Peet's-Fueled Cogitation on the Collapse of a Complex Society

I hasten to add that when I use the word "collapse," I am paying un hommage to Joseph Tainter, who, when I think about it, must have been studying at Berkeley at about the same time I was. He went on to write The Collapse of Complex Societies; I went on to write this blog. Oh well.

1971 was an unusual year for me. I was marginally attached to the university, living in a rather strange habitation in Berkeley near the Oakland border, and waiting to see what the federal government wanted me to do. I had been through my pre-induction physical at the Oakland Induction Center (1-A, baby!), and the question was whether Richard Nixon was going to ramp up that misbegotten war or wind it down. In modern times we always know the answer: we're going to keep fighting the same wars no matter what because "military Keynesianism" requires us to keep fueling the Pentagon or the economy will sputter and die completely. In 1971 we still had a functioning economy with some actual productive, revenue-raising parts, so we had choices. I can virtually guarantee you that as soon as the Ungrateful Nouri finishes evicting our troops from Iraq, those 50,000 souls, and a lot more, will be rotated into some new theater of operations somewhere in the Middle East. Maybe Syria, maybe Yemen, probably Iran.

Anyway, Berkeley, 1971. The "apartment" I lived in was actually an enclosed porch in an old house on Claremont. The main part of the house was also divided into rooms, and there were a lot of tenants. I paid $65 a month for my one room. The floor had two levels, and on the raised part was the bed and a trap door which led to the basement. That's where the shower was and a laundry tub which I used as a sink. A grad student, a nice lady, lived in a converted greenhouse out in the garden, and she and I shared the "bathroom." To be respectful and polite, I learned to knock on the trap door before descending the short flight of steps to the basement. I guess there must have been a toilet down there too; gee, all these things you need for "civilization." I didn't have a television or a telephone, however, and I used an electric heater to warm up my uninsulated dwelling (which I'm sure was an illegal unit and rife with code violations - good ol' People's Republic of Berkeley!).

My marginal attachment to the university(I had already finished my undergrad work but was titrating my app for a diploma based on Nixon/Kissinger calculations) allowed me to take a couple of courses, one in the literature of Shakespeare and one grad-level course in mathematical applications in social sciences. As you might note, I had no clear focus, career-wise, a condition which never completely abated. The second course introduced me to the work of Herbert Simon, the brilliant, hard-to-classify polymath who did a lot of work in the new field of systems analysis and complexity theory. Tainter must owe something of a debt to Herbert since most thinkers in the social sciences do.

Joseph Tainter's book is definitely worth reading, particularly for his modern interpretation, based on complexity theory, of the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire, probably the best anthropological precedent and cognate for the American Empire. "Collapse," as in the Western Roman Empire, refers to the disassembly of the big, complex system into smaller independent parts. I think this is what is going to happen in the United States after we thrash around in the La Brea Tar Pits of chaos and indecision for some indeterminate period of time. If we can get China to do the same that would be very helpful.

The basic idea in complexity theory is marginal utility or diminishing returns. Essentially, the idea is that when a social system becomes excessively complex, the marginal cost of keeping the whole thing together, of the communications necessary to keep the system hooked up, and of supervising and regulating the mess, and of the impenetrable complexity of the information necessary to understand what the hell is going on and how everything relates to everything else -- finally leads to the breakdown of the system. I would say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the United States has crossed that threshold.

One symptom of the breakdown is the instability of the political system. We're now into a kind of impulsive changing of the guard - get rid of these Republicans, we need Hope & Change ™! Okay, that didn't work. Let's get the Republicans back in, or this Tea Party! That's the ticket! Oh hell, they're going to raise the debt ceiling after all. Let's get the Democrats back in! Look, Obama is the Comeback Kid™! One effect of this kind of societal nervous breakdown, for example, is that the House of Representatives is now full of Creation "scientists" and global-warming deniers. Maybe that's not why these people were elected but they're part of the net result of a loss of control over the system.

The fiscal mess in the federal government is simply beyond the pale. America cannot admit to itself what the obvious, simple mathematics point out, that our "standard" of living is overstated by about 40%. Since there is only chaos, and no informed consensus on which to make rational decisions, the political elites have succeeded in convincing the booboisie that this obvious truth is not real, that's it's just a matter of time before the national income reaches $3.5 trillion and is in equilibrium with the irreducible federal budget (oh, excuse me - Boehner's got a plan for shaving $100 billion from a $3.7 trillion budget, or 2.7% - we're saved!) I mean, gosh, we added 100,000 jobs last month; true, you need to add about 125,000 jobs, at least, per month to cover new entries into the job market, but the U-3 unemployment rate fell to 9.4% because we stopped counting all the people who've completely given up hope of ever finding a job! The system works!

No, it doesn't. We're way beyond that now. However, folks, wouldn't you rather have France and Spain and Germany and Holland than one big ugly Roman Empire speaking a dead language? I sure would. It will be okay, more diverse, and a lot more interesting. So cheer on the chaos and dysfunction. Raise that damn debt ceiling, to the moon, Alice!

Globalization redux

I think if Thoreau were suddenly to appear on the scene today, it would take him a while to get his bearings, certainly, but he would get a handle on globalization eventually and would recognize it for what it is: another unsustainable instance of mankind becoming the tool of its tools. He warned against that over and over in Walden. As with so many of the developments in modern civilization, human society has adapted its living arrangements to what is technologically possible. Thus, in the "gee whiz" writing of essentially shallow and unscientific thinkers like Tom Friedman, the circumstance that a technology like fiber optic cables can be used to hook up faraway call centers so that formerly poor peasants in Bangalore can answer your questions about your Dell Computer is something that has to be done because it's possible to do it. First the technological breakthrough, then the adaptation of society.

In a similar, lower-tech way, the fact that American businesses can open factories in China and other Asian and Latin American countries where the cost of labor is much lower, and the environmental damage can be treated as someone else's "externality," means that this has to be the way to go. Again, because it can be done. Following on such massive integration of the world's economies, it is only natural that the financial systems should be melded into banking behemoths like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which act as proxy governments and fiscal armies for the developed world to control the economies in the Third World. Such integration can lead to very severe unintended (although inevitable) consequences such as runaway inflation in countries such as Tunisia (and now spreading to the Middle East) causing food riots, as the money printing by the West slops over into vulnerable economies where the peasantry is forced to spend upwards of 50% of their income for food and water. Also, when one large economy engages in systematic financial fraud, as the United States did during most of the period 2000 to 2008, the entire world economy is brought down because of all the monetary and economic connections among the various nations.

One is accused, of course, of being a Luddite and an unrealistic person if you assert that this state of affairs is a kind of consensus insanity. It is complex beyond human control or comprehension, it is inherently unstable and subject to Black Swan events, and it's a drag to think about it all. It is defended primarily because those in a position to profit from the complexity and integration control the organs of government and power, such as the U.S. Congress, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lower Manhattan.

A different question would be posed by Henry David Thoreau: is it a good way to live?

