Trying to care about November

I'm sure I should care. The midterm elections in November, I mean. This could be momentous, and I'm going to start caring pretty soon. Others obviously do; I get several emails a day from barackobama.com, for example, imploring me to support Democratic candidates. Okay, I guess that's what they're saying. I haven't opened an email from barackobama since sometime in 2009, I'm guessing. I haven't given a dime to any candidate; I'm like you, Barack - fiercely bipartisan. I did give about forty bucks to a nice young woman going door-to-door soliciting money to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Regardless of how I feel about Democrats or Republicans, I like sea otters, sea lions, seals, dolphins, whales, fish. Even plankton. Even if I don't stop to say it often enough, I do owe a huge debt of gratitude to the lowly work of the plankton, and so do you. Floating around at the bottom of the food chain, getting swallowed in enormous quantities by the humpback whale, as he plays his game of migratory Pac-Man up and down the coast between Alaska and Baja.

Speaking of Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, hereditary Senator and Republican from Alaska, is in real trouble. Some Tea Party guy named Joe Miller, with a slightly pudgy, high fructose corn syrup ingesting-looking wife (perfect for modern America), is ahead of her by 1,700 votes. Ominous! I should care about that. One thing to bear in mind is that Hitler, before rising to total power, actually never commanded a simple majority of all German votes. Didn't need to. Got close enough and then what you might call non-democratic tactics got him the rest of the way there. It took quite a while, actually, between the Beerhall Putsch in the early Twenties to his final victory in 1933. That's the way these things roll out. See, it doesn't matter all that much whether the Right Wing (Tea Party) of the More Right Wing Party in America (the Repubs) actually gain a majority in the House (or Senate) this time around. I don't think they will. But what's on their side is time. Do you honestly think economic times in America are going to be better in 2012? Nah, we're just getting started on the Highway to Hell. And massive unemployment, foreclosure, displacement, anxiety -- these classic sequelae of a Depression are driving the political process at this point.

Gee, what if Carly becomes Senator instead of Barbara Boxer? That should be important, shouldn't it? I get a couple of emails a day from Barbara, probably because of my halcyon days when I gave money regularly to Barry, Barry of the country club on Martha's Vineyard. Man, I'd like to be on the fairways at Martha's Vineyard myself, especially with the whole course essentially closed off just so I could play through. No sour grapes, though. Where was I? Oh yeah, Barbara. She's a stalwart when it comes to global warming. Too bad she's serving in the United States Senate, where there's no chance of any effective legislation ever being enacted. That's the thing that could happen if I don't start getting interested - Obama and His Merry Band of Democrats have gotten very good at passing big bills with the Names of Big Issues. What I call the Names Project: Healthcare Reform (with no reform), Financial Reform (ditto), the Stimulus (what can you say?). Bills With Those Names won't even get out of committee if the Democrats lose. And then you know what? The war in Afghanistan will get escalated, and then a new, secret, robotic war in Yemen will start up...

I'm trying to stay focused here. This isn't funny. The Tea Party is the leading edge of a very negative development, nativist, nationalistic, belligerent, intolerant, obscurantist. Yeah, I know what you're thinking - would you really be able to tell the difference? Sure you would, I say. We need some sort of rallying cry: Vote for Democrats! They don't do anything, except it feels okay, because they're not that scary!

Finally, I think I've found an approach that will work for me.

Crabwalking the Ground Zero Mosque

Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, wrote a recent piece for Bloomberg News in which he argued persuasively that the USA is utterly, thoroughly, irrevocably bankrupt, with its total liabilities, honestly counted, in the $202 trillion range, or about four times the annual gross world product, and 15 times the annual American GDP. We've reached, he writes, the end of our Keynesian rope and there's simply no way out. We're trapped in zero interest rate paradigms (ZIRP) because the national debt, and the rate of new debt issuance, have become so monumental that the slightest tick upward means that debt service alone will crush the federal budget and cause the country to implode. Kotlikoff is the author of The Coming Generational Storm, a prescient look at the impending war between young and old concerning the attempts of the Baby Boom generation to retire and draw Social Security and Medicare in amounts that the American economy simply cannot support, despite what clowns like Krugman write about "trust funds" and the rest of the illusionary nonsense. Nor will the various governments, federal, state and local, be able to fund, in full, all of the pension promises they have made to former and existing employees. The money is simply not there, and future funding is based on completely unrealistic, quasi-hallucinatory 8% rates of return which haven't been around since the Clinton Administration.

While these Depressionary realities continue to roll out, it's only natural that the MSM and the Klown Kollege in D.C. would disport themselves with any distraction at hand, since if one thing has become absolutely, completely obvious, it is that the political system in this country cannot handle any real problem whatsoever. Those days are over. No part of the federal government has the resources, the competence or the good faith to deal honestly with anything, and they are going to ride the Titanic right into the iceberg, stripping the crystal chandeliers and pocketing the sterling silverware while they party on into the night.

So we learned that much, at least, with the election of Barack Obama: nothing is going to help. Good to know. You, me and the cockapoo over there at the corner of the greensward taking a dump - we're all on our own. So what's to report?

Well, we can get excited about whether Muslims will build a new mosque within a few blocks of "hallowed" Ground Zero. Barack calls it "hallowed ground," echoing Lincoln at Gettysburg, as if that makes any sense whatsoever. Gettysburg was hallowed ground, in Abe's estimation, because of the pitched battle which had occurred there not long before his speech at the height of the Civil War, and the deaths of soldiers on both sides, particularly the armies of the North fighting to preserve the Union. That's not the same thing at all as the site of a terrorist attack; it gives way too much credit to the terrorists. But Americans are not deep historians, so who cares.

Obama began his participation in the "controversy" by saying something banal, obvious, almost principled: in America, under the First Amendment, the right to practice religion shall not be abridged, for anyone, and the equation of American Muslims with al-Qaeda or the terrorist cell which attacked on 9/11 is bigotry. So far, so good. Then, as usually happens, he frightened himself with his unguarded candor and began hemming and hawing, in his usual irritating way. What he meant was, see, yeah, we have a First Amendment and everything, I'm not taking that back, but is it such a good idea for Muslims to be building a mosque near Ground Zero, because, you know, those were Muslims who attacked us and everything, and people could get the wrong idea, and...

