The Supremes & the AZ Immigration Law

I will be as interested as the next blogger when the Supreme Court delivers its decision on Obamacare tomorrow.  The court certainly has developed a keen sense of drama, waiting till the last day of the current session to drop the Big One.  The decision on the Arizona immigration law was clearly intended as a teaser, a preview of coming events.

While the liberal commentators have spun the immigration decision as a stunning victory for Obama, it was in reality nothing of the sort.  Those parts of the law which were overturned were clearly "preemptive" of federal law on the same issues (penalties for working in the United States while an illegal immigrant), and that is a normal basis for finding state overreach.  Immigration is supposed to be a federal issue, after all, although in modern times it is simply a political football at the federal level.  Conservatives favor loose immigration laws because they like the effects of cheap labor on production, both directly and on the cost of American labor.  Liberals like loose immigration laws because it feels generally good to be "humane" and compassionate and because courting the Hispanic vote tends to give the Democrats a competitive edge over the heartless Republicans.

I suspect the motivation of the Arizona legislature was more basic, and not really governed by either of these federal electoral considerations (everything at the federal level is simply game-playing at this late, decadent point in our country's history).   Namely, I think Arizona's motivation (and that of the other "Red" states which have passed similar laws) is territorial, in the atavistic, reptilian sense.  They're invading us! The part of the law that survived is the only part that mattered - the duty of the local constabulary to ascertain whether a person lawfully stopped for an offense unrelated to immigration status (coasting through a stop sign, for example) is or is not an American citizen where "reasonable grounds" exist to suspect the person is not in the country legally. 

How might those "reasonable grounds" manifest themselves?  It is on this point that "Godwin's Law" ("As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.") usually raises its ugly, Death Skull head.  Asking "for papers" is what the Gestapo used to do, or what the French gendarmes did in the opening scenes of "Casablanca" when they rounded up the usual suspects.  Well, think about it: the police always ask "for papers" when they stop you for a traffic offense: license, registration and proof of insurance.  Like duh.  Suppose you don't have a license, or your car is registered in Matamoros if at all, or the license doesn't match the registration, or the registration is five years out of date.  Or the stopped driver is unable to describe with any convincing particularity where he lives.  And so forth.  One question leads to another and it is ultimately determined that in addition to coasting through a stop sign, the driver is in the country illegally.  By the same token, a driver who coasts through stop sign might have alcohol on his breath, and the next thing you know, he's trying to walk a straight line while juggling three tennis balls and reciting the alphabet backwards.  Or why the cops can ask whether that's oregano in that plastic baggie you were too stoned to remember you left lying on the back seat.  That's why the Supreme Court voted unanimously (liberals and conservatives alike) to uphold this part of the Arizona law.  It's "black letter" law. The police can follow up "reasonable suspicions" that arise after the traffic stop (or any other crime).  The only controversial thing about the Arizona law is that the legislature did it, whereas a state with entrenched liberal politics, such as California, would never dream of such a thing.

The truth of the matter is that the "privacy" or "equal protection" arguments are all red herrings at this point.  There is no privacy in American life; we all know that.  If we had actually cared about privacy, we would have paid attention to the massive illegal wiretapping begun under the Bush Adminstration and continued enthusiastically by Obama.  The Fourth Amendment is dead and buried, the result of the extreme passivity of the citizenry and the hopeless complexity of American political life in general (as in, who has the luxury of time to think about stuff like civil liberties?  Is that something I should be worried about?).  By training a temporary, laser focus on an issue like the "stop and ask" law in Arizona, the law can be given an outsized, disproportionate importance it does not really merit.  The Arizona immigration law is not going to transform the United States into a "police state."  The United States is already well on its way.  The President has the power, which no one is apparently worried about, to have an American citizen assassinated based on secret, subjective criteria.  Yet we're supposed to get all worked up if Alberto has to prove that he's in the United States legally?

The legal reality is that there is nothing unconstitutional about determining whether someone is in the United States legally.  The "parade of horribles" used to deny this truth (the tendency toward proving Godwin's Law, in other words) is simply electoral politics, the meta-reality that now determines all matters of national policy, to the exclusion of all considerations legal, constitutional or environmental (such as the right of a given polity to control its population and rationally plan its use of resources and tax revenues).  All such rationality was long ago lost in the electronic cacophony of our daily discourse.

The Conservative Supremes wanted to zing Obama, and they did.  That's all that will come of this.  Th net effect of the AZ law is that civil rights lawsuits by illegal immigrants will be somewhat curtailed in federal court in Phoenix - that is, the cops had the right to ask, so next case, please.  The next zinger will come with tomorrow's decision on the "individual mandate," which might actually have an effect on the Commerce Clause, that Legal Swiss Army Knife which has caused so much loss of local autonomy in America.  Although the Supreme Court, a federal institution, might think twice about decentralizing power and surprise even this attentive blogger.

Blogging in the Post-Dilworth Era

Please excuse the recent hiatus.  It was nothing personal.

I would note that since I read Craig Dilworth's Too Smart For Our Own Good, I find it a little harder to come up with interesting topics, or, to put it another way, topics which actually interest me.  I suppose this is because, despite my self image as an Aware Dude, I had never really focused on just how utterly hopeless the problem of human overpopulation actually was.  Talk about overlooking elephants.

As the result of this "revelation," it has become somewhat harder to get wrapped up in such topics du jour as the "Eurocrisis," for example, which seem merely like passing ripples on a broad stretch of ocean.  Financial imbalances can always work themselves out, usually through violent revolution.  If you think of the natural progression of capitalism or tyranny, it always goes the same way: money tends to shift toward elites; they take steps to preserve their relative advantages, through monopolies and political influence; a broad class of the dispossessed is created; the dispossessed (the Wretched of the Earth, as Franz Fanon called them) tire of the inequality and begin stringing up, decapitating and shooting the elites.  Thus, in no particular order:  the American Revolution (taxation without representation), the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Cuban Revolution of 1959. 

An alternative path, if the elites choose to keep their heads firmly attached to their bodies, is to engage in the kind of Debt Jubilee that the renegade Australian economist Steve Keen has proposed.  This alleviates the debt peonage of the great unwashed masses and allows a fresh start for the economy; however, it comes at a high price for those in the advantageous positions in the current society, namely, those whose wealth is measured by the debt of others (banks, for example).  Thus, the Power Elite are currently in the process of doing everything they can to protect the privileged positions of the banking cartels, particularly in the United States and Europe.  Europe has gone so far as to depose the elected leaders of Greece and Italy and to replace them with hand-picked puppets from the banking industry, in bloodless (so far) coups without even the trappings of democracy.  I would say we are much closer to the end game of such desperate self-preservation than we are to the beginning, and I would expect the violence to start (but not to end) in Europe first, since they have a long tradition of working things out through war and revolution.

But as I say, at base all of these things are simply problems of the phony world of economics, where the "representation" of wealth (money) can now be electronically generated at will by central banks in crazy attempts to sustain a doomed status quo.  One can also add an extra hour to the day by turning the clock back when it's the season for Standard Time again, but how many days in a row can you do that before you're back where you started?  (I can add that metaphor, I guess, to the Yossarian Bomb Line Metaphor, which remains my favorite.)

One interesting matter of perspective: I happened to turn on C-Span the other morning and there was Senator John Kerry (immaculately dressed, by the way) delivering a long lecture on global warming.  As you might imagine, an address to such an archaic, imbecilic body took the usual form of trying to convince the rest of the Senate that global warming was a problem and not a hoax.  That's a measure of our progress on this life-and-death issue.  It can't hold a candle, of course, to the news coverage received by Moody's downgrades of Spanish banks, which holds the financial world's rapt attention.  There will come a day, of course, when global warming will cast the same sort of spell, when the problem is as immediate as the pension crisis in Greece, but the problem is that while the pension crisis in Greece can be alleviated for a while by firing up the printing press at the European Central Bank, by the time we pay attention to global warming, we will probably be about two decades too late.

As I say: I'm one to talk, having just realized that human beings number about 7 billion (and with the obesity epidemic, the number is actually functionally much higher in terms of total biomass effect) where natural balance might support about one million Homo sapiens.  A prodigiously self-destructive species, with a very short attention span, unable to prioritize, and motivated primarily by avarice.  The Earth is certainly going to miss us.

Public Service Announcement

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Gonorrhea+close+being+untreatable/6743424/story.html

Please feel free to use the following mood music as a soundtrack while reading:

It's interesting that no reported cases of untreatable clap have yet been reported in the United States. I think I have an explanation for this fortunate exception to the epidemic.  Bacterial resistance to antibiotics depends upon mutation, the fundamental concept involved in evolution.  Since evolution does not exist in the United States, it's fairly clear that drug-resistant gonorrhea cannot develop here, whereas the tenacious bugs are running wild in most of the godless regions of the world.  I'd like to hear some left-leaning scientist deal with that.