One of the major victims of globalization has been the American economy. With the full complicity and even enabling of the U.S. government, the industrial economy of the United States has been hollowed out and made dependent on inputs of recycled fiat money that American citizens sent abroad in the first place to (a) buy things we don't make anymore or (b) buy things we're running out of and refuse to replace, such as oil. The typical answer to such observations is that, well sure, it's unfortunate that the U.S. is sinking in terms of its output, its educational and quality of life standards, and that it bases its economy now on financial swindles and money printing, but hey - that's just the way the modern world is. The USA cannot be an island. Instead, we should be grateful that our largest employer, Wal-Mart, stocks a lot of stuff we don't really need, all made in China, and sells it to Wal-Mart employees whose money is sent to China so that it can be reinvested in U.S. Treasuries and then doled out to banks who can lend it to Wal-Mart employees who want to buy an inflated-price McMansion and live in it for a couple of years until they lose it to foreclosure. Or so the system used to work until a few years ago. Now it doesn't work at all. The Chinese cannot even lend us enough so we've taken to buying our own debt and calling the process "GDP growth."

A moment's reflection reveals that this answer cannot possibly make any sense. If one thinks of the USA more as a commune and less as a switchboard and "platform" for the wealthiest 1% to take advantage of globalism to achieve a lifestyle unavailable to the other 99% (and to widen that gap year by year), one can see that the United States, more than virtually any other country, does in fact have the complete wherewithal to sustain itself with only moderate inputs from the rest of the world. (Note to the NSA: I'm using "commune" not in the sense of Karl Marx, but perhaps more in the sense of collective action, as in a kibbutz or similar communal arrangement.) We export food because we raise more than we need. We are in a latitude almost uniquely favorable to massive development of solar and wind power. Instead of selling off our 3rd largest solar power manufacturer to China (as is contemplated in the Obama-Hu meetings underway now), we could build a huge alternative manufacturing industry here. We could revive what was once the greatest railroad system in the world.

In short, we have everything necessary to sustain our vital heat, with a lot of margin left for building the necessary complements to a full life. It isn't necessary at all to go all-in on this globalization insanity. Water seeks its own level, and what we are allowing the U.S. to do is to sink to a level commensurate with the wretched of the Earth so that an elite which profits from global integration can continue to get obscenely rich.

If the Tea Party, or someone, could figure all that out, we could start moving away from unstable, unprofitable complexity and toward self-reliance and a sane life. The problem, however, is that as C. Wright Mills told us many years ago, the governing principle of those in power is to make decisions which tend to perpetuate their power. Thus, change will come about, in the American instance, following collapse, when there is no other choice.

Just read this book and nobody gets hurt

Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave.

These are among the most frightening words in the English language. They are posted now on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. These words, really six words and an initial, portend another disaster for American society, for they mean that Thomas L. Friedman is going to publish another book. There is probably no way to stop him. I am personally a supporter of First Amendment rights, I do not believe in prior restraint, and I don't suppose there's a way to characterize a Friedman book as yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Although it's a close call.

It could be argued, and I suppose I'm arguing it now, that Thomas L. Friedman has been perhaps the single-most deleterious force in American society over the last 15 years or so. Certainly from the time he began cheerleading for the Iraq War in 2002, but his destructiveness cannot be confined to his insane insistence that after 9/11 the important thing was to attack an Arab country, virtually any Arab country, as he told Charlie Rose in that infamous interview. No, all of that, even his hypnotically boring insistence that the Iraq war could produce a "decent outcome" if we would all just give it another Friedman Unit (6 months) - all of this was very bad for the country, indeed, but it was not fatal.

No, what was fatal was Tom's pimping for globalization. In a series of books with the clunkiest, most infelicitous titles in the history of American letters, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, Hot Flat & Crowded, (it's painful just to look at them), Tom laid out his case for the unalloyed blessings of the "plug&play world," of integrated world markets, of offshoring of American manufacturing jobs so these "old economy" careers could be replaced with higher-tech jobs worthy of our educated, dynamic work force, and so that peasants in China and India and Malaysia could be lifted up out of poverty to become insatiable consumers of all that wonderful stuff America was going to be making in its New Economy.

It didn't really turn out that way. Instead, we went to Hell in a handbasket, replacing those solid middle class jobs with Wal-Mart greeters hired out of the probation department of the local medium security prison. Still, Tom had a lot of fun making up names for all the technological razzle-dazzle that made globalization such a cool thing: in-sourcing, for example. Throwing all those hip techie terms around like "fiber optics" and "work flow software." I had the sense, when I tried to read parts of one or two of the books, that Tom's real grasp of the underlying technical detail was nonexistent, that just using the names was as deep as it went. Still, here's the important point: the one certain way to make money from globalization, aside from being a multinational exploiter of the lax labor and environmental laws of the Third World while dumping all of your overpaid American factory workers who had the audacity to demand a living wage - is to write books about it. True, they're terrible books. The writing is awful, the metaphors don't work, his neologisms make you cringe. But how do we measure the success of a book in America? I guess by its presence on...the New York Times Bestseller List! Here it must be admitted that Friedman has something of a built-in advantage.

I think we're beginning to see the end of globalization now. It depends so much on the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels to move all that stuff around (including oil itself), and even though Tom is a big advocate of "geo-green" technology (writing about it in the den of his 12,000 square foot house in Bethesda, Maryland, affluence made possible in part, aside from all the awful books, by his marriage into one of the largest shopping mall fortunes on the face of this Flat World of ours), we're probably not going to be able to "scale" such technology (one of Tom's favorite "verbs") in time to avoid a major disruption. Thus, along with surging food prices now leading to social unrest and revolution in Third World countries, secondary to the massive inflation caused by all the fiat money printing in the developed world, the table has been set for the general collapse of all this misguided global integration.

Like the guy at the Pond said, simplicity really is best. Organization on a "scale" that humans can actually understand and exercise some control over. The way it used to be before guys like Friedman came along with their grandiose, half-understood nonsense. Of which there appears to be more in the pipeline.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I thought he was a great man, one of the most inspiring and courageous in American history. I can't watch his "I Have A Dream" speech without choking up, and I don't know any people of goodwill who can.

(The photo above is mine, taken of the King Mural in the basement of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.)

Martin Luther King was really from another era, an era less about superficial appearances and more about achieving just results, whatever the cost. As great as his speech before the Lincoln Memorial was, I was more impressed by his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which I read for the first time when my brother and I happened to be in Birmingham, waiting for my mother to arrive by train (how else?), about ten years ago. A diorama of King in jail is part of the Civil Rights Museum in that city. I would place that letter, that manifesto of courage, on a level with the great founding documents of American history.

The other members of the Southern Baptist Leadership were becoming concerned that Martin was perhaps pushing things a little hard; look where it landed him-in jail. Here is what King wrote, in part, in reply:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation...

