A flash in the Texas Panhandle

It's possible that Rick Perry is just too dumb to win the Presidency. That's an odd sentence to write, because I'm talking about the Presidency of the United States here, not President of the National Academy of Sciences or President of the local chapter of the Rotary Club. You know, a position where some measure of intelligence is actually expected, or the norm. Yet, despite my sentimental attachment to the Perry campaign, the weird basis of which I have described on prior occasions, I'm reaching the conclusion (not reluctantly) that this hayseed is just too dumb even for America. Those who have called Perry "Bush without the brains" are on the right track.

Although I never actually thought Bush was unintelligent, despite occasional bleatings to the contrary. Bush's IQ was definitely higher than the controlling mean for the Washington press corps, for example, and by "controlling mean" I refer to that baseline average of insight and complexity which sets the standard for national reporting. Individual reporters are more intelligent than this average, but they have to dumb it down in order to maintain a job and an audience. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post was an excellent example of this limiting factor. But Bush's ability to humiliate and bamboozle the press, in general, on a constant basis was actually fairly impressive. As the signal example of Bush's skill, I always think of the Valerie Plame matter. Somehow or other, in ways I can't quite fathom, Bush seemed to convince the moronic Washington press corps that he was an innocent bystander to the "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, even though he talked daily to people, such as Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, who were involved in the matter up to their eyeballs. Bush claimed at the outset that he would "conduct a search" for the people responsible for Plame's blown cover; you know, those people who sat in his Oval Office every day of his Presidency. And yet the Washington press never figured that out, even though Representative Henry Waxman conducted a hearing where Bush's "White House security team" admitted that they were never even asked to open a file on the source of the leak. Why would Bush "search" when Cheney had already told him? That was a master stroke by the Old Bushter, to pull off that caper unscathed, and bespeaks a fairly crafty intelligence. Along with an absolute, complete contempt for the media people he fooled with his lies and evasions.

Perry, on the other hand, has sustained the one wound which is mortal for national candidates: people, including the press, are already laughing at him. This didn't really happen to Bush until after the Katrina fiasco and his "heckuva job" comment to the incompetent idiot he'd placed in charge of FEMA. (Katrina, in this additional sense, was surely an Act of God.) Once everyone started laughing at Bush, his power began to wane, which is why Bush rushed to pass the Military Commissions Act in 2006, with its blanket exoneration of all crimes of war and against humanity which he and his henchmen had committed (that was the actual purpose of the rush job in Fall, 2006, of course; unless I missed something, I don't believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Gurgling Confessor, has been placed on trial yet [5 years later] in Cuba, although that was the ostensible reason for the hurry, and not the impending seating of a Democratic-controlled House in January, 2007). You know, that's actually another instance of Bush being much, much smarter than the Washington press corps - he pulled off that Military Commissions statute, unconstitutional though it was, without anyone noticing his true motivation, which to me was as plain as the Space Needle would be if suddenly moved to Death Valley.

By way of contrast, the C+ student from Texas A&M just looks more and more out to lunch with each one of these painful, embarrassing Republican debates. He can't explain his "ideas," such as they are, with any clarity whatsoever. He's utterly lost trying to think in public. The coup de grace may have been delivered last night by "Saturday Night Live," where Alec Baldwin played a clueless, stumblebum Perry in a debate to oafish, moronic perfection. Even the Washington press corps would wonder how we could have fallen so low if this guy got elected. So I think they're going to cut Ol' Rick off at the pass and stop his run for the White House.

That's actually a pretty good litmus test: when a candidate is too dumb for the media in this country, you know we've got a real lamebrain on our hands.

As the world twists

Today, September 23, 2011, at 9:04 am, Greenwich Mean Time, Earth's axis of rotation was perpendicular to the line connecting the center of the Sun to the center of the Earth; thus, autumn began at that moment.