The Yossarian Bomb Line Economy

I think I prefer this metaphor to "Cargo Cult Economy."  Plus, I just never get tired of quoting Joseph Heller:

"All through the day, they looked at the bomb line on the big, wobbling easel map of Italy that blew over in the wind and was dragged in under the awning of the intelligence tent every time the rain began. The bomb line was a scarlet band of narrow satin ribbon that delineated the forward most position of the Allied ground forces in every sector of the Italian mainland.
"For hours they stared relentlessly at the scarlet ribbon on the map and hated it because it would not move up high enough to encompass the city.

"When night fell, they congregated in the darkness with flashlights, continuing their macabre vigil at the bomb line in brooding entreaty as though hoping to move the ribbon up by the collective weight of their sullen prayers. "I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe that we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of the night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

"In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The financial Big Cheese are awaiting word from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on whether he will announce another round of Quantitative Easing or Large Scale Asset Purchases or Pulling Cash Out of His Asshole and Calling It Money.  If he makes such an announcement, or hints that he will, then the stock market will probably head northward again.  It's really that easy.  The economic indicators in the United States are beginning to soften and ooze again, and the temptation to give the economy a jolt must be overpowering, given how simple the process is.  The Fed merely has to use its "transmission mechanism" for introducing electronically generated money into the economy.  It does this by buying up preexisting assets which are in the hands of big financial players, mainly the Primary Dealers holding large stakes of Treasury bonds or mortgage-backed securities which are guaranteed by one of the federal agencies (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA).

Since 2009 when the Fed began this process of hitting "Ctrl-P" on the computer in Ben Bernanke's office, the Fed has generated about $2.2 trillion in new money, swelling its balance sheet from about $800 billion pre-crisis to its current size, just under $3 trillion.  The Federal Reserve has become the largest Treasury holder in the world through this process, larger than China, Japan or the United Kingdom.  When you eliminate the intervening step of Primary Dealer purchase of Treasuries at auction (which precedes the Fed's action in taking the Treasuries off the PD's hands), the entire caper looks suspiciously like a way for the United States to buy its own debt.

All of this has leaked into the general consciousness of anyone with an IQ, say, one standard deviation above baseline normal who pays any attention to any of this.  This general awareness is itself something of a problem.  John Kenneth Galbraith described the dilemma perfectly in 1975:

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.” 

All of the talk about "Quantitative Easing" (this is surely an excellent example of Orwellian euphemism) has raised the visibility of the Fed's money creation to a squirmingly obvious level.  Bernanke's real rationale for injecting money into the economy through QE is to elevate the stock market.  He is aware that QE and the concomitant process (which is related to QE) of keeping interest rates artificially, grindingly low has the negative effect of punishing savers, who can't make any money on their nest eggs without, in effect, going head to head against the High Frequency Trading Robots of Wall Street and their rigged casino.  I think that Bernanke is sorry about this (because he's a decent man, really, and not the "Chairsatan" of popular libertarian lore),  but he's a one-armed wallpaper hanger in a basketball court-sized room who has long strips of paper peeling off and burying him under a serpentine pile as he rushes from wall to wall trying to keep the whole thing together.

Bernanke chose the stock market because it gives him leverage in a way that interest rates alone do not.  He knows the housing market is a lost cause.  It isn't coming back to 2006 levels unless we move into hyperinflation.  But the stock market is the bubble tenuously keeping aloft the public and private pension funds in America, the insurance investments which allow the payment of annuities and claims to policyholders, and all the other funds, foundations and endowments which rely completely on high rates of return (in the vicinity of 7-8%) for their very viability.  There is no way to get such returns on conservative investments in a worldwide moribund economy.  Only the casino players can generate such out-of-this-world income, and they need juice, Bernanke's Juice, to do so.

If the stock market goes, the game is up.  All of the pensions, public and private, will head toward complete insolvency as they use up the corpus (the capital invested, not the return) to pay current beneficiaries the money promised.  Insurance companies, even the casualty companies writing auto liability, will have to jack their premiums to the moon in order to remain in business.  They will face the same problem which the health insurers already face.  Homeowner's insurance, long term care, disability policies - all will face the same fate: a pool of money with no place to invest the funds to earn a decent return, essential to their actuarial reality.

So the Wall Street Players stare at the Bomb Map of Finance.  And one night soon, in the wee hours, Bernanke will knock on wood, cross his fingers and tiptoe out of his office to move the Bomb Line up over Bologna.

Saturday Morning Essay: A Presidential Misstatement, Or More Truth Is Said In Error

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Roast...

"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"  - John "Bluto" Blutarsky, in the course of a rousing speech to his frat brothers in "Animal House" (1978).

"Obama on Tuesday used the expression "a Polish death camp" while honoring a Polish World War II resistance hero rather than wording that would have made clear that he meant a death camp that Nazi Germany operated on Polish soil during its wartime occupation of Poland."  AP, May 30.

Well, sure.  Obama blew it, and without the galvanizing effect of John Blutarsky, who also erred but, as Otter said to a frat brother who sought to correct Bluto, "he's rolling."  President Obama is the first president than whom I am older.  I think I've got that grammar right.  I am about 1/2 generation ahead of the O Man, reckoning as we used to that a generation is 25 years or so. (Among younger Americans of my demographic, I think a generation is currently never.)  Obama is a full-scale member of the TV generation, that first cohort in American history who grew up, in an undiluted way, under the influence of the tube.  My generation was about 50/50.  We watched TV, but we also got a lot of information from reading material.  If Jerry Mander was right in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (he was, of course), you don't really absorb information you consume by way of video images in the same way you do with the linear process of reading.  This is probably why many Americans, perhaps a majority, cannot find the United States on a map of North America.  It just never sunk in.

Early in his presidential tenure, Mr. Obama sought to alleviate the embarrassment of an Austrian struggling with English at a conference by saying that he (Mr. Obama) "did not speak Austrian, either."  This was gracious, if somewhat imbecilic.  Compared to this gaffe, the Polish death camp faux pas is minor league.  And in any case, the death camps (Auschwitz, Treblinka, several others) were in fact located in Poland, so the statement is not exactly incorrect.  One might wonder, indeed, why the Polish President Komorowski is so damn sensitive to a "misinterpretation" of what Mr. Obama said, when it's so obvious what Obama meant. 

Especially when you consider that Mr. Obama had taken time out from a busy day of largely ceremonial exercises in statecraft to give a posthumous Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a Polish (and Catholic) resistance fighter who allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto so he could be sent to a Polish, er, Nazi death camp and report on what he observed.  Somehow he managed to get out of the camp and brought news back to the West about Jewish extermination, er, Nazi extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka and elsewhere.  When the news reached FDR, Roosevelt realized that the Germans had succeeded where FDR's quotas on Jewish participation in the professions in New York had failed, and he did nothing about Karski's revelations.

Still, it's never too late to do the right thing, so someone told Obama that it would be a good idea, if we want continued Polish cooperation with missile defense against Russia, er, Iran, to recognize the magnificent futility of Jan Karski's heroism in risking his life against unimaginable odds to get the news to an anti-Semitic, anti-American-Japanese, anti-everybody-except-East-Coast-WASPS President. 

It was all perfect until Mr. Obama called them "Polish death camps," and then the Polish front office got nervous and touchy again, because while it's true that Poland was a "logical" place for the Nazis to set up their death factories (3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before the war, Poland was away from Eastern and Western Fronts, Poland had a functioning rail network, et cetera), logistics weren't the only consideration.  It helps to have a sympathetic local population for such a barbarous undertaking. Couldn't that be true as well?  Does a wild Polish Pope shit in the woods?

Thanks, Doc, for all the pickin'

With Doc Watson in the house, who needed a fiddler?  His flowing style reminded me of fast-moving water headed down a rocky stream bed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK3xkLtqo7g

The Mad Tin Foil Hatter, 2

What do the following Congressional, Executive and Judicial actions have in common?

1.  The George Bush/Henry Paulson TARP bailout of Wall Street casinos.

2.  The specific legislative proscription of Medicare's ability to engage in bulk purchase discounts with America's pharmaceutical companies.

3.  The 2005 Bankruptcy reform act which protected credit card companies and banks against the previous unqualified right of individual citizens to declare bankruptcy when they became insolvent.

4.  The inability of students to discharge in bankruptcy loans taken on to finance their educations at America's overpriced colleges and universities.

5.  Agricultural subsidies paid out to monoculture Big Ag, particularly corn and soybean growers, and the "food pyramid" of the Department of Agriculture recommending a "balanced diet" designed to fatten and finally finish off America's vast hordes of grossly obese citizens.

6.  The 10 to one price discrepancy between American pharmaceuticals purchased in America and American drugs purchased just across the border in Canada, with the concomitant illegality of "re-importation" of American drugs into America because of "safety concerns."

