High Speed Rail & Schizo-Politicosis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLgEnDGkG4

As I fumble my way toward my magnum opus, trying to define my topic, trying to describe the underlying connections between certain modern, media-related phenomena that have made our lives seem so alien to us...

One idea that keeps coming to mind, and I don't know how it relates to the overarching Theory of Everything, is that political discourse in America has taken leave of any lingering connection to reality in favor of an ideologically-driven style of "thinking" about all problems. As one example: as I played chess online, I listened with one ear to President Holograma's State of the Union Address. I believe at one point he voiced his support for high speed rail and talked about demonstration projects in different locations around the country. And the thought occurred to me: why don't you just build an intercontinental system? We have lots of unemployed people in the construction and manufacturing trades. We have tons of unused factory capacity, such as in Detroit (Michael Moore had the canny idea a couple of years ago that Obama ought to convert a lot of the auto manufacturing business to building locomotives and rolling stock for a national rail system, instead of propping up General Motors). Hire all those people and let's get to work. We need transportation. We need jobs. Air travel is a killer when it comes to carbon dioxide pollution. We need a way to get away from the single-auto mode of moving around.

Just build the damn thing. We must have the money, because we always find it when we need to invade the Middle East. Why can't we invade our own Midwest, say, with a high speed rail project?

It's right at this point that the insanity sets in. Immediately. First, everyone must consult their internal ideological gyroscope: is this Socialist, or is this Free Enterprise? That's the first cut. Obama must be very cautious (second nature to him) because he knows that Jim DeMint does not want anything whatsoever done that even sounds like government involvement in doing something other than building bombs. It might be better to "seed" private enterprise and just kind of hope that the private sector does it. The Obama Administration is sinking a whole $27 million into "promising" solar projects, for example. Imagine that. $27 million. And, over a very long period, $18 billion into high speed rail, if Congress will let him have the money after he's already out of office.

In China, Japan, Germany, France, Spain and the rest of the civilized world, they do not really detain themselves with ideological debates before they build high speed rail networks. It's assumed that such public facilities will require government support. They don't have to "pay for themselves." A Harvard economist named Edward Glaeser recently wrote a series of posts at the always-helpful New York Times in which he knocked HSR around because of its costs and other problems he foresaw. He used a hypothetical HSR line from Dallas to Houston for his model, which raised an immediate question in my mind: why would anyone in Dallas want to go to Houston? His hit pieces can be found here: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/high-speed-rail/ Thanks a lot for that, Mr. Glaeser, you buzzkill. The one thing I noted, in skimming through his analysis, is that all of his estimates are complete guesswork: cost per mile of construction, maintenance cost, everything. It's a complete GIGO situation that doesn't explain anything. After reading his blog posts, I had to ask myself whether it was simply a hallucination that I rode the AVE Spanish high speed train from Madrid to Seville, or the TGV from Lyon to Paris. Did those rides really happen, or can Prof. Glaeser correct my faulty memory? How were these other countries able to build these trains and continue to operate them?

I wonder if the free market extremists, in demanding that any good new idea always pay for itself, ever consider that the federal government currently taxes gasoline sold in this country to the tune of 18 cents/gallon, and that the money in this fund is used, among other things, to maintain the interstate highway system. Why don't the conservatives demand that the highway system pay for itself and refuse to drive on the nation's roads until they become self-sustaining? Why do we have a Federal Aviation Administration? Shouldn't the planes be allowed to collide in midair rather than risk doing something so obviously Communist?

Anyway, building a high speed rail system connecting all the major metropolitan areas in this country would really be something, which is why I suppose it has zero chance of getting anywhere over the next twenty years or so. We always begin every debate over doing anything with a very long, protracted discussion about which kind of "thing" it is, socialist, capitalist, anarcho-syndicalist, and expend all of our energy in this pointless drivel confirming everyone in their ideological purity. Then we move on to the next thing we don't do.

As I say, somehow this tendency, this increasingly ingrained habit of mind, has something to do with my Overall Theory of Everything. I don't think it will make anyone forget Godel's Incompleteness Theory, but perhaps 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

A note on the unemployment rate

Various wags around the blogosphere are having a lot of fun at the expense of Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, and her Bureau of Labor Statistics, which some have taken to calling the Ministry of Truth with reference to the dystopian misinformation bureau in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latest fuel on the fire came in the form of Friday's NFP (Non-Farm Payroll Report) which claimed that 36,000 Americans found jobs in the prior month, and that as a result the U-3 unemployment rate (which is the only one the media/political class ever pays attention to) had fallen from 9.4% to 9.0%.

