and torture-induced hearsay are freely admissible, and the trial itself is probably pointless because a defendant can be held forever whether he can be convicted or not.

We comfort ourselves with the reassurance that these outrages are only directed against Muslims; if you're not a Muslim, where's the problem? We often forget that our own guarantee of due process, at having a chance at fairness if a bad turn in life should suddenly propel you into the gulag of the criminal justice system, depends, first and foremost, on a mind set which honors such fairness. Once a nation allows exceptions for "special circumstances," because of a felt need for enhanced security, when it just seems too dangerous to play fair, then that country is well on the way toward tyranny. I hear arguments for such "exceptions" all the time from Republican legislators in Congress -- it's just too dangerous to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, where his crime was allegedly committed, although other Muslim terrorists have been tried in Manhattan in regular civilian (Article III) courts without incident and without endangering security. New York's Republican Congressman Peter King is especially awful at this kind of demagoguery, this fear-mongering, but he is joined in his play to the cheap seats by the likes of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The great shame is that Obama, and Eric Holder (apparently the Attorney General, based on rumors and occasional public sightings), have played along with this profoundly unconstitutional approach. It has always seemed to me that it's possible to disagree on the substance of a subject such as terrorism, for example (how big a problem it is, whether "blowback" is responsible for the threats that exist), while still agreeing on the procedure for determining guilt or innocence for those who get caught up in our system of justice. That is our great legacy from the Enlightenment thinkers who founded our nation. It is always the most stirring theme in any movie or book featuring the legal system, when you think about it, from "To Kill a Mockingbird" to "Inherit the Wind." We were ashamed when an African-American could not get a fair shake in "To Kill a Mockingbird," despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Finch, precisely because it offended our sense of justice. It should not matter whether a person is a pariah in a given social context, that is what Atticus Finch tried to tell the jury. It remains the bedrock of due process.

I saw early on that the concepts of due process and fair play were easy for Barack Obama to sacrifice, if it meant he could pander to those same regressive, unenlightened Americans that Peter King likes to impress. If Obama could give up on something like that, he could give up on anything, and he has not disappointed.

Well, I note with satisfaction that a new CNN poll concludes that a majority of both Democratic and Republican voters, at levels around 57-58%, have expressed the opinion that their own Congressional Representative should not be reelected. Disenchantment with both political parties has reached epidemic levels, in fact, since approval of Congress does not reach even 20%. That's remarkable, as if the general electorate has awakened to the startling realization that the freeloaders under the Capitol dome don't represent them and never did. Upon such a realization stands the basis for genuine third (and fourth through nth) party viability. And if the duopolistic strangle-hold of the two big parties could be broken, why, who knows? Maybe even campaign finance reform could follow and the ownership of Congress by the military-industrial-media complex might come crashing down.

There I go, hoping again.

What if they held an election and nobody came?

I haven't been able to bring myself to the effort necessary to understand the "debt ceiling deal." Some of it sounds, as usual, unconstitutional, since our scofflaw government rarely pays any attention anymore to the actual rules of our charter document. Something in there about a "Super Congress" which will fast-track budget cuts, without the opportunity for normal amendments, if the two Constitutional bodies (the House & Senate) don't get with it and impose enough austerity on the American people. The Super Congress will be composed of gangs from the two houses - this gang problem is getting serious in Washington. Every time you turn around, there's a new Gang of Six taking control of the street and telling the rest of them in the Capitol 'hood what to do. The Super Congress will apparently be a Gang of Twelve, indicating an escalation in turf warfare. Maybe Obama should appoint a Gang Task Force to try to get this crisis under control.

Meanwhile, despite the best efforts (ha ha) of Congress and its various Gangs, the United States has had its FICO score lowered by the rating agency S&P, which was one of the main rating agencies most guilty of malfeasance during the mortgage-backed securities fiasco, which (briefly) brought Wall Street to its knees, until it was rescued by the Gangs of Washington. Thus leaving only the American people in general on their knees, the other 90% or so who are not actually represented in the District of Columbia.

I was gratified to see on Lawrence O'Donnell's show the other night that at least one national poll indicated that the general approval rating for Congress now stands at 14%. In some ways this is remarkable, given that it was only last year that there was a wholesale turnover in the composition of Congress. It would appear that this convulsive, spasmodic thrashing around by the electorate is not making any big difference in how the American commoners view Congress. As if an awful truth is beginning to dawn on The People: it doesn't make any difference what the exact composition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress is: we still cannot abide them. They are a pestilence, a waking nightmare from which we can't escape. They are forever there, these same Zombie-Solons, Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, betraying us, selling us out at every turn, standing in front of a "bouquet" of microphones, intoning the same nonsense, the same stock, utterly fraudulent phrases, invulnerable even to Woody Harrelson swinging a baseball bat to their oozing heads - they just keep coming!

Aiieeeeeee!! (In the old comic books, that was supposed to be a scream.) In the space of a couple of weeks or so, I have now read the same blog post by two different writers. The first, which I take to be the original, was by Guy Saperstein, an East Bay civil rights lawyer working in Berkeley for whom I have high respect. He argued, rather persuasively, that the main problem with the Obama presidency is that it has utterly de-fanged and neutered any progressive or civil liberties movement in the U.S. His logic proceeds from the simple binary truth about our politics: if a Democratic President does all of the same awful things as a Republican (which Obama does), such as starting unconstitutional wars, over-using secrecy, denying due process, using "military tribunals" indiscriminately (and contrary to the 5th & 14th Amendments), reauthorizing the Patriot Act without even bothering to see how it's working, jacking up the Afghanistan War in ways not even Bush would have countenanced, refusing to close Guantanamo, buying into Republican ideas of dismantling the social safety net, passing an insurer gift bag of a health bill, etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam, there is no effective opposition because the Democrats in Congress must support their party leader. Whereas if John McCain had done all of these things (plus had acted out his essentially insane ideas on other other subjects), there would have been at least the semblance of resistance.

