Pensées dans l'isoloir

Everything just sounds more deeply philosophical in French.  It translates as "thoughts in the voting booth," and concerns that quiet moment, when one is all by oneself facing the ballot, and your brave and independent pronouncements about voting for a third party candidate are at last put to the real test.

So much to think about.  So many pensées.  Have I made myself a victim of my own "false equivalence," that easy cop-out favored by the Mainstream Media (those sycophants you often call the Lamestream Media in your snarky moments)?  Is it just too easy to say that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are indistinguishable politically, that voting for the lesser of two evils is nevertheless voting for evil, that third parties with actual real, helpful ideas can never break through to relevance and power if election after pitiful election we keep saying to ourselves, not this time, there is simply too much at stake?

Certainly these are conundra worthy of Voltaire and Descartes.  


One begins with the electoral facts.  California's 55 electoral votes are cast on a winner-take-all basis. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that anyone other than Barack Obama is going to win the Golden State.  Plus, I know that my vote is worth 25% of the vote of a pickup-driving cowboy from Laramie, Wyoming.  Wyoming has the constitutional minimum of 3 electoral votes (matching its two senators and one congressman) with a population of 563,000.  California's 55 electoral votes are based on a population of 37 million, roughly 74 times larger than Wyoming.  Yet the electoral votes are only 18 times as many.  Since we do not have direct election of Presidents by popular vote in this country, my vote is not what it appears to be in the first place.  It's a diluted ballot that I cast; thus, as far as symbolic votes for third party candidates are concerned, California is a nice safe haven to exercise one's conscience (and if it's not safe, whoever in the United States indulges himself in an act of conscience?  Certainly almost no one in the White House or Congress.)


There is a good reason that the Obama and Romney campaigns do not waste their money running expensive TV ads in California.  I hear about these "hard hitting" ads in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but I never have my focus on "Big Bang Theory" disturbed by actual viewing.


Thus, a voter in California who worries a lot about how he votes, as a matter of reality, is engaging in a form of electoral grandiosity.  The die is cast; the fix is in.  Maybe the national polls talk about "razor thin" margins for Obama, a lead within the "margin of error," it's currently "neck and neck" at 47% all (that was actually the last number I heard - rather ironic, because I imagine, Venn Diagram-speaking, that there is a huge overlap between that 47% and the 47% that Romney despises).


I can assure you, however, that the campaign honchos do not look at those national polls.  They're irrelevant.  Ohio and Florida, Ohio & Florida, Ohio/Florida: color in the rest of the states red or blue, and just hold the elections in Ohio and Florida.  I'd hate to be a voter in Ohio: I'd be so tense every four years.  Here I take my place among the voters of a state with one of the worst-performing educational systems in the country (its glory days as No. 1 long past), casting my vote upon a sea of votes from millions and millions of uninformed, functionally illiterate, easily-manipulated (remember Proposition 8, anyone?) fellow citizens.  Please: give myself a break.


On the merits: I would rather see Obama win, and I'm fairly sure he will.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, however, believe any longer in the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  That is not false equivalence; it's just the way it is.  For a person like me, a "process liberal" as opposed to a "substantive liberal," my enthusiasm for the voting franchise took a major hit during the Misrule of George W. Bush, and virtually all of Bush's most repugnant, anti-Constitutional positions have been continued, and even expanded by Barack Obama.  (I don't know if you've noticed, but Barack is just not real original.)  Both parties appear content with the awful ruling in the Citizens United case.  Mr. Obama peeped about it in one State of the Union address, and that was it.  The big telecom companies were just granted final immunity by the Supreme Court from their complicity in all of the warrantless wiretapping of the Bush (and Obama, of course) years.


On and on.  Both candidates are warmongers, both will overspend on the defense budget forever, both will kowtow and cater to the interests of Wall Street over Main Street (it's where the campaign cash is).


But, but...yes, I know what you're going to say.  What about abortion and gay marriage?  What about those Supreme Court appointments?  This is the ratio decidendi (basis of decision) of all elections, isn't it?  This is actually what the Presidential election is about: not tax policy (the President doesn't decide tax policy, the Congress does); not the "war on terror" (there's no difference); not the "budget" or deficit (the Obama Administration doesn't even propose budgets anymore); not environmental issues (both candidates are against the Earth); not nothin'.  Abortion, and in recent years, gay marriage.


Look, I wrote a screed on the effect of overturning Roe vs. Wade a long time ago.  Such a ruling does not mean that abortion is everywhere illegal in the United States.  It just means that you can't get an abortion in a Red State. So weigh that in the balance.  You have to travel from Texas to California.  My mother did that (not to get an abortion - to get the hell out of Texas).  Texas is a good place to get out of, for whatever reason.  


Should the rise of actual alternatives to the Two Party Duopoly system, with its thorough corruption and ossified inability to adapt to a changing world, be forever held hostage so that women in an unfortunate situation do not have to travel from Texas to California?  Nothing is perfect in this world, after all.  Perhaps we could organize the modern equivalent of the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad for women who need to travel to escape the ideological slavery of their judgmental, religious fellow citizens.  That, in fact, would be an excellent plank in a Third Party Platform. You have to take a few chances to get anywhere.

The Crisis of Global Warming Passes

It will hit 88 degrees here today in Northern California and 90 tomorrow, according to my usually reliable iPhone temperature app.  That's pretty warm for mid- to late October around here. Not that I'm one of those scientifically illiterate guys who think "weather" is the same as "climate" or anything like that.  I understand the difference.  Still, it's somewhat worrying, you know?  A little weird.

However, I think it must be my imagination because I watched the debate between the two presidential candidates who are allowed on mainstream television last night and the words "global warming," "climate change," or even "weather" were never mentioned.  Not a single, solitary time.

Since the Arctic ice depletion this year is the greatest in recorded history, and there are many other signs of warming, ocean acidification, collapse of marine life, and migration of infectious diseases and tropical insects into formerly temperate climates, one would think that in the course of such a debate climate change would at least merit a passing comment.  You might think about it this way: let us say that you're uncertain about the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Shouldn't the issue at least be aired out?  It does have to do with the viability of Earth as our natural habitat, and that seems important.  Granted, you've been influenced by the dissenters, who at this most point are mostly Freeman Dyson, a very elderly mathematician who dabbles in atmospheric science mainly to irritate people (especially his wife); and Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at MIT.  Unfortunately for Denier Orthodoxy, the shock troops of AGW skeptics were dealt a heavy blow recently when Richard Muller, a prominent UC Berkeley scientist, changed his mind.  As reported by the Chronicle:

 "The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/UC-climate-change-skeptic-changes-views-3748148.php#ixzz29ZK4ipMI

For the Denial movement, scientists can be very unreliable supporters since they have this distressing habit of changing their minds in the face of new evidence.  I suppose this is why there is such a perfect congruence between the base of Denialism and Evangelical religion, where Denialism is an article of faith (so to speak).  If you can believe that present life forms were simply placed here on Earth about 6,000 years ago by some Guy you read about in a book, then Denialism is the classic piece o' cake. Evidence?  What's that got to do with anything?

Still, one may deride the scientific bona fides of such skepticism, but one thing you gotta admit:  the AGW deniers are in charge in this country.  They don't need Muller, they don't even need Lindzen (who actually wobbles a lot - his argument seems to be that AGW is real, but it's not so bad).  They don't need anyone, since they disproved Evolution by devising their own "probability" science.

It works, too.  The heavily upholstered Candi Crowley, last night's moderator, certainly never brought the subject of climate change up.  Not a single questioner (the good citizens of Nassau County, N.Y.) were allowed to broach the subject (the moderator and CNN know, you see, what questions will come to the floor); and I imagine that the campaigns knew in advance that neither side would be "embarrassed" by a direct question on AGW because that would force them to commit themselves, one way or another.  So Romney can pretend to disbelieve in AGW, to please his salivating, know-nothing base; and Obama can be assumed to believe in such malarkey, to placate his "liberal" supporters.

It's just better, in this country, not to talk about it.  Maybe if we ignore it, it will simply go away.  Let's develop all these fossil fuel sources, coal, oil, natural gas, as fast as we can so we become "energy independent," and release all of that pent-up carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fevered rush.  That was the message.  Better yet, if Obama is in charge of the release, the greenhouse gases, as I wrote on another occasion, will be "Liberal CO2," which I've shown is much safer than Conservative CO2.