Since as everyone knows (because the fact is repeated endlessly everywhere you look) the United States hatches about 125,000 to 150,000 new workers each month just through the maturation of the population, many looked askance at the effect of a number approximately 1/4th the size of the average of these two numbers in lowering the overall UE rate. Some cynics then suggested that if 36,000 new workers could lower the UE rate by .4%, then a bonanza month of hiring, say on the order of 360,000, well within historical precedent for previous recoveries, should take us all the way down to about 5%, which in Darwinian capitalism (the kind we practice) represents full employment. In other words, we're almost there.

Yet that seems a little crazy. How could such a huge problem of unemployment be solved with one fairly average good month, and with such a paltry number compared to the problem? Thus, rather than being like the other guys & gals writing about this, I decided to hike on over to the Bureau of Labor Stats website and see what was going on. Is Hilda, the lovely child of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrants, a loyal cadre of BarackObama's 2008 campaign who was rewarded for helping the O-Man with the Latino vote with a plum job in his administration despite virtually no visible qualifications for the position - is she cooking the books?

Of course not. For one thing, Hilda began as a supporter for Hillary Clinton and only started delivering La Raza for Barack when that fell through (though I was thinking, she must be quite an operator to turn on a dime like that and convince the wily Obama she was worth bringing onto his team). Hilda's a good California kid from the San Gabriel Mountains area, educated at Cal State Poly-Pomona, who worked her way up through the ranks of California state politics. It's just a guess, but I doubt that she knows anything more about statistical manipulation than she does about labor policy, whatever that might be. In general, with the notable exception of Steven Chu at Energy, there isn't much correlation between career expertise and cabinet position. It's more what the cabinet-appointees "have been interested in" at some point, such as a rancher being "interested" in the Interior or Eric "Place" Holder being "interested in" law.

But one thing I learned at Albion H. Horrall Elementary School in San Mateo, California, in the halcyon 1950's of this great country of ours was that a percentage is essentially a conversion of a fraction. 3 is 60% of 5 because 5 divided into 3 = .6. It's just that simple. So these cynics and carpers can go on all they want about the ridiculousness of 36,000 hires lowering the UE rate by .4% but it still all comes down to a matter of a numerator and a denominator. And the denominator is the Obama Administration's friend, see, because the FAQ for the BLS tells you exactly who is in that pool:

Who is counted as unemployed?

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.

Workers expecting to be recalled from layoff are counted as unemployed, whether or not they have engaged in a specific jobseeking activity. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work...

So there you go. Now if I can do that, why can't the other wiseguys? It's right there in front of us. Hilda has delivered once again for Obama, because I can assure you that the number he's going to use is that 9.0%, not some exotic indicator like the U-6, which sounds a lot worse, and he's not going to go into a lot of detail about how the denominator for U-3 is calculated. That's how politics works in a mass-media society, a subject which admittedly fascinates me. The public, the media, everything and everyone, are simply worn down by the repetition of the residual number, in this case 9%. There just isn't the patience or the mental space in our frenetic, crowded culture, every damn time out, to go into a whole routine about how the U-3 actually got better because the economy is so uber-shitty that no one even bothers to look for a job anymore, which is the actual, literal truth, but to point that out takes time and understanding, and those things don't exist anymore. The key to effective Presidentialness, and Obama understands this, I think, better than he understands anything else (it is the whole secret of his success) is to seize the headline numbers and make them work for you because no one, ever, is going to look at anything else, and your opponents are going to battle you on that turf.

Which is to say: modern mass-media politics is not actually about reality. It is essentially, only, exclusively, about the management of perceptions. It cannot do anything about real problems because it does not engage real problems; it only engages their simulacra, their indicia, their Platonic Shadows on the Cave Walls of Reality.