Then on "Counterpunch" yesterday, I read Alexander Coburn's piece saying the same thing, without so much as a h/t to Guy (Hey Alex! didn't realize us detail geeks read around so much, huh?) Coburn suggested that electing Romney would be a good idea for these reasons; Saperstein simply thought that any Republican in 2012 would be superior.

I take these two columns, thoughtful as they are, for the acts of sheer desperation which they represent. That's how nuts things are now - liberals are arguing for the advantages of electing John MCain and Mitt Romney. As they say in the rehab game, we've hit bottom.

Here's another idea: with only 14% of the electorate to go, how about a complete boycott of the electoral process in 2012? Instead of shuffling the Dems and Pubs, let's do away with them altogether. This surely would appeal to Americans' sense of disenfranchisement, apathy and dillusionment, don't you think? And what is easier than doing nothing? We don't have to vote - who is it, after all, who is constantly urging you to "exercise your franchise," to "do your civic duty" by voting? Democrats and Republicans. Know why? Because they want the power and the money.

Unlike my "535 Plan," whereby we simply replace everyone in Congress with someone new, preferably from a "third" party, this one would entail the honor system. Everyone must refrain from voting. Of course, even members of Congress can vote, so we might wind up with the same 535, each receiving precisely one vote. Yet that would certainly convey a message, would it not? What kind of authority and authenticity would a Congress person command through receiving a plurality of one? The important thing is, like the riddle "what do you call 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the sea?" - it's a good start.

Imagine there's no country

(Just a note: it occurs to me that John Lennon and George Gershwin, who both died too young, at about the same age though in different ways, were the two incandescent musical geniuses of their respective generations. John Lennon, who could not be imitated, fused rock music with the lyrical sensibility of poetry and the art song; and Gershwin, similarly inimitable, took the American standard to an entirely different level with the influence of jazz, Yiddish folk themes and classical music.)

As I tool around the fair environs of this pretty nice county where I live, sometimes on foot, or in a car, or even on a bike, I sometimes think to myself: my actual interface with government, the parts I really rely on, are very local. For example, we have a very good fire department here, because the conditions demand it. Lots of trees, lots of dried-out tinder every fall (we're entering fire season now and the signs are everywhere - "Get Ready! - meaning, prune back the overgrowth from around the house, etc.). I live in an unincorporated area so there's no city council and no municipal police, but we're covered by the Sheriff's Department. The nearest emergency room is within two miles from where I sit. The only federal facility I can think of, that I interact with regularly, is the U.S. Post Office. I practice law at the state court level, organized by county. These are the government features that seem to matter most to my individual well-being.

Which is to say, all this crap that goes on in Washington, that I write about, talk about, blog about, actually has very little to do with my everyday life. More than anything, it's a huge, complicated, irritating annoyance. It's such a mess that it's virtually incomprehensible. The semi-competent grifters in Washington, D.C., who went there out of ambition or because they could never find work in the private sector that paid nearly as much, have run the country's finances into the ground so that we're now a zombie country, more than just technically bankrupt - we're the real thing. When the tax revenue pays for slightly more than half the "services" you're trying to provide, you're bust-o - you just haven't admitted it yet.

All of these matters are intellectually diverting, of course, something to talk about, argue about. In a mostly pointless way. Americans have to "interface" with the federal government mainly when they fill out a 1040, and make their contribution to the "insurance company with an army" that is the United States of America. Although the federal government actually seems to have very little to do with one's day-to-day life, they're the big tax hogs. They want most of the money, even if to a large extent we have overlapping and duplicative levels of government - local, county, state, layered beneath the federal behemoth, all of which have to be paid for.

The sheer size of the United States produces a feeling of alienation and powerlessness in the individual taxpayer and citizen. Maybe we hang in there because we want, at the end of all of it, those goodies we've been paying for all those years - the "Entitlements." Social Security and Medicare.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the U.S. population in the year Social Security was enacted, 1935. It was 127 million people. The official census says we now have 307 million, so FDR introduced a program, when unemployment was at 20%, in the very depths of the Depression, to a population that was about 41% of its current size. In other words, the entire population of the United States was about three times larger than California's current population.(Detroit beat the Cubs in the World Series that year, 4-2, and Fred Perry won at Wimbledon. Minnesota was the NCAA champ in football.) The total federal budget was $6.4 billion. Life expectancy (from birth) was 61.7 for both sexes combined. A male reaching the age of 60 could expect to live another 14 years.

In 1965, when the Great Society brought us Medicare, the U.S. had a population of 194 million (the Dodgers took the Twins in the Series, 4-3, and UCLA beat Michigan, 91-80, for the NCAA b-ball championship. Roy Emerson won at Wimbledon.) Federal spending was $118 billion and the national debt was $322 billion (and was about to get much worse because of the Vietnam War). Life expectancy was 70 years; a male achieving the age of 60 could expect to live another 16 years (it's about 20 years today).

If James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, Guy McPherson (that's his website over to the right, "Nature Bats Last") and others are correct, that imminent energy shortages are going to force a "re-localization" of commerce and life in general, it's probably good to keep such basic statistics in mind. The local government entities that we rely upon stand a much better chance of weathering the storms of energy constraints, and of national insolvency, than the huge, bloated, militarized, globalist federal government, for which size, distance and "reach" (the ability to "project power") are everything, its life blood, perhaps the only justification for its existence (if that's a justification). The feds dangle those pretty baubles of the "entitlements" in front of a dazed and confused populace in order to keep them in the game, along with the paternal protection of the huge military establishment keeping us safe from all those terrible al-Qaeda monsters who are out there somewhere, "plotting" even as we sit here nervously wondering why they've waited a decade to hit us again. (We're spending trillions to protect ourselves here! For God's sake, give us something to work with!)