7.  Wars of choice against various Muslim countries with no discernible connection to any threat to the United States.

8.  The Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) of the Federal Reserve, apparently now a permanent fixture of American finance, which makes it impossible for America's retired citizens to achieve any sort of reasonable return on life savings without gambling on a manipulated stock market.

9.  The Citizens United case handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, guaranteeing continued corporate ownership of the electoral process.

10. Senator Dick Durbin's statement, in reference to the Senate:  "Frankly, the banks own this place."

Admittedly, #10 kind of dispels some of the mystery.  The overriding point is this:  the federal government does not exist, and does not function, for the general welfare of the American commoner any longer.  This conclusion was made perhaps most elegantly in Sheldon Wolin's book, Democracy, Inc., with its subtitled reference to "inverted totalitarianism."  Professor Wolin (Berkeley, Princeton), in using this description, was distinguishing the American form of tyranny from the Soviet system, where the state owned the means of production (socialist ownership of the economy) and from the Fascist system (derived, as Mussolini told us, from "fascia," meaning tissue) where private ownership of business exists, but the private economy is nevertheless under the effective control of the central state.

In America we've come up with something different.  Using the exigencies of globalism as a pretext and rationale for unfettered growth of monopolies and cartels in big business (we have to let our big companies compete on the world stage, after all, and many foreign multinational companies, as in China, are merely extensions of the central government), America's big multinationals and monopolies have achieved a power and dominance such that they effectively own the government.

Obviously, all of this is achieved through money and its corrupting influence on the political electoral process.  The rationale behind each of the nine federal enactments or decisions in the list above is that each serves the interests of Big Business, at the expense of the individual American citizen.  These federal actions are fully bipartisan.  Senator Joe Biden, for example, was one of the prime movers behind the Bankruptcy "Reform" Act; many financial companies use the corporate Reno of Delaware (Biden's home state) as their state of domicile, simply because of the favorable (read: lax) corporate environment provided.

Thus, I think the "conspiracy theories" that matter in American life are not complicated mysteries concerning how a TWA flight went down near Long Island, or whether Elvis is alive and working for the CIA.  They're right out in the open, and the "mechanism" of the conspiracy is very simple: a recognition of commonality of interest among America's big businesses and the federal government which serves them. 

The needs of Big Business are simple:  low tax rates; lax regulation; the absence of any effective criminal prosecution to rein in the excesses of the financial industry;  and, to the extent that money paid into the federal government (or, increasingly, "borrowed" from the Federal Reserve) is not wasted on senseless boondoggles like Social Security and Medicare, an "investment" in the military-industrial complex, which requires endless, meaningless wars in order to keep the populace frightened and the money flowing to the Pentagon and defense contractors.  Congress and the Executive Branch provide all of this and more.

It's instructive that Senator Russ Feingold, formerly a Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, prided himself on his ability to run campaigns financed almost entirely by contributions from individual supporters.  He was in many respects the conscience of the Senate, a legislator who actually sought to hold George W. Bush accountable, for example, for the many felonies committed by the Bush White House in its serial FISA violations (illegal wiretapping).  Feingold attracted the support, I believe, of precisely three other Senators for his censure motion.  It was not a popular move in that bank-owned institution, and it's certainly significant that Feingold was defeated in a recent election.  He didn't play ball, and he paid the price.

Mad Tin Foil Hatter, Part One

As I recall from my law school days, a criminal conspiracy is essentially an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime, accompanied by at least one "overt act" in furtherance of the plan.  Thus, for example, if Sluggo and Rico are knocking back the muscatel in an alley somewhere and realize, in an unclouded area of one of their brains, that they've run out of money, they might hatch a scheme to knock over the local 7-11 in order to refinance their operation and continue with their lifestyle, which consists of drinking muscatel in an alley and finding creative places to urinate where they won't be arrested.  Unlike lower mammalian forms, human life is not always ennobling.

The law school exam "issue" (which you're supposed to "spot") is that no crime has been committed yet. So far we just have two derelicts talking about robbing a convenience store, an activity protected by our precious (if fast disappearing) Freedom of Speech.  However, Sluggo, who is resourceful when an acute shortage of muscatel presents itself, remembers that his pal Yerzy has a .38 revolver which could help with the heist, and he and Rico stagger over to Yerzy's to borrow the gun.  They brag to Yerzy about their plan, in their incoherent, brain-damaged way, not realizing that Yerzy acquired the policeman's special .38 revolver from an actual policeman, on account Yerzy is a snitch on the payroll of the local fuzz.  As soon as Rico and Sluggo stagger off, Yerzy calls the cops.  They sweep in and make the bust as S & R approach the unwitting Pakistani behind the counter at the 7-11.

Question: has a crime been committed?  Well, yeah.  Sluggo and Rico don't actually have to rob the store to be guilty of a conspiracy to commit armed robbery, a felony.  There was an agreement and the overt act of borrowing a snitch's revolver to use in the scheme.  Sluggo and Rico cop to a year in the local pen, although Sluggo dies of the DTs while awaiting sentencing.

So much for the formal, legal meaning of conspiracy.

We live in a society that is now rife with conspiracy theories of a different kind.  Such theories tend to abound, I believe, when conditions of life become excessively complex and incomprehensible.  It becomes a great challenge, requiring prodigious exercises of the intellect, to discern any reason at all why things happen the way they do in modern American life.  As more and more power becomes concentrated in distant seats of government or non-governmental, financial authorities (Washington, D.C., the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve), the individual citizen becomes simply a passive pawn in the digitized, hyper-reality of a confusing technocratic state, casting votes in a haphazard, more or less random way for either Republican or Democratic imagery.

Leading to questions such as: just what the hell is going on?  The esteemed Dimitry Orlov allowed himself a little conspiracy theory, subtly expressed, in one of his recent posts, where he was writing about "skyscraper theory" (the idea that skyscrapers tend to be built in increasing numbers just before financial crashes, citing a theorist who linked the two through interest rate analysis).  Dimitry had this to say about the demolition of skyscrapers:

The prospect of collapse is built right into the very concept of the skyscraper. The best case scenario of a controlled demolition requires explosive charges and electronic sensors to be placed in key areas all along its steel frame. The explosions must be triggered in a specific sequence, precise to the millisecond and dynamically adjusted by a computer so as to steer the accumulating avalanche of rubble into the footprint of the skyscraper's basement, to be excavated using heavy machinery once the entire mass stops burning and cools down. Without such precise and active control, things are guaranteed to go sideways because errors multiply rather than cancel. The idea that a skyscraper can collapse down into its own footprint by itself has been disproved by every generation of little children who played with stacking up blocks and knocking them down: the blocks don't land on top of each other in an neat little pile; they scatter all over the living room floor. The worst case scenario is that the entire structure will eventually start to lean a bit, then a bit more, and eventually topple, forming a trench forced with twisted steel. Where the skyscrapers are packed close together, as they are in the many “downtowns” where skyscrapers are to be found, there is a chance of a domino effect, with one skyscraper knocking down others in a chain reaction.

I think I see what he's getting at, and so do you.  This is one kind of "conspiracy theory," one that I personally do not place much credence in.  There were many eyewitnesses to the two airliners hitting the World Trade Center towers, were there not?  To accept this kind of conspiracy theory, you have to believe that there was considerable planning involving the 9/11 terrorists, who were allowed to hijack planes and fly them to lower Manhattan, and domestic authorities who rigged the towers to blow, killing many people including New York fire and police.  Thus, in this scenario the Arabs provided a false flag diversion, making it appear that the airplanes were the proximate cause of collapse, but their nefarious American co-conspirators didn't quite have the heart to rig the building to fall down haphazardly, risking an utter catastrophe, as Orlov describes.

Yeah, I know:  No Arab-piloted plane hit World Trade Building 7, and it fell down too.  Was a plane supposed to have hit it?  Nevertheless, is the example provided by "experiments" by children with blocks actually transferable to buildings made of structural steel where the upper floors (weakened by burning jet fuel and damaged directly by impact) pancake onto the floors below?  I'm not so sure about that at all.  The design flaw of the twin towers, according to the engineer who built them, was that the internal, horizontal members were light and susceptible to failure, compared especially to the heavy strength of the vertical elements.  This might explain the "controlled" nature of the collapse.

This kind of conspiracy theory highlights the difficulty of actually knowing anything about anything that happens outside the range of one's own percipient faculties.  One is left with the banal common sense of saying things such as, well, if a conspiracy had been involved, wouldn't someone have divulged something, anything by now about how it was carried out?  It would take so many people to plan it and put the scheme into operation.  This is no Sluggo & Rico caper.  By and large, I think such criticisms are valid, and I use this approach for Reality Navigation in my own life.

Without being 100% sure.  Yet I do think that most of American life is in fact now controlled by conspiracies of agreed interests, which operate on a different basis and for different purposes. More on that subsequently.