So then we were back to Louis Gates, the Cambridge cop and the Biergarten moment. Lah dee frickin dah. Where else could we wind up? For the aid of invertebrates everywhere, here are what I think are the two principled positions possible on this issue:

1. We have freedom of religion. Thus, the right to build a place of worship is equally accessible to any religion which applies. Thus, Muslims can build a mosque in Lower Manhattan, and Catholics can build cathedrals near elementary schools.

2. There is something suspect about Islam. They don't make enough noise about anti-Americanism, they won't condemn terrorists, they tend to institute Shariah law whenever they get enough critical mass together to influence politics. We have to start rolling back Islam in this country, as some European countries are doing now, as in France with the anti-head scarf rules, et cetera. What the United States is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably soon in Iran, really is a crusade against Islam, not a coincidence connected to oil or oil pipelines, and we're taking the war to the new battlefield, right here at home.

Take your pick. Strict Constitutional approach or something different. What's it gonna be? Saying you wonder about whether it's "wise" to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan is not leadership. It's an attempt not to take a position. Not that I'm telling you anything you didn't already know.

Sunday Funnies

The question thus arises, what is to be done with the train wreck that is the American economy?

One approach that has become popular is to write about it. There is a land office business these days in gloom and doom. Its practitioners are now so numerous it's pointless to list them all. Those who become prominent have made a business out of bad news. That is, after all, the American way - maybe the economy is coming apart at the seams, but how can I, personally, make some money out of this deal? There are hundreds of books on the subject, many websites, thousands of blogs. Not all are venally motivated; some, after all, are exercises in pure Schadenfreude, others are the psychological working-through of chronic depressives.

Here at the pond, I must say that I'm clearly not in it for the money. Nor do I consider myself a chronic depressive, and it's bad form to revel too much in misfortune. It's not even in good taste, in fact. I do find it interesting, that's all. It's interesting to understand the reality of a given society and polity. That's what Thoreau was into - how does this whole situation work? Why do people behave the way they do?

One thing I think we can say without being gainsaid (successfully) is that for something around forty years, American society has been on a downward trajectory. That's old news at this point, but certain parameters bear the judgment out. As one example, the breathless analysts at outlets like CNBC and Bloomberg, whose relevance depends on the relevance of the thing they're selling, the ups and downs of the stock market, don't often point out that the S&P 500 and the Dow are at virtually the same level now that they were in 1998; however, there has been at least 25% inflation during that period, so to adjust for constant dollars, one would have to put the S&P in the 750-800 range instead of its nominal 1,100 or so, and the Dow at 7,500, instead of just north of 10,000. So why don't the stock pundits talk about this? It's obviously the reason that Wall Street got into the casino business. Churning the market and creating exotic betting vehicles were the only way to make money once the traditional retail trade dried up and "buy and hold" took its place among our durable illusions.

And then, of course, the illusion-bordering-on-delusion of the globalization movement. Americans are so gullible and so poorly educated about what is in their own best interest that they listened to functional idiots like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose only expertise, so far as I can discern, is in clumsy writing. Or Paul Krugman, another Times-sponsored propagandist, who doesn't talk a lot about the fact his Nobel was won for work he did on "patterns of international trade," back in the go-go 1990's, when NAFTA was signed and Perot heard that giant sucking sound of American jobs heading South O' the Border and to Asia. Look, how obvious can something be? If you're the top economic dog, paying high salaries for value added work such as manufacturing complex products like automobiles and electronics, how is it going to benefit the mass populace if you ship all those jobs overseas where the work is performed for pennies on the dollar, and relegate yourselves to retailing and importing the stuff you used to make? Won't water seek its own level? You might ask, well isn't such a process inevitable? No, of course it isn't. Someone not in the thrall of American-based multinational corporations increasing their profit margins by using cheap labor (completely free of environmental considerations) would see what was going on and bring home the reality that the economy needed to be restructured, less on consumerism, more on essential value-added manufacturing, small-scale farming and ecological balance. Essentially, a post-growth economy. The United States has the resources to accomplish this. The crisis in the United States was an act of slow-motion economic suicide.

Well, we don't have central planning, in any rational sense. The current takeover by the federal government of what's left of American industry and finance is simply a salvage operation to keep the game afloat for a little while longer. Bernanke & Co. are attempting to maneuver the American economy into a glide path leading to the softest possible crash landing. There is wisdom in this, as Dmitry Orlov has written. If you ease your way down, then when the final collapse comes it will be more like falling out of a ground floor window than from 85 stories up.

Return of the native

Admittedly, I was a little spooked when I read about Project Vigilant, a "private sector" outfit that snoops all over the internet looking for signs of un-American activities, assembles such data into "actionable" form and then peddles it to "three initial" federal agencies, which surely include the FBI, CIA and NSA. You can imagine the kind of fine, discriminating, First-Amendment-protecting approach which would be used by such a company. Apparently, Project Vigilant comes up with something like 250 million bits of useful nuggets per day, from emails, websites, comment sections, et cetera.

Still, evil flourishes when good men do nothing, and one tries to be a good man, despite everything. But as insurance, I've begun perusing right wing websites such as Red State, Powerline and even Fox News. I just log on and let them run in background. Then when PV takes a look at the Ol' Swimmer, they have to admit I also spend hours a day figuring out what Sean Hannity thinks about the issues of the day. I like balance, see.

Since I last wrote regularly, nothing much has happened. Maybe that's just the nature of a Depression. Money was the energy behind many developments, and the money's all gone, and the folks back home don't wanna talk on the phone. My guess is that President Barack Obama did not realize he was signing on to govern a country mired in an actual Depression. Like many of the propagandists around him, he participated in the groupthink idea that this was simply another in a long series of cyclical recessions, deeper than most, but nevertheless a species of the same thing. This was the wrong read of the situation. What we're in now is the historically inevitable result of the destruction of the middle class, from many causes, and the usual quick fixes such as tinkering with interest rates are not going to work. I don't think Obama, at the personal level, has any idea what to do about it, because nothing in his background, work experience or education prepared him at all to lead a country out of such a morass. I mean, all that he would have been able to do, at best, would be to begin the process, which is going to take a long time. His easygoing, golf-playing, back-patting, hoops-with-LeBron style would have worked fine if the economy, as with Clinton, was taking care of itself, or at least appeared to be doing so. But when radical (note to Project Vigilant: radical as in "radish," to the root of the matter) changes are needed, and not just Change as a campaign slogan, then it becomes something altogether different. Obama, with his escalation of the Afghanistan...whatever it is we're doing, and his general approach of pretending he was elected in 1992 instead of 2008, is not getting the job done.