Among the civilized and educated nations of the world, the United States of American does indeed dwell within a cocoon of profound ignorance.  It is eerie to behold it on such brazen display as last night.  One candidate, Romney, proposes a mathematically impossible plan of getting rid of whole categories of taxation without, somehow, increasing America's $1 trillion per year deficits.  He pays no political price for such nonsense, of course, because the mathematically impossible is just as easy to believe, in this country, as Creationism or the existence of a stable climate.

FAQ on the Fiscal Cliff

(Written without prior research in order to test my credentials as a low-information voter.)

1.  What the hell is the fiscal cliff?

I'm actually not clear on this.  If memory serves, it's some terrible thing that will happen right after December 31, 2012 (a little over two months from now) if Congress, which acts always as a slow, dumb and blind beast, does not get its act together and do something about it.

2.  Yes, but what is it?

Again, going from memory, when Congress was last faced with the notional illusion of a "debt ceiling," like the little kids they are they decided not to deal with it right there and then but told themselves that if they didn't really, for real, deal with it by December 31, 2012, that (in order not to have to think about it again and make difficult decisions) that all sorts of "Draconian" things would automatically happen (as if, in other words, they had not set these very things in motion by deferring a decision).  Among these terrible things are the expiration of the so-called "Bush tax cuts" (the reduction of the top marginal rate on income); the 2% FICA reduction; various other tax "relief" measures piled on in the endless pandering to the electorate which has been much in vogue since the economy collapsed; and (the Big Enchilada) 25% reductions in all "discretionary" spending categories, which would include, amazingly, defense spending, but exempt such old standbys as Social Security, Medicare and interest payments on the national debt.

3.  Isn't this kind of a mindless, stupid way to do things?

Well, yes of course.  The important thing to remember is that Congress wasn't the least bit sincere in this pantomime of fiscal probity.  The poison pill lodged in the middle of all this stuff is the reduction in defense spending.  That just isn't going to happen.  Since the United States, at the moment, is fighting about 14 wars worldwide, Republicans and Democrats alike can point to the need (as always) to "support the troops in harm's way/in the field/fighting to keep us free" and (reluctantly) extend the deadline on the fiscal cliff (that's a mixed metaphor - maybe "cantilever out" on the fiscal cliff) so that Wile E. Coyote has a little more running room before the moment of truth.

4.  How long will Congress keep extending the deadline on the fiscal cliff?

Essentially, till the freaking cows come home.  One thing to remember about the Republicans and Democrats infesting the building under the Capitol Dome: it isn't actually their money, all this tax revenue and cash they raise by borrowing all the time.  They don't really care.  They could solve these problems if they wanted to, but they don't want to.  They use all this money to solicit bribes (campaign donations) from crony corporations who feed off the federal budget. Other than the Entitlement programs, which have dedicated taxes of their own and thus are not the least bit interesting to Congress, other than as irritating drains on what little money America has left.  But you can't literally give the American people nothing and remain in office, so they live with it.

5.  Why is imagery from The Roadrunner cartoons used so much in discussing this issue?

The short answer is that public discourse in this country suffers from a paucity of imagination and cultural references. There are essentially only two metaphors used to discuss every dismal facet of the modern American economy: the Titanic (and generally rearranging the deck chairs thereof); and Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff and hovering briefly in midair.  At some point, you'd think the pundits would realize these tropes are completely played.  Then again, one would think that this "debt ceiling" nonsense would fade away as well, but there's not much chance of that either.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Snarky Smirk versus the Wrinkled Forehead

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Bay Blend (Ultra Dark Roast)...

I confess at the outset that I've always thought Joe Biden was the example par excellence of everything that is wrong with modern American politics.  He is, without doubt, the apotheosis of the style-over-substance practitioner of the black arts of the Beltway.  (Okay, Black Arts of the Beltway: that one's going in the pantheon.) 

Joe doesn't stand for anything, least of all the middle class.  When he ran for President in 1988, he didn't even run as Joe Biden; he ran as Neil Kinnock, a British politician who had challenged Margaret Thatcher.  Biden liked Kinnock's stump speech so much (redolent of rags to riches touches) that Joe began borrowing whole segments of it for his own campaign stops.  That wasn't quite enough, however (Joe, as you saw Thursday night, never knows when to stop), so Biden then began borrowing actual details of Kinnock's life, and soon we were hearing about the coal miners in Biden's ancestry.  Which seemed plausible, since Biden was from Pennsylvania, but unfortunately was contrary to reality.  Other tales of flagrant plagiarism from Biden's law school days then came out and Biden abandoned his run for the presidency (a picture of Joe in 1988, under siege, is above).  For 1988, at least, but he's made periodic stabs at it since then.

Biden was the perfect choice as Obama's running mate, as the Big Dog Triangulator, Bill Clinton pointed out early.  Obama had "knocked it out of the park" by choosing Joe.  And what wasn't to like?  Running against George W. Bush's record, with wars "put on credit cards" (Biden trotted that very hoary cliche out on Thursday night), there was the straight-talkin' Joe to watch Barack's back.  Because Joe Biden had always been a fervent opponent of the wasteful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hadn't he?  He must have been, because the "liberal caucus" in the Senate in 2002 would certainly include this fearless champion of the people, a man who, even when the war drums were beating loudest, would keep his head and see through the propaganda.  Certainly Biden would demonstrate the kind of moral courage that I thought, even at the time, was reminiscent of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.

So here's the list:

Sens. Akaka (D-HI), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Byrd (D-WV), Conrad (D-ND), Corzine (D-NJ), Dayton (D-MN), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Graham (D-FL), Inouye (D-HI), Kennedy (D-MA), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Reed (D-RI), Sarbanes (D-MD), Stabenow (D-MI), Wellstone (D-MN), and Wyden (D-OR).

Hmmm.  Something's wrong here.   Certainly Joe Biden wouldn't leave Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Carl Levin and other vocal war opponents just hanging out there, would he?

Well, of course he would.  He voted for the other war on the charge card, too, Afghanistan.  Joe's "tough on terror."  Maybe Biden himself never served in the military, but he can claim (as he does, endlessly) that at least his son has put his life on the line fighting in these pointless wars his father voted for.  So that's something, at least.  What, I'm not so sure.

Joe was asked for another performance Thursday night, one where he just couldn't stop laughing at everything Paul Ryan said.  It got very, very silly, since Biden's risibility was so obviously counterfeit.  Biden was either not listening or he was high on nitrous oxide.

I suspect it worked.  That's not surprising, since Biden, who derived most of his campaign funding from banks and credit card companies (the Delaware senator led the charge in "reforming" the Bankruptcy Code to make it more difficult for the "middle class" to escape those onerous 29% interest charges through bankruptcy, another 2005 event that's gone down the memory hole), continues to survive politically through pure imagery.

As for Paul Ryan: who really cares?  I will say this.  At least he stated a few unpleasant facts, which we don't often hear in the anodyne evocations of America's glory which characterize all political appearances during the campaign.  Ryan said that Medicare and Social Security are insolvent, and they are.  He said that 10,000 Americans are reaching retirement age every day, and that's true, and the social safety net is being ripped asunder as a result.  Ryan said that 23 million Americans are unemployed and underemployed, that 15% of the total population lives in poverty, that the economy is actually decelerating, and that there are not enough millionaires in the United States, even if taxed at the 100% rate, to balance the federal budget.  These are the facts.

Joe Biden prides himself on a "lifetime of service" to the American people, and yet what this really means is that he's a career politician who has presided over the fiasco that the American economy and budget have become.  Biden, with his craven votes for war and Big Defense, has seen to it that the Social Security "trust fund" was squandered on pointless military adventures, so that now, in a debate, he attacks his opponent for wanting to "privatize" Social Security (as Bill Clinton proposed during his second term).  There's really nothing left to "privatize."  The money's all gone and the system is collapsing under its own weight.

Still, as Joe bragged on Thursday night, he always says exactly what's on his mind.  Or Neil Kinnock's, but the effect is much the same.

Sunday Morning Essay: The Show About Nothing

Brought to you by Costa Rican Organic coffee.... 