"Weight of the Nation," en revista

I have watched, seriatim and in bits and pieces, HBO's multi-part documentary "The Weight of the Nation" about the American obesity epidemic.  It's very poorly done: superficial, misleading, stupid.

As a Neo-Caveman interested in the general subject of weight maintenance, and having read some of the seminal books on the somewhat shopworn (at this point) topic of American fatness, I have come away with the basic impression that the problem is not really all that hard to understand.  HBO uses the Talking Faces approach to the documentary, and we hear from school administrators, doctors, obesity experts from various prestigious universities (Yale, in particular), and, of course, Congressional panels.  The language used to describe the problem is mostly bureaucratic and confusing: we need a "multi-disciplinary, multi-modal" approach to this perplexing problem of fat people that have emerged from the American landscape over the last thirty years like a monster crop of oversized pumpkins ripening in October.

Meanwhile, the documentary shows many clips of kids zonked out in an easy chair pushing buttons on the remote controllers of World At War and many other video games, hear from school administrators who lament the reality that physical education is now maybe a two-hours-per-week or maybe never affair, and also the inevitable excerpts from Dr. Robert Lustig of the University of California, a renowned expert on pediatric obesity.  Lustig, who has been very clear on the reasons for the epidemic among children, is lumped in with The Perplexed who just can't understand why the hell Americans are so damn fat, why we're moving toward a society where two-thirds of the people are clinically obese and about half have diabetes.

How about: Americans are physically inert and eat and drink way too much stuff loaded up with sugary calories?  Why is that so hard to understand?  And why can't HBO just come out and say it?

Well, HBO can't do that, Congress has to obfuscate the hell out of it, and Lustig has to be denatured and taken out of context in order to fit within the Great Mystery paradigm that HBO is selling.  Otherwise, you anger the Department of Agriculture and the Corn Distillers Association and Senators and Congressmen from Midwest states who keep the monoculture subsidies coming to corn and soybean farmers year after year.

Within the interstices of the documentary, the truth nevertheless leaks out.  School lunches are, of course, roundly lambasted, but in a general, ewwww! way that does not clarify things.  Lots of pictures of hot dogs, for example, and railing against saturated fat and carbohydrates.  Since that only leaves protein as a nutrient source, and since kids aren't actually felines, it's difficult to understand what the answer is supposed to be. Yet at other places HBO lets drop that Americans today drink twice as many sugary drinks as they did 30 years ago, and that a great deal of this sugar comes from high fructose corn syrup, the convenient byproduct left over from America's vast inedible (unless you're a cow, and even then you're not supposed to eat it) fields of corn.

It's true that portion sizes at fast food restaurants are absurd, including 48-oz. containers of water and HFCS. Still, they can study it all they want, but they will not repeal any of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and a slight upward delta of 500 calories a day over caloric usage, particularly when those calories come in easily fattifiable form such as a Big Gulp or 72 ounces of Bud consumed at a tailgate, and when combined with an American Consumer who gets most of his exercise walking to and from the refrigerator on NFL Game Day -- that delta might tell the whole story, might it not?  500 calories/day = one pound of glistening fat (so colorfully displayed during one of the liposuction closeups on HBO!) per week = 50 pounds per year equals a 650 pound Exceptional American a decade later.

Or, it could be a Big Mystery.  Congress should study this and not rush to conclusions.  It's possible that two-thirds of Americans have gland problems.

Saturday Morning Essay: Rise of the Net Jockeys

Brought to you by Peet's Major Kong blend...

I see where Dmitry Orlov has now added "Published On Tuesday" to his masthead, which is a good sign since it probably means that this particularly insightful writer will be seen on a more regular basis.  With

James Kunstler appearing every Monday morning, rain or rain, we now have a powerful one-two punch with which to start the week off all wrong.  Maybe I should add "Published On Wednesday" to my blog and rename the whole thing "Why Go On?" just to finish people off.

One curious thing about the Internet and the accessibility of good writing available on the web in general is that we now can easily find excellent analysis of the world's problems by people who actually know what they're talking about, as opposed to the "columnist" approach to explaining what's happening.  As a result, the major newspapers have a hard time competing and have been relegated, along with almost all TV news, to infotainment and sensationalist, yellow journalism.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, is a constitutional lawyer who actually handled a lot of First Amendment and other civil liberties cases.  As a lawyer, I can tell that Glenn knows what he's talking about.  He knows how to analyze precedents, read statutes, and can describe clearly what is happening to the Bill of Rights on a real-time, case-by-case basis.  By contrast, the editorial pages of the New York Times or worse yet a column by Tom Friedman, one of its Staff Morons, can only flail around with generalities, and the usual on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand bullshit.  A column by Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd or David Brooks has about the same level of rigor and depth as the social studies essays we used to crib from the World Book Encyclopedia circa 1959.

Worse yet for the newspapers, writers such as Kunstler, Orlov and Greenwald write much better than the columnists.  Not to pick on the New York Times, although I'm clearly picking on it, virtually every writer in its starting lineup is a terrible writer: dull, turgid prose of an almost unreadable sort.  Oddly enough, this is probably the trait that drew these journalists to the profession: they thought they could write well, so writing for a newspaper became the skill they acquired.  However, this is not actually a subject matter skill, like law or science.  So the writing, even if it's belletristic (which it's usually not - work your way through one of Paul Krugman's dirges, with half the sentences beginning with the conjunctions "And" or "But"), it's nevertheless uninformed by any real grasp of the subject about which the writer is writing.

Writing well is not actually that difficult a skill, when you get right down to it.  We don't teach it very well in our schools anymore, and the prevalence of video images as a source of information has debased the art of the written word.  The remaining value of newspapers is that they should be a source of investigative fact-finding; this is expensive, however, and with their declining revenues it is difficult for newspapers to finance such work.  As Glenn Greenwald points out on a frequent basis, most of the "big time" journalism now performed by the Washington press corps is of the "access" variety and is thoroughly corrupted.  If you watched Brian Jennings gee-whiz his way around the Situation Room with President Obama on the anniversary of taking bin Laden out, you could see this type of "reporting" at its worst.  Williams was given a plum assignment, the first reporter ever allowed a tour of this sacred White House tank, and Williams was not going to sully the occasion with a question such as, "Any thought given, Mr. President, to the idea of capturing bin Laden alive and bringing him back to the U.S. for trial?"

That wasn't in the script.  Fawning hagiography over Our Tough & Decisive Leader was the theme of the program.

So for the time being, we have a problem.  We can gain access to subject-matter experts very easily on the Web.  The problem, in terms of current events and politics, is factual investigation; who is doing that, and how does it get paid for?  The absence of an adversarial press, such as in the United States,  means that any kind of government propaganda can now hold unchallenged sway over the largely uninformed populace.  If Watergate happened today, absolutely nothing would change.  Certainly the Valerie Plame scandal was on a par with Watergate, but only one government staffer, Scooter Libby, was sacrificed to hush the whole thing up.  Monumental criminal conspiracies, such as the RICO-level crimes of Wall Street in the mortgage-backed securities frauds leading up to 2008, are forgiven cavalierly with the President's soothing assurance that maybe some bankers "misbehaved," but no crimes were committed.

Well, that's not exactly right.  Read Bill Black - on the Web - and see what I mean.

Existential Axioms

Thoreau had his simple dictum about basic necessity: one must maintain vital heat.  Thus, in our ancestral native habitat (Equatorial Africa), this amounted to finding enough food through hunting and gathering. By the time Thoreau wrote Walden (and as many do not realize, he did not write this book at the Pond - the writing was done years later, based on notes which he kept while living in his one room house), the Little Ice Age in New England presented problems of a different order.  Thus, maintaining vital heat required not only food but shelter and clothing.

I like this approach to the search for basic ideas, an Occam's Razor of ontology.  If we were to state, a priori, the essential principles of human life beyond mere survival (Thoreau covered those correctly, I think), perhaps they can be stated as two axioms:

1.  Consciousness.
2.  Existential insecurity.

Continuing in this Euclidean mode, we might be able then to derive from the axioms the basic theorems of existence.

One such derivation is this: it seems clear that human consciousness is maladaptive in evolutionary terms.  Human cognition simply went too far.  We may glory in our intellectual grandeur, but human intelligence has presented us with more problems than it has solved, and to make matters worse, it has presented us with problems of an insoluble nature.  Another way of saying this is that intelligence somewhat superior to the chimpanzee and gorilla would have been sufficient to compensate for our evolutionary degradation in terms of size, strength and speed, but our development of intelligence overshot the mark and we wound up with nuclear fission, the internal combustion engine and the integrated circuit.  These inventions are not necessary to maintain vital heat, but they do, paradoxically, practically guarantee our extinction.