At the Souk in Old Baghdad

(Click on the image to see full picture of satisfied customers.)I dimly recall that the chief rationale for invading Iraq in 2003 was to rid that nation of its suspected stores of weapons of mass destruction. Now that we've pacified that country (only 15 Americans killed in June, for example), it's time to do some business:

"Iraq's prime minister said Saturday he was reviving a stalled deal to buy multi-million-dollar fighter jets from the United States and affirmed the need for American trainers to help Iraqi forces operate and maintain the 36 F-16s.

"However, Nouri al-Maliki avoided saying whether the trainers would be active-duty troops or private contractors - sidestepping the key question of whether American military personnel will be asked to remain past an end-of-year deadline for withdrawing. That question is Iraq's top political issue and is being hotly debated among the country's leaders." Bradenton.com.

Look, Lockheed Martin needs to move some merchandise, and food and war are two of our best product lines. The F-16, sort of the Chevrolet of Lockheed's fighter-bomber fleet, no longer interests the U.S. Air Force, we know how to make these things, so why not work a sale with the government we put in power in Iraq? The cover story we're using is that Iraq may need these 36 F-16s "to protect its sovereignty." (From whom? From us?)

Whatever. I looked up the specs on the F-16 to get an idea just why the Iraqis would be interested in these somewhat obsolete warplanes. Turns out they're surprisingly cool, still. At top speed, they'll make Mach 2, 1,500 miles per hour. If you're wondering (as the thought immediately occurred to me) how long it would take an F-16 to fly from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, the answer is about 20 minutes, since Tel Aviv is 565 miles away (as the F-16 flies). Of course, we've also sold plenty of F-16s to the Israelis, and the F-16, as well as being an effective bomber, is also highly maneuverable and a good dogfighter, so the Israelis will probably put in a purchase order for more F-16s to deal with the F-16s we're about to sell to Iraq.

Actually, we've sold F-16s to just about everybody. And no wonder:

"The F-16 soars above all others as the world’s standard. Nations around the world have evaluated the variety of choices available and consistently selected the F-16, the world’s most capable multirole fighter. More than 4,400 F-16s have been produced for 25 countries with 53 follow-on buys by 14 customers – a key indicator of customer satisfaction. These customers have experienced the performance and reliability of the F-16 firsthand and reaffirm the high quality of the aircraft."

Okay, that's Lockheed tooting its own horn a little. "Customer satisfaction:" you have to kind of like that. We're not really instigating war by governments when we sell these warplanes. We're servicing our customers. Could Milo Minderbinder have said it better? I wonder if you can get a luxury-pak upgrade with seats made of fine Coreenthian leather? It's surprisingly difficult to get a clear read on what the F-16 costs. For one thing, you can't just get an out-the-door price. It's not like Best Buy where you have a choice on the extended warranty and the Geek Squad. If you buy an F-16, you're going to need all the spare parts and the Geek Squad, most likely private contractors from the U.S. who know how to maintain these complicated contraptions. The basic price seems to be about $25 million, but $40 million, counting all the support you need, is more likely. Thus, by creating a new customer in Iraq, the U.S. government has handed Lockheed Martin and subsidiary companies a cool sale of about $1.44 billion. You don't think Lockheed Martin appreciates that? Just ask Senator Daniel ("Mr. Earmark") Inouye, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, whether they do, next time a senatorial election is held in Hawaii.

Lockheed Martin lobbies like hell, in fact, which, along with their satisfied customer base, is one of the reasons it's such a huge government contractor, where it derives about 86% of its business. In our civics class fantasies, we don't always think about these things as much as we should. John Tirman wrote about the influence of the arms trade in his landmark Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade, quite some time ago. Since reading it, I've acquired a different way of looking at Congressional voting patterns. Why is Sen. Joe Lieberman such a hawk? Well, what companies are headquartered in Connecticut? What about Dianne Feinstein of California? California has a very large aerospace business, including Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, California. Hell, even Barbara Boxer voted for the continuation of the F-22 fighter-bomber, even though the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, thought we didn't need it. We don't need it for war, maybe, but members of Congress need Lockheed's money, so let's build the damn thing.

Sometimes, when you add it all up, you have to be a little...pessimistic about America's overall influence on the well being of the world. Uncooperative (and ignorant) about climate change; flooding the world with genetically modified, patented, unreproducible crops; endlessly warmongering to protect our oil interests so we can maintain our car-based transportation system, and selling other countries the means to wage war and subjugate their populations with our high-tech gimmickry.

I guess all these things are offset by our intentions, however, which are always good. If we make a little money at it, it's only our just reward.

Going all to pieces

John M., whose comments I always value, recently asked me if I had lost my marbles completely. (He added the honorific "sir," so I know it was all in good fun.) In point of fact, yes. At one time I had them all in a kind of rawhide bag - the steelies, the purees (some made of real amber - what opulent times, the 1950's!), the boulders, the cat eyes, and of course the small, generic "marbles," which looked like they were made of, well, marble, because they were. We played two kinds of game. One was played in the gutter where we shot the marbles along the street, using the up slope of the gutter to allow a kind of parabolic trajectory to get at marbles beyond those in our way. And the other the usual circle game, maybe marked out by string, where the object was to use one marble (maybe a fierce ball bearing) to knock an opponent's marble out of the circle. Maybe winning it (temporarily), if we were playing for keeps. But I didn't lose my marbles playing for keeps, because I was actually pretty good at the games. I just lost them, the way you lose most of your toys. One day you move on to something else and forget all about them.