We're just drifting. Since the Administration cannot create jobs, they've decided to work with the statistics instead. To keep from going "over budget," the Obama Administration has become the first in living memory to forgo the whole budgetary process. We don't have a budget. Tax revenues this year, including Social Security, will hit about $2.1 trillion. The total outlays (can't call it a budget, since there isn't one) will reach about $3.6 trillion. Nevertheless, Paul Krugman says the federal government is not "cash strapped," because it can borrow money at astonishingly cheap rates. This is true. And the reason the Treasury can issue ten-year notes paying 2% is because the economy is so moribund this is considered a good return.

I remember the phrase my father used to use: the "depths of the Depression." In other words, you don't get there overnight. The crash occurred in 1929, but things steadily worsened during the Thirties. 1935 was worse than 1930. It takes a while for the accumulated savings and forward momentum of the good years to play out, and that's what is happening now, three years after the beginning of the downturn in the summer of 2007, when W warned us "this sucker could go down." Facing the music would be a start, but the political system, addicted as it is to magical thinking and the election cycle, cannot do that. So we pretend things will get better if we wait and just keep doing the same things. House prices will go up because that's what they do. Jobs will appear because America is "innovative." Don't think so. This sucker's not going back up until we do something different.

Mine eyes have not seen the glory lately

I confess to a flagging interest in maintaining this journal of half-baked ideas because, let's face it, it's mostly about current events, and current events are depressing. As in Depression. There are numerous bloggers who revel in the steady decay and disintegration of the American economy and its political system of civil liberties and justice, but I'm not really one of them. The Doomsayers include zerohedge, The Automatic Earth, Max Keiser, Peter Schiff, Karl Denninger and The Big Picture, on the economic side, and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan on the civil liberties/due process side, and they all make their case forcefully, relentlessly and with the overwhelming facts on their side. The Econobummers, when you think about it, are just doing what American entrepreneurs do: there's a buck to be made in bumming us out, so even if they just keep repeating the same mantras day after day (with evidence changing slightly as time passes and the disintegration accelerates), they can draw eyes to their sites from Internet addicts who can't get enough of all this bad news (which Freud would tell us is a definite symptom of a deep-seated hatred of what we've become).

Economically, you can stick a fork in us, and that's not likely to change for years. Realistically, we started this steady slide in 2007 and it shows signs only of getting worse. There is no leadership and no political inclination to tell the truth. Deficit spending ("stimulus") hits the wall of the yearly deficit and national debt (meaning, we waited till we were too far gone before getting serious about doing anything other than enriching the top 1%). Civil liberties and due process have been trashed by the constant militarization of foreign policy and the maintenance of the National Security State.

In November, I suspect things will get markedly worse, as a desperate populace starts electing certifiable lunatics to high office. This, again, is probably part of the natural course of empire; after it begins to crumble, there is a period of intense decadence when greedy imbeciles rush in to fill the void created by the departure of legitimate authority. You can think of the Tea Party as our modern equivalent of the Vandals and Visigoths, breaching the walls of normality and savaging the fat, complacent, stupid citizenry within. I would rather write a sentence like that now than take my chances after the Fourth Reich sets up shop in Amerika.

Maybe we'll get lucky and just slump down into Japanese-style deflation and malaise. That would be a pretty good outcome, all things considered. Their debt is 200% of GDP, but people are still eating and making do. As I've written before, however, culturally we're not a whole lot like the Japanese. We'd rather take our problems out on each other than try to figure out what to do next.

In true American, atomized style, there will be about 300 million solutions to where we're headed in the months and years ahead.

Beyond composting toilets

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html

The linked article by Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, is one of the smarter things I've ever read on how the USA could (but does not) create jobs in high-tech fields (h/t Willy). To summarize inadequately (because the essay is far clearer and more thorough than any summary I can present), America's irrational addiction to Free Market Fundamentalism puts us at a decisive disadvantage in "scaling up" high tech industries such as photovoltaics, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries, all of which are being manufactured overseas (particularly in China) at ratios of 10:1 versus American production. Other countries, lacking our free market purity (and obsession with wars), invest government money in priority projects, rather than leaving the whole thing to "garage" startups, the fantasy approach advocated by New York Times columnists and other American "intellectual" leaders. This allows rapid scaling up of important industries so they produce jobs, and also establish the "high tech ecology" which permits other advances in related fields.

Alas, in the USA we listen to people like Thomas Friedman, who doesn't know anything about anything (including how to write) and to Paul Krugman, who writes the same, identical column twice a week, advocating more "stimulus" without ever specifying (a) how much or (b) where the money should be invested. It's not surprising; neither one of these guys knows anything about how business or high-tech is really done. Mr. Grove does. I suppose it's an advantage of a place like the PRC that they are not so dazzled by Celebrity Thinkers who lack all substance but are high profile nonetheless, like most things in this country. I doubt that Barack Obama, given his background, knows anything about how to actually prioritize and build business in the high-tech and alternative energy fields. He would rather chase the 50 al Qaeda members hiding in Waziristan than bring photovoltaics back to America. And note to Tom Friedman: I don't think you really should fantasize anymore about "cleaning China's clock" in the alternative energy field. Not while they're busy mopping the floor with us.

The Immigration Reform Speech

But before getting to that, an answer to John's question about Dmitry Orlov's onboard toilet facilities: my understanding is that the yacht is equipped with a composting toilet. My own very limited experience with such facilities suggests that a composting toilet aboard a a fairly small boat (32 feet) could present some olfactory challenges for the average American, who tends to be somewhat squeamish or sensitive about such matters, more so than (I'm guessing) a native of Orlov's homeland, the Soviet Union. Americans do not like body smells of any kind, actually, which is one of the reasons we have trouble with international travel. As for the rest of Orlov's carrying charges, I doubt he generates much trash or garbage, living as he does. The cost of berthing a boat in a metropolitan area probably varies by season, but I agree that's a major consideration. I took a tour around the berths of Orange County's Balboa Island recently, and the guide made it a point to impress us with the outrageous cost of berths, which often exceeded the rent on a good-sized apartment. Then again, if you're handy with oars you can moor the boat instead of berthing it. I suspect overall, however, that being freed up from mortgages and real property taxes (and paying much less for insurance) results in a far lower shelter cost, and Orlov, who's an engineer by training and very rigorous in his approach to, well, everything, no doubt has thought it all through. By the way, the picture is of the house of the infomercial king who came up with not just the Veg-o-matic, but Spray-On Hair, a monument to American entrepreneurship in one of its last bastions, the RepublicanLand of Orange County.