Meanwhile, down here on the surface of Spaceship Earth, that marvelous blue and white orb which has been infested with a particularly maladapted and hugely destructive species for a tiny fraction of its total existence (and the Earth still has about 5 billion years to go before the Sun begins its fatal expansion to a red giant and incinerates this place once and for all, thus assuring that for probably the last 99.99% of its existence, the Earth will be blessedly human-free), the arguments currently are about how various forms of paper counters of wealth are in conflict with each other, and the various games that can be played to make a given country's money seem as if it is worth more than the paper it is written on. The United States, which long ago gave up productive enterprise in favor of devoting itself to just such paper-manipulating games as the exclusive means of not only maintaining one's vital heat, but of expanding the mansion out in the Hamptons and stocking the garage with several high-number-model Mercedes Benzes, has decided, this time around, to use its central bank, the Federal Reserve, as a means of controlling "long term interest rates."

It will accomplish this ruse by Operation Twist. In this game of make-believe, the Federal Reserve will use part of its stock of Treasury debt by which the Treasury "owes" money to the Federal Reserve, to the tune of about $400 billion, to purchase longer-dated Treasury "debt" in the 6 to 30 year range. The Fed owns about $1.2 trillion of Treasury "debt" (it is the largest "creditor" of the Treasury in the world, and it "purchased" all of these bills and bonds by conjuring the money out of thin air, or, if you prefer, by pulling the money out of its ass). The Fed will "sell" $400 billion of shorter-duration bonds to "raise the money" to "purchase" the longer-dated stuff. The Fed will then pretend to "receive" coupon payments from the Treasury (by making data entries on its computers noting the creation of money representing the payments) and then will use part of this "money" to pay the Fed's operating expenses (this is one of the Fed's sources of "revenue"), and promptly remit the "balance" of the money to the Treasury which it just received from the Treasury.

Once the Fed's big decision was announced, the Dow Jones immediately fell 400 points. A reasonable person might opine that all of this talk about the hallucinatory essence of the American money system might cause rational people to believe that the whole economic situation is too ludicrous to be part of, that one must flee it in favor of something more substantial and real, like a cave and an acre of tomato plants. In such thinking one would be incorrect. Wall Street was freaked out because the Federal Reserve was not hallucinatory enough. Operation Twist simply takes previously hallucinated money and transforms it into long-dated Treasury bonds. The "Quantitative Easing" episodes, by contrast, conjured substantial amounts of new "money" on the Fed's computer, over $2 trillion worth, and most of this money found its way into the rarefied atmosphere of the Titans of Wall Street, to speculate and play dumb big money games with.

However, this time around the Federal Reserve, intimidated by certain know-nothing governors who threatened, in essence, vigilante justice if the Chairman should venture into "money printing" again, kept things on the down-low. Well, hell, that's not going to work. You can't actually expect the American economy to prosper on its own merits. That's not how we do things around here. It's why we liked that magical period between about 1998 and 2006. Money just sort of happened. People got rich while watching "The Weakest Link," chugging a Budweiser and filling out a re-fi form. That's more like it!

How we gonna stay rich if Chairman Ben starts bogarting the punch bowl? This is unnatural. It's damn near unAmerican, as I have come to understand the term.

Katch-22 in Kandahar

"To summarize: our invasion and occupation is what enables the Taliban to recruit massive numbers of Afghan teenagers into their cause. And now, we have to stay until we either kill all the people who hate us and want us gone from their country or propagandize deradicalize them into meekly accepting our presence. Once there are no more Afghans left who want us gone, then we can leave. For those of you who have been cynically claiming that this war has no discernible purpose other than the generalized benefits of Endless War for political officials and the Security State industry, now you know." -Glenn Greenwald, summarizing a Washington Post article on current plans for de-radicalization of Afghan youth.

Yossarian didn't know whether he believed in reincarnation or not; he just knew he wanted to stay alive, and if Eastern mysticism did the trick, that was good enough for him. Even if it meant that instead of being a B-25 navigator based on Pianosa during World War II, he was now a grunt in America's seemingly endless war in Afghanistan.

"Think I'll ever get back to New Jersey?" he asked Doc Daneeka, as they sat on a couple of canvas chairs in front of the medical tent.

"It depends," said Doc Daneeka.

"Depends on what?" said Yossarian.