John's question had to do with some comments I was making about the possible breakup of the United States into its constituent parts. Now, I have no idea whether such a thing is really likely to come to pass. The main things favoring the integrity of the USA are, at this point, (a) inertia, and (b) the dependence of the Red States, particularly in the Deep South, on central government largess, since they are the net beneficiaries of all that money flowing into Washington, 40% of which comes from five large, populous, mostly Blue states, California, New York and Illinois prominent among them. The Red States, of course, are the bastions of the anti-government Tea Party, and I would imagine that if 22% of all "income" these days is the result of federal "transfer payments" (Social Security, food stamps, unemployment), which it is, that the percentage is even higher in the states complaining the most about "big government."

But who ever said that American citizens weren't stupid? Wasn't me. Anyway, in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle, a lead article lamented the reduction of California's federal funding. With the budget problems in Washington and all this belt tightening, the Golden State might lose about 10% of its fed money, and the feds send California bout 1/3rd of California's total annual funding. So that's about 3.3% of the total budget, on top of the other problems we're having out here. It should be remarked that about 1/10th of everyone in the United States lives in California. California's return on taxes paid equals about 87 cents on the dollar, a bad ratio, though not as bad as states such as New Jersey and Connecticut. New Mexico, on the other hand, receives about two bucks for every dollar it sends in, Mississippi a buck eighty, Alabama a buck and a half, Kentucky (Mitch McConnell's home!) a buck forty-eight, Oklahoma (power base for James "Global Warming is a Hoax" Inhofe), about the same as Kentucky.

Incomes tend to be higher in the Blue States, where many of the citizens have read science books which look favorably on Darwin's Origin of Species, first published in 1859, and since these states also tend to be more populous and urban, and the federal income tax is progressive, it is perhaps natural that Big Blue States would send a lot of tax money to D.C. In exchange for this tribute, the Big Blue States are held hostage to the obscurantism and pure ignorance of the Bible Belt. If 53% of the entire American populace believe in literal Creationism (which they do), then one can surmise that in the humid precincts where the mega-churches provide most of the instruction on cosmology and the ascent of Man (as in plop! - he was just there!), this would be a very conservative number.

Well, Barack Obama never believed in this "Blue State, Red State" stuff. Remember that thrilling passage in one of his stump speeches on the campaign trail? "There's no Blue America or Red America," he intoned, "there's just the United States of America." To which I would ask the O Man in all candor these days: How's that workin' out for ya?

Oh, the divide is there all right. Now, there are advantages to a united nationality. Freedom to cross borders, for one thing, with only completely unmanned vegetation check points on the California line to force your speed down from about 80 miles per hour to 60 as you shoot the booths. Okay, that's the only advantage I can think of right now, but that's not negligible. I'm up in the air about the federal government's program of killing Muslims more or less at random in countries halfway around the world. Does that make me safer? I tend to doubt it, actually. I note ruefully that the same edition of the Chronicle reports that Iraq is descending into complete chaos again, with the violence approaching levels last seen in 2007. Were you aware that 15 American soldiers were killed in Iraq in June, in other words, last month? Of course you weren't. Why would anyone talk about that? Shiite insurgents are upping their activity in order to "force the United States to withdraw" according to the Status of Forces timeline, at the end of this year, but the Ungrateful Nouri, a Shiite, is not certain that's advisable. Al-Maliki thinks that it may be necessary to maintain a larger U.S. presence to quell the Shiite violence that is apparently the result of having a large U.S. presence in Iraq.

It's good to know that things in Iraq make as much sense as ever. It would certainly be difficult, if the dissolution of the U.S.A. should ever happen, to leave all that behind. Although I must say again: one can't predict what will happen over the next decade or so. I suppose if I were trying to sound intellectual about it, I would say that future developments belong to the realm of chaos theory. Who's to say how all the various competing forces of unity vs. dissolution will play out against each other, how desperate financial matters might become, how fractious the national discourse might get. We do have our own version of James Buchanan as President right now. What we don't have, anywhere on the horizon, is our own Abraham Lincoln.

Thinking Outside the American Box

I think there are two basic reasons that the United States has budgetary problems: (1) The USA spends way too much on defense; and (2) It doesn't collect enough in income taxes. One would never guess that these are the actual problems based on Congressional and Presidential soundbites in the general vicinity of the issue.

I spent an unedifying hour this evening watching the House debate on the so-called Boehner plan. I'm not sure why they're having this debate; the whole thing was an ill-tempered exercise in bad faith and posturing. If it passes in the House, the Senate will vote it down. Then what? No matter. What is striking is that the political process in Washington, D.C. is now so completely dysfunctional that the obvious solutions cannot even be mentioned.

The simple charts up above are a graphic depiction of where America's income taxes come from, who pays them and how much. The top chart is from 2007, the bottom the most recent tax year. They afford a picture of the radical skewing of wealth in the United States. Essentially, the bottom 50% of earners in the USA contribute virtually nothing to the approximately $1 trillion in income taxes collected by the IRS. On the other hand, the top 1/5th of earners pay in nearly two-thirds of all such taxes. These are the people who were most helped by the so-called "Bush tax cuts," who were exposed under Clinton's regime to marginal rates of 39.6%, but gained "relief" through the legislation of 2001 and 2003 and now pay 35% on such marginal income.

The big earners, of course, such as the Wall Street playuhs, have a great deal of "marginal income" exposed to such rates, and the nearly 5% reduction means a lot of additional take-home. If $1 million of your income is paid at the highest marginal rate, you can save $46,000 under Bush that you used to pay Uncle Sam under Bubba. That's a lot of additional cocaine and Ukrainian whores. Another way of thinking about our absurdly imbalanced society is to reflect that the saving alone is higher than the average national income for the rest of the plebes here in our increasingly Louis the Sixteenth wannabe times.