Human consciousness and existential insecurity are interplaying elements.  I was remarking to a friend at lunch on Monday that I regularly read a group of writers I call "the Apocalyptics," who, in this age of all graphs going parabolic, describe their ideas with a poorly-concealed lust for the imminent collapse of this monstrosity we call modern civilization, in favor of a return to a localized, comprehensible, anodyne world where we have a sense of control.  Such writers include Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov James Kunstler and many others, and whenever these highly intelligent, deeply insightful people are confronted, for example, with news that the United States might be able to convert its huge motor pool from gasoline to liquid natural gas and keep the whole car fiesta going for another one hundred years, these worthies lapse into paroxysms of outrage and scorn, denying that such a thing is possible.

Yet it is possible, unfortunately, and I suspect they know it.  Indeed, it will probably happen.  But you see, the Apocalyptics were counting on Peak Oil to act as the cavalry saving mankind (and particularly America) from itself.  We needed something out of our control to make us do the right thing.

This last sentence begs a question: why is that?  Simply put, it is because of our fundamental existential insecurity: at some point, after many years or a few, we all die.  This is the essential reason that we cannot succeed in getting the human race to react constructively to overpopulation, global warming or the threat of nuclear annihilation.  These aren't our biggest problems.  Death is. A very personal, individual death.

Thus, to derive the theorem of human impotence in the face of existential threats from the two axioms: human intelligence went so far beyond what was necessary for basic survival that it reached the point where it was not only capable of creating the conditions for its own extinction,  it also comprehended the futility of human existence itself.  Increasingly, the thrall in which our consciousness was held by comforting mythologies is giving way to this searing recognition.  As if to say, yes, it's true that homo sapiens is in mortal peril, but we all gotta go sometime.  That will be our epitaph and our legacy.

Saturday Morning Essay: A Modest Proposal for Eliminating the Problem of Fiscal Deficits in the U.S.

 Brought to you by Peet's Costa Rica blend...

Mankind has always been fascinated by the concept of the perpetual motion machine.  A gizmo that will keep running forever without additional energy inputs, that relies on its own internal feedback loops to supply the forces needed to keep it going.  Alas, such contraptions always seem to run afoul of the basic laws of thermodynamics.  Someday even our Sun is going to flame out, expanding out to engulf Earth and ending everything we know, even Dancing With The Stars.  And this particular solar system will be no more, and unless we first establish contact with an alien civilization with better survival prospects than our own, there will be no history, anywhere, that we ever even existed.

So how serious, really, can any problem actually be?

Still, it pains me to see economists and other learned charlatans struggle with this concept of the national debt and fiscal deficits.  It takes up so much time, and in this day of digitally manufactured money, it just seems silly.  So I wanted to come up with a way, working within existing laws and the basic framework of Federal Reserve finance, to solve this problem once and for all.  And I think I've got it.

I was writing last time out about the ways in which the American money supply has become a thoroughly confused admixture of both "traditional" (debt-based) money and the increasing component of cash which the Federal Reserve and Treasury pull out of their collective ass.  This is one of the advantages of having a very complicated government with a byzantine financial structure, with lots of very serious men and women in dark clothing harrumphing on about "quantitative easing" and "Large Scale Asset Purchases" and "increasing the monetary base" and all the rest of this nonsense.  In the midst of such confusion, it's easy to slip in little money-making tricks like having a pile of IOU's (the Social Security Trust Fund) which essentially say, "The United States Promises To Pay the United States $2.5 Trillion," actually produce money which gets "added" back into the federal budget.  Or having the Treasury issue bonds to Primary Dealers (the Kool Kids on Wall Street) which the Federal Reserve "buys" with billions blown out its bunghole, and then the Treasury is "obligated" to the Federal Reserve, except that the Federal Reserve just uses the "interest" earned on the money it made up out of thin air to pay its expenses and remits the balance to the Treasury.  Thus, the larger the obligation of the Treasury to the Federal Reserve, the more money the Treasury can earn on its debts.

It was this latter realization which caused the light bulb to go on over my head.  Why are we fooling around here with half-measures when the solution is at hand?  I want to reiterate that it is actually adult human beings who are playing the games sketched out above.  They do these silly things while cloaking the whole malarkey in lots of learned discourse and serious verbiage designed to make you think that cowpies are chocolate danish.  So I say, let's just get the whole ridiculous thing over with.  As follows:

The Treasury holds the Final Auction.  At this auction, it will sell Treasury obligations to the Primary Dealers in the total amount of $100 trillion, paying a 5% coupon over 100 years.  The Primary Dealers agree to borrow the money they need to fully fund the auction from the Federal Reserve at the current fed rate of .01%.  The Federal Reserve, acting as any prudent banker, takes as collateral the future expectancy of the bonds themselves, a dodge made necessary by the current, laughable rule that the Federal Reserve cannot bid directly at a Treasury auction (it has to wait, like, a day until the Primary Dealers take down half an auction).  The Primary Dealers buy the Treasuries, they immediately sell them to the Federal Reserve (the Federal Reserve hitting the keyboard to come up with the hundred tril), and now the Treasury Department owes the Federal Reserve $100 trillion, at a 5% coupon.  After deducting the Federal Reserve's insignificant expenses, this allows the Treasury to earn $5 trillion per year on the debt which the Treasury owes to the Treasury (I'm just leaving out the silliness of pretending the Fed is anything other than a proxy for the Treasury in this scheme).

The federal government is fully funded without taxation or further bond sales.  Indeed, the Treasury has about $1 trillion surplus, which can be doled out to every man, woman and child in the United States, on a per capita basis.  A nice little stipend for everybody.  There is no need for inflation, and barely any need for employment.

It's simply a matter of Thinking Big and going for it.

Noodling on the National Debt

Paul Krugman is fond of saying that the U.S. economy (or any economy) "is not a morality play." I think I understand what he means.  For example, the current national debt in the United States is about $15.7 trillion (you can follow the number with the gadget over on the right.  As you watch the numbers whirl, you'll see that the "public" part of the debt [about $11.6 trillion] increases at the current rate of about $3 million per minute, a rate which is always increasing, of course.  The magic of exponents!)

What Mr. Krugman is saying, however, can be succinctly summed up as follows: So what?  The absolute numbers do not matter so much, at least at present.  What matters is the actual carrying cost of the public part of the debt, which is to say, interest expense.  The average interest rate applied to the American pile of public debt is currently only about 2%.  The bond auctions conducted by the Treasury usually go off without a hitch, with probably 3 bids for every bond sold.  Shorter term bills (one year and under) essentially pay no interest at all (and relative to inflation, they yield a negative return), yet those are all sold as well.  Indeed, unless you're willing to buy the ultra "long" bond (30 years), you can't earn a real return on any U.S. paper.  Yet the Treasury sells all of it, week in and week out.

The $11.6 trillion figure itself has to be reduced by about $1.3 trillion, because this latter figure represents the holdings of the Federal Reserve.  The Treasury does not really "pay" interest on these bonds; indeed, it works the other way.  The Treasury "credits" the Federal Reserve with interest on the bonds the Fed holds, and the Fed uses this "money" to pay its expenses and then remits the "balance" back to the Treasury, representing "income."  Thus, the more "debt" the Fed holds, the more money the Treasury can make on its own debt.  This is one of several ways that the United States Treasury hallucinates money into existence.  Another is the "interest" paid by the Treasury on the "intragovernmental" part of the debt (about $5.6 trillion, representing the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and other funds, such as government pensions).  The current shortfalls in Social Security, for example, measured as the difference between the amount of FICA taxes actually collected and the amounts paid out to the burgeoning rolls of recipients (the Boomers! my Peeps!) is made up by pretending the huge stack of stationery in a couple of file drawers in West Virginia (this was actually one of George W. Bush's insights, and I thank him for the colorful description) actually produces "money."

Still, suppose we keep doing what we're doing (and we will) and the public part of the debt rises to $30 trillion over the next decade or so.  Let's suppose that the Fed holds its position as a 9-10% stakeholder, or about $3.0 trillion, leaving $27 trillion actually owed to the public.  Well, if the carrying cost stays at about 2%, the total interest expense, to the extent it matters, is about $540 billion per year.  And against this figure we can subtract the money the Treasury "earns" by pretending to pay interest on the money the Fed pretends to pay back to the Treasury, which should be about $60 billion or so (the Fed currently "pays" about $75 billion per year to the Treasury, reflecting, I guess, some higher-paying vintage bonds). 

Krugman and New Keynesians like him are, I believe, influenced by the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory, and when you come right down to the cult-like basis of MMT, it is a concept that money does not, as it traditionally did, bear a real relationship to some point of reference, such as gold or the underlying value of goods and services which money can pay for or command.  Money (or the idea we call Money) Is A Thing Unto Itself now, an electronic creation, which enters the economy by government fiat, and once it's there, it's the same dollar in your pocket regardless of its origins. Thus, the whole system is now permeated and shot through with huge elements of both "traditional" money and the increasing supply of conjured electronic money, and the American economy depends on both without differentiation.

