Saturday Morning Essay

Brought to You By Peet's Coffee.

As I've said before, if Barack Obama is reelected, then Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis should win the Most Valuable Player award going away. The official unemployment rate, U-3, keeps dropping, now down to 8.5%, despite two facts that would appear to make such a development mathematically impossible. (1) The actual number of jobs in America has not increased, holding steady at around 140 million. (2) The working age population continues to increase, month by month, year by year, and is now about 250 million. Using our fifth grade math, we can simplify terms and create the fraction 14/25. To convert this to a percentage, we divide the numerator by the denominator, and we get about 56%. 56% of the working age population in the United States, other than those in prison, the military or mental hospitals, have jobs.

I would guess that a very large percentage of those with these jobs hate their work and wish they didn't have to work. Such thoughts usually bring me around to thinking about Emile Durkheim, the famous social theorist who gave us the term "organic solidarity" to describe the economies of advanced industrial nations. Durkheim was referring to specialization, that rat-race arrangement that Henry David Thoreau, writing around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, tried to warn us against. Society in modern countries has become a kind of "organism," a complicated, interrelated contraption in which we perform specialized functions to satisfy our various "needs," such as the need to undergo a weekly spiritual lobotomy while watching "American Idol" or "Dancing With The Stars."

Nevertheless, despite this proliferation of "needs," the actual requirements remain those of the evolved homo sapiens, as described in Walden: maintaining one's vital heat. With modern technology, this is not really that hard to do. For example, I wear clothes, as all non-nudists do. I buy mostly discount clothing at Costco, stuff arrayed on the big tables. Khaki pants, jeans, polo shirts. It's all cheap and it gets the job done. You don't have to spend more than 12 bucks for a pair of pants made in India or Vietnam. I have shirts in my closet that I've had for 20 years. They're in good shape, too; I'm easy on stuff. America makes about 7% of its own clothing these days, down about 80% over the last 40 years. At the next layer of heat maintenance, I have a house. It's about 50 years old, in decent shape, and it retains heat, not as well as it should (it's an American house), but it's warmer in here than outside. I heat it with a furnace fueled with natural gas. America produces a lot of its own natural gas. The electricity for the lights and the various gadgets in the house is furnished by PG&E, and this utility (very hip and committed to the battle against climate change) produces power through natural gas, hydroelectric dams and nuclear power, for the most part. I use compact flourescents for the lighting.

I eat fairly low on the food chain, and much of the food, including the beef, is produced locally. We have a big "local food" movement in my county, and it works fine.

So that's it. All of my needs are met. I can stay alive with what I've just listed above. When you think about it, America needs far, far fewer than 140 million people with jobs to get the things done I've just listed. Farming, for example, has mostly become agri-business and is not labor intensive except for certain crops at harvest, and probably more Mexicans and Guatemalans do that work in America than Americans. As noted, we don't make our own clothing anymore; 12 year old girls in Asian countries handle that for us. The energy industries hire a lot of people, but increasingly that work is mechanized as well. Auto manufacturing and sales in the USA are on a steady decline; the 250 million cars and trucks we already have are increasingly being kept for longer periods of time as the economy stagnates. You can fix your beater instead of replacing it every three years just for show, and avoid investing a ton of dough in an immediately depreciating hunk of metal, leather and rubber.

We need trades people, of course, plumbers and carpenters. We need doctors (far fewer than we have and better allocated to useful specialties), accountants and lawyers, although we could probably get by better with about 1/4th the number of attorneys we have. We need teachers to train people in the skills they will need to participate in the "organic" society, an admittedly kind of circular logic.

I really wonder what the "core" number of workers that we need to make society function actually is. It's pretty easy to list completely superfluous professions and occupations: nail salon workers; cosmetic plastic surgery people; tanning salon owners; party planners; wedding planners; florists; financial planners; workers in luxury car factories; personal trainers; 90% of the movie stars and movie makers; radio "personalities;" 90% of the politicians; professional athletes; NASCAR drivers; runway models; anyone named Kardashian; tabloid publishers, editors and writers; 85% of the real estate brokers; the lower half of the island of Manhattan; 80% of federal employees, most of them duplicating work that could be done at the local level; 80% of those in the military, many of whom simply serve because the "organic society" doesn't produce any real jobs; everyone in the fast food industry; all workers in the defense industry other than those making nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them, just to show the world we should be left alone (the only meaningful "national defense"); hundreds of other occupations and preoccupations. My guess is that the common estimate that 20% of the people do 80% of everything necessary is not far wrong, so that 80% of everything could be accomplished by about 28 million people (20% of 140 million, the work force) strategically and intelligently placed in American society, and the remaining 20% is probably, after all, not necessary. So 222 million working age Americans are just kind of futzing around pretending to do something necessary that we don't actually need.