So the top 20% are paying about $640 billion per year in income taxes. Since restoration of the top marginal rate would imply an increase of about 14% in such rate, as a first approximation we might guess that the $640 billion would increase by a similar amount, or about $89 billion, if only this rate were changed and the rates of the lower earners (which were also reduced by the Bush legislation) were left alone, as they probably should be. Alternatively, a steeper progression could be applied to the top 40% of all earners, who pay nearly 85% of all tax, in an effort to close the budget gap. You get the sense, however, that such measures are seriously inadequate. Even if this raised an additional $200 billion (dubious), the actual budget deficit this year (a year without extraordinary stimulus spending) is about $1.7 trillion, or 1,700 billion.

It's funny, in a sickening way, when you think about how profligate the Bush Administration was with war spending. How many times did we hear about supplemental appropriations for the Iraq War where Bush would demand another $140 billion, or $115 billion, or whatever the number of the day was in order "not to abandon the troops?" And his obedient Republican Congress would play along until they were unseated in 2006, and then the Pelosi-led House took their turn writing blank checks. Look how hard it is to come by such sums of money! Squandered, wasted, thrown away, by an Idiot-in-Chief who knew absolutely nothing, as in zero, about how to run a business or balance a budget.

Still, the goal now has to be to find some midpoint between feasible revenue and sensible expenditures. The entitlement programs, if their surplus payments since 1983 are counted as they should be, are not the source of the problem. (The problem was Congressional stealing of the surplus for use in defense contracting and fighting superfluous wars.) The problem is how to raise enough money to support a $3 trillion budget in today's dollars, with defense and security expenses reduced from their current $1 trillion to about $300 billion. At this level, the expenditure would still be about three times larger than our mortal enemy and business partner, the People's Republic of China. Realistically, this is the only country which offers any serious threat of taking us on.

Most of the military budget could be funneled into the nuclear umbrella. I wish, for many reasons, that we still had public intellectuals of the stature of Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman who could guide this debate and remind us of the stark realities of nuclear winter and the unwinnability of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Big wars between big countries are no longer possible, yet we maintain a force and weaponry structure appropriate to re-fighting World War II, but with no conceivable relevance to the world we live in. World War II is no longer possible because it would immediately escalate to World War III, the one that Tom Lehrer's singing pilot told us would be over "an hour and a half from now." Our current military force has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, either, unless the fact that Osama bin Laden's body was dumped from a warship counts as "use of the Navy." Iran, Iraq (at one time), North Korea, Pakistan, Israel -- all of these countries have acquired nuclear weapons, or are trying to acquire them, so that other countries will not invade them. That is their "best" and only sane use. The same goes for us, and we're still the Big Dogs in the nuclear weapons world. But maintaining a nuclear umbrella requires a very small fraction of what we now spend on defense.

So we could actually operate with a budget of $3 trillion, with a combination of somewhat higher tax revenue (from the current $2.2 trillion to, say, $2.6 trillion as we finally recover and as we raise taxes at the marginal rate), with the safety net intact. Borrowing $400 billion a year is certainly manageable. We could institute a single payer system so that we don't pay double what the rest of the Western world pays while achieving inferior results, thus controlling the explosive cost of health care. The defense budget would still be the world's largest by a factor of three, but all 750 international forts, bases and installations would be shut down worldwide and the troops demobilized.

Watching the morons on TV tonight, I know that such rationality never enters their minds. Yet it's right there. It's not that difficult. If we once began doing rational things, it might even become a habit.

Waiting for things to pick up

I suppose one upside of the debt ceiling fiasco is that more Americans have become aware of the fine-grained details of the federal budget. It is oddly telling, however, in this day of PowerPoint and desktop publishing, that the President, when repetitively addressing the nation about the dangers of not raising the debt ceiling, never once uses any form of visual aid or chart. Thus, our leaders want us to be aware that there is a problem but not to the point of being fully informed about how bad it is. Being fully informed can lead to unwanted reactions, such as totally freaking out.

There appear to be two forms of denial in operation these days, as the good ol' U.S. of A. comes to terms with its new, penurious reality. One approach, favored by liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong of Berkeley and Dean Baker, is to assign most of the current problems to the financial shock delivered by the fall of one medium-sized investment bank in late 2008, Lehman Brothers. This approach has the merit of allowing such wishful thinkers to use a straight edge to graph a GDP-growth trend line from 2003 through 2007 - and then to extend such a line into 2011. Under this approach, the liberal economists can then laugh and snicker at the feckless policy makers who fail to see that federal spending, always in some vague, unspecified amount, would restore the nation quickly to such hypothesized trend line, and voila! the bad times would be over. Krugman often laments that the failure of the government to take his advice has "gratuituously" consigned America to economic recession. I really think that Krugman's ego should be designated a National Monument, if indeed not a National Park.

The other approach, now taken by the Sturmabteilung wing of the Republican Party (the Tea Bag contingent), is to believe that America's greatness can be restored simply by identifying federal government "waste," such as the Department of Education and the EPA, eliminate it, and America will then gain "confidence," and small businesses, freed from the yoke of intolerable "regulation," will go on a hiring binge which will fill the nation's coffers with overflowing tax dollars.

These are the competing fantasies of our political leaders. The sad truth is that the early years of the Aughts decade (2000-2007) were an illusion and an aberration. Taking office with a small surplus bequeathed to the Republicans by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tom DeLay pushed relentlessly to lower the top marginal tax rate while simultaneously massively increasing military spending, both as a Pentagon baseline and for the "supplemental" costs of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was remotely necessary for the nation's safety or defense. Because, however, the housing bubble was in its most robust expansionary phase, the tax revenues (resulting from all that consumer activity made possible with borrowed money) kept fairly close pace with the federal budget, although Bush, as with all Presidents since Reagan, cheated by subtracting the money stolen from the Social Security fund from the true yearly deficits. Measured as the growth of the national debt, Bush ran deficits of about $500 billion per year, even in the midst of the housing boom and with total tax revenues nearing $2.7 trillion, or at least half a trillion more than today, four years later.