"On whether you survive this war," said Doc Daneeka.

"Interesting you should say that," said Yossarian. "I've been thinking of ways I could get out of this war and get back to New Jersey. At last. And one of those ideas involves you."

"I'm not surprised," said Doc Daneeka. "Although I think you'll find New Jersey is not quite the garden spot you remember from 1942."

"I can't even figure out why we're fighting this war. Or why I'm here. Every day, the Taliban try to kill me."

"They're trying to kill everybody," grunted Doc Daneeka. "Don't think of yourself as so special."

"So why do you think we stay here?" asked Yossarian.

"Because they want us to leave," said Doc Daneeka. "As long as they want us to leave, we have to stay."

Yossarian nodded, sensing what was coming.

Doc Daneeka went on: "If they want us to leave, it means they're not ready for democracy and we have to stay."

"Until they're ready for democracy?" asked Yossarian, taking a shot.

"No, until they ask us to stay. When they ask us to stay, it means they're ready for us to leave."

"So if they ask us to stay, we know we can leave," said Yossarian, half to himself, filling in the blanks.

"Right," said Doc Daneeka. "They'll never be ready for democracy. Not even we are crazy enough to wait for that. Meanwhile, the war must go on, and we must keep killing them until they ask us to stay."

"Doesn't it seem unlikely that they'll ever ask us to stay if we keep on killing them?" asked Yossarian.

"It's only unlikely until we kill all the ones who want us to leave and only those who want us to stay are left," said Doc Daneeka, staring straight ahead as he took a swig from his beer bottle.

"But if we keep killing all the ones who want us to leave, won't that just make the ones who want us to stay angry about our killing all the ones who want us to leave, and then the ones who want us to stay will want us to leave, but we can't leave then because they want us to?" Yossarian took a deep breath, exhausted by articulating this fine web of logic.

"That's right," said Doc Daneeka. "As long as we keep killing all the ones who want us to leave, we'll keep turning the Aghans who want us to stay into Aghans who want us to leave, so we have to stay and keep killing those same Afghans until there are only Afghans who want us to stay."

"Then we can leave," said Yossarian.

"Right," said Doc Daneeka. "Or until there are no more Afghans at all."

"Can they have a democracy with no people?" asked Yossarian.

"Probably not," admitted Doc Daneeka.

"It's Catch-22 all over again," said Yossarian.

"Some things never change," said Doc Daneeka. "Especially in war."

"So about that Section 8," said Yossarian.

"Same problem as last time. The war's crazy, you aren't. I can't Section 8 you out of a war you think is crazy to fight when it's a war that's crazy to fight. Sorry."

"If I thought it was sane to fight this crazy war, would I be crazy enough for you to say I was insane and didn't have to fight?" asked Yossarian.

"Maybe, but not in this life."

The fish weren't biting anyway

Enough of a break for now. I feel that I'm missing out on opportunities to chime in on this Rick Perry "Ponzi scheme" "controversy," and that's intolerable, given the close, quasi-symbiotic relationship which has always (okay, almost never) existed between the Perry Campaign and Waldenswimmer (which is to say, they quoted me at length once; think about it: there will probably come a day when I can say that I was quoted by the campaign of the President of the United States of America. Awesome.)

Anyway, my main complaint about the abuse of such terms as "Ponzi scheme" to describe Social Security is that, as with so many other usages which evaporate into the MediaCloud (TM pending) and become completely amorphous, this perfectly good, sensible term becomes debased and useless because of the lack of precision so characteristic of this dumb-ass country. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It has many problems, chief among them the fatal demographics of this country and the fact that on a cash flow basis (the only basis that counts) Social Security is already in the red, 6 years earlier than forecast in the recent past. So we're hosed.