All the big central banks (European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, most certainly the Federal Reserve) are now playing this game.  "Rogue" economists such as Steve Keen point out, indisputably in my opinion, that this is little more than an electronic Ponzi scheme: electronic money is conjured out of thin air in order to pay preexisting debts, many of which were also based on obligations created with "fictitious" money.  The whole contraption of international money does have a slightly queasy, vertiginous feel to it, as the printers at the various central banks, faced with huge, unpayable debts (unpayable in the sense of paying with the "old" money based on reference to an underlying measure of value) go into hyper-overdrive.

Still, it's not a "morality play."  I agree with that. We're a long ways past the old traditional, Mom 'N Pop ideas of thrift and understandable finances. The lives, and the livings, of millions and millions of real people, who are themselves cut off from things of real value and sustenance (such as food producing land) depend on the continuation of this game.  It is a game, however, with many hidden points of vulnerability, as with any complex system with many interacting parts providing negative and positive feedback loops, and many of the factors are not under direct U.S. control.  But we can't suddenly stop playing this game, even if it's the "moral" thing to do.  The U.S. deficits are "structural" at this point.  Raising income tax rates on the super-wealthy will not come close to closing the gap. Cutting defense by 50% will not come close, even in combination with massive tax increases (and cutting defense will entail the negative feedback of huge job losses, since war is an important American industry - one of the biggest).  The U.S. economy cannot really create enough jobs that pay enough money to provide a tax base that can stay up with ever-increasing U.S. federal and state expenditures.

Unless we want to face what this is (and we don't), we're stuck.  It's not a "morality play."  It might be a different drama, however:  Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit."

********************************************

Many thanks to John M. for his very helpful suggestion of a Kindle version for some of my cousin's out-of-print books.  I have passed that idea along to Jim's literary executor, with credit where it's due.

Obama, Romney & Ruth Bader Ginsburg

(Okay, it's #1,000, but I've always preferred the everyday to the special celebration.  Special celebrations are merely annoying distractions from the more interesting aspects of everyday life.)

I saw my first "Anybody But Obama" bumpersticker right here in my chic-Lib county yesterday.  It was cleverly done.  In the lower right-hand corner was a tally sheet.  The left-hand column was headed "Promises Kept," and beneath that was "0."  The right-hand column was marked "Promises Not Kept," and beneath that heading were tally marks adding up to about 30, as far as I could tell on quick perusal.

I imagine the Obama Campaign is doing a lot of internal polling, now that they know (for certain) that Mitt Romney will be the GOP candidate.  Not that anyone in America ever had any real reason to doubt that the media would ultimately insist on an Obama-Romney runoff.  The electorate at large can only focus and talk about those candidates given visibility by television shows.  Romney and Obama have The Look that plays well on TV, whereas candidates like Santorum (geeky, weird), Gingrich (chubby, snide) and Ron Paul (elderly, cranky, wheedling voice) don't work as TV characters.

So Central Casting has narrowed down our American Idols to the two obvious choices.  But back to the Obama Campaign, and their internal polling: Pretty soon Nate Silver at the New York Times will begin giving us the real story on how this titanic contest is going, but I suspect the Obama people are pretty nervous.  It's not a good sign when a bumpersticker such as the one I saw shows up in a county which is so Orthodox-Progressive.  It's jarring, and it means that people now feel safe to admit the truth: Obama has been a huge, epic disappointment.  Obama's base is essentially limited to (a) Democratic operatives, (b) public employee unions and (c) minority pressure groups.  It's difficult to conceive of an actual Independent being genuinely excited about reelecting Barack Obama, and yet Independents are the cohort, we are told, who decide modern elections.  Essentially, all those Americans who hate both political parties but feel they need to participate in our Game Theory Politics to avoid a more-evil outcome.

Obama will not have the "Hope & Change" shtick this time around, and since his signature accomplishment, Obamacare, was actually borrowed from Mitt Romney, that's probably not a good thing to boast about (especially since most Americans hate it anyway).  Obama's foreign policy is identical to that of the Bush/Cheney regime, only more unconstitutional and warmongering.  Obama runs an opaque administration with a fetish for State Secrets and has compiled a terrible record on civil liberties.  Obama coddles the banks and his anemic Attorney General, Eric Holder, never lifts a finger to enforce the law against big campaign donors.

The Onion ran a hilarious piece in the latest issue about the Obama campaign's decision to tone down the slogans from "Yes We Can!" to "Some Stuff We Might Try, But It Probably Won't Work."  Amid all the commentary about the implacable hostility of Republicans to Obama's "initiatives" that we have heard over the last three-plus years, and the rest of the excuses,  the American public still has trouble avoiding an uncomfortable (inconvenient even) truth: Obama just isn't very effective.  Don't know exactly what the problem is.  Hard to put your finger on it, exactly.

The intrepid bumpersticker guy probably knows that in our Game Theory Politics his position (Anybody But Obama) is equivalent to "Let Romney Win."  Indeed, the bumpersticker was in red, white & blue (get it?).  This could be a clever Romney tactic in areas where overt advocacy for a Republican is just unthinkable (where I live, e.g., or West L.A. or most of Manhattan).  It's a hip way to seem aloof from politics.  Bringing us to the question: what happens if Romney is elected (and there is a pretty fair chance he will be)?

Three words:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the ailing and elderly Supreme Court Justice.  If Romney is elected, he will choose her sucessor during his first term, and then regardless of which side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of a particular morning, the Supreme Court will be firmly conservative and Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. As I have written before, the effect of a Roe reversal is not the immediate outlawing of abortion; it is a return of the sovereignty of the individual states to decide the issue of criminality.  It's possible that certain Blue States (California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, Washington) will retain the right as under Roe.  Each of these states will become a kind of abortion Reno, at least for a while.

Otherwise, I don't think the changes will be momentous.  America's slide toward Banana Republicanism is already well underway, and a new President (or a second term for the old one) can't do much about that.  I've just been disappointed that Obama never tried.

Next Stop, Tehran

I found this exchange last month between Jeff Sessions, Republican Senator from the great state of Alabama, and Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, rather telling and instructive on the state of unconstitutional procedures currently in vogue in the U.S. of A.  I don't recall any news coverage of the colloquy, of course; it must have happened around the time that George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin were dominating the airwaves, or maybe Kim Kardashian had a butt implant go all wrong.

Whatever the reason:  Jeff Sessions, with his slightly inbred look and Yoda ears, presents something of a quandary for me.  He's a former district attorney and is actually pretty good at asking questions, a skill not usually found in serving members of Congress.  Plus, I noticed during the Alberto Gonzales scandal that he was actually, dare I say it?, pretty principled when it came to picking holes in Alberto's obviously perjured testimony.  He clearly did not like the politics that controlled hiring and firing at the Justice Department during the Bush/Rove regime, and Sessions was probably as instrumental as anyone in driving Gonzales from office in 2007.  Of course, as a Republican he is required to participate in many of the standard lunatic orthodoxies of the GOP, but that's to be expected.

Panetta, on the other hand, has always seemed to me the Democrats' version of Dick Cheney.  A reliable functionary and apparatchik who can be counted on to carry out the policy of any president he serves, and in fact Panetta has held many of the same jobs which Cheney held: Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, a member of Congress, etc.  Like Cheney, he seems more industrious and can-do than particularly bright or creative.  As you know, I also believe that Panetta got his start playing the pharmacist on the old "Dobie Gillis" series, although I cannot find this on Panetta's Wikipedia entry.

The phrase "Kabuki Theater" gets overused in our cliche-ridden MediaWorld, but this hearing might be aptly described in just such terms.  The question is whether Sessions is in on the fix, or was genuinely "breathless" over the unconstitutionality of Panetta's described approach to war authorization.  As a legal matter, there isn't much to talk about.  Panetta is talking absolute nonsense.  There is no "international" authority for a president to take the country to war, so it doesn't matter what NATO says or wants, and it doesn't matter whether our "international partners" want our help.  These considerations (international cooperation, defense of an ally) might be motivating factors, but the constitutional law remains that only Congress has (a) the authority to declare war, or (b) authorize the use of military force under the War Powers Act of 973, which is Congress's way of sidestepping its obligations to commit the country to war (a sidestepping dance it has performed since 1941, ridiculously enough).

Sessions obviously knows the law, and he reminds the members of the panel (which included Panetta and some top military brass) that they know it, too.  Nevertheless, it is fascinating to watch Panetta refuse to meet Sessions eye-to-eye, and to remain obtuse and opaque in his answers to very clear, well-posed questions.  Panetta does not give an inch, continuing to repeat his message-control mantra that the president has the unilateral right to protect and defend this country, and that "international" considerations guided the president's response in some relevant but not clearly-defined way.