Laughing at the Apocalypse

Dmitry Orlov has a new video up which is worth watching in its 1/2 hour entirety. I was intrigued to hear him echo something I wrote about a while back in these very pages, the idea that what the United States is involved in now, toying and tinkering while it verges on collapse, is not in any sense necessary or inevitable (a million electric cars by 2015! Now I see what Obama meant by Change! That's nearly 1/2 of one percent of all cars on the American road!). As a uniquely positioned nation, in terms of latitude, resources and relative remoteness, the USA has always had it within its potential to order its economy and political arrangements so that all basic human needs are met. Orlov, in fact, sounds a great deal like Thoreau when he talks in these terms, especially when he describes the "ambitious" human activities that not only are not necessary but actually detract from a worthwhile and enjoyable life. It is all these "ambitious" and grandiose pursuits, such as a world empire and the globalization of the economy, which have led to the precarious position the USA now finds itself in. The video is on Orlov's cluborlov.blogspot.com website, or here in YouTube format:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zrz5ucQACo8

I'm always amused by Dmitry's deadpan, phlegmatic delivery, which makes Noam Chomsky seem like an ADD sufferer by comparison. The contrast of style with Orlov's subject matter could not be more stark. Who else could calmly discuss a die-off of 5/6ths of the world's population and a reversion of human civilization to hunter-gatherer status without ever betraying any angst? Only Dmitry, I think.

He has obviously thought very deeply about the subjects of global warming and peak oil, and the basic problems he outlines are impossible to rationally dismiss. The calm denial of the human race in the face of what's coming is not so surprising, of course, since it is that attitude which has allowed the problems to go past the point of no return. I agree with Orlov that we're now in the adaptive rather than ameliorative mode. When you get right down to it, that's just how mankind rolls.

Welcome to the Midway

Something in a comment on a Zerohedge post rocked my thinking: the United States government is now in a position where it needs to borrow one-half trillion dollars every three months just to stay in business. One arrives at this conclusion by considering that the official deficit is $1.5 trillion, which is the difference between tax revenues and federal outlays, and then noting that the national debt grows by $2 trillion per year, reflecting that the Treasury must also borrow money in order to pay maturing (rollover) obligations coming due, with Niagara-like relentlessness, on an ongoing basis.

When you think about things like that, you begin asking yourself: Does America even have an economy? We may, in fact, have entered a period which one could call the Postmodern Economy, one in which almost all income-producing activity is accomplished by illusion and sleight-of-hand. The fiscal position of the U.S. government, in this sense, is simply illustrative of the underlying reality, or lack thereof. America has become completely dependent on its status as the printer of the world's reserve currency. That is not only our ace in the hole, it is our entire hand at this point.

Consider that the Federal Reserve Bank is now the single largest holder of Treasury debt in the world, bigger than China, bigger than Japan. This fact alone must cause a thoughtful person to wonder just what the hell is going on. How can the Federal Reserve Bank, which is the bank where the Treasury Department maintains the U.S. checking account, and is in some ways the alter ego of the Treasury Department, also be a creditor of the U.S. government, especially when the Federal Reserve Bank is also the entity responsible for creating U.S. money in the first place? How can an entity which creates money at will for the debtor become a creditor of the entity which it creates the money for?

Add to this observation that the "debt" which the Federal Reserve Bank holds is "purchased" by the Bank with money which it creates out of thin air. The Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO) of the Federal Reserve are illustrative of the shell game methods by which this is accomplished. The Treasury auctions off bonds of a certain duration. Among the participants in such auctions are the Primary Dealers (PDs), a group of 18 banks and broker-dealers which are required, in order to avail themselves of the many benefits of being in the In Crowd, to participate in such auctions. Let us say that the PDs take down about 50% of the total auction, and let's say the total auction equals $15 billion. Thus, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, et al, pay in $7.5 billion. A short time later, often the next week, the Fed conducts a POMO in which it goes into the "open market" and offers to buy back the same Treasuries which were just auctioned off. The PDs then regurgitate a significant fraction of the bonds which they just bought back at the Fed, often selling at a premium, functioning, I guess, as some sort of reward for their cooperation in keeping the shell game going.

Where does the Fed get the "money" to "buy" these Treasuries from the (very) recent purchasers? It creates the money out of thin air. Now ask yourself a simple question: is there a material difference between what just happened and the Treasury simply buying its own debt? One might point out that the Fed has only purchased a "fraction" of the just-sold bonds. True, but that's for each POMO operation, and the Fed just keeps buying, with at least $600 billion planned for the latest go-round of Quantitative Easing. Another question is equally obvious: would the PDs, the Kool Kids on Wall Street, even bother with these ultra low yield instruments if they did not know the Fed was planning to buy them all back, plus a kicker, in the next week or so?