Some ideas for questions for the next "debate:"

Q:  Professor Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State, has stated that Arctic ice melt and the melting of land-based ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica are "decades ahead of schedule" according to climate models.  Groups at MIT and Stanford have concluded that the forecasts of the IPCC are, if anything, much too optimistic.  Do you consider the future habitability of Planet Earth by human beings an important issue?  Should we do something?

Q:  Almost everyone in America is clinically obese and dying of Type II diabetes.  Should we take a look at the federal government's massive subsidies to the inedible corn industry?

Q:  Since the world is running out of affordable petroleum, should we think about building a railroad so people can get from one place to another?

Q:  Should food be labeled so that Americans know whether they're eating a biological substance produced through millions of years of evolution, or is something concocted last week by a genetic engineer at Monsanto?

Q:  Gentlemen, should the President of the United States be given the power to assassinate American citizens without judicial process of any kind?

Q:  Mr. President, Governor Romney, should the President be allowed to invade and bomb any foreign country he chooses without seeking Congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution and even without complying with the War Powers Act of 1973?

Q:  Should the President be allowed to suspend the right of habeas corpus for an American citizen on American soil simply by labeling someone a terrorist or by accusing him of material support of some terrorist organization?

Q:  Should an American official ever be prosecuted for a capital war crime, such as causing death by torture, in compliance with the War Crimes Act and with the Convention Against Torture to which the United States is a signatory? Should the answer be any different if the American official in question admits on national television that he ordered torture?

Q:  Should anyone on Wall Street be prosecuted, ever, for committing mega-fraud in the mortgage securitization business? Or were President Obama and Attorney General Place Holder correct that, "unfortunately," nothing anyone ever did was illegal?

Q:  Should the rule of law be reinstituted as a governing principle in the American Republic?

Such questions seem unlikely.  Rather, the passions of the mob will be stirred up instead by the riveting arguments over such issues as whether Mitt Romney does or does not propose $5 trillion in tax cuts at the top marginal rate over the next ten years, and whether Obamacare does or does not involve "raiding" Medicare reimbursements.  That's pretty much the whole story.  

Oh, and jobs.  Both candidates favor jobs.  I guess the next go round will be all about foreign policy.  Whereas in Round One there might have been a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates, this time the gap will narrow to the dimensions of the aperture in the electron slit experiments of quantum mechanics.

I tend to agree with those wags who opine that the problem with the debate format isn't that third party views are completely excluded.  It's that there is no second party represented.

Damn That Lincoln-Douglas Thing Anyway

A few inchoate reactions to the debate:

My own "format" for watching/listening to the debate was a little haphazard because of evening chores, but it went like this: I watched it live on TV for about a half hour, then drove somewhere and listened on the radio for about half an hour, then came home and watched the end of the debate live and then the general pandemonium among the MSNBC panel of Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, et alia as they tried to come to terms with what a terrible debater their champion, Barack Obama, actually is. Then I watched the 20 minutes or so I had missed while performing my St. Francis of Assisi duties in San Rafael.

Impressions gained by my multi-media encounter:  Barack Obama does better if you're only listening to him and not watching.  Mitt Romney does pretty well either way.  If you're watching and listening to Barack Obama, you get the full effect of his overall weakness.  The fidgeting, the downcast eyes, the lame hand gestures, and (his true Achilles Heel) that dreadful insertion of the long, drawn-out "Aaannnnnddddddd" between phrases as he tries to think of what to say next.

Paul Krugman, on his mysteriously-named "Conscience of A Liberal" blog, had this to say:

The hard-hitting and effective campaign against Romney led many people to believe that this wasn’t going to happen again. But in the first debate, there was Capillary Man once again.
I really don’t know what this is about.

Actually, Krugman knows exactly what this is about and doesn't want to say it because his conscientious liberalism won't allow him to.  Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes to argue his positions successfully.  He doesn't know how to marshal facts on the fly, synthesize them into a forceful, cogent argument, and go for the jugular of his opponent's many weaknesses (as opposed to the capillaries, as Krugman notes).  How the the rich scion of a prominent family, who dismantled American businesses for a living, who serially evades taxes, who won't disclose how little he pays to the government each year although he's seeking to become chief fiduciary of the country, who stashes money in the Cayman Islands, and who stated on videotape that he has nothing but contempt for about half the American public too broke to pay federal income taxes - how a guy with all these liabilities (we're talking about Romney here) could escape utterly unscathed after an hour and a half of discussing almost nothing except taxes and entitlements - I really don't know what that is about.

Except to avoid Krugman's disingenuous posing: the same fecklessness in Obama was evident in the Obama - McCain debates, but John McCain was such an inconceivably lousy candidate, crotchety, incoherent, often nonsensical, that it didn't matter.  Now it matters, and the Democrats have a huge problem on their hands.

It's only too bad that Obama wasn't debating Jim Lehrer.  Actually, what I'd really like to see is a Jim Lehrer versus Bob Schieffer debate, one-on-one.  The winner would be the first guy to remember why he was there.

The Hep Cat & The Bag Man

It occurs to me that in Portuguese, the native language of Brazil (I note for those of you unfortunate enough to have been educated in America's schools after about 1980 or so), that "BumBum" might well be pronounced "BoomBoom."  I don't know that for a fact; I just think it's a nice touch.  A less scrupulous man than myself might use such an intro to post another rearview photo, but I will refrain.

No, instead I turn to tonight's Presidential Debate.  I feel it is my responsibility, being a blogger who focuses on political, economic and, above all, philosophical questions.  The Debates are the major league baseball playoffs of American politics, although, it's true, the field has already been narrowed to the final two teams.  We will not see, for example, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party or Gary Johnson of the Libertarians in tonight's contest.  The inclusion of such parties would knock the dyad all out of kilter, and introduce a lot of issues and viewpoints that would confound the media format.

No, we can't have Jim Lehrer talking to Dr. Stein about genetically modified foods or the relocalization of agriculture, or global warming, or any of these other irrelevant distractions. There are only a couple of issues that really matter to the American people: (1) When do I get my check?; and (2) Are we safe yet?

It will be very difficult for the corporate Bag Man, Mitt Romney, to outflank Barack Obama, the Hep Cat, to the O-Man's right.  How can you do that at this point?  Would Romney have killed bin Laden twice?  And you can't blame Obama for leaving Iraq, as Romney has nevertheless tried to do.  George W. Bush got snookered by the Ungrateful Nouri on that one.  Al-Maliki refused to give Bush the Status of Forces Agreement that would have allowed American servicemen to remain safely in Iraq, that is, to stay there without being subjected to the whimsical judgments of the mullahs in Islamic courts. So it's not Obama's fault that Obama had to bring to a close a war which Obama called a dumb war but then wanted to keep going because, as in the case of surging the troops in Afghanistan, it looked all Presidential and war-like, and thus bankable at election time.

Besides, it keeps us safe.  No, I'm not sure which parts of the preceding paragraph have to do with national security, but that's been true for eleven years now.  Thus turning us to domestic politics, that is, the Entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, since the federal government is an insurance company with an army and we've already covered the army part.  The Hep Cat won't touch the Entitlements now, of course, because it's election time and they're sacred.  Red or Blue, skinny or (far more likely) obese, Deep Southern or Yankee Northeast, everyone wants their check, and they need to be reassured that the federal budget (60% taxes, 40% borrowed) will be used to support the old folks (those so likely to vote, in Florida and Ohio, for example), and what isn't used for that can be sent to the weapons manufacturers and the Predator drone pilots.  Whatever the President wants, just give me my cut. Romney is in enough trouble with the "47%" so he's in zugzwang on that one, too (a chess term - see the games of Garry Kasparov).

It's simple really, this debate.  A simple agenda for a simple country.  A broke-ass country with its head up its broke-ass.  It should be riveting.

The Desk Set

A few years ago, in these very pages and while still possessed of a capacity for patriotic outrage over the systematic debasement of the core Constitutional principles on which the country (according to my study of history and law) was founded, I quoted Hannah Arendt's brilliant coinage "Desk Murderer" to describe certain highly-placed government officials who carelessly, wantonly destroyed human lives in distant countries and could not even be bothered to respond to methodical counts of the death toll. Professor Arendt used the term to describe monsters like Adolf Eichmann, who sat calmly and methodically at their desks and worked out the logistics of the Holocaust - train schedules, food supply, payroll, as if he were simply engaged in running a railroad whose end product happened to be death.  There were many Germans working in this "business" in the Third Reich, and for many of them the limited range of their function shielded them, to a large extent, from a daily appreciation of the true horror of what they were engaged in.