What the lib econ guys miss, such as Dean Baker, is that the boom times cannot be extrapolated forward to the present. (I don't know how they miss it, but they do.) They're gone. However, thanks to the mania for compromise which characterizes our current Chief Executive, the tax reductions, which would have expired on December 31, 2010, remain with us (along with a poorly conceived reduction in the Social Security tax). Further, Barack decided to be Just Like George on the war front as well, expanding the war in Afghanistan and starting brand new ones in Yemen, Libya and Somalia while making no reductions whatsoever in the Pentagon baseline budget.

We thus have a Triple Witching Hour placing enormous pressure on the federal budget: an aging work force trying to retire, but with too few active workers to support their Social Security payments; an inadequate tax base with marginal tax rates too low and unemployment too high, but with a plutocracy in control which will not allow any increase; and an obsolete "consumerist" economy, hollowed-out by offshoring and ruinous free trade agreements, with no housing equity to keep the buying bonanza in motion.

Despite the above, indisputable realities, the country keeps trying to spend about $1 trillion per year on defense and homeland security in its maintenance of an international empire. Every day we unleash more Predator missiles to defend ourselves against Muslim insurgents, terrorists and surprised members of wedding parties, all of them in countries thousands of miles from the United States but in some undisclosed fashion posing an imminent threat to our safety. (We're unclear whether we "almost never" kill innocent civilians, as John Brennan, the National Something-or-Other claims, or we kill about 14 civilians for every "terrorist" we take out, as a just completed British study contends. One or the other; doesn't matter, as long as we're winning.)

We will certainly raise the debt ceiling. The Republicans are simply looking for a way to do so while fooling their cadres of overweight, white, religified government dependents that they're not doing precisely that. Remembering that the government runs a deficit of about 12% of our entire GDP, and that GDP is calculated by adding C+I+G+(Ex-Im), where C is consumer spending, I is certain types of capital investment, G is government spending and Ex-Im is the net of exports over imports (this one's always negative here in Walmartland), one can deduce that if the government suddenly loses 42% of its "funding" (borrowing) equal to about 12% of GDP, the gross domestic product is going to take a massive hit. Those in power from either party will not want to preside over that, because telling the Tea Baggers, "This is what you wanted," will not do the solons any good while the tar pots are being fired up.

It will be good when the fiasco is behind us, simply because it's too demoralizing to think about and hear about all the time. We will then go back into Godot Mode, as in Waiting For. Waiting for the economy to recover, for jobs to appear, for seniors to unretire, for the sick on Medicare to get well, and for candy-shitting unicorns to reproduce at a prodigious rate. This has been the "strategy," one way or the other, for about five years, from that occasion when W told us, in his one moment of felicitous description, that "this sucker could go down." He might very well have been right.

Freedom from Debt Slavery

I am intrigued by the argument, now being voiced by more prominent figures such as Bill Clinton, that the way out of the debt ceiling impasse is through use of a rather obscure paragraph of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. To wit,

4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

When the 14th Amendment is mentioned in public discourse, it's usually about its first paragraph, the one containing the prohibition against denial of due process or equal protection by any State of the Union (the Fifth Amendment already covering these points where the federal government is concerned). The 14th was one of the crowning achievements of Reconstruction; it eventually assured the citizenship of any slave born in the United States, and served, ultimately (nearly a hundred years after its passage in 1868), as the basis for the Civil Rights Movement, as the 14th was the great federal trump card against George Wallace, Orval Faubus and other blights upon American history, who were the ones who gave "States' rights" a very bad name which persists to this day.

Paragraph 4 was not really passed with the current situation in mind, of course, anymore than the Founding Fathers were thinking about gestational trimesters when they enacted the Ninth Amendment. The Constitution is a small island of text, however, surrounded (and inundated) by an ocean of judicial gloss and exegesis (and oceans made of glosses and exegeses rarely occur in nature). The 14th Amendment's "debt" clause (the above paragraph) has only rarely been addressed by the United States Supreme Court, and never in the context of a contest between the legislative enactment known as the debt ceiling (which has only been around since 1974, I believe) and the Constitution. If there is a contradiction, of course, then under the holding of Marbury vs. Madison the 14th Amendment prevails, although with Roberts, Scalia and Alito around, the overturning of even Marbury vs. Madison is a possibility. That would raise some interesting logical paradoxes - the Supreme Court overruling the concept of Judicial Review by using Judicial Review to conclude that Judicial Review is unconstitutional. More or less like figuring out: This Statement Is False. I love stuff like that. Maybe the Supreme Court could meet in a building patterned after an Escher drawing.

Although there has not been much judicial guidance as to the application of the 14th to the debt ceiling, the current learned debate concerns whether the "public debt" that "shall not be questioned" refers to existing debt incurred through Treasury borrowing or is a more general prohibition against denying the validity of obligations of the federal government. Either way, it might offer President Obama a way out if push came to shove.

Under a conservative reading of the first sentence (and Obama, being a preternaturally cautious individual, would certainly prefer to go out on a limb only as far as necessary), the 14th would seem to permit the incurring of additional debt if necessary to carry on debt service on existing debt or to "roll over" outstanding Treasury obligations (since there is never a precise, neat and clean correspondence between maturing debt and how much money you need to handle the redemption). That is to say, the Ponzi economic scheme we now use, whereby we take on additional debt by selling Treasuries to marks and suckers who "invest" so we can use their money to handle the debt from suckers who invested earlier in the inverted pyramid, "shall not be questioned," because it's either who we are or what we've definitely become. A nation with an acquired, vested right to live permanently beyond our means because we're Exceptional. Deal with it, world.