The Treasury's ability to raise money through bond auctions, in other words, is heavily subsidized by the actions of its own bank in creating an immediate secondary market for the stuff it sells, and that bank, the Fed, creates the money for the secondary market by hallucinating it into existence.

We do not need to be detained by shell games, since we are innocent bystanders not directly involved in this conspiracy. We can collapse the process and simplify terms, using Occam's Razor to avoid the multiplicity of entities involved. If we simply equate the Fed to the Treasury and call it the TRED, for example, then we can see that what is really happening is that the TRED, or the Treasury itself, is creating the money to buy its own "debt" to a significant fraction of the total debt issued, probably at least on the order of 50%, and this fraction is increasing. Thus, while Ben Bernanke has sworn under oath that the Federal Reserve would not monetize debt, this, in fact, is exactly what the Fed is doing: it is monetizing America's huge, gaping deficits by printing money and running it through a complicated shell game to conceal just how close we are to the abyss, and to hide the very scary truth that no natural, realistic market for American debt exists at any interest rate which the country could afford to pay for the amounts of trash we need to issue to keep the game going.

An organic, actual economy, of the kind the United States once had, where Americans had real jobs and made real money, and sold actual stuff to foreign markets, and where large percentages of the American populace were engaged in productive activities such as agriculture and building cars and fabricating steel, produces a tax base which allows the federal government to function more or less in balance with the underlying activity. That American economy is gone, hollowed out by globalization and the impoverishment of the populace. About 47% of the American working age population actually has a real, full-time job. All kinds of games can be played with metrics such as U-3 and U-6, with its many categories of part-time, marginally attached, discouraged, etc., but those figures are strictly for the election cycle and for the economics departments of universities with close government connections. They do not reflect the underlying reality in the country. Close to 50 million Americans receive food stamps so they can eat. That is about 16% of the entire population.

Anyway, I think I answered my own question.

Strike Two for Obamacare

Judge Roger Vinson's opinion in the Florida case striking down the Obama health care law is a far more serious problem for the Democrats than the previous district court ruling in Virginia reaching the same result. No doubt the case of McCollum vs. Dept. of Health & Human Services was helped along by the forum shopping available to state actions. The Florida Attorney General chose Pensacola, in the Redneck Riviera, as the venue and probably hoped that Judge Vinson, a Reagan appointee, would wind up with the case. All of this went according to plan.

McCollum (wasn't he one of the lawyers who appeared on TV regularly during the Gore-Bush Florida thing?) was joined by 25 other states in challenging the constitutionality of the law. Most of those states are among the group you would expect to join Florida, but there were a few surprises, such as Maine and Washington. The challenges to the law were fairly sophisticated; in addition to the Zen-like question framed in the Virginia case, is the not doing of something an "activity?", a second argument, which I think is actually more compelling, was involved in the plaintiffs' complaint. Namely, if you force the states to expand Medicaid (as the act does) by expanding the boundaries of poverty to include those not currently eligible for Medicaid, but do not provide the funding for the expansion, is Congress engaging in unconstitutional coercion of the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment (the "states' rights" Amendment). I wondered about that myself. Bush's No Child Left Behind program suffered from the same problem - a massive mandate from Congress impinging on local budgetary decisions about schools with no earthly way to pay for it all.

Judge Vinson essentially passed on the "coercion" argument and stated that at the present time it's not possible to tell whether the states will ultimately benefit from Obamacare or go broke trying to comply. Since he was ruling on a Motion for Summary Judgment (a proceeding without a formal evidentiary trial), he gave that one to the DHS on a TKO.

As to the Zen koan, however, Judge Vinson was much more thorough and scholarly than the earlier Virginia judge, and cited numerous Commerce Clause cases which dealt with the "activity-nonactivity" dichotomy involved in Congressional authority to regulate. Essentially, as I read his long, 78-page opinion, Vinson essentially forced the DHS and the U.S. Government to admit (and remember, the U.S. team is ultimately headed up by Eric "Place" Holder, perhaps the most passive Attorney General in the history of the Republic) that there are no cases where Congress regulated what is so clearly a "non-activity" or a "non-decision," and he did a very good job (bordering on masterful) of making ridiculous the DHS's strained efforts to demonstrate that not buying health insurance is an "activity," or that the "activity" can be supplied by Congress fining or penalizing someone who chooses not to buy health insurance. Vinson pointed out that if the second criterion worked under the Commerce Clause, then Congress could regulate anything so long as they attached a penalty to not doing it. Touche, with or without the accent.