But what of the President's speech today on Immigration Reform? How can we let such a milestone pass without remarking on this singular event, and asking what one hopes are salient questions. Such as:

1. Why the hell is the President giving a speech on Immigration Reform?

That's all I can come up with right now.

Paul Krugman's Wild Week

Noted Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently threatened Germany with U.S. Congressional action, followed that with a threat of trade sanctions against China for its currency manipulations, and then threw a tantrum in the form of an essay because no one is listening to his demand that the federal government dump some more stimulus money on the U.S. economy. Since we won't listen, he told us we were in for a Depression.

Krugman is kind of like a guy in a bar at 2 a.m. who's been spoiling for a fight all night long and can't find an opponent, so at last call he just starts hurling insults in all directions.

He may be right about the Depression, depending on how it's defined. Some definitions I've read set the bar at about 25% unemployment, a standard reached during the Depression of the 1930's. It's worth noting that Roosevelt tried everything to lift the country out of the Depression, including massive stimulus and public works, yet nothing really worked until after World War II, when the world lay in ruins (except the USA) and the Marshall Plan maintained the home industries at war pitch. What Krugman leaves out in his simplistic insistence on simply spending money in an undirected way is that the U.S. economy, prior to 2007, was running on the fumes of debt-propulsion. I think the United States is in much worse shape, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, than we were in, say, in 1937. We have this weird "consumerist" economy, one that requires 10.3 hectares (about 25 acres) of Earth's surface in order to supply the "basic resources" (and deal with the waste), most of it plastic junk, generated by each American citizen. Compare this to the figure for Germany (5.3) or to the average for China and India (1.0 hectare). The German "austerity" which Krugman is whining about is simply a cultural value; they're more efficient, less wasteful and more productive, and Krugman thinks that is unfair.

It's because Krugman, like all the "name" American economists, is a growth fetishist. That's all they ever learned and all they believe in: the economy has to keep growing, even if that simply means a greater transfer of wealth to the upper fractions of one percent of the population. The GDP must increase.

Well, not really. We would be very fortunate if the average American enjoyed a quality of life comparable to life in Germany or France, and they manage such a life while using much less energy, and generating much less waste, per capita than their American counterparts. Thus, the GDP could contract, and contract substantially, while the overall quality of life in the United States improved, if the national economy were reoriented toward productive work, fair wealth distribution and environmental sustainability built on a no-growth framework. We don't do these things because this country is the way it is, but blaming Germany or China for our problems is just stupid.

H D Thoreau as one of the original survivalists

Just a passing thought, but one that hadn't occurred to me before: while half-paying attention to this pretentious, boring, stultifying thing called the "G-20," where a group of political half-wits gather to decide the fate of the world, it occurred to me that Thoreau would, in modern contemplation, be called a "survivalist." I don't know why that never occurred to me before, but sometimes I get distracted. The thought came to me last night while reading a series of essays in Dmitry Orlov's print-on-demand book (I hold copy number 149 of a run of 500) called "Hold Your Applause." Dmitry and his wife live on a 32-foot sailboat in Boston Harbor, own no car, bicycle everywhere, and are apparently quite content. Probably more so, and understandably, than an unemployed carpenter who used to live in a suburban tract home in Riverside, now foreclosed, whose unemployment has run out and has no prospects for future work.

So, in one of those "fractal" moments, I thought that this will probably be the shape of future American social evolution. No one other than those at the G-20 meetings and their thousands of hangers-on really wants to hear what they have to say about their "stimulus vs. austerity" arguments, their manipulation of electronic money, and the rest of their standard crap. Economies organized at the global level are really stupid and unworkable, and may it all go to hell. Meanwhile, as Orlov has demonstrated, the one great advantage of certain technological breakthroughs, such as photovoltaics and small-scale wind turbines, is that one can be a survivalist without giving up much in the way of modern convenience; indeed, the ability to convert solar energy at the very local level (micro application) means that you can derive everything that modern society actually can offer while unplugging from most of its useless, insane and environmentally destructive superfluities. Dmitri, for example, outfitted his sailboat with a few solar panels and a wind turbine. With the main expenses of life, a house and a car, out of the way, he can maintain his vital heat (and his wife's) without worrying about the G-20's call on whether to expand the Fed's balance sheet, e.g. Since the "captured" national government cannot find its way out of legacy industries, cannot lead the way to an alternative energy future because of its utter corruption and cluelessness, it will come about from the grassroots. Which is fine really, making expendable, as it does, the whole apparatus of Congress and the rest. Perhaps the changes will come about before macro-organized governments finish off the rest of the oceans.

Survivalism is obviously a growth industry, another demonstration that Henry David was always way, way ahead of his time. Many American manifestations of Thoreau's Walden cabin, of course, will feature .50 cal machine gun placements at 100 yards, but that's my country for you. Just set yourself up as far from such free-fire zones as possible.

Summertime, and the livin' should be easy

Pardon me while I step away from the keyboard for a while. If you feel like it, check back in August. Perhaps I'll be here again. A few parting thoughts:

1. Sure hope they stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. While humans, thinking (as always) it's all about them, concentrate on whose fault it is, millions of innocent marine mammals, birds, crustaceans, and fish are dying awful deaths. Just stop the damn flow, that's all.

2. It seems to me that the Obama team did a good job "shaking down" British Petroleum, if that's what they did. The basis of the Republican criticism, and concomitant coddling of BP (for which I hope they pay dearly in November), seems related to their absolute determination to conclude that Obama can never be good at anything. He was good at this. Deal with it.

3. James Kunstler posted a blog today in which he compared Obama to Millard Fillmore, and likened the death of the Whig Party to current Democratic troubles. He used the phrase, "history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes." You tell me if you've read any of that somewhere before.

4. The American economy seems to have entered a spin cycle in which it goes round and round, squeezing the water out, keeping bank accounts as worthless assets while allowing high-speed computers to rule the stock market, and getting nowhere. It's become very boring to write about it.

5. I'll never understand why Barack Obama's administration thinks it's a good idea to keep innocent people locked up forever in its Cuban concentration camp, fighting tooth and nail against release, even when a court rules "emphatically" on a habeas corpus petition that injustice has been done, as a court just did in the case of Mohammed Odaini, a Yemeni who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, at the age of 17 while studying religion, and detained despite evidence throughout his imprisonment that he has done nothing wrong.