A great cry would of course arise from the humid, fetid trailer parks of this great land, as the Tea Bag contingent of the Booboisie (h/t: H.L Mencken) realize they've been had by this Ivy League hipster, and next thing you know, we'd be embroiled in an impeachment crisis; a Constitutional crisis, as the Supreme Court, naturally, rules against President Obama on the issue; and many other circus-like developments. I can only say: please, Lord, let all that happen. Impeachment would fail, as it did against Clinton, because 2/3rds of the Senate is not going to vote to convict. If the Supreme Court rules against President Obama, O can reach into the mists of history and use that great quote from President Andrew Jackson replying to the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester vs. Georgia: "Justice Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."

Sure, the quote is apocryphal, and sure, Barack Obama would never say such a thing, but it would be a great "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" moment. More interesting, anyway, than listening to John Boehner.

The Upside of the Downside, Revisited

I think I should first make clear that I don't consider the current financial predicament of the United States my personal fault. I've done what I could, but it was obviously insufficient. I think, rather, that the proximate cause of the current troubles (employing that term in the vague way it is used in legal parlance) was the 8 years of catastrophic misrule by the Bush/Cheney cabal, from which we're not likely ever to recover, at least not in the proximate future. Bush's decision to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 35%, thus granting relief to the taxpayers (high earners) who primarily finance the income tax side of national government, while substantially increasing defense spending both as a baseline and with all the huge supplemental appropriations for the unnecessary, profiteer-motivated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, operated as the coup de grace.

None of this has anything to do with Barack Obama. Bush ran deficits, measured in the only real way, as the increase in the national debt year over year, of about 1/2 trillion per year for a period of 8 years. The red ink flowed at exactly the wrong time, while the Baby Boom generation was nearing retirement (78 million strong), and while the endless series of "free trade" agreements and federal enabling of big companies that wanted to move jobs offshore were in full cry. Bush & Cheney wore flag lapel pins, but Cheney reportedly kept about 69% of his vast fortune (acquired through his connections to corporations with strong federal contracting, such as Halliburton) in foreign currency denominated assets. So while Bush & Cheney were ostentatious in their "display" of patriotism, they were not patriots in the sense I think of the word. They were using the United States, and the fear they could instill in the populace through their absurd exaggeration of the terrorist threat, to make a bundle, although certainly this was more Cheney than Bush, since Ol' W couldn't figure out how to get really rich even when the fix was totally in. As the great Phillip Roth wrote about Bush, he was a man who "lacked the acumen to run a hardware store," and we put him in charge of the most complicated political/economic organization on Earth.

This is a failure of democracy, pure and simple, although certainly in 2000 it was not the fault of the popular vote. Whatever, Bush performed true to all indicators in his past, which is to say, he ran this country into the freaking ground. Because the attention span of the average American observer is approximately that of a six-week old kitten juiced on methamphetamine, most members of the American electorate, dazzled and confused by the carnival barking of the Mass Media, can't remember how we got here - on the brink of default. But that is, in fact, where we are. The cable TV news shows (which I am now privileged to see again, having hooked up the satellite and changed my habits from watching only Netflix streams of old "Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock" episodes) naturally turn the current dilemma into a Red/Blue, Dem/Repub morality play, with some justification, but this drama does not actually produce any money for the country. Nor is it productive, as I hear Ed Schultz say tonight, to constantly repeat that the "Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2037," because this is a talking point with about as much content as the trust fund itself.

The only salient fact is that the United States does not really have very much money. The Treasury has some billions in its operating account at the Federal Reserve. You can look it up online, if you like. This is the one area of federal governance of reasonable transparency. Beyond those billions (certainly less than $50 billion), the United States does not have any cash. To speak of one part of the government owing another part money (as the game is played with the entitlement trust funds) is a form of denial bordering on delusion. We say such things because, at bottom, we're afraid to come to terms with what is real here. Any money that we raise through some mechanism other than printing must come from either taxes or from borrowing through Treasury auctions. Taxes (inclusive of income taxes and FICA) come to about $2 trillion annually, net of trust fund games. The outgoes are on the order of $3.7 trillion. If we don't raise the debt ceiling and resume borrowing more, we're stuck trying to match the insufficient income to the overwhelming expenses.

I don't know which way this thing ought to go, to tell you the truth, and thus the title of the post. It is not that I sympathize with the Tea Party, because I think they're mostly lunatics. They are dangerous True Believers who sign away their independence to loyalty oaths and pledges, and these are always the mark of the Fascist Right. The Nazis were not great political theorists, they simply achieved their aims through iron discipline (enforced implacably and increasingly through violence as the years went by). The Tea Party cadres love the feeling of solidarity they get from the Movement, of signing the pledge never to raise taxes, no matter what, even if the country must have additional income. These are the stigmata of the extremist.

Yet if the whole system goes down because of the implacable resistance of the Right Wing, as it possibly could, then I think the Right Wing will go down with the whole system. Like Samson, they will bring the temple down on their own heads. If the federal government is an "insurance company with an army," as it appears increasingly to be, given its extreme budgetary limitation, what happens, at the state level, if the central government lacks the money even to perform these two functions, that is, it cannot fund both the entitlements and the trillion dollar defense budget?

An interesting conundrum. If the entitlements are the only things that survive (and Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and debt service on existing Treasuries is all that $2 trillion will pay for), then why have a federal government? Would the states encourage their citizens to send money to Washington, D.C. just so D.C. could send it back, minus its "administrative costs?" Wouldn't the states be more likely to begin thinking, "it sure would be nice to keep that money right here where we can put it to use right now" ? If, on the other hand, defense keeps its trillion dollar share, perhaps by what amounts to a military coup (and here's where Barack Obama would be particularly useless, standing up to the Pentagon), thus requiring drastic cuts in the entitlements (but leaving room for the $300 billion or so in interest payments to avoid default), wouldn't the citizenry then cry foul! at this betrayal of government promises, leading to the same result of dissolution?