So the term occurred to me when considering the death toll in Iraq, now generally accepted to have been a "mistaken" war, or a "dumb war," in Barack Obama's phrase (when he was campaigning in 2008 and before he tried negotiating an extention of the American occupation beyond 2011). To wit, the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study which had concluded, using standard epidemiological approaches to such questions,  that something on the order of one million "excess deaths" (over and above what would have happened under Saddam Hussein had there been no invasion) had occurred in Iraq following the American occupation.  When "confronted" with this finding (at some Rose Garden White House/media love fest), George W. Bush simply dismissed it as "flawed methodology."

And that was that.  When the Obama Administration not only adopted all of the Bush era "modifications" of civil liberties (end of habeas corpus for American citizens; free-for-all domestic spying; use of the "state secrets" defense in court to end any and all attempts to win compensation for illegal detentions and torture; maintaining Guantanamo as a due process-free concentration camp; and, the Crown Jewel, assassination of American citizens by Presidential diktat), I knew we had undergone a paradigm shift that we're not likely to recover from while the nation remains in its current form.  Which is to say - never.

But the young, the idealistic young...along come research groups from the Stanford and New York University Law Schools, in a combined report called "Living Under Drones," and the problem of becoming a militaristic empire resurfaces all over again.  As noted by The Australian (you didn't think this report would get much play in the States, did you?):

A NEW study by researchers at Stanford and the University of New York has found that American drone strikes in Pakistan are killing far more civilians than advertised, taking out few high-value targets, and have become the primary recruiting tool for the terrorist groups the policy is aimed at combating.The report, "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan", is based on "more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting" conducted over nine months.
The research found that in the past eight years drone strikes have "killed 2562 to 3325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children". Meanwhile, only 2 per cent of those killed were "high-level" targets. This means the strikes have killed three times as many children as terrorist leaders.
The report also shows that the impact of the drone war isn't limited to those directly affected by strikes because the constant presence of drones overhead "terrorises men, women, and children".

 

The writer goes on to state that it's "stunning" that this issue is not a bigger feature of the current presidential campaign.  Well, I don't know, mate - is it really as stunning as all that?  How exactly are President Barack Obama and the Carpetbagger supposed to talk about this one?  Granted, perennial troublemaker Glenn Greenwald, who writes for an English newspaper (The Guardian), is a graduate of NYU Law, and resides in Brazil (where the 2011 winner of the Miss BumBum contest is pictured above-I hope this answers your question, Willy, about my marketing ploys) has been all over this story.  

So what are these legal upstarts suggesting?  That President Barack Obama is another Desk Murderer?  Just because the drone campaign has, you might say, a 98% failure rate?

Well....not in context, when you think about it.  It is true that, in the first place, we're not even at war in Pakistan.  We're just killing people there, mostly by remote-controlled drones (which are operated, quite literally, by guys at desks in Langley, Virginia [CIA drones] and by the military at bases in Texas and Nevada).  Well, what are you gonna do?  Washington, D.C. has it in its collective head that the American people will only support a warmonger, and to be a warmonger you have to remain continuously at war.  President Obama has internalized that, and the Carpetbagger, given half a chance, would double down on our military adventures and start bombing whatever Muslim country might be left that we're not currently bombing.  

What is kind of funny is to watch the polemical gyrations of the Liberal Desk Murderers, such as Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and lots and lots of Hollywood's glitterati. For in an ethical universe, to support a Desk Murderer, one who these idealistic students claim is "terrorizing" the indigenous population of Pakistan through systematic commission of war crimes, such as bombing rescue operations and targeting funerals of Pakistanis already killed by missiles, is, through moral accountability, to be a Desk Murderer yourself.  We're not too far gone to see that still, are we? Well, for the Liberal Desk Murderers, there is no doubt that Barack Obama is most definitely their guy - he's the cool brand, and what Obama actually does in office is not nearly as important as how he does it. Plus, maybe both Barack Obama and the Carpetbagger are Desk Murderers, but Obama is the Desk Murderer with the more equitable tax plan and the greater commitment to Medicare and Social Security.  Sorry about all the dead kids, but first things first.  It's important to keep our focus where it belongs, on our short list of self-involved topics.

Yes, I know what you're thinking - when the Liberals champion their own Desk Murderer, we have crawled into a hermetically-sealed madhouse and locked the door behind us. You won't get much of an argument from me.  

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Now that the election is out of the way

No Republican candidate has won the presidential election without carrying the electoral votes of Ohio for the last eleven elections.  Ohio is the swingiest of the swing states.  Mitt Romney is getting positively creamed in Ohio - as many as 10 points back in the popular vote, which is an enormous deficit in this day and age.  In all the other swing states, where the election is decided (you can color in huge blocks of the country in red and blue even before anyone is nominated for President), Romney is not doing much better.  Romney could save us all a lot of trouble by giving his concession speech now.

He's a dull and irritating candidate, prone to smug and derisive remarks about anyone not born into privilege the way he was.  The people who will vote for him are those who see the "R" next to his name and check the box.  That's it.  He generates no excitement whatsoever.  He looks like a guy who should be wearing a fishing vest in an L.L. Bean catalogue. 

In Brazil they're holding the annual Miss BumBum contest.  This is a beauty pageant which focuses on the best butt in Brazil, a nation known for fabulous backsides on prominent display at all their beaches and carnavals.  One gifted gal from each of the 17 federalist states of Brazil is nominated for the final runoff (back off?) in Sao Paulo.

In the United States this week, the nation will rivet its attention on a contrived "debate" between Barack Obama and....the aforementioned Mitt Romney.  This will be the dullest debate in the history of the known world.  President Obama can be articulate when he is reading a speech or reciting one from memory.  As an extemporaneous speaker arguing on the spot, Obama makes used dishwater look positively incandescent.  He is halting, banal, predictable, play-it-safe, and yet still manages to say absurd things that make no sense.  Romney, apparently, has put together a bunch of "zingers." Oh God, please spare us.  I am sure these will be delivered in a natural, flowing way, and won't look at all contrived.

I think two old-line WASPS (McCain, Romney) getting steamrolled in a row by a gifted minority politician marks a decisive turning point in the history of the country.  James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation says that Romney is the Millard Fillmore of the Republican Party, playing the same role as the hapless Millard (Romney is Willard, don't forget) played to the Whig Party; namely, ushering them into extinction.  The remnants of the Republican Party will then scatter into ultra-Right Tea Party and White Supremacist factions, with Wal-Martians moving into the power vacuum.  That sounds about right.  It was primarily white trash that formed the operative legions of the Third Reich.

Maybe Barack, with no future election to hold him back, can start to boogie - have some fun, go a little crazy.  Get street, you know?  Sure hope so.  If we can't have a Miss BumBum, we should at least be allowed that.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Frail Economy

Brought to you by Trader Joe's French Roast (Strong & Dark)...

One of the difficulties in blogging regularly is that my favorite posture for typing is to place my feet on the table with the wireless keyboard in my lap.  However, this is also the posture my cat Jewel likes best, and it is her considered opinion that she ought to be where the keyboard is.  I don't know if you've noticed, but cats have a kind of shamanistic quality that makes it seem, well, unholy to move them once they're settled in.  It upsets some delicate balance in the space-time continuum.

Anyway, a word on the economy, which is again faltering.  Precisely at the point where the incumbent political system (where the Democrats hold the White House, have a bare majority in the Senate, and are underwater in the House) need the economy to show signs of strength, it's softening up again, with incomes stagnating or falling, prices of food and energy rising, and job "growth" failing to keep pace with population growth.  While any reasonably objective observer can see this, plain as day, the political class cannot admit reality because the world of politics exists in an Alternative Reality defined by the virtual dimensions of the TV/Internet Miasma.  In the Miasma, any admission of the obvious is a one-way ticket to Palookaville.  Thus, in August or whenever that was, we were treated to two conventions of the big political parties in which the governing themes were taken directly from 1964 because no one really wants to talk about 2012 in the national arena.