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

One hand is on the tightrope walker

Paul Krugman, Ace Economist of the New York Times, uses the FRED site for just a whole lotta his research into the vast detail of the American economy. It's maintained by the St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve Bank, and graphs such as those above (click on the graphs and they'll open in a separate window so you can see the whole thing) are available in pretty profusion. They're not too politicized, either, as far as I can tell, although a little of the Administration's propaganda bleeds over into its reporting. For one example, notice that little upward tick at the end of the graph of receipts (taxes, mainly) up above. The Treasury is sticking to that forecast of $2.4 trillion for Fiscal 2011, and I wish them well. Currently, through three months or 1/4th of the year, the total take is about $500 billion, so I'm not sure how that extrapolates to $2.4 trillion, but hey...We Are The Change We've Been Waiting For.

Down below you see the Federal Government's expenditures. No real legerdemain there, just the grim facts. The slope of that line is, I believe, called "going parabolic." It looks like FRED is trying to tell us we're going to spend in the neighborhood of $3.7 trillion this fiscal year. Thus, it would be nice if the more optimistic forecast of receipts is accurate, although the gap is still $1.3 trillion if it is, versus, say, $1.5 trillion if national income is like last year.

The Capitol Rodeo Clowns (a/k/a Congress) are currently up in arms about the "debt ceiling." You can take one look at these two pictures and realize this is a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing. When your books look like this, you have no choice - you have to keep borrowing. The federal government is in the ridiculous position of spending $3.7 trillion of which $1.5 trillion is borrowed, per year, and the national debt is growing at the rate of $2 trillion per year, or over 50% of its yearly budget.

A question to ask oneself is this: how does a nation manage to get itself into such a predicament? It's absurd, isn't it? Another question that comes to mind is this: do these two graphs suggest that Congress (a) should have extended the "Bush tax cuts" and (b) cut another $120 billion from income over the next year with the "FICA holiday" ? (I wonder how that rosy forecast of $2.4 trillion is affected by that second little detail, by the way.)

The U-6 unemployment measure is stuck at around 17%. The economy is not creating jobs. Tax receipts would be flat, except for Congress's self-inflicted wounds, which mean they will go down, not up, in Fiscal 2011. The cadres of the vaunted "Tea Party" revolution currently throwing their weight around have already ruled every last single item of the federal budget "off limits" to any meaningful reduction (most particularly, defense). The one currently, actually reliable way Congress has of raising money is by borrowing it, particularly since "Quantitative Easing II" allows the Federal Reserve to buy about half the issuance of the Treasury's new debt (on the open market, of course - wink, wink).

I'm trying to imagine how this could possibly end well. When the situation is this precarious, the slightest hiccup can spell disaster. An abandonment of the Treasury auctions by foreign buyers. A sudden spike in interest rates of T-bonds and bills (just a reversion to their historical mean in the 5-7% range would be ruinous). An idiotic Congress refusing to raise "the debt ceiling." Ben Bernanke, a tightrope walker high above Niagara Falls with his foot on a banana peel, has to have everything go right and not a single thing go wrong. How many things in human life proceed along such a sunny path?

A few words on the Arizona shooting

One's interpretation of what happened in Tucson yesterday is essentially a psychological Rorschach test. If you need to see a broader political significance to the acts of a troubled young man with typically easy access to rapid-firing weaponry, then you can find it. You can look at Sarah Palin's "bullseye" chart, note that Gabby Giffords is on the map, and conclude that Sarah Palin incited an impressionable psychopath to act out. In this way you can use the horrific event as another means of conducting a political argument.

Firing handguns at politicians from point blank range is not anything new in American history. The American John Wilkes Booth and the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan did the same thing. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Byron de la Beckwith operated from farther away. John Hinckley fired from medium range.

America's a shooting gallery. The University of Texas, Columbine, Virginia Tech, post offices, workplaces, disgruntled ex-employees, enraged and estranged husbands, the D.C. sniper. A certain irreducible percentage of the population is mentally deranged, paranoid schizophrenic, violently predisposed, and any of these nut cases can get guns. The respectable, overwhelming majority of the populace supports their Second Amendment right to arm up. Justice Antonin Scalia, who likes to shoot caged birds, has confirmed that the Second Amendment is an individual right, not just a collective right belonging to official "militias."

The political discourse in this country, especially on the Right, has gotten completely gross, it does incite to violence, it's unhinged, but logically speaking, it acts in exacerbation of a preexisting tendency among that irreducible small cohort of lunatics to fire away. People who place bulleyes on national maps next to the names of politicians who need to be "taken out" ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is no shame left in this country, and after a brief period of fake penitence, the yahoos will again be out in force.

The Republicans & Their Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade

"Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. ...When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. ..To Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a glorious pain in the ass, since it complicated their task of organizing the crews for each combat mission. Men were tied up all over the squadron signing, pledging and singing, and the missions took hours longer to get under way. Effective emergency action became impossible, but Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren were both too timid to raise any outcry against Captain Black, who scrupulously enforced each day the doctrine of “Continual Reaffirmation” that he had originated, a doctrine designed to trap all those men who had become disloyal since the last time they had signed a loyalty oath the day before. It was Captain Black who came with advice to Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren as they pitched about in their bewildering predicament. He came with a delegation and advised them bluntly to make each man sign a loyalty oath before allowing him to fly on a combat mission."

Any excuse, after all, to quote from Joseph Heller's Catch-22. I thought of that incomparable novel (I've often thought that Joseph Heller was the closest that modern America has come to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels) when I heard about the newly empowered Republicans in the House and their idea that any bill introduced must cite its Constitutional authority. There's just something about Republicans....the clannishness, the sense of wanting to belong to a club, the way they revel in conformity and groupthink. They love flag lapel pins, monolithic voting, yielding to authority, unthinking solidarity, dumb little rules that identify them as members of a clan, such as citing Constitutional authority for anything you bring up in the House.

I'm okay with it all. The new House will be fun. They are absolutely full of terrible new ideas, ideas that make no sense, that are wildly impracticable, but since the USA has passed that point of complexity that Joseph Tainter, among others, pointed out as the zone of diminishing returns, where each new accretion of complexity only causes the system to break down further, it really doesn't matter. Which makes me think of Catch-22's Captain Dunbar, Yossarian's foil and philosophical buddy, who sought out the company of extraordinarily dull and tedious people, because they made time go more slowly and thus gave the illusion of a longer life. While the United States swirls down the toilet, we will have the spectacle of that supreme corporatist, President Barack Obama, attempting to differentiate himself from the moiling Tea Party dunderheads by bleating "progressive" sounds from time to time, while the Republicans lurch farther and farther to the Right in an effort to draw clear distinctions between themselves and the ever Rightward-leaning President. Obama will chase their Conservatism, in other words, but he will never overtake them, because the capacity of the Right for truly loony ideas is insatiable, protean and inexhaustible.

It should be fun to watch for a couple of years. I don't think many rational people believe at all anymore that the political class in Washington, D.C. is capable of any kind of ameliorative action. Any economic relief for the peasantry is strictly an unavoidable by-product of the Power Elite's main focus and preoccupation, which is concentrating power and wealth in Washington and Wall Street.