Since Judge Vinson found that the plan can't work at all without the individual mandate to buy insurance, he declared the entire law unconstitutional (nonseverable, in law-speak). This again is an extension of the previous ruling against the DHS.

I would say that in some ways the ruling opened my eyes. I did not realize on what shaky Constitutional grounds those hacks in the Democratic Party were operating on in coming up with this massive gift to the insurance industry, the individual mandate requiring the purchase of a private commercial product from a private corporation on pain of a federal penalty. It turns out they were venturing into the unknown in their craven desperation to avoid confronting the real and obvious solution: a single-payer system where you just get rid of this whole merciless, stupid idea of profiting from the illnesses of American citizens.

As I said before, who knows what the Supreme Court will do with this thing? Scalia is a "strict Constructionist" so he might favor a narrow reading of the Commerce Clause. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are corporate stooges who probably like the idea of an expanded market for their friends in the insurance industry. Thomas will do what Scalia does. The rest will probably be pro-government, except not necessarily Justice Anthony Kennedy, who will decide the fate of Obamacare, as he decides the fate of every big decision divided along partisan lines. It all depends on what he has for breakfast the day the case is decided.

9 on a scale of 10 sphinxter response

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHngF_b3NuE&feature=related

First, an updating of the Riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and struggles on three wheels as it fights for lift-off in the afternoon? Answer: Hosni Mubarak, as a child, as an adult and then as a deposed dictator trying to flee in his Lear with most of the country's gold reserves.

With that out of the way, about this situation in Egypt: first, it's damned inconsiderate of the Egyptian masses to carry on this way because it forces the U.S. government to come up with some way to make glad noises about freedom, self-determination, et cetera, while hoping against hope that in some way or other we can keep our corporate-friendly thug in power so the real business of America, business (Calvin Coolidge said that, I think, or maybe it was Hoover) can proceed as planned. I watched the outgoing Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, writhe and squirm for about a half hour yesterday trying to find different ways to say "we're monitoring the situation," including "monitoring closely," "following the situation closely," "in regular contact with the situation," and other similar filler. Nevertheless, no one seems to think Hosni is going to survive this uprising, so Egypt's version of Dr. No, Mohammed El-Baradei, is being warmed up in the bullpen so we have someone we can control when the dust settles. You'll recall Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's embezzler/carpetbagger/Friend of Cheney, who was going to be installed by the Neocons after the fall of Saddam. The best laid plans of mice & men aft gang aglay...

This thing with Mubarak is pretty dicey. You can probably recall President Barack Holograma's speech in Cairo a couple of years ago when he limned the sorry tendency of America to be on the wrong side of history in the Third World, usually siding with the resident Thugocracy instead of the uncontrollable masses. Thus, going with the Shah in Iran instead of their constitutionally elected president, pulling the same trick in Iraq before Saddam, and like that. I remember Charles Krauthammer, he of the train-tunnel-sized nostrils and haughty manner, questioning in the Washington Post whether Mr. Obama was actually fit to be President when he harbored such anti-U.S. sentiments. Now the Egyptians themselves, the very people the O-Man was talking to, are presenting a test of the sincerity of the statements therein expressed.

Iraq was easy compared to this. George W. Bush could sincerely celebrate "freedom on the march" there because Saddam was seriously contemplating getting into oil deals where the euro would replace the greenback as the reserve currency for settling Iraqi petroleum sales. This little move threatened the very lifeblood of American hegemony. Almost any puppet regime, and most certainly Dr. No, a sympathetic crook, was preferable to letting that trend gain traction. Plus, W reasoned he could go the prissy GHW Bush one better by finally toppling Saddam once and for all, and with that cakewalk under his belt (sorry, that's a mixed metaphor worthy of Thomas L. Friedman - well, it is Sunday, and there's no Tom to read because of his book leave) W's reelection would be assured. Imagine W's consternation when it almost cost him the whole deal, but fortunately, George was running for reelection in the United States of America, where scarcely 40% of the populace believes in science. So how hard was it to convince about 79% of them that Saddam had personally planned 9/11 on his Compaq Presario? More cake under W's Lone Star belt buckle. (If Friedman doesn't come back, I think I'm ready to take over.)