Considering the various schemes and strategems of our federal leaders over the last twenty years or so, we can descry various approaches to maintaining the illusion of overall economic health. There was the Internet or Dot.Com Bubble, followed by the Housing Bubble, giving way finally to the Money-Printing Bubble.   Throughout these exercises in Potemkin Village Building, the rhetoric from Washington, D.C. and from its house organs, the New York Times and Washington Post, never really varied much.

Nevertheless, Actual Reality is not fooled, and this shows up in the Actual Real employment statistics, which simply locked up around the year 2002 and never progressed.  The employment rate of the general population is stuck in the low 60% range, and the overall quality of the jobs which the economy produces continues to decline.  This is the real reason that the big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, are in such big trouble, although the deterioration of the latter is accelerated by the "legacy" expectation of the medical/pharmaceutical industries that their fields should be highly lucrative even if no one can afford them anymore. 

Despite the relentless money printing, inflation remains low (where not explained away by drought effects on crops or on oil shortages).  Interest rates on savings and Treasury bonds remain absurdly anemic.  There is a reason for this other than the libertarian trope of "manipulation by the Fed."  It takes economic activity, broadly based, to generate much in the way of a return on money, which is what interest on a passbook savings account is.  Treasury bonds compete, as an investment, with other forms of passive return, and there is no passive return anywhere to provide competition.

By analogy or metaphor, you might think of the U.S. economy as a very old and frail human being, who, though racked by pneumonia, fails to generate much of an elevated temperature.  The normal temperature does not indicate the absence of infection in such a case; it indicates a general lack of life force.  To extend the metaphor, the money printing which the federal powers have seized on as a way of pushing up the stock market (and providing some means for the vastly underfunded pension and insurance systems to generate a return, however evanescent) is like a feeding tube, designed to extend the life of a terminal patient for as long as possible.

I think that's all we're doing with such shenanigans.  The problem with gimmicks is that they're not a substitute for actual strength.  Take, for example, the parlous predicament of the Social Security "Trust Fund."  By law the "fund" (the accumulation of excess FICA taxes paid in over the last 30 years, currently about $2.4 trillion) must be invested in Treasury bonds.  As the current inflows from FICA taxes are insufficient to pay the swelling rolls of recipients, the deficiency is "funded" by this phantom account.  Since the "account" is earning such a low rate of return, the Social Security "Trust Fund" is now calculated to be completely exhausted by the year 2023, a little over a decade from now and about 14 years sooner than the rosy scenarios that the Bush Administration used to talk about.  Again by law, at that point Social Security benefits must be cut by 25% across the board, and that's the minimum.  Whether the other 75% is payable or not depends on whether the one-and-a-half bartenders, baristas and cocktail waitresses for each Baby Boom retiree can actually keep the game going.

And by then I'm sure bartenders and baristas will have been replaced by robots.  As for cocktail waitresses - we'll have to wait and see, but I hope not.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party

Dad taught me that.  It uses the most commonly-deployed QWERTY letters on the typewriter except for Q, V, X & Z, and who needs them, most of the time? I guess it could have read, "all very good men," and fixed part of it.  Or  "all quixotic, zany, very good men," but then typing students would not memorize it.  "Now is the time for all quixotic, zany, very good men to come to the aid of their party." I feel I'm on the edge of immortality here.  Not quite solving Fermat's Last Theorem, but a breakthrough nonetheless.

While sitting in Caffe Rulli on Magnolia Avenue, staring at the surface of a cappuccino and wondering, how does the barista form that leaf pattern with milk foam?, I asked the comely ginge who was my companion (excuse the Britishisms, but I'm reading a novel by Martin Amis), "Are the powers that be really doing us any favors by holding off the sea changes that will inevitably arrive for America and the other Western nations over the next decade?"

This is our concern, Dude, as Brandt said to Lebowski.  Is this really a good idea?  All of the deficit financing, the money printing, the reassurances, the promises of economic "growth," the political class's insistence that the American Way of Life, just the way it was, can be restored once we get past the lingering effects of the "financial crisis" ?  Or would it not be better to look at the vast array of forces militating against such a rosy scenario and let nature take its course, thus unleashing the (admittedly chaotic) creativity which will be necessary in order to adapt to these changed circumstances? 

Consider this from a recent Los Angeles Times analysis of the city pension crisis down there, which will bring the City of Angels ("I never found it to be such myself," said the Stranger in the previously cited movie) to the verge of insolvency, or beyond, in the next three or four years. 

"David Zahniser of The Los Angeles Times also contributed to the ground swell by highlighting that the City’s contribution to the $4.8 billion underfunded Fire and Police Pension Plans (“FPP”) is projected to escalate by 56% over the next four years, from $506 million to almost $800 million.

But that is just part of the story as total pension contributions to both LACERS and FPP over the same four year period will increase by over 50%, from $850 million to almost $1.3 billion, representing almost 26% of General Fund revenue.

And if you toss in benefits, pension and benefit expense will total almost $2 billion, representing 40% of General Fund revenue."

Obviously, once you get to the point where a city is using 40% of its general tax revenue to pay for retirement of employees, you are in a Game Over scenario; to wit, L.A. will go Full San Bernadino, which I guess is the City of Saint Bernard, and perhaps I did find it to be such.

I don't think, really, that these city employee benefits are excessive, if judged from the perspective of anticipated growth in the U.S. economy circa 1998 or so; but that's sort of the point.   That was also a Bubble Period, as the housing bubble was a Big Bubble, and we're not forever blowing bubbles anymore.  The difference between Los Angeles and the federal government is that the feds can play all sorts of money-printing games, and borrow 40% of its budget against the future (notice the eerie correlation between the Treasury's need to borrow and the amount that Los Angeles needs from its current budget to keep up with pensions).  This "40%" shows up everywhere you look.  It is a measure of how far beneath our "postulated" standard of living our real means have fallen.  It is a guide to how far housing prices have fallen in much of the country, for example.

The big entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security, face the awful demographics of the aging American population.  We've crossed that Rubicon where the recipients of Social Security, for example are more than half the number of those working and paying in.  That is to say, there are not even two American workers for every Social Security beneficiary, and this situation will obviously get worse as the vast throng of Baby Boomers move into their sunset years, and depend on bartenders, waiters and baristas to support them.

Throw in Peak Oil, overpopulation of the Earth, global warming which makes increased fossil fuel use a suicide pact, and the falling percentage of Americans in the actual workforce (and those working increasingly toiling away at low-paying service jobs (like waiters, bartenders and baristas), which replaced the high-paying jobs lost over the lasgt 30 years), and you're left with the question: how is this all supposed to work?

And thus my ruminative question to the comely ginge.  If society had a Collective Brain, which worked, it would face the facts and move to a new paradigm.  I suspect, however, that Nietzsche had it about right: 

“Madness is rare in individuals but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Now Entering the Binary Zone of the Campaign

There's no sign post up ahead to tell you that, either.  As noted yesterday, the election will now revert to standard amygdala-driven impulses.  Liberal critics of Obama, those chronic malcontents (ahem...you rang?), must now shut up with their endless cavils, their pet complaints, and get with the program.  There is an election to win here.  Forget the Bill of Rights, forget Obama's abandonment of millions of American homeowners who were underwater on their mortgages...

Well, on that point, it appears that even the reliably liberal New York Times is not willing to cut the O Man any slack, going into excruciating detail in an editorial piece about how the President was willing, with the banker-friendly encouragement of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, at all stages of the game to assist Wall Street banks with their solvency (and bonus) problems, but offered only the pathetic "HAMP" program to help out the millions of Americans whose mortgages exceeded the value of their homes.  There was so much more the President could have done to alleviate this problem, but it was opposed by Wall Street because the resulting "impairment of collateral" in the form of reduced or "crammed-down" mortgages would have negatively affected the balance sheets of the big banks.  And we can't have that; their profitability (and bonuses) depend on their continuing ability to mark-to-fantasy all of the worthless junk they carry as assets, such as all those fraudulently marketed mortgage-backed securities.  In haec verba from the Times article by Binyamin Applebaum:

“Mr. Obama sponsored cramdown legislation as a senator, endorsed it as a presidential candidate and called on Congress to pass it in the Arizona speech.
But he also repeatedly pressed the pause button. When proponents sought to add a cramdown to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in September 2008, Mr. Obama, who had flown back to Washington from the campaign trail, persuaded them to postpone the “partisan” effort as an example to Republicans, who said the measure would violate existing contracts.