Congress Dances Up Against the Ceiling

Afflicted as I am with the common cold (rhinovirus? coronavirus? I know not), I find myself with a few more morning hours of wakefulness than I would choose to have under other, more healthful circumstances. To wit, I'm under the weather. Let us call this Day 4 of the Cold, the first (Monday) being largely symptom-free until later in the day, when a peculiar taste of almonds took up residence in the back of my sore throat. Then general malaise, that useful French word for which the English equivalent is "malaise," sneezing, as the viruses began using the cells of my upper respiratory tract to be fruitful and multiply. By the millions and millions. Day 2 marked the development of post-nasal drip and clear congestion in the nose, fatigue, and a subnormal temperature (pathognonomic for cold versus flu, except for H1N1, but there's no way I could have that; I mean, all those blackbirds falling out of the sky worldwide are simply auditioning for Birds II: This Time It's Over). Day 3 (Wednesday) introduced me to a chartreuse form of mucosal discharge (TMI, I know), a dry cough, more sneezing, a headache, a slight rise in temperature (the white blood cells at last mounting a counter-attack), and a curious euphoria that made me think I was better already, except I wasn't. Today (Thursday) is like a mature form of Tuesday. It's said a cold will last 14 days if you treat it, two weeks if you ignore it, but the symptoms are only aggravating for the first 6 to 9 days, depending on the severity. One thing about living alone is that there is virtually no secondary gain from illness, so I'm motivated to forget about this annoying cold as soon as possible, and I promise never to mention it again.

Now, a word from Frank Sinatra:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlv2IM67LQ

This is the classic "Dancing on the Ceiling" by Jule Styne and Betty Comden; I'm sorry, but I just can't get myself to take Lionel Richie seriously about anything, although I'm sure Richie made more money than Jule Styne with one song ("All Night Long") than Jule did writing what I consider the greatest standard ever written ("Just In Time"). I think Lionel was kind of rubbing it in by writing a cheesy disco tune with the same "Dancing on the Ceiling" title as Jule and Betty's great song, but such are the ways of progress and the relentless debasement of popular culture.

Yet it is Congress which now dances up against the ceiling, the debt ceiling in this case. Off to your right you can watch the National Debt Clock whirl away. The Klowns only gave themselves leeway up to $14.3 trillion last time they raised it. After that, the federal government supposedly loses its "authority" to spend money and must "shut down." Here's the key point on the National Debt Ceiling: it's utterly meaningless. Many of the Tea Party Reps and Senators made a big issue of the debt ceiling when they were elected (Rand Paul being one of the more vociferous), but they're caught in a strange version of Catch-22: if they seriously tried to stop the government from borrowing more money to stay in business, then their own salaries, those of their staffs, the whole apparatus of Congress, would also close down and terminate, and the very oxygen which sustains them (publicity) would also disappear. This leaves them in a rather obvious contradiction now, because they did make such a huge deal of the National Debt Ceiling when they were shucking and jiving their way to Washington. Hell, even Barack Obama voted against raising the National Debt Ceiling in 2006, when he was briefly a senator, once Barry was absolutely certain there were enough votes in the Senate to ensure that the ceiling would be raised anyway.

As I said the other day, Congress absolutely depends on you, me and every other American never paying any attention to the hard numbers involved in the "budget debate." If we really analyzed this freely-available data, published monthly by the Treasury Department with lots of details and lots of forecasts for the coming year, we would immediately see the absurdity of all this talk about a "balanced budget." The United States has never been farther away from a balanced budget. This year Congress will spend about $3.8 trillion, and about $1 trillion will be for various forms of defense and "security." There has never been a time in the history of the American Republic when the U.S. Treasury ever received even three trillion dollars in taxes and receipts.

So how will Orangeman and the Tea Party (maybe the GOP could stand for "Grand Orange Pekoe") learn to live on about $2.4 trillion per year, which is what the government plans to take in for fiscal 2011? (I don't think it will make that much, now that it's given away about $400 billion in tax revenues with its end-of-the-year "bipartisan compromise.") That's a good one, huh? What's the point of reducing federal spending to $3.7 trillion per year except as Kabuki theater for the rubes in the cheap seats? That's what I mean about how completely these dorks count on us falling asleep in civics class.

So hell yeah, Rand, I'll take what you said to Judge Napolitano recently on TV seriously: you think we ought to live within our means, within that roughly $200 billion per month, and I'll give you credit for actually using a realistic number for your calculations. Here's one idea: leave Social Security alone. It has a free-standing funding mechanism, the FICA tax, which would require only raising the cap above the present $100,000 limitation to put it back in the black (and doing away with that suicidal reduction in the employee's share of FICA). So that's okay, and that's about $790 billion per year. The Department of Health and Human Services, which adminsters Medicare, has a budget of about $900 billion per year. Listen up, Rand: do you think you're going to turn all those over-65 people loose to take their chances with private insurers? Here's a clue: I pay $718 per month to Blue Shield with a $5000 deductible, and Blue Shield just announced it plans a 59% rate hike. Using my 1950's-era grade school math skills, that tells me I'm looking at $1,141 per month, and being out of pocket $18,692 per year before I draw my first dollar of benefits. That's not a lot less than I made as an annual salary at my first lawyer job out of law school. How many seniors do you think might wind up uninsured, especially since they would be rated at higher premiums? When their medical premiums exceed 100% of the Social Security they receive?

Are you beginning to feel the room heat up a little, Rand? We're coming very close to the Tea Party's Golden Fleece: the defense budget. As a benchmark, Russia, our perennial nemesis, our death-struggle foe, the Mutual in Mutual Assured Destruction, spends about $40 billion per year (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mo-budget.htm). China, our new nemesis and rival for world domination, spends about $77 billion. How about this approach? We'll add these two together = $117 billion, and spend that. I know, ridiculous. Okay, how about we double that figure and spend $234 billion per year, and reduce the defense budget by about $800 billion? We're living on our income now. We still have about half a tril to cover the rest of the federal government's basic services, and that will be enough. The old folks are secure, the country's safe, the courts are functioning, the national parks are open for business, and Congress can meet about two or three times a year to conduct what little business will be left.

Works for me. Let's balance that sucker. Otherwise, just cave in now and shut the hell up.

And just outside the Capitol, the Real World

I came across this video from The Nation posted on Dmitry Orlov's site. A reminder that there are issues far more important than John Boehner's search for a superfluous $100 billion (which I understand the Republicans have now abandoned anyway - there's just nothing that can be reduced).

http://www.thenation.com/video/157441/peak-oil-and-changing-climate

The always provocative Noam Chomsky brilliantly outlines the dilemma the human species faces as it awaits action from corporate America: the fiduciary duty of corporate CEO's at big oil companies, coal companies and other polluters is to maximize short-term profits for shareholders, and anything less than this result, for whatever reasons of conscience or concern that the planet is doomed if we don't change our ways, will result in the ouster of management. With the House of Representatives now overrun by climate change deniers, it's difficult to see what combination of corporate or governmental action will bring this country around to a sane adaptation, short of literally having no choice, at which point the choice may be completely illusory.