Still, it's not a Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi ran a Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme. The cardinal characteristic of this species of confidence fraud is that the fraudster, such as Madoff, solicits investments which he represents will be placed in income producing assets. He promises a steady, lavish rate of return. The gullible marks turn over their money. The fraudster then takes this money, skims enough to buy and maintain his chateau in the Loire Valley and waterfront house in Palm Beach, sets himself up with lavish cash flow, and then begins doling out the "returns" (say 12% per year) to the suckers, who are unaware that their own money and that of later "investors" who bought from Madoff on the recommendation of themselves and other suckers is being used to fund these fictitious gains. Then a smart Greek like Harry Markopolis comes along, realizes in an instant that nobody can pay out returns like that, year after year, in a dogshit economy like the United States, and proceeds to bust the con.

That's a Ponzi scheme. It's really beautiful in its simplicity and sheer criminality; the crook gets rich using only what Willy Loman had, "a smile and a shoeshine."

But that's not Social Security. As I listen to more and more of Rick Perry, I am reaching the conclusion that even by Republican candidate standards, this is a pretty dim bulb. His explanation for his charge against Social Security is that younger workers won't receive their promised benefits. Yeah, true; it's likely that those now retired or nearing retirement aren't going to receive all of their benefits either, and for the same reason. The program just doesn't work anymore. Today's retirees (the Boomers, who are reaching Social Security age at the rate of 10,000 people per day) are counting on about 1.75 workers per retiree for their support. In a dead jobs market. With average wages, in real terms, declining. Indeed, the Census just released numbers showing that the average male worker in the United States, in inflation-adjusted dollars, earns less than such a worker in 1968 America. As I said to the research scientist at the Great Southwestern University, that sounds completely believable. 1968 was absolutely an affluent, wonderful time here in the U.S.A, provided you weren't involved in fighting one of the first of the completely useless wars America concocted. Or unless you were Martin Luther King, Jr. Or Bobby Kennedy. Okay, nothing is ever entirely perfect, even if you had a new black Mustang.

Social Security worked fine back then, too. It was easy; the tax was light, the earners were many, the country was rich. None of these things is true anymore. The latest monthly disaster report was just issued by the Department of the Treasury, which confirms the ongoing trend. Total FICA receipts (including disability) were about $43 billion; the outlays, including disability payments, were about $60 billion. The shortfall was made up by payments from the "Trust Fund," which doesn't exist; that is to say, the difference was made up the usual way, by public borrowing, or by having the Federal Reserve pay the interest which the Treasury owes the Federal Reserve on the Treasury bonds held by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury (I just like saying that).

Consider the viability of a system which requires 1.75 workers to support each retiree (many of such retirees are still of working age, actually - such as your faithful blogger here, who is still working - please, no applause necessary), a retiree cohort increasing by 10,000 golfers per day. And all of this is happening against the background of a crap job market, massive unemployment, declining real wages, and a political class who keep reducing the FICA tax (thus hamstringing the funding mechanism further) in an effort to curry favor with the electorate. Rather than ideological rhetoric about "Big Government," the C+ student from Texas A&M should focus rather on the inherent unworkability of this thing (I'm still trying to help, Rick - shucks, I just cain't quiiiiiiiiiitttt you!). But you can't call this "fraud," because the facts are open and obvious. Liberal economists may emphasize the "moral imperative" of recognizing the validity of the Trust Fund (which I have always characterized as a crime scene), others may talk about "tweaking" the system, but it doesn't make any difference in the long run. The money isn't there, it's not going to be there, and as younger voters come into their own, they're going to dump this thing. And who can really blame them?

Social Security is doomed, but not because it's a Ponzi. Because its day has come and gone. Because we'd rather spend a trillion on the military to fight wars to secure our oil supplies. Because we'd rather go on being energy pigs. Because we're a country in name only. Because, fundamentally, we don't give a shit. Because frankly, Scarlett, it's not 1968 anymore.

Forgot to Go Fishing

Time for the annual summer break, now that summer is almost over. Since I've never been entirely clear on why I do this, it's doubly nuts to write the blog when I can't think of anything I want to say. There isn't really much "news" these days anyway; all industrialized nations are financially strapped and drowning in unpayble debt; we're not doing much about climate change; we're still operating at the 1.5 Earths rate in terms of resource depletion; the United States is still fighting about six (6) wars, give or take an unmanned drone or two. Big Business still owns the federal government.