In February 2009, after Mr. Obama became president, the White House asked Democrats not to attach the measure to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, fearing it would cost votes. In March, a watered-down version finally passed the House, but the mortgage industry rallied opposition to block it in the Senate.”

This is, of course, absolutely vintage Obama.  It may recall virtually exact behavior regarding the "immunity for telecom companies" regarding illegal wiretapping, or, more tellingly, Obama's refusal simply to let the "Bush tax cuts" lapse at the end of  2010, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, the House and the White House, and the Bush tax cuts, that fabled marginal rate on all the "millionaires" was going to sundown under its own provisions.  And Obama sold it out to buy another year of unemployment insurance instead, reenacting the mess of pottage deal from another era.

Refusing to help millions of homeowners by using real money, instead of lavishing it all on the "fat cats" he pretends to despise, resulted in millions of Americans forced into the street through foreclosure.

But what about Mr. Obama's soaring rhetoric last night, his populist call-to-arms?  What about, you know....all of that?  Well - it was a good speech.  He's good at doing that.

Yet as I say....it's time to put all of that grousing away.  It's crunch time.  If it's not Obama, it will be that carpetbagger Mitt Romney, the robber baron in funny underwear.  The O Man at least mouths the right attitudes about certain things.  Gay marriage, for example.  And he was willing to admit that global warming is not a "hoax."  It's true that Mr. Obama did not throw much American weight behind the recent Rio Conference (or, actually, even attend), but at least he says climate change is real, whereas the Carpetbagger makes clunky jokes about it.

Thus, um, so what you should do is...hmm, where was I?  I guess that's about it.  I know our President is in a tight spot because the millions of individual donors who rallied to his cause in 2008 seem mysteriously to have disappeared, and we're in the somewhat anomalous situation where the incumbent is in danger of being seriously outspent in this campaign.  I just can't imagine why the President's liberal base has eroded over the last four years.  Whatever.  In America, as in driving a car, voting should be a defensive act.  You don't vote for what you want; you vote to try to avoid what you most fear.  If that isn't Exceptional, please tell me something that is.

Who let the Big Dog out?

One must simply give it up for Bill Clinton; he is, indeed, The Natural, as Joe Klein in his anonymously penned book called him.  I don't know exactly how he does it - pure brilliance, I guess. He is a credit to Southern white trash everywhere. I speak from experience. While other speakers appear often stiff and scripted, the Big Dog seems to wing it, speaking off the cuff, stringing together long sequences of grammatically perfect clauses far, far beyond the ability of any other speaker in American politics, including the incumbent President.  It has always amazed me.  At press conferences while President,  he could trip off accurate statistics on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) for a variety of fuel sources, deal with atmospheric science, then switch to pure political calculation. 

Of course, this is why the Republicans hated him.  Indeed, the moment of psychotic break for the Republican Party can be traced to Clinton's presidency.  I've long suspected that a few of the more prominent Republican "floor leaders" in the impeachment madness (particularly one from South Carolina) were motivated by man-crush jealousy over the smart Jewish girl who temporarily stole Bill Clinton's heart.  Just a guess. 

The Big Dog is a little faded now, hobbled by heart problems, thinned out by a strict dietary regime. He was President between the ages of 44 and 52, and I was an American subject of his Presidency during my stretch from 42 to 50.  In other words, a golden age for both of us.  He was the Boomer's Boomer.  Narcissistic, self-involved, complicated, materialistic, deceptive, thoroughly modern.  He introduced, and perfected, the art of cynical triangulation, of selling out basic American values (such as the easygoing repeal of Glass-Steagall which really started all of the Wall Street debacle); welfare "reform;" and the use of military adventurism as a means of distracting the public from domestic troubles (in his case, "domestic" can be taken quite literally).

His endorsement of Obama will not mean much, of course.  It was all just a feel-good moment for us and, of course, for the Big Dog himself.  Bill, genius that he is, knows that much of the Constitutional fabric of the American Republic lies in absolute tatters, battered by a series of unconstitutional choices made by the last two presidents in particular and the dominant role of money in determining politics.  An indication of Clinton's brilliance is that he can give a rousing speech in praise of the O Man and never get near any of these touchy subjects. It's all good.  And with his acute political sense, Clinton knows that all voting decisions in the television and video age are made by a flash connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, with no complex cerebration in between.  Just:  Obama, good; Romney, bad.  That's it, a general feeling about which way to vote.

The Big Dog was there to help that feeling along.  Nobody does it better.

Charlotte's Web, or the Riddle of the Major Parties

One must not engage in "false equivalence" between the conventions of the two major parties; I have been preemptively warned off such a course by the growling arbiter of all things ethical, Paul Krugman of the New York Times.  The Democrats are good people, the Republicans are evil.

Yet how can one call the party of the White Christians evil?  It seems like a contradiction in terms.  I think what works better (and this gets us past made-for-controversy Manichean dualities such as those indulged in by Krugman) is to look at it this way: the Democrats are the party of Human Perfectibility; the Republicans are the party of Humans After the Fall.  Democrats, in their official outlook, tend to see humans as inchoate saints who just need the support and help of society to become fully realized.  This is an Enlightenment ideal.  On the other hand, the GOP sees the "help and support of society" as the main problem; it tends to produce a nation of dependent, lazy, handout-chasing slackers.

In reality, neuroscience and anthropology (basic biology, for that matter) would not support either of these views of Homo sapiens (although it might be closer to the Republican view).  Human beings are animals which, in very recent times historically speaking, have organized themselves into complex civilizations with interdependent functions.  What we are learning now is that this is not actually a "human" way to live at all.  It's just that the human life span is so short in terms of the epochal transformations of civilization that we have no individual frame of reference by which to judge whether this manner of living is "normal."  There are all kinds of signs that it is not, such as population overshoot, destruction of the natural habitat (i.e., Earth), global warming, oil shortages, alienation of the populace from one another, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and gross worldwide obesity in all the "modern" civilizations. 

Thus producing the "Age of Anxiety" as the chief characteristic of modern life in an advanced culture. The Democrats and Republicans do not deal with such issues in their platforms or in their speeches.  That is because these two political behemoths are fully vested in the continuation of a top-down, bureaucratic Big Government as the solution to everything, continuing an approach based on the "organic society" in which the very basic things (food and energy) are produced by a tiny sliver of the overall population, while the rest of humanity engages in some "specialty" that earns money through which to participate in the "consumer economy."  As I say, we've gotten so used to this that we can't see that human beings have any alternatives, and none is ever offered from the dais of either the Donkeys or Elephants.

Thus, the two major parties simply engage in fables, literally "fabulous" tales of rags to riches that recount one period of historic dominance (post-World War II to about 1973, when the first oil shock hit) which happens to coincide with the cultural memory of most of the old pols still running the machinery of the Big Two.  This is an instance of the Parallax of Nostalgia (trademark forever pending).  The speeches of Ann Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Julian Castro and Michelle Obama all fit into this matrix.  I have no doubt that Barack will not disappoint.  I get the sense that the speechwriters are all using some proprietary software called SpeechMaker 2.0 which tells them exactly where to put the tearful pause when talking about the sacrifices of Mom, just before mentioning that the speaker was the first in the family to go to college, just before casually dropping that the college in question was Harvard.  It all seems like some strange hybrid between Dancing With The Stars and a Chautauqua Revival tent.  The production values are all from Reality TV, and the "scoring" by the panel (Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, et al.) are all based on the quality of the "performance."

Granted, the speeches need to be performances to get anybody to watch these things; but the curmudgeonly question that remains for me is, what does any of this have to do with anything? How does it address any of those urgent questions listed up above?  And one other thing: if we're really honest, hasn't the fantasy of the "American Dream" had as much to do with producing that string of nightmares as any other cultural force in history?  What the GOP and the Dems want is more of the same, only on steroids, as the U.S.A. throws open its doors of opportunity to the world at large and becomes the Cesspool of Last Resort.