Back to the Land of the Pharoahs. Egypt presents a different kind of Pyramid Scheme from the one the Wall Street gangsters (and the U.S. Treasury) have perfected here at home. As the Egyptian riot police fire American-made rubber bullets and American-made tear gas cannisters at the rebels (all this ordnance helpfully stamped with its place of origin, the better to display on Al Jazeera), Obama and his team of corporate insiders feverishly look for just the right way to remain publicly noncommittal while quietly hoping that Egypt, home to half the world's Arabs, settles back into a nice, quiet, dependable tyranny, where a friendly guy who manages to win 99.9% of the vote every few years, and has been doing so for 30 years despite the overwhelming opposition of the electorate, can find a way to hang in there until this whole thing blows over, the way it did in Iran. Because now things are beginning to heat up in Jeddah, and while losing Egypt to democracy could probably be folded into our globalist scheme, the idea of the Ghawar reserves, the longest-tusked of all the Elephant Oil Fields, falling into hands other than the bony grasp of the gerontocrats who rule Saudi Arabia (described by one Berkeley prof as "less a country than a family-owned filling station")...is just too much to bear. The world is at oil equilibrium about now, no doubt we're at peak, and any sizable disruption (and the Saudi contribution would certainly be that) would expose the terrible miscalculation of the federal government in not switching to a non-oil-import paradigm for American transportation a long, long time ago...about when Jimmy Carter gave his famous speech about energy independence.

Things could get very interesting indeed if that happens, and it probably will. Do we then invade Saudi Arabia to save a dictatorship? If we don't, are we all going to wind up walking...like an Egyptian?

Do the States Belong to the Union?

I have read different legal opinions on the right of the states to secede. There is the Governor Rick Perry approach, which seems to assume, without citing authority, that if Texas wants to leave the Union, it is free to do so, although in truth I have read analyses which support the governor's view. (He and I have had a symbiotic relationship ever since his campaign, misunderstanding the irony in one of my posts, quoted Waldenswimmer at length in a refutation of Keith Olbermann's sarcastic handling of Perry's claim, which was correct, that Texas is economically better off without the United States than with it.)

Abraham Lincoln led the Union in the Civil War to quell what he considered an unconstitutional multi-state breakaway. The South, of course, called Lincoln's action the "war of Northern Aggression." Since might makes right, the actual underlying legalities were never resolved. I have the general feeling the issue is going to arise again. I have felt for a long time that the United States, as presently constituted, is unworkable for reasons of regional incompatibility, size and complexity. It remains together, I think, primarily for reasons of institutional inertia. For example, President Barack Obama cannot really be president of the United States of America if those very states cease to be united. Many, many political, economic and media elites rely upon the existence of the USA as presently put together for their livelihoods, prestige and reputations. To a great extent, institutional perpetuation is more important to these opinion leaders than whether the union makes a whole lot of sense.

Yet the question whether it actually makes sense remains. As Chalmers Johnson predicted with deadly accuracy, the strains of empire and unsustainable debt are now beginning to work a fierce toll on the body politic. The Hologram did a nice job on Tuesday night of trotting out, one more time, the usual bromides around American Exceptionalism ("winning the future;" maybe just getting there would be enough), but what was notable was how little impact this cheerleading had on the national mood. Almost within minutes the Congressional Budget Office was out with the alarming news that Social Security is now in the red; that the deficit for this fiscal year will be around $1.5 trillion; and that we're probably stuck with the same pitiful income (around $2.2 trillion) as last year, thanks to the wisdom of the Republican/Hologram pact to reduce American income through tax tinkering. I don't believe there is any earthly way for the two ossified political parties which control this country to reach a rational compromise on making the country solvent again, and meanwhile the great mass of Americans remain essentially unrepresented by their representative government. The central government simply acts as the enabler of a small stratum of multi-national corporate operators who themselves are only marginally attached to the United States (and those attachments are purely financial and have nothing to do with "patriotism."). These elites use the Third World's labor supply and America as headquarters for their farflung enterprises, but the participation of about 89% of the American people is limited to buying what these companies make (given that manufacturing is only 11% of the American economy).