One thought that does occur to me: I read something about Noam Chomsky's idea of "spectator democracy," which he says has become the reality in modern America. The voters are moved around by the advertising business, which in turn is paid for by Big Business, and these ad campaigns determine who will serve in federal government and execute the business plan of the powerfully wealthy. Hard to argue with that. It helps explain Barack Obama's extreme passivity and seeming acquiescence in the status quo. He's just the front desk man -- it appears that his Wall Street bankrollers knew what they were getting, even if the rest of us, unfortunately, allowed ourselves one last illusion about "Light Workers" and conquering heroes.

I would add to this Chomsky concept the idea of "mediated reality," a term which first came to my attention thanks to the great Jerry Mander (and h/t here to the research scientist at the Great Southwestern University) in his visionary book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. It does seem that at the outset of every cultural watershed, there are those who see clearly, and first, what the real implications of a pervasive technology will be. Mander could see it where television was concerned. His point about the substitution of electronic images for the real world, and the consequent tendency of those living in industrial countries to become indifferent to the actual state of the natural world, has only gotten worse with the Internet and social media. Dmitry Orlov, I note, has taken up this theme - the younger generations growing up with Facebook and Twitter have happy glowing images and avatars to look at, to become absorbed in, so no need to notice the incredible ugliness of the artificial environment we have constructed around them.

Yet "mediated realities" have other effects. I think "spectator democracy" is one of them. We're so immersed in reading about the political scene, and "forwarding emails," and the rest of it (even blogging about it all), that we forget all of this solipsistic activity is largely impotent to change anything in the real, non-virtual world.

Perhaps a key distinction is the rise of the Tea Party, and it is here that the connection between the Tea People and Evangelical Christianity (and its darker spawn, such as Dominionism) is perhaps telling. Evangelical Christians get together, physically, on a regular basis, and they discuss their agendas, religious, political and otherwise. And the Tea Party people, building on this organizational advantage, do physically assemble for the petition of grievances - and it is this distinction from the passive liberals which accounts for their astonishing success. I cannot even tell what the Tea Party message is; their "platform" appears to be a hodgepodge of completely inconsistent planks. They seem to be both for and against Big Government, for and against Big Business, for and against almost anything you can name. I am sure the Tea Party people do use the Internet; the point is, they do not stop there. They assemble outside the White House. They show up, in droves, at political rallies and candidates' appearances. They're all over the place, and they force the Republicans to answer to them.

These methods were the ones used by liberals in the 1960's for the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Today liberals would hope to integrate Alabama lunch counters and Arkansas schools, and stop the war, by means of forwarding emails, I guess.

Anyway, see you in a month or so, probably. Or not. Depends on whether anything new ever happens.

Agnotology and future developments

Not to belabor these religious matters, but the inability of anyone from a skeptical viewpoint ever to close the difference between hermself and the community of believers is instructive in other areas as well. I was thinking, in particular, about the reflexive habit of Christians to refer to the Bible as proof of the Bible, and, in general, to the primacy of strong feeling over a more austere, scientific approach.

My thoughts led me to a slightly ghoulish train of thought which I'll reproduce here, the ghoulishness at least having the advantage of being memorable. It starts with this observation: if I trust the formulas in a physics textbook, for example, it is because I sense pretty strongly that the formulas have been experimentally validated in the real world. Most rational people would not argue that the formula for a falling body above Earth (d=1/2gt^2, where g is the terrestrial constant for gravity, d is distance, and t is time) is true because this formula is written down in a physics book; it's the other way around. It's in the book because it was experimentally validated first.

I performed one such validation a few years ago when I was writing a novel which had a scene set on the Golden Gate Bridge. Given my penchant for gathering essentially useless facts, I researched and found that the bridge at the center is about 225 feet above the water. This gave me, roughly, d. The question germane to my book was: if a person stepped off into space from the center of the bridge, how long till splashdown? I had a lousy high school physics teacher (discussed at length recently with faithful reader W, who suffered the same fate), a teacher who thought physics, in some sense, could be taught non-quantitatively, so I'm always at pains to fill in this gap with some real number crunching. Rearranging the formula above, I came to a result of around 3 seconds, with maximum speed at about 80 miles per hour.