The hearing nominally was supposed to concern Syria, and whether President Obama was going to go off on his own again, as he did in Libya, seeking neither a declaration of war under Article I of the Constitution (obviously, no president ever does that anymore) nor an authorization from Congress, which Bush at least did with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq.  I think, however, that this hearing, and Panetta's canned, robotic resposes, were really about Iran.  A decision has been made by the Obama Administration to attack Iran with its "international partner" Israel and maybe members of the Arab League (such as Saudi Arabia, who do not like the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran, to say the least), and Congress is going to find out about it when the world at large finds out about it.  If the hearing were really about Syria, Panetta would not need to dig in so deeply.  Enforcing a no-fly zone or running bombing runs, as in Libya, is no big deal to Congress, and they've already demonstrated they're completely asleep at the switch and will demand no accountability from Obama for his violation of his oath of office.  That sort of legal nicety is not even talked about anymore, let alone enforced.

But Iran?  That's the Big Persian Enchilada, and it's a hole card Obama wants to keep face down in the event he needs an October Surprise to get him over the hump against Romney  Remember that Bush was reelected in 2004 with a real majority (as opposed to 2000) even though by that point the American electorate knew the war in Iraq had been launched on false pretenses.  Just the fact of being at war probably worked greatly in Bush's favor, a fact obviously not lost on Obama.  And yes, the American electorate is that stupid. 

So no contradictory testimony from Panetta was going to be recorded at this hearing, try as Sessions might to make sense of what he was hearing.  The law is an ass, as Charles Dickens wrote.

Saturday Morning Essay, Charlie Bates Versus the Cars

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This past Monday was the third anniversary of my cousin Jim Houston's passing, and to do something about the mood this put me in (generally down, and on a Monday to boot), I went to my Jim Houston Library (bottom shelf, bookcase in the den) and pulled out Gasoline, Jim's collection of Charlie Bates stories.  The collection I have was put together by Capra Press of Santa Barbara in 1980, and my volume was signed by Jim in 1986.  All of the stories are terrific, written in Jim's distinctive laconic, simple, flowing prose, which has a way of disguising the penetrating intelligence behind the beguiling language.

I chose "Gas Mask," just for old times' sake, and because it was the first story Jim ever talked to me about personally, as he was writing it in 1964 (he was thirty years old at the time; I was fifteen).  It was a summer get-together at his parents' place in Saratoga.  Jim's mother, Loretta, had made her trademark lemonade with grapefruit-sized lemons fresh from her own orchard.  It remains to this day the best beverage I have ever had the pleasure of drinking.  I asked Jim what he was working on, and he told me it was a story about a guy, Charlie Bates, his Everyman lost in an increasingly confusing and deranged technological wonderland, who is driving home one day on an elevated freeway (it sounds, in the story, like Los Angeles) when the traffic comes to a complete stop.  Charlie feels the pressure of a car pushing against the back of his Volkswagen Bug.  And the drivers, including Charlie, are then stranded with their automobiles in total, city-wide gridlock. After a while a helicopter appears overhead and moves down the road, announcing that traffic is blocked and that it will take at least twenty-four hours to clear.

"He was on a high, curving overpass that looked down on a lower overpass and farther down onto a twelve lane straightaway that led to the city's center.  As far as Charlie could see in any direction cars were jammed end to end, lane to lane, and nothing moved.  The pushing had stopped.  Evidently there was nowhere else to push."

Charlie strikes up a conversation with Arvin Bainbridge, who is in the car adjacent to his driver's side door.  This is the only other driver identified in the story, adding to the mood of alienation and anomie: there are thousands of stranded motorists on this nightmare-scape of roadways, but all are essentially alone and isolated within their steel vehicles. Where Charlie is different (in each story of the collection, actually) from those he finds in his shared predicament, he improvises in the face of these man-made, hostile environments.  He borrows a tow rope from Arvin, ties it to the railing, and goes hand over hand to the freeway level below.  From there he can climb into the top of a tall tree and shinny his way, at last, to terra firma.  He then walks several miles home to his wife Fay. 

Charlie discusses the situation with Fay and a decision is made to borrow a friend's two-seater bicycle and ride back to the freeway.  Eventually they take an elevator to the top of an apartment building with a view of the freeway, where Charlie can use high-powered binoculars to keep an eye on the Volkswagen.  Charlie follows the loops and curlicues of the freeway and realizes there is a way, using onramps and the median strip, to get back to his car on foot.  Meanwhile, the helicopters announce that the gridlock is likely to remain for thirty-six more hours, two more days, three more days.  Fay and Charlie then discover there is an apartment for rent in the building they have used for the roof-top view of the freeway.  They take the apartment and then divide "watches" into four-hour shifts.

A helicopter lowers a portable toilet onto the freeway, and a long line of stranded motorists wait their turn.  Through the binoculars, Charlie sees a woman enter the toilet and close the door. He tells Fay,

"A woman just opened the door and stepped inside."

"What if the cars start moving while she's in there, Charlie?  That's what I'd be worried about."

"It's a risk, all right, one of those risks a person just has to take."

Charlie begins frequent jogs to his car, leaving his bike at the foot of the onramp.  He talks things over with Arvin Bainbridge, who tells Charlie things on the freeway are "bout the same."  It's hot out on the asphalt during the day, and uncomfortable to sleep in the car at night, but Arvin tells Charlie that "you get used to it."  He compliments Charlie on his improving time in getting to and from the Volkswagen.  Charlie's been clocking himself, and Arvin asks for the time.  Charlie tells him.  Arvin is impressed:  "Cuttin her down, hey boy."  Charlie suggests that Arvin come to the apartment, have dinner, a drink, take a shower.  Arvin mulls it over.  He's still making payments on his car, he muses. Finally he tells Charlie that he "just can't."  Arvin wants to be there when the cars start to move again.  Charlie tells him that he understands.

And so the story ends, Charlie and Fay in their eagle's nest vantage point, the cars permanently gridlocked, the drivers in the stranded vehicles hollow-eyed, grimy, in wrinkled clothes, wraiths scattered along an endless terrain of asphalt.  "Gas Mask" cannot have a happy ending, because the madness will obviously continue whether or not the cars ever start moving again or not.  We leave Charlie in an army surplus store, buying a gas mask to help him deal with the eye-stinging, suffocating pollution he encounters during the times he spends on the freeway with his car, as the motorists periodically fire up their engines in anticipation that perhaps this is the Moment of Movement, a hope which spreads virally from car to car like an urban legend.

I've always considered this story a largely unrecognized miracle of dystopian satire.  I think it is brilliant in its spare, matter-of-fact depiction of the insane accommodation of oppressive, inhuman (even anti-human) technology in the lives of ordinary modern people.  It was written by a young man of prodigious talents (in so many arts) who looked on the world with wry bemusement, who understood, deep in his calm soul, that nothing can change the course of progress, that all we will ever do is make seemingly sane adaptations to a thoroughly mad artificial environment, and take the "necessary" risks involved, such as using a toilet on an elevated freeway in the middle of The Traffic Jam at the End of the World, without ever once asking ourselves how we created such a monstrosity in the first place, or what human purposes it serves.

Approaching One Grand

This will be the 997th blog post I've hoisted onto this site in the last six years.  I imagine that each one averages about 350 words, so that's a lot of brain-belching.  Still, it's a piker's effort compared to the big boys, like Paul Krugman, who writes about 997 blogs a day.  It should be pointed out that each of Mr. Krugman's blogs is the same as the one before, but it remains a prodigious effort simply to put that many words on paper (or into pixels), as I should know.

Philosophically, I think my orientation has changed over the last six years.  For example,  like many initially afflicted with Blogger Grandiosity Syndrome (BGS), at first I though it was incumbent upon me (even expected of me) to comment on every major meme arising from the maelstrom of American pop culture. 

The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman saga is a case in point.  A few years ago, I would have felt it my solemn duty to weigh in on this sorrowful episode with my own pithy insights.  I now see that this is simply falling into the American Meme Trap.  It won't be long before this Crime of the Century will fade into absolute nothingness, and then all we will have as a memory is the unfortunate way that mass media intrude into the legal justice system and make it practically impossible for us to think straight about matters of crime and punishment. 

To fit the agenda of the News Cycle, a "hook" must be found.  It was easy in this case: a non-black shooter kills a black person, and the Florida police and district attorney do not immediately push for prosecution, citing Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, another artifact of America's gun-happy, bloodthirsty culture.  (It's always Frontier Land here in the U.S.)  The reason becomes immediately "obvious" to everyone: non-blacks shooting blacks are less likely to be prosecuted, while blacks shooting whites are always indicted.  I heard this exact formulation of the "issue" on our local KGO, as advanced by Ronn Owens, probably the dullest and most cliche-ridden talk-radio disc jockey in airwave history (NorCal Division), but with a huge following, it goes without saying.