A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence "overwhelmingly supports Odaini's contention that he is unlawfully detained."

Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years -- beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 -- when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court's description of that history).

In the absence of a better explanation, one must conclude that both the war in Afghanistan, now in its 9th year, and the deliberate policy of incarcerating innocent people in cages whom the government knows to be innocent, are undertaken as part of a program of pandering to the Right Wing. This is craven and evil. I suppose it's my status as an officer of the court, and my desire to behave as a decent human being, that compel me to point this tyranny out.

Not writing about such stuff will be a great relief. That such things continue is disturbing to the conscience.

Let's drop the Big One and see what happens

Admittedly, I'm intrigued by the idea of using a nuclear bomb to stop the Deep Horizon spill. The science is fairly straightforward: drill down very deeply into the sea floor in the general area of the well head, plant an A-bomb, and kablooey! The rock formations are superheated by the nuclear fireball, converting them to glass and sealing the oil reservoir. Problem solved.

The Russians, naturally, have already done this kind of thing, although never underwater. When I read that the Soviet Union had exploded five A-bombs between 1966 and 1981 to seal off natural gas wells (usually because of uncontrollable fires), I thought: well, of course they did. If it's big and loud and environmentally catastrophic, the Russians have already tried it. Just the way they do stuff. We've got a natural gas fire burning out of control here, Comrade. What shall we do? Is pooting it out with nuclear bomb! It must be all the vodka.

But before I get Dmitri Orlov all pissed off at me (because he only likes comparisons where the Soviet Union comes out on top), we should probably consider just how bad this oil problem could get. I think that people (including your humble blogospondent) are having trouble coming to terms with this catastrophe. We're in a state of denial. We allowed a foreign company with a miserable record of safety compliance to drill a well under five thousand feet of water into a huge oil reservoir with no effective plan for dealing with a blowout of precisely the kind that occurred. We don't know how bad this situation will become, how far the oil will spread, how much oceanic water will be affected. We can't foresee the ecological consequences of this much oil contaminating the seas. You start thinking: given the intricacies of the web of life, the continuity of the seas, the inability to seal anything off from anything else, the delicate structure of the food chain - could we all wind up dying from this, directly or as the result of an unforeseeable and incalculable chain of causation?

Thus, people are getting freaked out. Matthew Simmons, the Oil Guru, doesn't help when he talks about the failure of "down hole" structures below the superstructure of the blowout preventer (BOP). Julia Whitty in Mother Jones was writing about that. Simmons is adamant that oil is leaking not just from the well head, but from the sea floor at some distance from the BOP. Which suggests that the uncontrolled rush of oil is eroding and damaging the subsurface piping. That's the true nightmare scenario, because if the subsurface pipes fail, there isn't going to be any way to confine the control efforts to the BOP superstructure. The relief wells thus become a race against time in a different sense: can they get there while the existing well is still mainly intact?

Simmons urges the use of a nuclear bomb.

Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge. "Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil," he said.

In some ways, I like this approach just because I'd love to hear Barack Obama, who tends to be a little on the cautious and measured side, announce the plan. "The beaches of the Gulf will be more beautiful than ever," he intones, "but first we have to hit them with an A-bomb."

It's all kind of surreal. We currently won't even let Dutch skimmers help us out with technology they possess but we don't, which involves sucking up oil-contaminated seawater, separating out the oil, and discharging the seawater overboard, the reason being: there is a small residue of oil in the discharge. (h/t Gary). This is the kind of fussiness which prevented Louisiana from constructing sand berms on a hurry-up basis. We're determined to use bureaucracy to get in our own way in dealing with the problem, but not to prevent the problem in the first place.

Of course, no one has ever drilled down 18,000 feet into a sea bottom 5,000 feet beneath the surface and detonated a nuclear bomb. No one can say for certain it will work, although the Russians are confident. But then they think that nuclear explosions are the answer to everything.

Unless BP has a nuclear capability (and maybe they do, they have more resources than some of the countries that have A-bombs), it looks like it's time to call in the guys from Lawrence Livermore and order up something kind of special.

Not even wrong

I've been reading a very good book about theoretical physics titled Quantum, by an English philosopher-physicist named Manjit Kumar. It's all about the debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about the nature of reality at the subatomic level. Like most liberal arts types with intellectual pretensions, I like to read this kind of stuff so I can throw around terms like "quantum jump" and "valence electrons" and "uncertainty principle" (that's the formula pictured) and sound real rigorous and, you know, smart. Kumar even allows the lay reader some respect: he uses actual formulas in his book. Imagine that. American scientists who write for the general public might throw in E=mc2, but that's as far as they'll go. Otherwise, they lose book sales, of course.

Among the colorful characters and anecdotes, Kumar recites one I had heard before about Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian physicist who many considered a virtual peer of Einstein. Einstein and Bohr agreed that Pauli's immense intellect and mental quickness, coupled with his scathing wit, intimidated them both. That seems like quite an achievement: to intimidate Albert Einstein intellectually. Goes to show, I guess: there's always somebody faster. At one point, Pauli, commenting on a paper written about quantum physics by another, lesser light, dismissed it as "not even wrong." I'd heard that before but didn't try to figure out what he meant. So thinking about it, and coupling it with something I had read recently by Richard Feynman (I take my pretensions seriously, you see) in which Feynman said that the true method of science was trial and error, that we learn by mistakes and constant improvement of accepted knowledge, I thought I had a glimmer. What Pauli was saying was that the work in question was worthless even as elimination of a wrong approach. It didn't suggest a different approach to other scientists (enlightened by the failed analysis in question), it wasn't even "in error," it was simply irrelevant. It was so far off it didn't have anything to do with anything. Pretty funny, thought about that way. The depth of some minds...

Okay, so watching the Obama speech last night about the BP oil spill, I had the same kind of reaction. Obama is not even wrong. His leadership has become so completely irrelevant that it cannot be judged as helpful or counterproductive. His way of approaching things cannot be used to suggest another, better way of handling things. All that you can do at this point is to say that whatever it is that he's doing has nothing to do anymore with the fate of the nation.

I don't know if you've seen this clip from The Daily Show, but here it is in living color: Jon Stewart going through Obama's complete repetition of the Bush-era transgressions against civil liberties:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/stewart-critiques-obama-f_n_613937.html.