I knew that Chomsky's description reminded me of something earlier in American history, and then it struck me that what he was describing was essentially identical to the deceit and immorality of Big Tobacco. The execs at the big smoke shops all knew, to a moral certainty, that they were manufacturing death-by-the-pack, and yet for as long as possible they hid the results of their own research and deliberately lied to Congress and to the American people. For the sake of the bottom line, they killed (and continue to kill) people by the millions. So too now does upper management at Exxon, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and the rest know that anthropogenic climate change is real, yet they fund specious research to discredit legitimate climate science, hire trolls to undermine criticism of their industry, and buy off Congressmen by the busload.

It is difficult not to share the pessimism of the phlegmatic Dr. Chomsky. On the other hand, what we can't accomplish volitionally, a collapse of the U.S. may deliver to us willy-nilly. As Mom used to say, God never closes a door without opening a window somewhere.

A Citizen's Guide to the Upcoming Budget Debate

First of all, it's important to remember when pondering the august proceedings of the Kongressional Klown Kollege that nothing is as it seems. While the IQs of the 535 members of Congress are definitely shifted to the left under the standard bell curve, even these mouthbreathers are aware that there is no earthly way for them to come close to balancing the budget. It is, as they say, to laugh. That is why The Man From Planet Orange (although he looks more cordovan in some light), John Boehner of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, talks about cutting "$100 billion from discretionary domestic spending." There are two ways of reading this statement of intention:

1. It's a joke.

2. Orangeman believes that the American people are even stupider than his colleagues.

Thus, to level the playing field for those of us outside the rotunda...

The Kongress Klowns are probably dimly aware they are running the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the civilized world. The federal income is wholly inadequate to keep the doors open and the suckers buying Treasury bonds. To illustrate this point, we can refer to the the U.S. Treasury Department, which publishes its income on a monthly basis. Its website is here: http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/index.html One valuable act of citizenry, in my opinion, would be for all literate, voting Americans to bookmark this site and check it once a month. It can really open your eyes to the reality of the American fiscal situation. The White House and Congress count on your ignorance in saying the stupid things they say, such as Boehner's statement above.

For example, in October of 2010, the first month of the current fiscal year, the United States received in income taxes, inclusive of Social Security (FICA) taxes, $146 billion. In November, 2010, the figure was $149 billion. The outlays (expenses) for these two months were, respectively, $286 billion and $299 billion, for a net deficit, in two months, of $290 billion, or approximately the same as the total income for the two months. We're talking here about two months. Now I will grant that the months of October and November are not necessarily the best months for federal income. If one were to extrapolate the approximately $300 billion received during these two months, total income for the fiscal year would only reach $1.8 trillion. The Treasury's "forecast," however, estimates total income of at least $2.4 trillion. So what I did was, I looked at the last fiscal year and noted that in three months (heavy taxpaying months), the Treasury received about $100 billion more per month than in the usual month. Thus, if we gross up the $1.8 trillion by these bonanza months, we should reach a number like $2.1 trillion.

This indeed was about what America made last year in taxes. The $2.4 trillion figure is a Hopium-enhanced number, although since the unemployment rate has not improved at all, and wages are flat, how is this supposed to be accomplished? Add to this dismal picture the recently passed FICA reduction of 2% on the employment side, which should affect the last 9 months of the fiscal year in a very negative way, and we begin to depart the Reality Station and head down the Track of Deep Denial altogether.

What happens if we multiply the outlay side by 6 (2 mos. x 6 = 12)? Well, the $600 billion spent in the first two reported months of the 2011 fiscal year extrapolates out to about $3.6 trillion, which again is fairly close to the actual budget number, although America has not in fact had an actual, passed budget lately. Just sort of a gentlemen's agreement (continuing resolution, they call it) to spend a helluva lot of money.

Chalmers Johnson, before his lamented death, made the point over and over that the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States, honestly accounted for, spends about $1 trillion per year. Never mind the official budget number of $660 billion or so. This does not count "supplemental" war appropriations (as if Congress is not aware that these tragically expensive follies are going on), expenses for caring for the wounded and maimed veterans we're mass producing, the nuclear bomb budget in the Department of Energy, Homeland Security, the various paramilitary outfits attached to the intelligence agencies, nor the debt service on that part of the national debt attributable to defense costs (about half, or close to $250 billion per year at present). When you add all of these up, you come very close (or over) Chalmers's number.

Do you hear anyone, anywhere, demand that the defense budget be reduced to some sane level of expenditure that we can actually afford on our somewhat pitiful income? The actual income of the U.S. Treasury is only enough to pay the existing defense budget (fully accounted for), Social Security and interest expense on the national debt. That's it. And it's very likely, at the current rate of debasement of the dollar and the addition of approximately $2 trillion per year to the national debt, that the interest expense is going to crowd out its two rivals for attention in future years.

Against this picture, I would ask you: what the hell does $100 billion in "domestic discretionary spending" have to do with anything? Leaving only the question: what are these mountebanks actually up to?

The Historical Arc of American Real Estate Fantasies

One curious feature from the late 1970's, as I recall among the hominid subgroup technically known as Yuppus Californicus (the thirty something, sub/urban professional milieu in which, always somewhat uncomfortably, I found myself immersed), was the real estate conversation. These discussions followed a predictable course. Someone mentioned they had bought their house for $140,000; however, they believed they could now sell it for $180,000. After only 3 years! Well, that was nothing, someone else would say; a friend bought their house in Mill Valley for $160,000, and now it was worth well over $200,000, and that was after one year!

And so these dreary, boring, vaguely sickening conversations went, all the time, everywhere. Californians of that period were absolutely obsessed with real estate, home ownership, and the rapid, accelerating appreciation thereof. It's what life was about. You might be thinking of the fugue movement from Bach's Lute Suite in E Minor you were learning on classical guitar. Didn't matter, that's nothing to talk about; shut up and listen to how much cash I just pulled out of this killer re-fi I'm about to close!

Yet another curious feature of the same historical epoch was this: it was generally conceded that the actual income of most people was insufficient to explain this meteoric rise in real estate prices. Which is another way of saying that the general economy did not seem to have anything to do with what was going on with property values. Meanwhile, one could see the deleterious effects of this phantasmal wealth. Well-to-do enclaves (the East Bay hills, the west side of the Peninsula, southern Marin County) were becoming ghettos infested by only two types of (white) people: "legacy" owners, ordinary people who had been in their houses a long time and were aging along with the house; and the YUPs who were invading these enclaves with their high salaries (doctors, lawyers, investment bankers). The ad valorem basis of real property taxes in these pre-Prop 13 days meant that the escalating prices were hammering the older, fixed-income people, which led to the "1% rule" of Prop 13, which led to the death of California's once-proud public education system. To a large extent, "ordinary life" disappeared from the Bay Area's upscale suburban areas in favor of real estate speculation and the devotion of ever-increasing amounts of one's income to keeping a roof over your head. The artists, the Bohemian or "genteel" poor, the people who just didn't want to focus their lives on working for a huge mortgage payment, were first marginalized and then driven from the scene altogether, along with all the mom-'n-pop stores and the other charming features of what we used to think of as real life.