The Cigar Store Mormon at the White Christian Coven

And yet, and yet...there was something oddly affecting about that sea of cheering, well-fed, and (above all else) pale faces in the convention hall in Tampa, as Mitt Romney took his turn at the dais, revving the crowd up with his promises to retain the sanctity of marriage (i.e., gays need not apply), to sanctify life itself (by making sure babies resulting from rape are allowed their chance at it), and even making fun of Obama's (former) preoccupation with that silly liberal hoax, global climate change. (The Know Nothings loved that one.)

It was a tour de force, of course.  The Cigar Store Mormon, clad, no doubt, in his occult undies, promised, as did his running mate, the creation of twelve million new jobs for the beleaguered American commoners.  How will this be accomplished, when growth itself seems increasingly impossible and when the White Christians, first and foremost, believe that charity must begin at home and must never flow from government taps?  These are details, my friends, sordid details which detract from the rousing forward momentum of these galvanizing White Christian speeches.

But back to that eerie feeling, that glow that somehow comes from listening to such tripe...and then the answer seemed plain.  Just as the audience looked like all the people in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, the words themselves sounded like a convention speech from....about 1960!  That was it.  That is the game that Mitt Romney & Paul Ryan are playing.  Mitt talked about "turning the page" on Obama, but what he's really talking about is turning back the clock.

I admit that 1960 could be fun again.  I was very young, the country was hopeful, America was about to elect a youthful and optimistic President who promised to land a man on the moon and bring him back to Earth safely (and then delivered).  We now live in a country that isn't anything like that.  We've used up so many of the Earth's resources, and damaged so much of its fragile ecology, and so overpopulated its surface, that you can even say we don't live on a planet like that anymore (the world's population has more than doubled during that time period).

The White Christians are simply appealing to nostalgia, harking back to a day when even I was a White Christian (okay, not really, but I was going to church - under duress and all, but still).
 The GOP should consider doing their campaign videos in blurry 8 millimeter Kodak film, with everyone (especially cornball Mitt) wearing Madras shirts and tooling around in 1957 Chevy Bel-Air sedans.  Take us back, Mitt, to the days when we didn't have one-sixth of the American population on food stamps, when the federal government didn't borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends, when the wealth disparity in the country was not so vast that people, well, like you, Mitt, didn't live in a different economic realm from the hoi polloi.  When Big Government, with its bloated defense budget and endless wars, was not owned and operated by Big Business, when to be extremely rich did not mean total immunity from prosecution from any crime, no matter how egregious and damaging.

Because if you can't put together some sort of Time Machine to get us back to 1960, then you, Mitt, are going to be up against the same overwhelming forces as your predecessor, with a broken, offshored, robotized economy, with fewer than two people working to support every person on Social Security, with local governments going bankrupt and no way to print money to make up the difference (as the feds do), and with the negative effects of climate change (as with this year's epic droughts in the Midwest) right here, right now, in the actual year we're dealing with.

Bummer.  Those were the thoughts that intruded into my peaceful slumber as I awoke this morning.  It's 2012, not 1960.  That's why Mitt's fantasy doesn't work.  It's now, not then, and he's hoping to get elected before anyone notices.

From the Proceedings of the White Christian Party

Succumbing to pressures that exist only in my own mind, I tuned in to the proceedings of the White Christian Party in Tampa, Florida (with its delayed start because of the Jewish himacane which had passed through on Monday as some sort of Old Testament tocsin aimed at Southern smarm).  I watched the convention as narrated by MSNBC since the most enjoyment, for me, comes from the cognitive dissonance set up by (a) seeing and hearing something with your own senses as juxtaposed to (b) the immediate, contradictory spin put on what you just saw by the liberal talking heads, such as Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell.  This makes it fun, almost.  It's like a Spanish translation scene from Woody Allen's "Bananas."

The speeches were pretty dreadful, of course.  Mike Huckabee, an Evangelical like President Obama is an "Evangelical," bent over backwards to find common ground with LDS'er Mitt Romney and Papist Paul Ryan (if all of this sounds like a burning cross meeting in Macon, Georgia, circa 1925, well...).  The White Christians know they're up against it, and they've come out swinging.  They had their Show Negro, Condoleeza Rice, in a prominent role, as if to defuse the very obvious racist innuendo aimed at Obama all night long.  Former Secretary of Something Rice was praised to the sky by the liberal commentators, especially Matthews, because, well, she's black.  I chalk it up to Bush Nostalgia, something I thought could never happen.

On the other hand, Matthews, Maddow and O'Donnell, following a corporate script, couldn't find enough bad things to say about Paul Ryan.  The funniest criticism was that Ryan gave, in essence, a "stump speech."  Full of campaign phrases, such as "we can do this."  Well....yeah.  As opposed to, what?, a lecture with a large blackboard, PowerPoint, and differential equations squiggling from the end of Ryan's chalk?  One gets confused as to the nature of the criticism or what sort of game the commentators think they're playing, sometimes.

Actually, Ryan was pretty effective.  I had seen him speak extemporaneously on C-SPAN in the House, and he seemed like a dim bulb trying to live up to an unearned reputation as a smart, "intellectual" wit.  I'm sure that this impression was accurate.  However, when he memorized a speech written by others (Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist, gave their names), he did a good job delivering the words.  It made him look smart and sincere, no small task for this guy.  Thus, he has essentially the same talent as Barack Obama himself, that of projecting qualities which he doesn't really have through the medium of television to the 80 to 90% of the voting American populace who react only to these images.

Thus, what the liberal panel should have been talking about was Romney's "wisdom" in choosing such a mannequin (with his pretty, blonde, Catholic wife, and their adorable little brood of pretty, Catholic children) to tour the country with him.  Because Ryan, when given a script, can get the message across that Obama (his dusky doppelganger) wasted his first term by screwing around for a full year on a mess of a health care overhaul that no one likes, that forces American commoners to buy lousy coverage from private industry, and which can be portrayed (although inaccurately, but that doesn't matter) as negatively affecting Medicare.

Which is exactly what the Cigar Store Mormon needs, because Mitt himself is so uninspiring, conflicted, amorphous, and did I mention he was Mormon?  Which is a major strike against him with the White Christian Party, because Mormons believe in a fantastic variation on the mythology believed in passionately by the White Evangelicals.  The Republican factions do remind me often of the old Communist internecine factionalism involving Bolsheviks, Trotskyites and Mensheviks, with their fussy, doctrinaire little quibbles in the middle of a totally unworkable ethos. The quibbles, of course, providing sufficient cause to shoot each other.  It never occurs to the White Christian Party that with regard to Catholics, or Mormons, or Holy Rollers, that everything all of you believe is complete and utter nonsense so what the hell is the difference?

Just an existential take on political discourse.  Anyway, I'm hooked.  I just can't wait for the Tax Haven Meister himself tonight!

The Reverse French Revolution

Sometimes Dmitry Orlov is just too funny (from cluborlov.com):

"And if you can't, then why don't you go out and take part in the Reverse French Revolution that's underway in the US. That's where revolting peasants do all they can to elect an aristocrat who will swindle them out of their savings even faster and lock up even more of them in the Bastille. And what makes these peasants so revolting is that they are all fat—from eating cake instead of bread, just as Marie Antoinette had suggested.]"

I don't know how to describe the tendency of the American electorate to "vote against its own economic interest," as Thomas Frank described in "What's The Matter With Kansas?" and as Roy Zimmerman set to music in "Real America" any better than calling it a "Reverse French Revolution." I suppose, back in France in 1789, the French, inspired by the American example of 13 years earlier, could not be so easily distracted by warning them that if the Aristocrats were not allowed to stay in power, the next thing you know, Henry et Jacques will be getting married!  Sacre bleu!

Whereas, in the United States of 2012, that's all you have to do - just tell Americans that, although they're broke, at least raped young women are going to have increasing trouble getting an abortion.  So we've got you covered! 

Meanwhile, the Most Boring Presidential Campaign in American History grinds on toward its electrifying finish - Bank-Coddling Barack versus Offshore Tax Haven Mitt.  I presume that if Mitt is elected, he will enthusiastically endorse (and begin to use) the new power which Obama created, that of the Presidential right to whack American citizens deemed Too Dangerous to Live, without trial, without charges, without giving a reason, for that matter. 

It's all good, all part of the Reverse French Revolution that is the American political process.  Tom, just write another book and call this one What's the Matter with America? 