Around this time, the haunting documentary "The Bridge" was released, and I watched it on dvd. This movie actually films a number of bridge suicides over the course of one year by means of a camera constantly trained on the span. Ergo, of course, I used the stopwatch function on my phone to time one particularly well-filmed jumper (who cooperated by falling backwards off the bridge rather than jumping, which confounds the calculation). It was shown, naturally, several times, both in slow-mo and in real time. My stopwatch reading was consistently 4 seconds for the real time sequences. Well, of course: air resistance, wind, et cetera. Close enough, however, for some sort of Newtonian validation.

Biblical proof is circular because it has no real-world cognates or referents. It's a completely sterile exercise in reading something and declaring it's true because you just read it. We're asked to believe what's in the Book because it's in the Book. I've often thought this circularity does not need to be so. An actual god could show up at Times Square at noon on Sunday and put on a magic show which would eliminate all doubt. Believers have various answers for this curious resistance of the deity to clearing up the mystery, none of them particularly convincing to me. Most of the excuses, in fact, sound a little smug, as if believers actually prefer the mystery as a way of enhancing the In-Crowd nature of being among the saved.

Anyway, this word "agnotology" has arisen recently as a word applicable to what is becoming known, in America, as the "Alternative Reality Right (ARR)." Essentially, agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance. To run for President as a Republican these days, it is almost mandatory (why do I say "almost?") that a person voice certain culturally-required professions of profound ignorance, such as Rick Perry's idea that evolution "is a theory with some holes in it." Why stop there? Maybe that gravitational theory up above has some holes in it too. (I've never understood how Strict Creationists deal with the ability of bacteria to develop immunity to antibiotics. Is it the Creationist position that bacteria just "figure it out?") And although 97% of the scientists seriously involved in climate research confirm that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is occurring, and that, if anything, the official pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are perhaps dangerously optimistic in their time lines, the ARR will point out a few dissenters (usually referred to as "thousands of scientists") and claim that these lone voices (some with demonstrable links to oil and coal companies) are right, although, to tell the truth, the ARR cannot explain even the fundamentals of AGW and are basing their preference for the (extreme) minority position for the same reason as their preference for Creationism, I guess, which is also an extreme minority position among biologically-educated scientists, including all of those in the National Academy of Sciences. In point of fact, it's a mystery to me why three disparate fields of human inquiry (the origin of the Universe, evolutionary adaptation and AGW) should all inspire the same response from the same theocratic impulse. Is it just a maniacal desire to be wrong all the time, no matter what the human cost?

Since the United States is the world's primary energy hog (on a per capita basis - well, hell, you name the basis), there are real world consequences of such idiocy. Reading this book by Richard Heinberg (and the Peak Oil theorists in general, including Our Man Dmitry), I'm beginning to see that peak oil, and the concomitant requirement that life again be re-localized on a massive scale, may operate as a kind of deus ex machina (and that's the one sense in which "god" might have some currency). To wit, American progressives (the educated members living in Consensus Reality) are never, ever going to convince the ARR of...well, anything. That's what agnotology is concluding. The ARR is so stuck in a kind of mindless denial and delusion, so haunted by ghosts, souls, goblins, gods, demons and the rest of their dramatis personae of insanity, that there is absolutely no hope whatsoever that this thing can be turned around through rational procedures. Thus, to counter the impediment which the United States is, an outside force, called Mother Nature, must intervene and compel all the changes that America, acting monolithically, is incapable of making on a volitional basis.

There might be time for that to happen before the window of opportunity slams shut and runaway greenhouse becomes inevitable, and Mankind's arrogant experiment with accelerating the entropic conversion of potential energy to waste heat beyond natural rhythms will come to a screaming stop. It's almost enough to make me believe in Divine Providence.

Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth

I've been reading Richard Heinberg's latest book, The End of Growth, which follows up where his book Peak Everything left off. Increasingly, it seems to me that we've turned a corner in our economic reality. Whereas before the arguments were monopolized, on the one hand, by the liberal Keynesians, who contended the path to growth, and thus full employment, was a robust participation by the federal government through spending to take up the slack in private demand; and on the other, by the Austrians and other "conservatives" who are convinced that government is the problem, and that big public debts are the precursors to runaway inflation, the "Deep Economics" of people like Heinberg (building on seminal work by Herman Daly and his Steady State Economics of the 1970's, along with all the brilliant books by Barry Commoner, which analyzed the thermodynamics of our energy predicament), Heinberg et al. proceed as if there is a physical environment involved in economic reality. Pretty wild, huh? I think so too.

I think that small lacuna, the absence of context, is what drives me a little nuts about liberal economists such as Paul Krugman. His personal style, grandiose as it is, grates somewhat, but it's his (apparently) unexamined belief that "growth in GDP," regardless of its composition, that makes me question whether there is really much of a difference between a "liberal" economist such as Krugman or Brad DeLong (on the faculty at John Yoo University) and a conservative. They all want the same thing, I guess: the return of the American consumer economy with unemployment at a nice, healthy 5%, growth at 4% of GDP, just like the good old days. They are only arguing about how to get there - should the federal government increase its existing deficit of around $1.5 trillion (and 43% of its total budget) to something along the lines of $2.5 trillion? Krugman & Co. say yes, because they're convinced the medium-term growth in the economy will allow the economy to fill in the difference with tax revenues in the longer term. The conservatives say this is folly, not because they don't believe in growth, but because the federal government will "crowd out" private investment or "over regulate."

Although I write about it from time to time, I don't really care whether the United States increases its budget deficits. The interest rates it pays on Treasury debt are, for the time being, dirt cheap, and the effect on servicing costs of the national debt (that $8 trillion or so that is truly "public," that is, not one of the intragovernmental trust funds or bonds owned by the Treasury's alter ego, the Federal Reserve) are not a big deal - now. But I actually don't care because it's pretty obvious we're never going to get near paying off the national debt anyway because that would require true growth in the economy, and that is not going to happen. So pile it on: a deadbeat with room on his credit limit may as well take things up to the max before he goes belly up.

What Heinberg & his ilk point out (Dmitry Orlov is very good on these same points) is that actual growth in an economy (as opposed to monetary and fiscal games, which the United States substitutes for productive activity) requires energy. We don't often think about the congruence of energy and economic growth because we've been distracted by people getting rich writing credit default swaps, which seem to require only household alternating current plugged into a computer. But at the macroeconomic level, an increase in wealth (meaning, an increase in the overall well-being of the general populace in terms of maintaining their vital heat through eating and shelter) requires a real interaction between the human race and the planet we live on. Fundamentally, this is because we are ourselves carbon-based life forms dependent on physical processes for survival; while it's confusing at times because of all the virtual avatars we now substitute for our actual selves, facebook and Twitter, by themselves, are not something you can eat. The way we effect the interaction between Homo sapiens and Earth is through the use of energy.

We are now entering an era of permanent shortage in the cheap liquid fuels on which modern civilization has been built, and everything is going to change as a result. In the United States, for example, liquid fuels (primarily gasoline) are used for 90% of the passenger miles traveled by Americans. Petroleum inputs are used in virtually everything, but most critically in order to carry on agribusiness. Our consumer society depends on long-range transportation of goods through the global economy to their Big Box destinations. At a point past Peak Oil (which has already happened), then the whole system begins to wobble, as the price of oil goes up, the fear of shortages begins to drive future prices, as the uncertainty of long-haul restocking begins to weigh on the decisions whether to expand existing business, et cetera. As Dmitry Orlov has demonstrated through a careful thought experiment, the ride down from Peak Oil is not a smooth descent, but a chaotic, bumpy ride, as various negative feedbacks begin to interact. More or less the way the world increasingly seems to be these days, in other words. We're just not always aware of the Man Behind the Curtain, imagining it's all because of one political "policy" decision or another. Things will become increasingly clear over the next decade, that's for sure.

As I say: an interesting read.