The past is prologue. It was interesting to me to read a recent analysis by the brilliant, always useful Robert Shiller of Yale University (an economist who can see, unlike the confused and erratic Paul Krugman, the big picture and see it whole) about the actual historical trends in American real estate prices, from 1900 to the present. What he found was that real estate, except in aberrational periods, has tended to appreciate about 3.5% per year, year in and year out. It obviously declined heavily during the (first) Depression, and grew at ridiculous rates (about 19% per year) during the period 1998 to 2007 (although, as I said, the absurd was happening much sooner in California, as is often the case - The Golden Canary in the Coal Mine of American Life). 3.5% is essentially savings passbook return, or used to be, before we became so wealthy our banks could no longer afford to pay us interest. That's normal life. A house is actually a shelter from the elements, when you get right down to it. It's Vital Heat Maintenance Factor #1, in Thoreauvian terms, food being #2. Houses should appreciate along with general rates of low inflation, not substitute for a hot stock tip or a Ponzi scheme you've dreamed up.

So what is really going on in the "real estate crash?" A reversion to the trend line, as the water in housing prices is inexorably squeezed and wrung out. Peter Schiff, another brilliant Cal man (I don't mean me, I was thinking of Michael Milken), who never met a dismal economic fact he didn't like, has taken Shiller's analysis and run with it (into the ground). If housing prices have lost about 30% so far (and this is already a Depression-level number), they need to drop another 23% from present levels in order to fall back in line with the gently sloping upward line of Shiller's graph. In so doing, the slope would rejoin the essentially flat trend line of American earnings among the hoi polloi, that is to say, everyone outside about a ten square block area in Lower Manhattan. Americans have gotten essentially nowhere in their earning capacity since about 1973, which is why we substituted house appreciation for saved earnings as a way of building wealth.

So how far back will this regression need to go in order to regain congruence with Reality? You might think of prices in the late 1980's, early 1990's as your guide. Schiff, who has a kind of genius for making the blood redder in the water, predicts that the move downward will "overshoot" the trend line because of the general dislocation caused by Americans realizing they're dirt poor instead of real estate magnates. Thus, the move away from discretionary spending will be given another impetus once this reality sets in. The more general category of U.S.A. hominid, Americanus Consumerus, will pull in their horns.

I find this all intensely interesting, reflecting as it does the economic reality of my time on Earth, as an American. I think I'll write some more about it, especially the futile, insane attempts of Washington, D.C. and The Ben Bernank to fight these essential Laws of Economic Gravity by madly injecting trillions of dollars of notional "money" into the system in an effort to re-levitate the housing market. All because it has become a form of political suicide ever to admit that the last forty years of American economic history have, in essence, been a complete hoax.

Closing thought for 2010

I leave you with this idea, as we see the headlight of Train #2011 appear far down the track, heading toward the station: a constitutional democracy is something of a learned discipline, not so different from the scientific method in some ways. It takes a certain habit of mind, a kind of intellectual persistence to sustain. There is nothing automatic about it. "Serious" people in our society often seem to discount the idea that a democracy such as ours can degenerate into some far less desirable form of polity, but such thinkers suffer from the fallacy known as the normative tendency of the factual. This fallacy inculcates the illusion that the social and political arrangements around us are in some sense permanent and indestructible.

This is not really the truth at all. Democracy is actually the aberration; humans are far more predisposed to arrange themselves into hierarchical systems which are anti-democratic, which repose absolute power in elites accepted either by acclamation or by acquiescence in Divine Right. Looking back over history, and around the world even now, we can see that kings and dictators have been far more plentiful than democratic governments. Such tyrannies are the default position, anthropologically speaking, just as religion is the default position in the absence of a scientific establishment.

What is going on right now in Washington, D.C. is a modern, technologically-driven form of this degeneration. Sheldon Wolin calls it "inverted totalitarianism," Chris Hedges calls it a move from "Brave New World" to the dystopia of "1984." What it doesn't seem much like is the democracy in the United States which existed even twenty years ago. It's true we still have elections, as poorly attended as they are. There are still "sea changes" in our government, even "hope and change," yet you can still discern the inexorable slide toward a government of men and not of laws. If you pay attention, if you don't get caught up over much in partisanship and just observe how almost all of our leaders are behaving, you can see this. It has become the norm to disregard statutory law and the Constitution, most particularly the Bill of Rights. To my way of thinking, this is neither a "liberal" nor a "conservative" position, the act of pointing out this devolutionary process. Absolute power, once it is achieved by elites, is indifferent to "left" or "right." Was National "Socialism" a disease of the "left" or of the "right?" Were Stalin's gulags features of a "leftist" government or a "rightist" dictatorship? What's the difference, really? In neither system did the common person have any rights. Both systems were simply about the exercise of absolute power by those who seized it.

It has become standard practice in Washington never to punish a member of the political/financial/military elite for anything except betrayal of the elite's interests. That is the only crime now. Torture, lying to Congress and the American people in furtherance of a war, routine violations of the Fourth Amendment, suppression of First Amendment rights, fraud on an industrial scale - nothing ever is done about it through the justice system. Wars were launched first without a Declaration as required by Article 1 of the Constitution. Now they are pursued, as in Yemen, without even the token (and constitutionally insufficient) compliance with the War Powers Act. No government official seeks a FISA warrant to spy on us. If Wikileaks is too big a problem for the U.S. government, it employs a specious distinction which does not exist between Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, as far as First Amendment rights are concerned, in order to silence the former while leaving the latter, contradictorily, untarnished as an American hero.

In some way the power elites, as C.Wright Mills called them, have managed to confuse the common American into thinking that patriotism consists in party loyalty and not devotion to the best interests of the country. This is a very clever trick, and one that the Tea Party has completely fallen for. The Tea Party demands that "the Bush tax cuts" be enshrined and perpetuated, without seeming to realize that the evisceration of the U.S. Treasury cannot possibly serve the interests of the middle classers who tend to populate the movement. They cheer on wars that are supposed to keep us "safe," without thinking through that the wars are for the same purpose as the tax cuts, to keep taxpayer money (and the huge borrowing which such dwindling income makes possible) flowing to well-connected defense contractors and war profiteers. The power elites have managed to incite hate between liberals and conservatives by getting them to argue about such things as wars and tax cuts for the rich in symbolic terms - being for war and tax cuts for the wealthy is patriotic; being against such things is subversive and anti-American.