I'm serious, actually, and you probably sense I'm not far wrong. Most jobs in Durkheim's world are completely unnecessary, and many of them (when you consider the extreme degradation of the environment, to the point of human nonviability) are positively harmful and dangerous (consider this list from Desdemona Despair, a depresso-blog about ecological catastrophe: www.desdemonadespair.net/2011/12/50-doomiest-stories-of-2011.html). We're living on the edge because of our calamitous overuse of the Earth.

I think this is why we became a "consumer society." There's really not enough to do of an essential nature, so we just make shit up to do and call it "necessary." Thus, when the total jobs number stays stuck for years and years on end, we try to figure out what's "wrong" with the economy. What's wrong with the economy is that it doesn't make any sense to begin with. What we're trying to do, again, is to create the excess wealth within the economy that will allow millions and millions of people to pursue the superfluous and unnecessary occupations they used to have, and we're having a very hard time doing it. For about 30 to 40 years, we did so by leveraging the existing capital stock of the country (debt and mortgaging against bubble prices) to disguise the fact that the economy had run past its actual usefulness.

Thus, if humanity survives (a very iffy proposition), we will do so either along the lines of the Buckminster Fuller fantasy, where the vast majority of people do not work and are maintained in their vital heat by technology and a small cadre of workers, or we will revert to Thoreauvian, generalist competence, abandoning Durkheim's World. Either way, the times they are a-changin'.

And Now the Presidential Race Really Begins!

One must begin somewhere.

"He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. 'This is a dangerous world,' he said for no apparent reason, 'and this cat [Obama] isn't remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you'." Quote attributed to George W. Bush in 2008.

It's 2012 now, a leap year, and thus a Presidential election year. I'm sure we're all on the edge of our seats. The chief protagonists in the drama would appear to the incumbent; Mitt Romney, former merger-and-acquisition hatchet man for Bain Capital; and Ron Paul, a country obstetrician from Texas. If Obama is reelected, nothing will change. If Romney is elected, nothing will change. If Paul is elected, things will change in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

Most liberals actually want Ron Paul to win, without saying so out loud. They go about saying this in different ways, such as announcing confidently that Ron Paul has no chance of securing the Republican nomination, let alone winning the whole shebang. Once you have safely sidelined a candidate, marginalized him out of the Reality Zone, you are then free to speak wistfully about what it would be like if he were actually the President without saying, you know, that you want him to be President. This is how the game is played in our politically correct culture. Ron Paul has some dodgy things on his record concerning white supremacy and abortion, not to mention his unrealistic ideas of trading brain surgery for a dozen eggs, et cetera, and these positions mean that liberals must always be careful not to endorse him. Out loud, that is. Liberals can only support someone who agrees with them on absolutely everything - the slightest deviation from the liberal catechism means the candidate is out. I have observed since my earliest days of familiarity with liberalism, on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley in the Roaring Sixties, that liberal orthodoxy is enforced far more stringently than its conservative counterparts. Everyone must think the same thing about everything.

Still, liberals know that only Ron Paul is saying things that make any sense whatsoever. Liberals realize that Paul is savaged by the Mainstream Media because he threatens their meal ticket, the USA as a colossal empire. America as the Big Deal of the world is the basis of life in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C. The USA can't become France, or something. Thus, Paul is criticized as an "isolationist." Think for a moment about what this means. What other country in the world has 750 military installations worldwide? What other country has been fighting wars in as many as six countries during the last five years? What other country began and maintained two large-scale ground wars halfway around the world with troop commitments in excess of 200,000 soldiers for years at a time? What other developed country spends over two-thirds of its income tax revenue on the military, espionage and security?

It is only because we have become accustomed to the insane that a commonsense idea such as closing all of the foreign bases, bringing all soldiers home and scaling back the defense budget by 25% (all ideas of Ron Paul's) sound so "extreme" and "radical." Naturally, one can see that what is actually extreme and radical is the status quo. A person who argues for the alteration of the insane status quo is criticized as unrealistic and "kooky." Similarly, Ron Paul believes that American citizens should not be assassinated by their own government without presentment of charges and some kind of hearing, at the very least.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are totally fine with American citizens being assassinated by their own government without charges or hearings of any kind. It's the New Normal in America, so it's okay with them. In Barack's case, he might have qualms but I think George W. Bush, bless his heart, had the O Man about right. Obama simply lacks the inner resources to push for anything different, so he goes along with the hyper-conservative flow of modern Imperial Washington. Wherever that leads, secret drone missile attacks on faceless enemies, killing of civilians, assassination of Americans, indefinite detention without trial, it doesn't matter: if this is what the country does now, it's okay with him because it's just way too much trouble to oppose it, and more crucially, people might not think he's tough enough.