What's very interesting to me at this point is that I am not describing some sci-fi potboiler plot (it wouldn't be as good as Rod Serling's anyway). The situation I'm describing is the pretty pass to which the United States has been brought. I am describing the actual financial condition of the United States of America. Raising the debt ceiling is the actual fantasy, because given the intransigence over taxes, the future holds only an ever-deepening hole. The American economy is not recovering, employment is not getting better (stagnant, except for the bubble years, for well over a decade), and we are talking only about taking on The Bridge Loan to Nowhere.

A curse, I suppose, to live in such interesting times. We may be on the precipice of (a) default and dissolution, (b) a printing-press fired Weimar hyperinflation (if the Treasury decides to print its way out of bankruptcy), or (c) all three of these things. It's a Mad Tea Party, alright.

Refinancing Sparta

Glenn Greenwald, who does a much better job than I ever could of cataloging the absurdity of America's "war on terror," recently devoted one of his columns to Leon Panetta's exciting revelation that only about "10 or 20 al-Qaeda leaders" remain in Afghanistan. I think I mentioned before that Panetta, who always seems to hold some high post in every Democratic Administration (I think he's Secretary of Defense now, having moved on or up from the CIA), got his start as a character actor, playing a pharmacist on "Dobie Gillis." That's either true or something that I find funny and keep repeating even though it isn't.

A couple of thoughts come to mind: so this is why we're still fighting the war in Afghanistan, about ten years after we started? To finish killing off these 10 or 20 guys? And one other question: if we're at the point where we can count them, how come we can't just kill them now? My guess is that Leon did not clear this statement with Message Control Central over at the White House. He's been in politics for so long, Leon has (virtually his whole life), and has held so many big positions (he was Chief of Staff to Clinton for a while) that he perhaps forgot that he's a functionary in the Obama political machine and not a policy maker. There must have been some elaborate cringing in the West Wing when Leon delivered that little aperçu.

Still, it highlights the craziness of America's misguided reaction to 9/11. 9/11 was significant for two reasons: (1) it highlighted that it's dangerous to go to sleep on the job and to fail to use the existing intelligence apparatus to protect the country, as the Bush Administration unquestionably did; and (2) it was highly significant for the people who were killed and for the people who loved them. Beyond those things, 9/11 became simply a grandiose political football (if a football can be grandiose), and entered the myth-making machine of American mass media, never to be recognized for what it actually was again. Bush's carefully calculated overreaction (orchestrated by Cheney) was for the express purpose of diverting the national attention from the fact that it was the Bush/Cheney Administration's fault in the first place, and, of course, also serving as a pretext for what they wanted to do all along, pump more and more money into defense. If the al-Qaeda problem has been reduced to 10 or 20 guys (even allowing for a moment the unproved assertion that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11, instead of, say, the much more logical conclusion that it originated with the Muslim Brotherhood or Saudi factions unrelated to al-Qaeda), then why the continuing production of advanced fighter jets and aircraft carriers to launch them from, and the Bradley Fighting Vehicles and all the rest of this costly nonsense (h/t: Charles Dickens)?

It's a rhetorical question. Bush & Cheney, and now Obama, realize that all this "investment" is not necessary for anti-terrorist operations, which, last time I looked, is supposedly the existential threat to America justifying our extreme devotion to defense spending. I note that the Right Wing in particular likes to talk about our defense spending in terms of a "percentage of the budget," or even as a percentage of GDP, as if there is some unwritten axiom somewhere that dictates that a country must spend some part of the national wealth on the military. But what about just the absolute freaking number? We like to deceive ourselves with the idea that this number is $700 billion (as if we could afford that), but it's not $700 billion, because the metastatic process of the Security State gave us the Department of Homeland Security, the 14 different intelligence agencies scattered throughout the government, the National Security Agency, and they're all more or less doing the same thing: keeping us safe from those 10 or 20 guys, and it costs closer to $1 trillion a year, as the late, great Chalmers Johnson informed us in numerous books, including The Sorrows of Empire.

In other words, about half of our actual national income. If you look over there to the right and click on the link to Cost of Iraq War, you'll see a running total of the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We're currently at about $1.222 trillion for these diversions. If you add about $700 billion, representing the cost of Bush's reduction of the top tier tax rate from 39.6% to 35%, you come to about $2 trillion in squandered treasure, all for no reason other than mismanagement of the nation's business. The fact that Bush was elected twice should tell you why democracy does not actually work in America. Thomas Frank's brilliant query in What's the Matter With Kansas?, to wit, why do Americans vote against their own economic and social interest, cannot be answered except by saying, well, the electorate is kind of stupid, actually. The combination of a misinformed and poorly educated electorate with a money-driven, manipulative politics is pretty lethal, really. Which explains a lot of why things look the way they do these days.

So I notice, at long last, that even Washington, D.C., has begun to question the wisdom of so much defense spending. True, it's only because there's no other choice. Perhaps this will even lead to a diminution in missile attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and God knows where else, and will thus lead, as Glenn Greenwald persuasively argues (as do many other observers, including Robert Baer) to a diminution in newly-created, anti-U.S. terrorists, because our random killing of many non-terrorist people in these countries with our "precision bombing" is one of the main sources of terrorism. You could say that these constant drone and Predator attacks represent our cynical investment in the War on Terror: it's a self-perpetuating business, although if Panetta is right, the inventory is a little low, which probably explains why we've moved on to new markets in Yemen and Somalia.

Still, a chance to reduce the militarized nature of American priorities is one patch of blue in the dark skies of national insolvency. It would be nice if President Obama talked about that for a change, instead of decreasing the COLA adjustments in Social Security for Americans in their 80's and 90's, where his current focus seems to be. Maybe if we cut back just a little on the aircraft carriers and $250 million jets, and allowed our military budget to be, I don't know, only three times larger than the next biggest budget, that of China, instead of somewhere between 6 and 10 times larger, we could still be safe from the world, where no actual nation has any intention of attacking us, with enough left over to handle the 10 or 20 guys.