Eventually, when all the bills come due, the commoners always realize they've been had, when intellectual distinctions or the fine points of partisanship are no longer relevant, because the Queen is telling you to eat cake if there isn't enough bread. Then you wind up with France in 1789, or the American colonies in 1776. Or more darkly, Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1933.

While I don't really see how we're going to do it, I hope we begin to figure such things out before events themselves compel the changes. History teaches us that's often a disastrous way to evolve.

My fearless predictions for 2011

It's that time of year when all serious writers, or even people like me, cast their eyes toward the future and make meaningless predictions about what is to come. Since no one, including me again, is likely ever to look at this blog to see if I was right, I proceed fearlessly.

First, on the economic front: the leading economic indicators show some recent improvement. Even websites such as zerohedge which depend, for their very existence, on an unabated flow of disastrous econ news have been forced to acknowledge that some things are getting better. Mostly these things are of little benefit to the millions and millions in the abandoned lower and lower-middle classes, those on food stamps, unemployed, scrambling to keep body and soul together. 2011 will be another bad year for them. In the increasingly merciless form of pure capitalism which dominates the American scene, where even Christians believe that if someone is starving he probably deserves it because of character flaws (i.e., insufficient money), we leave the dead and broke behind and move on toward a Darwinist Utopia. Thus, next up: a curtailment of future Social Security benefits, sanctioned by our proto-Republican President in his upcoming State of the Union, and a gradual paring back of Medicare. With a House of Representatives full of Tea Party thinkers, those delegates ensconced by Fat, Dumb & Busted Americans trained to vote against their own economic interest, the entitlement programs will at last be under serious attack.

The American standard of living, based for the last thirty years or so on the housing market and house-as-ATM and retirement plan, will continue its inexorable sagging toward an Asian (Chinese) mean. There can be no miracles in this regard, folks. Prosperity depends on most people having a good, productive job, and we've sent most of those away. The housing market no longer takes up the slack; thus, how do we continue the consumer jubilee? The best we can hope for is that the descent is more gradual and less disruptive, as Americans adjust to their new, lower station in life. The Federal Reserve seems as though it's beginning to get the message, that the housing bubble cannot be reinflated without ruinous debasement of the U.S. dollar.

My reading, listening and watching lead me to believe that the next major economic hurdle facing the U.S. of A. is the insolvency of its constituent parts, that is, the states. The states and local governments are going to have to choose between paying their current and former (pension) payrolls or paying their bondholders. Big, populous states such as California, Illinois, and New York are involved in such excruciating calculi. I think this is where the Federal Reserve, having ridden to the rescue of Wall Street and Europe during 2008 to 2010, will next focus the powerful beam of its Magical Money Hallucination Generator. The Fed will "purchase" state and municipal bonds to stop a wave of defaults which will otherwise bring the roof down on the populace's heads. This at least is a more manageable job than the previous attempt to reinflate the housing bubble. Probably a trillion or two, chump change in Bernanke's world, will do the trick and buy the states and cities time to bring their programs into line with the general lowered expectations of America as a whole. Bernanke's willingness to conjure money out of thin air and to "appropriate" dough where the skinflint new Congress will not will of course cause all kinds of political convulsions, and that will be a big story line next year, especially with Ron Paul riding herd on the Fed. But we've all gotten used to doing things in a completely illegal, unconstitutional way, and it just doesn't matter anymore.

And as for war, and rumors of war: Obama may actually propose a budget for this (2012) fiscal year, unlike last year when he never got around to it, and there will be no decrease in the defense budget. Maybe a slight increase, although the Ungrateful Nouri over in Iraq remains adamant that the U.S. will leave his country at the end of 2011 as promised in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Smart move on his part; he's probably noticed that we have bases in Germany and Okinawa that were set up in 1945, and if he's going to pull this off, it's best to do so with a President who practices a form of preemptive submission when confronted with any challenge. What will happen to our "permanent" bases in Iraq? And that $12 billion embassy? How would you like to be posted with the foreign service in Baghdad, just across the border from Iran, with no U.S. military as backup? That's a weird one. We're going to leave the embassy staff in the gentle clutches of the Ungrateful Nouri, who is in league with Muqtada al-Sadr, who's already declared war on the U.S. once. What are we, nuts?

Afghanistan will drag on, of course. We have to have at least one shooting war and Afghanistan will have to do until North & South Korea actually get into real warfare, which could very well happen in 2011. That will be the new tour of duty for soldiers rotating home from Iraq.

American culture will remain the same dismal swampland of the lurid and meretricious. So be it. I still have my Complete Annotated Works of William Shakespeare, so I'm alright, Jack. Let us remember, as the Bard would have it, that it's not all that serious in the final analysis. Prospero said so:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Comeback Kid, Redux

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

If you're looking for a creative outlet during this slow time of year, you might want to sign up at xtranormal.com and begin making your own cartoons, using such characters as displayed in the linked cartoon or the familiar bears at right. I've written a couple of screenplays myself, collaborating with a buddy of mine who holds an MFA from the UCLA Film School, and thus has serious chops. One of these screenplays (based on my novel) went so far as to be read (and rejected) by a script editor at Lion's Gate. This is considered street cred in the amorphous world of movie making. Anyway, I pass along a couple of screenwriting tips for your use as you put together your YouTube viral instant classic:

As you write your script, remember the basic improv formula: build, don't refute. A character says one thing, and the other character says something which extends that comment or leads to a new turn. For example, if one character says, "Do you want to go with me?" the other character can't simply say, "No," or the skit is over. Instead, character 2 should say something like, "I'd like to, but I'm blowing up the Chinese Embassy." Then character 1 can say, "Well, how about Tuesday," or "Did you get a bad pot sticker?"

Keep the statements of the characters short. It doesn't have to get mannered in the style of David Mamet, but soliloquies are boring unless you can write like the Bard himself. Rapid interchange of dialogue is more interesting than two characters weighing each other down with speeches.

I'm working on a cartoon with two ready-made characters, Obama and George W. Bush, from the xtranormal.site. It's getting pretty obvious that the two are far more alike than different, and not just in the sense that they are both Harvard grads. Neither of them is (was) really up to the job of being President and Obama relies, and Bush relied, completely on a group of advisors to tell them what to do. Indeed, the three main advisors, David Petraeus, Robert Gates and Ben Bernanke, are the same for both of them. When you've accounted for the military-industrial-financial complex, there really isn't much left to talk about as far as American policy is concerned, and the same people call the shots now as did during Bush's reign. Obama kept Bush's desk, his Oval Office rug and his government, so it isn't really surprising that things don't seem very different. The fact that Obama would choose to copy George W. Bush in making most of his calls tells you probably everything you need to know about Obama's insecurities and internal resources.

In retrospect, it was Bush's unfortunate fate to fall under the insidious sway of Dick Cheney, and Bush the Elder was probably responsible for that, knowing, as he did, that his eldest son was a consummate lightweight and needed heavy guidance from a D.C. insider. But Pappy Bush misunderestimated just how radical Cheney was (I can't figure out why Blogger is underlining in wavy red a perfectly good verb form like "misunderestimated"). Thus, our Constitutional form of government went down the toilet during the Bush years and is probably not coming back.