Saturday Morning Essay: Reading The Dharma Bums again

Brought to you by Peet's Costa Rica blend.

It's one of life's interesting things to do to read the same book at different points in one's life.  An old and dear friend of mine, now long gone, once remarked that so much of what we glean from reading depends on "what we bring to the book."  I hear that.  That's what happened when I read Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums recently.  It was probably my third reading, I would say, but the first one in decades.  I always liked this Kerouac book more than On The Road, although the latter book, I appreciate, was the seminal work of the Beat Generation.

The Dharma Bums came out just after On The Road finally found a publisher.  Kerouac was living in a small cottage in Orlando, Florida and wrote Bums in about eleven days.  To avoid breaking his stream of consciousness while typing, Kerouac taped pages of teletype paper together so that he could feed a ten-foot length of paper into the typewriter (the Bancroft Library at Berkeley has the similarly written manuscript for On The Road).  When you consider how (and how fast) it was written, passages from The Dharma Bums seem all the more astonishing.  Such as: 

"Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us.  But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the  living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking as you pass on human feet instead of on wheels.  You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips."

It so happens that I grew up in a neighborhood that was absolutely perfect for just such a nighttime ramble.  As a kid, walking what I would guess was the mile from TJR's house to my own, at night under the street lamps, through the housing tract.  And there it was, "house after house," just as Kerouac wrote, the tableaux (Keroauc was of French-Canadian stock after all) of American nuclear families in their small living rooms watching the blue fire of television, internalizing the same stories, the same cheesy morality plays of the American sitcom, the grainy black-and-white globules of useless information we substituted for human community. 

Culture, even one as decadent as the American culture of Eisenhower and post-Eisenhower America, exerts such a powerful, deranging force on the personality that Kerouac remained defensive about his "bum" life, as you can discern from the above passage.  Shouldn't he have been inside one of those little houses watching television, with his life insurance current, his medical plan in place, his car payments up to date, his mortgage half-paid, the kids' orthodontia taken care of, the freezer packed, the two-week vacation planned, even the funeral plot purchased? 

My cousin the Santa Cruz writer, now no longer in the same corporeal form but returned to the star atoms from which he, and all of us, coalesced (and to which we shall all return), included among his aperçus (he was very good with the trenchant aperçu), that it is at the beginning of social trends that we often see the greatest, and most telling, rebellion, because the artists and other observers can most clearly see the trend for what it is.  So it was for the Beats.  American conformity of the Eisenhower Generation (and all that followed) wasn't a cool scene, man.  It was like nowhere. 

Like Vincent Van Gogh, Kerouac may have had too beautiful a soul for this world.  The pain was too intense.  As Gary Snyder (fictionalized as "Japhy Ryder" in Bums) remarks about him, Jack had a "great pity for the world and all the living things within it." Kerouac sought refuge wherever he could, in the nonsense of Zen Buddhism, in alcohol (he was an alcoholic Zen Buddhist, worthy of a koan in itself), but mostly in the physical beauty of the natural world, in moonlight, the Steep Ravine Trail over Mount Tamalpais, the eastern reaches of the Sierra Nevada, the Skagit Valley of Washington state.  He lived 47 years before his addicition killed him.  I doubt that he would have lasted as long in our day and age.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Bar Bet Economists in the Tavern at the End of the World

I think of Paul Krugman as my favorite Bar Bet Economist.  His columns and blogs, which are relentlessly self-congratulatory, seem often (almost always) about a couple of economic parameters which he has gotten right and many of his critics and others have gotten wrong. But these parameters (the coupon rates on Treasury bonds and the overall rate of inflation) are somehow trivial when compared to the enormous economic and environmental problems the U.S. and the other developed countries nevertheless face.  Thus, being right on these two indicators is a little bit like the guy on the adjacent bar stool who wants to bet on whether the next car passing in the street will be foreign or domestic, or whether the next woman walking in the bar will be blonde or brunette.  Leave me alone, I'm trying to watch the baseball game.

Mr. Krugman says that he has been right not because he's so smart but because his economic model, the Keynes-Hicks IS-LM model, predicted that in a "liquidity trap" such as the United States is in, where monetary policy (essentially, the lowering of interest rates and unconventional quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve) fails to achieve "traction" in the real economy because the American people are already in debt up to their eyeballs.  Thus, the central bank (here and in Europe and Japan) is "pushing on a string."  Rates can't go any lower, and printing money makes the stock market go up for a while (stock prices are measured in money, after all), but not much else happens, so monetary policy has shot its wad.  Mr. Krugman (who actually does think he's right because he's so smart, of course), who is a good Keynesian advocate, thus says that the remaining way for the U.S. economy to "end this depression now" (as the book he's flogging claims) is for the federal government to stop being so "austere" (running only $1.2 trillion budget deficits) and really spend some money.  Unlike the deluded "bond vigilantes" and those who have been so wrong about soaring interest rates on Treasuries and inflation (so far) like Peter Schiff, Niall Ferguson and others lacking a deep understanding of the IS-LM model, Mr. Krugman, who has won his bar bets, feels that he is entitled to advance his own theory boldly.

Suppose, however, that something else is really going on these days, something more sinister and threatening that is actually at the root of our economic malaise.  Suppose the easy analogies to the ways the U.S. rose from the depths of the Great Depression, or became the world's economic colossus after World War II, are in some ways inapt.  Suppose, in other words, it's 2012 now, forty years after the landmark work of the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth predictions.

Then we really have a problem, because then we're faced with the problems of the real world and not an internecine academic food fight between guys who want to shine at the expense of their peers at the next gathering of other non-scientists spouting (in Feynman's delicious phrase) their "general dopiness," defending their tiny little theoretical turf on which they've staked their academic reputations.  Or as Paul Craig Roberts puts it:

"Most intelligent people are aware that natural resources are finite, including the environment’s ability to absorb the wastes or pollution from productive activities (see for example, Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2005). But few economists are aware, because economists assume that man-made capital is a perfect substitute for nature’s capital.  This assumption implies that there are no finite environmental limits to infinite economic growth.  Lost in such a make-believe world, economists neglect the full cost of production and cannot tell if the value of the increases in GDP are greater or less than the full cost of producing it."

That's it right there.  There is no substitute for nature's capital because we remain, as Thoreau told us about 170 years ago, sapient and sentient beings who nonetheless have a primordial need to maintain their vital heat.  We've gone about this basic task in enormously complicated ways, constructing a vast, interconnected, globalized economy, which is extremely fragile and subject to cascading failure modes, and which is dependent on the enormous expenditure of energy to maintain.  Which, up till the present, has mostly meant fossil fuels. The good and dependable Gail Tverberg over at ourfiniteworld.com has put together a chart demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between the expenditure of energy and the growth of economies based (in the dopey way of economists) on GDP. It is reproduced just above.  Gail's regression analysis reveals an r squared value of .74 between the energy and GDP variables, which is less than ironclad, of course, but highly suggestive in a macro way, and certainly more indicative of how the world works than these crazy nostrums about "stimulus money" and the like from Krugman and other acolytes of a book written in 1935 when the world's population was almost manageable, we weren't cooking the Earth, the seas were 30% less acidic than they are now, the CO2 content of the atmosphere was perhaps 4% elevated versus the 35% we find now.  (If you're tired of reading this post, I commend you to Bill McKibben's brilliant essay in the current issue of Rolling Stone on global warming, where he boils it down to three numbers.)


Thus, as Gail notes, the interdependence of GDP growth and energy use, when considered in light of the manifest need to reduce our expenditure of fossil fuels (on the order of 80% between now and 2050, under the most hopeful scenario, in order to keep global warming under 2 degrees C, which may or may not be safe), means that we are in for a very long, protracted period of declining GDP (not growth, but in real terms) between now and 2050, unless we want to guarantee our extinction.


The situation is actually quite syllogistic and not dependent on malarkey like IS-LM Keynes/Hicks Liquidity Trap Zero Lower Bound Monetary Fiscal Mumbo Jumbo, and the rest of the nonsense Krugman and his ilk use for their useless stock in trade.  We're at the end of the line, we have to switch over to sustainability and reduced populations, and the Bar Bet Economists have to pay their tabs (which are enormous, because they've really messed up the world with their stupid advice) and go home.