Glenn Greenwald has been writing about these things in meticulous detail for a long time, and I suppose I have, too. I just don't get it. What is he doing? I have no idea. Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, began a speech recently in which he stated, quite frankly, that he was "disgusted" by the Obama Administration's approach to due process and civil liberties.

There's really no hope here, none at all. If Obama abdicates the throne and does not run in 2012, then the ascension of the Right Wing is a virtual given. 2012 is so far away, and economically the country just keeps sinking. The commercial real estate market, the public pension plans, the state budgets -- they're all in dire peril, in danger of failing. The level of national indebtedness and the delta between tax receipts and government spending have moved to absolutely preposterous dimensions. There is no movement to reorder public spending away from military campaigns, even though the obviousness of their unaffordability is ridiculously apparent. There is simply no plan, nothing, a complete vacuum.

Adrift upon a sea of oil-filled troubles, with no captain, no one to lead us to try anything new. No one even wrong.

High Tea in the Empire Room

But while I throw the term around, often (admittedly) in a pejorative tone: just what is The Tea Party? Is it presided over by the Mad Hatter, does it represent the modern-day avatars of the Sons of Liberty, is it a Support Group for Political Lunatics? Does it exist just to give people who are over 50, and white, and broke, an excuse to leave their trailers and get together in the rec room?

No, it's none of these things, actually. Lewis Carroll did not write the platform, the "Contract from America." The Tea Party might best be described as the Libertarian Wing of the Republican Party, and it's coming on strong. The party had the muscle to get rid of Robert Bennett of Utah, for example. It has nominated Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, it assisted Scott Brown in Massachusetts. It seems, really, never to lose any race it enters, and it did not really exist before 2009. It has the Big Mo', and it's for real. The Establishment Parties are scared shitless, as are their Mainstream Media sponsors. The MSM do not necessarily have any kind of foothold with the Tea Party, which means they don't know how to "access" them, and tap into them for "sources" and remarks made "on background" and "off the record." Thus, it is in the interests of the MSM to marginalize the Tea Party, because the fate of the existing media depends on maintenance of the status quo, which is a world inhabited solely by the Usual Democrats and the Usual Republicans. Whom, increasingly, absolutely everybody hates.

For these reasons alone, you kinda gotta like the Tea Party.

Let us drop the relentless snark, then, and actually look at a prototypical representation of the Tea Party platform, this one from Wikipedia, and not dissimilar from the Maine GOP platform which officially and explicitly adopts the Tea Party agenda. So here we go, with comments by your faithful blogger, a man sorta trained in Constitutional law, just as our President is sorta trained.

1. Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does (82.03%).

WS: Okay. What's wrong with that? Even if Congress just says, "Article I." Although I know what the TP is driving at. It's the absurd expansion of the Commerce Clause and the Ninth Amendment to allow any damn thing that Congress wants to do, even if the 10th Amendment suggests the states should have the primary right. Score: TP 1, Congress 0.

2. Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (72.20%).

WS: Well, see - they didn't want to say "carbon dioxide," because they don't believe in the theory (the "theory" in this case being "Science.") It doesn't have to be cap and trade, but we have to do something, and if you think the extractive and polluting industries are going to do so on their own, I have two letters for you: BP. Score: Push, because Congress sucks on this issue too.

3. Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)

Well, I don't think you need the 2/3rds requirement if you just enforce the first part. California has used that 2/3rds thing for a long time, and we're about to file B/K. But yeah - why shouldn't the federal government live within its means? Curiously, however, where is the mention of Pentagon spending? TP 1.5, Congress 0.

4. Simplify the tax system: Adopt a single-rate tax system; eliminate the internal revenue code and replace it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words. (64.90%).

Personally, I believe the correct number is 4,527 words. If there is no Internal Revenue Code, however, where do we put the 4,543 words? In the D.C. phone book? Much depends also on the "single rate." Talk about a blank check.

Unable to score.

5. Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities. (63.37%)

Let's be honest, people, if we're going to start fresh. Just come out and say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, Health & Human Services and the EPA. Score: subtract one point for disingenuousness. And please - no more Blue Ribbon Committees. That's why we never do anything. We "study" it to death. Score: TP 1/2, Congress 0.

6. Limit annual growth in federal spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%).

Not a good idea. What if there's a true emergency? The balanced budget plank covers this. Penalty of 1/2 point for missing the obvious. Score: TP 0, Congress 0.

7. Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23, 2010: Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (56.39%).

Fine with me. It's a piece of sell-out junk, and by the time it takes effect, doctors will get paid with cows. No credit, though, because the system if still completely broken.

8. Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of additional energy reserves to reduce American dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation. (55%).

This is the "burn coal," drill-baby-drill & build nukes plank. TP: -1, Congress, irrelevant.

9. Reduce Earmarks: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%).

Just eliminate earmarks. If a Congress member wants a pork deal for his state or district, don't allow it as an attachment to a general bill. Make him/her/it introduce it as a free-standing pander.. Swing and a miss.

10. Reduce Taxes: Permanently repeal all recent tax increases, and extend permanently the George W. Bush temporary reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and estate taxes, currently scheduled to end in 2011. (53.38%).

Oh hell, there's your dead giveaway. I thought we were going to have a brand new tax code. Why include a plank just to help "Bush's Base"? This plank betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Minus 2 points for overt pro-Republican sloganeering.. Score: -3.5.

As noted, there's nothing in the platform about out-of-control defense spending, illegal surveillance by the government, the abridgement of due process, or anything else that might offend Sean Hannity. Thus, the Tea Party platform lacks a coherent philosophy. It fails to address the problem of a huge military-industrial-security complex which drains $1 trillion per year from the national treasury, leads to a militarized, perpetual-war foreign policy, and infringes liberties at home. How do the Tea Party people miss this?

Not very encouraging. An aggressive, belligerent, militarized federal government which is simultaneously "small" and "limited." These conditions do not coexist in the Real Universe. As Eisenhower warned, if you persist in maintaining a huge MIC, you have to have a large federal bureaucracy to protect the citizenry from it. Otherwise, you wind up with a society as once existed in Germany between 1932 and 1945. Of course, Eisenhower was a fluoride-loving Communist.

Take me back to the days

One distinctive aspect of the dimming hopes for the Obama Presidency is that his eclipse will definitely usher in a truly nutty interregnum of bizarre politics in America. Indeed, we're well on our way. Sharron Angle is the Republican nominee for Harry Reid's Senate seat in November. Which made me recall this scene from 'Dr. Strangelove:"

Ripper: Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper: Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake: No. No, I don't know what it is. No.

Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

General Ripper's solution to the problem of flouridation was to set in motion a series of events confounding the American "fail-safe" program, thus ending the world in a nuclear holocaust. It was a bout of sexual impotence which alerted Ripper to the insidious effects of flouride in the drinking water. Was his diagnosis right, or wrong? It doesn't matter; all human life was destroyed anyway.

The theory that flouride in the drinking water was a Communist plot was promulgated chiefly by the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by the American candy manufacturer Robert Welch. Welch and his brother James invented the caramel-on-a-stick candy called the Sugar Daddy, which no doubt potentiated the formation of caries in many American mouths during the 1950's, providing as it did an ideal sugary, adhesive matrix for bacterial growth on the teeth. As I write those words, I can almost taste a Sugar Daddy in my own mouth, and feel its treacly essence against my teeth. If you bit into a Sugar Daddy, it could momentarily lock your upper and lower mandibles together. It was powerful candy. Thus, ironically (or was it?) Welch's anti-flouride campaign played directly into the hands of the Communist plot, weakening the enamel (and moral fiber) of American children.

Although my own conspiracy theory is that Robert Welch knew this when he founded the John Birch Society. He wanted us to have cavities! There is absolutely nothing easier on God's Green Earth than hatching your very own conspiracy idea, and I'm kind of proud of mine. It's just a matter of adding two plus two. Welch built on his theory with the allegation that Dwight Eisenhower, hero of V-E Day, was a paid operative of the Communist Party. The Paranoid Style of the Right Wing, the historian Richard Hofstadter called it in 1964. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Now comes this good news about Sharron Angle:

The Nevada state Assembly voted 26-16 to fluoridate the water of two Nevada counties. Angle voted against the bill.

History, as the wit said, does not necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This was really the kind of thing I was hoping for in the Tea Party Movement. Most of their ideas are incoherent, a matter of flailing in impotent rage against a Federal-Big Finance oligopoly which is strangling the country and impoverishing millions. Most fair-minded people can see that at this point; Washington's corruption is utterly complete, Wall Street is rigged in favor of a few large banks which make millions on every single trading day, the middle class is falling through the floor, the national budgetary priorities permit only war and bailouts while health care and Social Security go slowly bankrupt. There is no coherent opposition to these developments because it is essentially an Inside Job.

As long as the country is falling completely apart in the wake of the Obama debacle, however, I am at least grateful that things will be colorful and insane, the way they often were in the 1950's, the Golden Age of the Self-Made Millionaire Political Nut Job. The key point in contradistinction, however, being that America was definitely on the way up in the 1950's. Now it is just as evidently on the way down. Our incompetence and unwillingness to take our problems seriously perhaps find their best metaphor in this: the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with the oil of a foreign corporation which was under no obligation even to sell that oil to us. While our President takes lessons in Method Acting so that he can project just the right attitude of outrage to satisfy the cable news programs.

Against this kind of madness, Sharron Angle (and thank God for those two, distinctive R's in her first name! Isn't that somehow more interesting?) is diverting, appropriate and just what the doctor ordered. The know-it-alls are already laughing her off. This is a gift to Reid, they say. She's the easiest candidate to beat, because she's so loony. An anti-flouride zealot! Ha ha ha! I would say to those confident political pundits that they really need to get out more. It would not surprise me at all to see Sharron Angle in the Senate. Maybe she'll become the Majority Leader. Maybe General Jack D. Ripper did not destroy the world in vain.

My Mash Note to Sarah Palin

Dear Sarah,

First, I don't think I've written much about you at all on my blog. It's not that I haven't been thinking about you, because I have. You're very much in my thoughts. For example, I've found the "Delete Blog" command on my Blogger Dashboard, and that's really all about you. Hey, don't jump to conclusions, Sally. If you were President, who needs to write one of these silly things? Not me! So let's say it's shortly after election day, November, 2012, and this blog just sort of disappears. Is that cowardice? Heck no. Is it because I would consider my work done? You betcha!

Blogs are dumb. They're written out of frustration, megalomania, ego, despair, all kinds of reasons. They're an expression of Free Speech rights, but as we all know, people can get carried away with such liberties and play right into the hands of America's Enemies. We're at war, all over the place. With Terrorists, of course, and Iran and North Korea and the Liberal Media and the ACLU and the Democrat Party and...hell, you tell me. It's a jungle out there. This place shouldn't be run by a Community Organizer. A helicopter moose hunter is more like it, someone who isn't squeamish about getting elbow-deep in the gore of a gut-shot caribou as she field dresses it during a blizzard. You think those Muslims won't think about that one? Heh-heh. I know I will.

Though I'll be keeping my thoughts to myself. I'll just ogle your legs. You have nice legs, Sarah, the best of any female Presidential candidate so far. I know you're thinkin': damned by faint praise. Well, you wouldn't say it like that. You'd say, gimme a break, Dude! But what I mean is, a lot of these ancient horndogs, like Rush and John McCain and Bill Kristol, just have a lech for you, they think you're really cute and everything, but do they really respect you? I mean, like I do? I think they're condescending, frankly, and that's strictly entre-nous. That means "between us" in Frenchie, not that anyone should care how French people talk, and I'm not parading my education or anything, though perhaps it's a little superior and maybe more settled than yours, which, as I understand things, was undertaken at about 23 different undergraduate institutions. On the other hand, was I ever the Governor of Alaska? Who's got better legs, me or you? That's what I'm talking about.

Not writing the blog anymore after you're elected won't bother me. My guess is that I'll have other things on my mind. I'll be building a nuclear fallout shelter, for one thing, so I hope you'll urge all Americans to do the same so I don't look, you know, paranoid. But since everyone will be walking around with automatic weapons and wearing camo, I'm not sure paranoia will even mean much when you're in charge. I'll just need enough armament to keep people from siphoning the gas from my Humvee, that's all. I'm not going to get carried away.

Did I mention I think you're cute? Okay, covered that. Beyond that opinion (and it's sincere, Sarah, I mean it), I confess to having a little trouble concerning just what you and the Tea Party are really about, you know? The funny feeling I have is that you're so worried about your Freedoms that we're not going to be able to do a lot of the things we currently take for granted. Kind of paradoxical, huh? To use one of those Obama words. And it's ironic that what will make your Presidency possible at all is that things have gotten so bad. Ain't people just the livin' end sometimes? Oh sure, a lot of people will liken the coming of the Tea Party, and you as Number 45, to the rise of the Third Reich, a desperation movement for a humiliated people out of work, broke, foreclosed, threatened and with a pervasive sense of grievance against....shit, everybody. I don't see it. For example, did you ever see the bandy legs on that little Chaplin-mustached knucklehead? Not in your league, Sally.