Ron Paul doesn't mind being a kook. This is his great strength. I really have no idea what his personal qualities are beyond that, what it would be like if he actually had to govern the country. In that sense, he is the same mystery that Barack Obama presented. What Ron Paul mainly is can be characterized as a series of startling positions that are way out of the mainstream of the dominant Center-Right politics in this country. The other two guys will just float along in the mainstream and change nothing.

Gee, if only Ron Paul had a realistic chance, which of course he doesn't, it would be a tantalizing opportunity to effect real change. Glad I'll never be faced with that choice.

The Tenth Amendment Party, Part 1

In line with the wise dictum that it is better to light candles than to curse the darkness, I propose (modestly enough) a complete and total transformation of the American government.

I hold these truths to be self evident, that we have devolved into a nation dominated by Big Money, with a bought-and-paid-for, bankrupt government, and an imperialist, warmongering foreign policy which serves only the interests of the Military-Industrial Complex, precisely as foretold by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address; that the nation is dedicated and consecrated to the mindless and profligate waste of energy, that it is environmentally obtuse; that it has subjugated the legitimate needs of its populace for good jobs and decent educations to the demands of Big Business, the Empire, and the banking cartel; in short, that we have become a degenerate and profoundly undemocratic nation.

In other words, things need to change. Strangely enough, the means of change are plainly and obviously at hand: adherence to the Constitution of the United States of America, as brought up to date to reflect the quantitative and qualitative changes in the body politic since the adoption of the Constitution in 1789.

To bring the Constitution up to date, we need to do the following:

1. Change the provisions relating to the Executive Branch (Article 2) to eliminate the (indirect) election of the President through the college of electors. Instead of a President elected on a nationwide basis, we will switch to a leadership system modeled on parliamentary systems; to wit, the President will be elected by the single (unicameral) House members from among their own number (primus inter pares, as in Great Britain). The Senate will be abolished; its existing members can be transferred directly to an assisted living facility in Virginia, where the senile among them (most of them at this point), can be installed in a mock-up of the Capitol building where they can gas on till their final days, complimenting each other and passing "laws" designed to destroy the civil rights of the American commoners. They will never notice the difference.

This change in election method will preserve the great legacy of President Barack Obama. He will forever be remembered in American history as the chief executive who finally broke the back of the electoral system. Americans simply gave up after Obama; he was "the End of the Hope for Change" (h/t: Barley). A man engendering such profound, inimitable, life-altering disappointment in his former supporters that they became ready for something that would really work, instead of an electoral system based completely on Madison Avenue techniques. It is no small thing, Mr. Obama, to be the historical figure who prepared the American people for a return to a Constitutional form of government. Your caving in, your sell-outs, your abandonment of principles, your 180 degree reversals on virtually everything - none of this needs to be in vain. Thank you, Mr. President.

2. The new House of Representatives will consist of about 1,000 delegates, elected from districts among the states on a "one person, one vote" basis, to the extent this can be devised. The powers of the House (or Parliament) will be strictly limited to those enumerated in Article One of the Constitution. This is an extensive list, but the abuses of general language (particularly the Commerce Clause) will be rolled back by legislation in the form of a Constitutional Amendment so that power is reallocated to the states and local government wherever possible to diminish the encroachment of the central state on local sovereignty. This will probably be the main work of the new Constitutional Convention.

3. The 16th Amendment (passed in 1913) will be rescinded, eliminating the national income tax. Instead, the new central government, with its vastly curtailed functions, will be financed as it was during the first 124 years of the Republic, mainly through tariffs on imports and excise taxes. If it is considered necessary to supplement the income of the federal government in order to maintain a decent defense, a value added tax (which does not interfere with the right of states to levy sales taxes, a main source of revenue at the local level) should be added.

In my next manifesto, I will go through the Article One powers of the House and demonstrate (a) how easy the changes actually are (and how wise the Founding Fathers were) and (b) how far over the line the central government has gone with its ceaseless expansion and endless meddling into local governance.