I note that the MSM has lightened up on the O-Man recently, right about the time I decided to terminate Obama-bashing. Positing a causal connection between my decision and this more general trend, however, would amount to megalomania bordering on solipsism, so I will search for a different explanation. And it's this: the MSM and their corporate owners have decided to Manufacture Consent (thank you again, Noam, for this useful analytical tool) around the idea that Obama's list of trivial "victories" on DADT and Reagan's START negotiations (Obama being one of Ron's major Groupies) should kickstart the Barack's comeback. I believe that this decision (reflected in many opinion pieces from David Brooks at the NY Times to Howard Fineman) was in turn a result of these learned opinion-makers staring into the yawning abyss of a Palin Presidency and not liking at all what they were seeing. Obama, meanwhile, had given the rich a huge tax break in his "deal" with the Republicans (I hope he checked for his wallet as he left the room), and furthermore kicked the stool out from underneath Social Security with his really idiotic "tax holiday," which will cause the "trust fund" to bleed from every orifice over the next year and set it up for sacrificial slaughter. That really was the most evil ploy I've ever seen a Democratic President fall for.

Nevertheless, the MSM, and their dwindling band of mega-owners (Rupert Murdoch, Comcast, General Electric, a few others), must have asked themselves: what's not to like about Barry? He's given us trillions in tax breaks, he's gutted Social Security, he's agreed to leave Guantanamo open in perpetuity, he's "surged" the war in Afghanistan - what does he have to do for us? Why are we giving this guy a hard time? Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is a step into the great unknown. Some of the things she did during her brief reign as Governor of Alaska were scarily populist, such as dividing up oil revenues with common people. She's not controllable and malleable in the same way Obama is. Thus, the trick must be to maneuver the 2012 election toward an outcome where either the proto-Republican Obama is reelected, or (worst case) Jeb Bush is the Third Bush to ascend to the Kennebunkport Throne.

We should all take a great deal of comfort in that. The Powers That Be, while looking primarily to their own interest, of course, accidentally may look out for ours. I guess.

Christmas Comes But Once A Year

Which is undoubtedly enough. I trust no one is actively urging that it happen two or three times per annum. I once had the idea that Christmas should be like the Olympics: every four years. The Summer Olys use the prime time, the quadrennial divisible by four, like the Presidential elections. The Winter Olympics are relegated to the midterm election years. So the first New Christmas could use 2013, and every four years thereafter. 2017, 2021, 2025 and like that. Also, move the holiday itself to the solstice, which is usually on December 21 or 22, occasionally (very rarely) on the 23rd. When a 23 December Solstice happened to fall in a Christmas year, we could call it a Jubilee Year. That would happen very, very rarely. On a Jubilee Christmas, everyone's debts would be forgiven. Also, in the Quadrennial Solstice Christmas which we will first observe in 2013, we will adopt the Days of Awe approach of Judaism and use the roughly 10-day period between the Solstice and New Year to go around and make amends with all the people we've managed to offend or become estranged from in the preceding 12 months.

I think I have markedly improved the all-important Quality of Life in the United States with these humble suggestions.

My next random thought has to do with the Internet, and Al Franken's heroic efforts to preserve "net neutrality." I think I almost understand this subject. It has to do with convincing, or requiring, the big, soulless, monopolistic purveyors of Internet traffic, such as Comcast, to play fair with everyone who wants to use the Internet and not get into the practice of charging higher usage rates for websites such as Netflix who demand more bandwidth, or, worse yet, begin censoring offensive websites. The idea is that the Internet should remain the basic open access free-for-all we all know and love. All you have to do is come up with a ton of money every month in order to get online. And, naturally, it's all going to change over time anyway, no matter what Al Franken does. Completely open access might remain in Europe or even parts of Asia where Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and essentially free, but this is America, where the sheeple unquestioningly shell out 1000% more for the same American drugs which Canadians acquire for a pittance, and where our own Congress forbids us from cutting a better deal with pharmaceutical companies so we can afford our own drugs. This is the same Congress upon which we will rely to protect us from the monopolistic abuses of the big Internet providers. That should work out.

Though I had another thought: it's okay if the Internet providers commit suicide and make it too hard to use the thing. One big complaint I hear these days is that the federal government is spying on all of us, compiling dossiers, violating the Fourth Amendment left and right, et cetera. No doubt this is true. And what makes this espionage so easy, what makes us so vulnerable? Our constant use of the Internet. Think about it. When we were phone-based communicators, the federal government could certainly tap phones, but it's a monumental hassle. What you wind up with is billions of hours of taped conversations, most of it of the, "Q: Wanna come over? A: 'Kay. Q: When? A: I dunno, whadya think?" variety. There was great safety and anonymity in this tiny signal-to-noise ratio. Now we (a) label our conversations with our IP Address and (b) write it down so it can be archived by the big Internet providers like Comcast, who are dying to cooperate with the FBI and NSA and turn you in so they can demonstrate how Patriotic they are. Smart of us, huh? Even dumber is blogging.

The Internet is an amazing source of information, a great fraction of it unverified and unreliable. The Internet has driven traditional dead-tree journalism to the edge of extinction, including newspapers such as the Washington Post, which more or less by itself unmasked the Watergate scandal. Or the New York Times, which broke the back of the Vietnam coverup with the Pentagon Papers revelations. Nowadays scandals can take place in broad daylight and nothing ever happens to the perpetrators. Take the Valerie Plame situation, one of my favorite examples. One show trial with a communted sentence. One book deal and movie. That's it. Wall Street defrauded the entire world by knowingly boxing up and selling millions of mortgage-backed securities which they knew, at the point of sale, were absolutely bogus. And nothing happens other than the federal government's bailout. All of it massively covered by the Internet, by thousands and thousands of website posts, detailing every last fact and data point about what happened. Not a thing was ever done about it.

We live in an age of Impotent Information Overload. The Internet diffuses everything so there is no focus of public outrage. Just a million wildfires all burning at once and no concerted action. Blogging, Internet posting, the Huffington Post-syndrome, "email forwards" (remember the millions of forwards during the Bush years?) all give the illusion of resistance and push-back, but the only problem is that nothing ever happens. Not to go all Old School on you or nothing, but back in the day if liberals wanted to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, they did not forward a lot of emails and call it a day. They got together in a show of force and brought attention to the issue. They demanded accountability from the government. The same thing is true of the Civil Rights Movement. Email forwards would not have integrated the Old South.

The Tea Party people seem to know this. Sometimes it doesn't look like much, but they hit the bricks with their protests and their ideas and that's why they've gotten somewhere. They elected a lot of Congresspeople, an astonishing number, really, through mass organizing in the Real World, not the Virtual World of the Internet.

The non-business use of the Internet, when you get right down to it, is just a nice way to waste time. Even on Christmas morning, you know? Which happens about four times more than it probably should.