So it's all good. I understand it, really I do. Someday, around 2014 or so, depending on where I am and everything, I'm going to wish we hadn't had to go quite so far to try to make things Right, that maybe it would have been better if the old style pols had pulled off an American turnaround using what we might think of then, looking back, as "traditional methods." But as you would say -- coulda, woulda, shoulda. You would say that, right? Oh I remember - you betcha!

Love & kisses,

Wally

The Cargo Cult Economic Recovery Under the Rahm Emanuel Administration

Sometimes I say to myself, "Self (for I want to get my attention), what's the deal with this Obama Administration? Why is it setting the table for the Tea Party?" I'm willing, you see, to ask myself the tough questions. Others may dodge them, but in the privacy of my own mind, I follow the facts where they lead.

What I'm coming around to is the slow realization that the country is actually led by Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. If I think of it that way, it mostly makes sense. Rahm is Old School, a political deal-maker who operates pretty much as his brother Ari does in the show biz agency game. If you want to get things done, what you do is get a bunch of power players in one room and cut a deal. This is how Pragmatic People get things done. It's not a lot of airy-fairy, Hopey-Changey bullshit. That's fine for getting elected - give the suckers what they want to hear. But once you're in charge, you have to act like a grownup, and grownups deal with the possible.

Health care "reform" was done this way, the energy bill will be done this way, financial "reform"

is being done this way. Emanuel and his Democratic Leadership Council cohorts are running a kind of Names Project where the big bills have the titles of real change without any of the substance. You want Health Care Reform? Here. And what you get is a large, unfunded expansion of the Medicaid program, and not much else. That looks doable to the Big Boyz, so they do that. Financial reform? Okay, we'll limit what the Bank of America can charge you when you get cash back at Safeway on your ATM. Satisfied? Who cares if you aren't satisfied.

The people summoned to the back offices of the West Wing of the White House do fine under the existing economy, so they don't want to change much. In this sense, Barack is useful to them. Obama, I get the feeling, is something of a naif, a political neophyte, and more or less a tool for the Powers That Be. He's in over his head. His natural inclinations are conciliatory and "compromising," which the political sharks swimming around him take as an invitation to do things their way. It's kind of endearing and touching that Barack has this enduring belief in the good intentions of all the assholes in the federal government, but it's massively displaced and it has shanghaied his Presidency and made him ineffective.

The only satisfaction I get out of watching the U.S. economy thrash and struggle in the La Brea Tar Pits of the current Depression is the realization that Rahm Emanuel's Cargo Cult expectation that the economy will spontaneously "recover" is being systematically destroyed before our eyes. It isn't happening. Barack, Joltin' Joe and Rahm have been reduced to using Census Bureau overhiring (at ridiculous levels) as a sign of recovery. Nothing of the sort is happening. This is not a "cyclical downturn," and blaming all of what is happening on a "subprime crisis" is simply wishful thinking. We are experiencing the natural result of about three decades of allowing the U.S. middle class to be hollowed out and wrecked, and of permitting ever greater fractions of national wealth to be concentrated in financial elites who operate at the multinational level. It's really that simple. The middle class was kept viable for a couple of decades by massive borrowing, but now the collateral for such borrowing has been destroyed, average income will not support the previous standard of living, and the Moment of Truth has arrived.

To extend and pretend for a while longer, the U.S. has led the international community in taking private debt on to the public ledger, running huge deficits and turning what was a private catastrophe into a sovereign debt crisis. The alternative was to face the truth, something the political system will not allow. It would have taken a very forceful, self-confident, visionary, intellectual-sprung-from-the-head-of-Zeus leader to take us in the right direction, and Obama is not that person. Nor is Rahm Emanuel, who is running the show, although he is a great deal more savvy than the President. Rahm decided that it was innovative enough just for Obama to be the first minority President; beyond that, it was to be business as usual, with the Clinton Presidency as the cultural and political model. Thus, vacations on Martha's Vineyard, dinners in Georgetown, flexing of American military muscle to keep the Right Wing off balance, forgiveness of war crimes, continuation of Bush/Cheney outrages in detainee civil liberties abuses, expansion of unnecessary wars. All the same stuff, including (and unlike Clinton) an actual increase in military spending.

The only hope for the American economy in the long run is (a) a fundamental change in the energy paradigm and (b) protectionism in the form of tariffs and abandonment of the free trade fetish. The economy runs on energy. So many people could be employed, so much could be done at so little environmental cost, if we moved to solar power, in all its various forms, on a massive basis. And it here that Obama-Emanuel have been all talk and no effective action. The money, as always, goes to the Pentagon. From the 2011 Federal Budget description:

Encourages the Early Commercial Use of

New, Innovative Energy Technologies that

Will Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

The Budget substantially expands support for

DOE loan guarantees for innovative energy

technologies, by adding $36 billion in new loan

authority (for a total of $54.5 billion) for nuclear

power facilities and an additional $500 million

in credit subsidy to support $3 to $5 billion in

loan guarantees for innovative energy efficiency

and renewable energy projects. The loan guarantee

program also will continue to support a

range of commercial renewable energy programs

and other facilities that help reduce pollutants

and greenhouse gases while simultaneously

creating clean energy jobs and contributing to

long-term economic growth and international

competitiveness.

There you have it. All of those "millions of Green Jobs" that Obama talked about on the campaign trail: that's what is supposed to get it done. "Loan guarantees" for innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. And the cost of maintaining the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under the new budget? $170 billion, as part of $700 billion in official Pentagon spending. Obama/Emanuel do not want to give the Right Wing ammunition for the accusation that they are "Socialist," so they will not do what needs to be done, a true Manhattan Project for alternative energy. Too "radical." Politics is the art of the possible, and that just isn't possible. I understand the difficulty, I believe, but it doesn't make sense to be pragmatic when practicality keeps a country mired in stagnation. If you're going to Change things, you really have to be willing to Change things. Alas, it is not to be.

So let's wait, like the South Sea Islanders, for the cargo to float ashore again, as it has in years gone by. Let's pay about 16 bucks an hour to one in every 500 Americans to count the rest of us and call it "job growth." Let's screw around and just keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Let's all go to hell in a handbasket, but look Presidential doing it.