Ron Paul as the Nemesis of Big Government Liberals Everywhere

Yes, I am aware that Dr. Paul, as with many "purists," sometimes ventures into the realm of the completely fanciful and unrealistic. For example, in one of the Republican "debates," he argued against any form of socialized medicine and suggested that "private charity" might fill in the (gaping) hole left in access to medical care if we repealed Medicare/Medicaid, as if a person with a treatable form of cancer, e.g., might rely on the kindness of strangers to get him through his rough patch, and that such a paradigm is an acceptable substitute for an actual health care system. Maybe Dr. Paul (who is 76 and from Texas) can remember the days of trading a pig for an appendectomy, or something like that, but I don't think his idea is practical in modern times.

Does that mean that Medicare is practical? This is where Ron Paul is pretty indispensable to the national debate. Nobody else really says the stuff that he says. If the federal government has devolved into a huge "insurance company with an army," Ron Paul is the one guy who is willing to point out the absurdity of centralizing so much power into a remote, inefficient bureaucracy, financed by the money-hallucinating machine of the Federal Reserve. It is in this larger context that his philosophy has to be assessed.

Big Government Liberals (Paul Krugman, for example) see Ron Paul as a huge threat, and mercilessly belittle what they describe as Paul's lack of realism, or ignorance about modern economic theory. For the power of the Big Government Liberal depends upon the continuing reliance on the federal government to solve all problems, both national and local, even if there is no serious doubt anymore that the federal government cannot afford nearly half the things it is attempting to do (it can afford about 58%, in point of fact).

In a conversation recently with the Distinguished Professor of a Great Southwestern University, I adumbrated my view that the recent piece of atrocious legislation passed by the Senate, the Let's Throw Americans in A Dungeon Act, was actually a kind of desperate job-justification attempt; to wit, The Insurance Company With An Army (TICWAA) needs to justify that huge Pentagon expenditure (around $700 billion) that was passed along with the Dungeon Act, and formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act (all these grand names are another clue - this used to be called simply budget appropriations). Thus, even if terrorist attacks in the United States are a very, very minor cause of death compared to...well, just about anything else, but certainly compared to disease and auto accidents, Congress is not going to be able to lavish $700 billion on itself, and thus place itself in a position to dole out huge favors to military-connected contractors and lobbyists, by talking about auto safety or the obesity epidemic.

So the trick is to make the world seem as dangerous as humanly possible, to portray America as under siege, and the one resonant means for doing so is Terrorism, because while North Korea might be a bigger problem, we're not going to do anything about North Korea except hope the situation gets better, somehow. Terrorism works because of 9-11; without 9-11, all of this constant emphasis on Authorizations for Use of Military Force, and invasions of Muslim countries year-by-year, would seem like the obvious insanity it obviously is.

Thus, Congress has made a theme out of 9/11. 9/11 is the core of the Congressional Mission Statement. Congress just can't get enough of 9/11. As a realistic matter, it's the best thing that ever happened to the modern Congress. TICWAA really has nothing else. Congress does not want the American people to keep looking over there at the mustachioed clown behind the curtain.

If we consider how the Founding Fathers really saw things happening, the federal government was supposed to do things that the "several states" delegated to the central authority. These were logical functions: defending the national borders (an army and control of immigration); relations among the states (border disputes and interstate commerce); bankruptcy (to make uniform the discharge of debt across state lines); and maritime law, which follows naturally from defense, immigration and border issues. As I've written previously (sometimes to a chorus of boos), Big Government Liberalism came into favor because it reined in the injustices of the Southern States. It did this twice, the Civil War (to the extent the War was about slavery, which is not very extensive according to Leon Litwack, Professor Emeritus of the University of California and perhaps the leading Civil War scholar in the country), and the Civil Rights Movement. This is where Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, goes off the rails when he follows his father into excessive "purism" and argues that a motel in Kentucky ought to be able to send the nice Negro family on down the road to an establishment that caters to their kind. (There is nothing wrong with enforcing Equal Protection by the federal government; that's one of its good functions.)

But in order to assure ourselves of this beneficent function of the feds, we have given away too much sovereignty which should have remained local, as the Tenth Amendment states and as the True Liberal, Thomas Jefferson, intended. Under the guise of national security, we have allowed ourselves to slide into a police state, among other problems. And for what? So the TICWAA can recycle money generated by the citizens of the several states into two big liberal programs, Social Security and Medicare, while Congress pockets the Fun Money, the trillion or so for the military, the homeland security apparatus, and spy agencies (increasingly used to spy on Americans). The "liberals" in Congress are just as much in favor of this state of affairs as the so-called Conservatives, because their power depends on it. Liberals and Conservatives alike love to inculcate in Americans a sense of dependency, and that dependency is based entirely on fear, because Americans, in point of fact, positively loathe Congress.