Crime statistics certainly bear this bias out: African-Americans and other minorities are disproportionately charged and sentenced for crimes against whites, especially in the South.  However, there is a second question: was the decision by the Florida police and D.A. (at least initially) the result of this bias?  This is the difference between statistical tendencies and the facts of a specific case, and as every lawyer knows, only the latter, the relevant facts, have any bearing on the "truth" of a given event.  This did not stop pundits like Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC from screaming at the top of his lungs, crying for justice for Trayvon, or the President from making an extremely ill-adivsed comment about Trayvon's resemblance to a son he might have had, whatever that was supposed to mean.  O'Donnell and the President were behaving in extremely irresponsible ways in bringing pressure to bear on a matter under investigation (the second time the President has done so: will there be another Beer Garden photo-op?).  Thus, while it would be worthwhile and responsible to discuss the problem of discrimination in charging and sentencing minorities as a general proposition, we don't do Responsible in American media life.  You can't get the public's attention unless you turn the event into the kind of circus, based on a specific act of violence, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently (and searingly) fictionalized in The Bonfire of the Vanities, the lessons of which everyone has apparently forgotten.

So I've learned to refrain from such "advocacy" based on what is always a very partial understanding (filtered through a sensationalist media) of the actual facts.  What is increasingly more interesting to me these days is to assay the State of the Nation from a longer perspective.  We live at a particularly interesting time, here in 2012.  As Thoreau said in Walden, the Now is a meeting "of two great eternities," and we should "toe that line."  There is little doubt that we are living now in the aftermath of the Great American Experiment in Suburban Living, of the Consumer Society, of the debt-fueled maintenance of an expensive and extravagant lifestyle, which is groaning and collapsing under its own weight, as it has been for a very long time, but now the signs and symptoms have become too obvious for anyone to ignore or to hide behind the veil of American Exceptionalism.

Now there's an interesting topic.  To be of a certain age, old enough to have grown up in, and to have had one's consciousness formed by, the decades of the 1950's and 1960's, when there was no doubt America led the way in everything, and only the Beatniks were around to point out that the way we were leading was probably a very bad direction, indeed.  Nevertheless, the Western World (and Japan) followed us, all the way to the edge of the precipice, where we stand today, in an ecologically and economically unsustainable predicament.

As I mentioned the other day, Thoreau himself "toed a line" between the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in force in America, and a bygone agrarian, pastoral history.  Such times can be eras of acute clarity, and insight, into epochal transformation.  Thus, at Orwell's suggestion, I keep this journal of ideas.

The Simpler Way from Down Under

I think I mentioned a while back that as the result of writing about Craig Dilworth's book Too Smart For Our Own Good here at the Pond, I had heard from Prof. Dilworth himself, and that resulted, through the "connective tissue" of the Internet, in access to a lively discussion going on among those one might call Deep Ecologists. These are academics, thinkers and writers whose appreciation of the ecological predicament of mankind goes beyond the conventional "Green" narrative popular in America. The Green narrative suggests that if we all just insulate our houses a little better, support photovoltaics and windmills, and drive a Prius, we probably won't even notice a change from the current American lifestyle. One might even surmise that this way of thinking about the problem is the "Manufactured Consent" (in Chomsky's terms) of the issues: the mainstream media define the divide this way, between business-as-usual and slight tweaking along environmental lines to keep growth humming along and a bigger and brighter future on the horizon forever.

I asked permission from Ted Trainer, one of my new correspondents, who is based in Australia where he writes on Transition issues and oil depletion, if I could post one of his letters contributed to a recent discussion as a particularly good and concise introduction to the notion that the "Green" solution, as popularized in America, is way off the real mark, and Mr. Trainer graciously agreed. So, without any redactions, the letter follows:

[text of letter]

I was not able to contribute to your recent interesting discussion about the global predicament but I’d like to feed in what I see as a game-changing point of view that usually goes unrecognised.

So much of the discussion of the predicament takes for granted a uni-dimensional view of development, wealth, progress. For example many people (especially of the red-left variety) argue that there must be much more economic growth and therefore energy use to increase production so that the poorest billions can rise to satisfactory living standards. They therefore criticise the many green people who are saying that there is already far too much producing and consumption, energy and resource use going on. Many red left people argue for redistribution but many green people say that wouldn’t change the amount of consuming so it wouldn’t reduce resource and environmental pressure. So it looks like an insoluble dilemma.

The way out is to take The Simpler Way. I first put it in Abandon Affluence, Zed, 1985, and have detailed a more elaborate case in The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Envirobook, 2010. The first point is that the big global problems cannot be solved unless there is dramatic reduction in the resource consumption, GDP and “living standards” we have in rich countries, probably to one-tenth of their present levels. Several lines of argument within the general “limits to growth” analysis should now leave no doubt about this. For instance the Australian per capita “footprint” is 8 ha of productive land but by 2050 the amount available in the world will be at best .8 ha; so we are 10 times over a level that it would ever be possible for all to have. ...and these numbers totally ignore the absurd commitment to economic growth. Anyone who thinks 9 billion can rise to the “living standards” Australians expect by 2050 given 3% economic growth is assuming the planet can sustain 30 times the present global volume of producing and consuming.

It follows that we must move to ways of living, institutions and systems that allow us to live well on a small fraction of our present rich world affluence, and indeed of the present world resource production levels. The Simpler Way argument is that this could be done, easily and quickly, thereby defusing all the big problems...if enough people saw the sense of it. TSW involves mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies processing local resources to meet local needs, via intensely participatory and cooperative ways, with no economic growth, in economies that are not determined by market forces...and value systems in which there is no interest in competing or gaining.

Many of us in the ecovillage and Transition Towns movements live in very resource-cheap but quality of life rich ways. I live way under the “poverty line”, never travel, never watch TV, almost never buy new clothes, and could build you a beautiful small earth house for under $5000. My quality of life is high, but nothing like that in some of the communities I know. Meanwhile most of you out there are working three times too hard, going down with depression and obesity, as your social cohesion crumbles. Why don’t you come across to TSW and devote most of your week to your arts and crafts, conversation or just sitting in the sun (…working three hours a week in the remnant offices and factories we’d need)?

Now you might think the prospects for such a transition are remote. My view is that the transition will not be achieved. But that’s not central here. What matters is that you are going to move towards TSW whether you like it or not. We are entering the era of intense and irremediable scarcity. The resources are already inaccessible for most people, and becoming scarcer, especially if you attend to declining EROI (energy return on investment) rather than price. (EROI has halved for oil in a couple of decades.) Only 1.5 billion are using the resources now...just wait until another 8.5 billion go after them. And we few in rich countries are losing our capacity to hog all the available resource wealth as we have for 500 years The Chinese are racing past us and Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to be able to win the necessary resource wars any more. You are in for a rocky road down to getting by on something like your fair share of the world’s resources for a change.

So you might be wise to join us in trying to work out how to run very frugal and self-sufficient communities well, because the most likely alternative will be a nasty feudalism as the rich and the middle classes call for repressive state power to secure their property and privileges against the accelerating scarcity, discontent and breakdown.

My main point is that TSW represents a rejection of the uni-dimensional way of thinking, i.e., that the only way development can be thought about is in terms of moving up the slope of progress towards more jobs, production, income, GDP, wealth and development. No group has been more trapped in this mind-set than one of the teams I belong to, the Marxists. They adopt the same capitalist conception of development as the neo-liberals; development involves investment of capital to increase production for sale...how else could it be conceived? (Marxists just don’t want the capital to be privately owned.) So 3-4 billion Third World people are trapped in hopeless squalor waiting for trickle down from capital invested in the most profitable ventures ... when most of them have all around them the soil, rainfall, forests, traditions, networks, knowledge and labour that could quickly develop the simple but sufficient housing, cooperatives, chicken pens, permaculture gardens, swales, schools, woodlots, sheds, clinics etc. they need to meet most of their basic needs. Appropriate development needs little monetary capital.

Of course the rich countries work hard to prevent the available resources being devoted to such purposes; they must be kept free for use by transnational corporations, and devices such as debt and the Structural Adjustment Packages ensure that they are. (And any country foolish enough to still deviate is likely to find itself invaded on some pretext.) But the main factor preventing appropriate development is the mentality that can’t deviate from the development=growth dimension. It’s as blindingly dominant within NGOs as within the IMF.

The main reason why I don’t think we will make it is because the commitment to affluence is now so deeply entrenched. No one wants to think about moving to any alternative to it. It has a firm grip on academics in general and Marxists in particular. Their classic statement is that the revolution will take the factories off the capitalist class and then everyone can have a Mercedes. The left has no idea about, and evidently no interest in living simply in highly self-sufficient communities. It is still focused on getting control of the state to organise utopia from the centre. Scarcity rules that out; from here on there can be very little centralisation, heavy industrialisation, globalisation, transport , travel or tourism. Now a satisfactory society all could share can only be organised and run by small towns, suburbs and regions via political systems directly involving all in the decision making and implementation. Sorry but the Anarchists have the right vision now. (There will still be a remnant role for centralised “state” bureaucracies...which are given no power...see Chapter 10.)

The Transition book argues that both red and green people urgently need to take these simpler way themes on board.