Now we are beginning to see the failure of these centralized programs because of the inexorable rules of Complexity Theory - the marginal dis-utility of piling on ever greater levels of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic control. No one, and certainly not the average American voter, can figure out how the whole Rube Goldberg contraption even works anymore. Thus, democracy becomes meaningless, other than as a once-every-two-years convulsion of revulsion where the bums are thrown out in favor of new bums.

Underlying the whole mess is the simple question: if that's all the TICWAA does, recycles money from the states in inefficient programs and spends money far in excess of what's necessary on defense and security, why do we even have this system? That's what Ron Paul is actually saying. That is his context. He argues for closing ALL foreign military bases. For ending ALL foreign wars. For returning power to the states and localities to handle state and local issues. For abolishing the federal income tax so that local revenue is retained to deal with local government problems.

You can see why he is hated and reviled by Big Government Liberals and Conservative alike. Whoever heard of anyone in national politics actually saying all of these things out loud? He must be a kook. We'd better dig up some of those old videos about abortion and civil rights. This asshole is getting a little too close to home.

Will the President Kill You?

Things are getting a little hysterical these days. Take this appearance on CNN by law professor Jonathan Turley, wherein he states:

It's even worse than coming into your house. President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he's satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States.

I will not quibble with Jonathan's summary of the President's powers, which the President first arrogated unto himself before noted liberal Carl Levin of the Senate helped him along by codifying our right of "self defense" against a broader array of terrorists, or "associated forces" of terrorists, or people in general who might "substantially support" "associated forces" of terrorists (or the Taliban - I'm not technically sure that they are "terrorists;" it's possible they are an indigenous people resisting a foreign invasion, but I hasten to add that I do not support, substantially or otherwise, the right of indigenous people to defend themselves against any invaders when those invaders are Americans, because then those indigenous terrorists are acting contrary to our right of self defense, which is why we undertook the invasion of their country in the first place).

Anyway, note the qualifying language: if he's satisfied you are a terrorist. All these so-called experts make it sound so arbitrary. He has to be satisfied first that you are a terrorist. Granted, as Congress keeps broadening the categories of those against whom the President is empowered to take action under various Authorizations for Use of Military Force, the definition of "terrorist" keeps expanding. In a sense, this might seem surprising, here in the waning days of 2011. Bin Laden is dead, the government tells us Al Qaeda has been rendered essentially "inoperative," it's been over a decade since any kind of serious terrorist attack occurred here in the Homeland (the "Homeland" being what we used to call "America.") I know that in our culture we equate sequence with causation (we try, whenever possible, to avoid statistical rigor in our public discourse); thus, if there have been no major terrorist attacks (other than the many instances of mass murder on campuses, at 7-11 stores, various other venues in Shooting Gallery America, but those don't count unless there is a kind of Muslim/political connection to the mayhem), we assume it is because of the War on Terror. It's true, of course, that about 8 years passed between the first, half-assed attack on the World Trade Center in 2003 and 9/11, and those years of calm cannot be ascribed to a Department of Homeland Security or War on Terror that didn't exist yet, but, you know...what the hell's the point of all this logic?

It's actually easy not to be a Terrorist, after all. I don't know what criteria the President uses to "satisfy" himself that someone is a Terrorist (and no criteria are published or even exist, for all I know), but I have a hunch that if you just shut up, vote for one of the two major parties, and stay away from Occupy demonstrations, or Tea Party gatherings - you know, just don't cause any goddam trouble - the President will be satisfied that you're not a Terrorist, and the odds of your being assassinated are probably less than being killed by a lightning strike. If you live on a golf course in the Dallas area between the months of April and October. Even if the 5th Amendment and Due Process have been repealed, let me ask you this question: if you're not guilty, why do you even care about the 5th Amendment? Will anyone accuse you of anything (thus activating your need to invoke Due Process) if you haven't done anything at all? Okay, someone might, but I don't see how that's the point. Let me rephrase that: yes, it is the point, that's exactly when you wish you had some process for determining your guilt, when you're not guilty and someone accuses you of something, but in order to be safe from those once-a-decade attacks (they don't really occur that often, but for the sake of argument), we should certainly be willing to tolerate the occasional, mysterious annihilation of Americans who behaved in ways that satisfied the President they were doing something covered by one of the new vague standards of terroristy things. Surely that's exactly what John Adams had in mind.

Anyway, Winston Smith came around to seeing things that way, but why go through all the miseries of his learning experience?