The United States has a large enough land area and population to support about four countries the size of Germany (actually, geographically we are much larger than that), or six or so countries the size of France. Within our large boundaries we have populations which favor theocratic rule (the Deep South, Western prairie areas such as Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, et cetera) the same way that many Muslim countries prefer Sharia law. Yet Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and the rest are frustrated in their attempts to install the Bible as their foundational legal document by the heathens of the Northeast and West Coast. Their goals are simple in a way: to make abortion murder; to outlaw the teaching of evolution, global warming and science in general; to make school prayer mandatory; and to put a gun in the hand of every citizen. The "progressive" areas of the country want to proceed with the 21st century, to advance scientifically, to deal with the world in a factual way rather than on the basis of delusions and mythology, to cope with environmental catastrophes so that the human species survives, and other modest aims, which are in a way consistent with the approach of the social democracies of Western Europe. Some areas are more ecologically oriented, some agrarian, and so forth. Just like the rest of the world.

Something has to give. A federation providing for reasonable common defense, along the lines of NATO, could achieve the one overarching area of shared purpose among the new nations of North America and perhaps avoid an internecine war among the new polities. The European Union could serve as a model for cooperation and freedom of travel, although I suspect that strict immigration controls would be necessary to ensure rational planning in the new alignment.

The Eastern Bloc, Yugolslavia, and many other areas have achieved stability following an initial period of sometimes chaotic disintegration. It appears that the archaic dictators of the north of Africa are now beginning their disappearance from the world stage, and that process will probably spread to the Middle East in general (Saudi Arabia, Yemen and others). Change is in the air. It is a propitious moment to begin thinking of ways to stop throwing good money after bad and to cease operating on the illusion of a shared common purpose which has probably not actually existed since the 1960's.

A rational reorganization would certainly beat the hell out of a breakdown forced upon us by bankruptcy or military overthrow. Maybe Jerry Brown of California and Rick Perry of Texas could discover they have something in common after all. Haven't both of them, after all, wanted to be the President of someplace themselves?

On the Appalachian Trail: The Governor & Maria

Mr. Smooth

It's interesting to watch something like the State of the Union on a live feed without commentators talking over the audio. I could hear what President Obama was saying as he entered the House chamber, undiluted by Chris Matthews telling me that "the President can really work a room." He can, but I was able to figure that out better without Chris's help. Obama, like a lot of upbeat extroverts, seems to take energy from human interaction, in the same way Bill Clinton did. You could see with George W. Bush that the whole process was pretty wearing. He just wanted to crawl into bed, or maybe into a whiskey bottle.

The O man is a master of the small, personalized comment, the bro-hug, the chaste kiss on the cheek (particularly of the women of color in government), the back-pat, the handshake that swings into position in a roundhouse loop. He's charming and he puts people at their ease, and watching him up close (with no Chris Matthews in your ear), you got a palpable sense of his charisma. He's the goods, alright. Particularly in a room full of nerds and geeks, Barack Obama stands out as an actual guy.

As for the speech, well, what the hell can you say about a speech anymore? It was fine. Barack doesn't try to scale the rhetorical heights these days. He's above average in his delivery, his timing and cadence are good, but he's left off from the old style Baptist Revival stemwinding. Anyway, it's hard to get too worked up over stuff like spending freezes - the phrases sort of die on delivery.

Like a lot of charming, intellectually shifty operators, the President doesn't betray any kind of embarrassment over obvious reversals in his position or his adoption of the rhetoric of the former opposition. Indeed, this has become something of an Obama trademark. Take, for example, what he had to say about Iraq:

Look to Iraq, where nearly 100,000 of our brave men and women have left with their heads held high; where American combat patrols have ended; violence has come down; and a new government has been formed. This year, our civilians will forge a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people, while we finish the job of bringing our troops out of Iraq. America's commitment has been kept; the Iraq War is coming to an end.

This looks innocuous enough, even meaningless, but consider for a moment: Obama ran for office declaring that the Iraq war was a "dumb war." He was certainly right about that. What "commitment" did we keep? We invaded Iraq because the Bush Administration told us that otherwise the bad news might arrive "in the form of a mushroom cloud." Remember? We invaded Iraq because of its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, not as an exercise in nation building. It appears to me that Obama is conceding, as he has on other points concerning the Great War on Terror, that Bush and Cheney were right all along and he was wrong.

Then there's this:

We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago. And in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people's pockets.

Not quite, Mr. President. Why is Obama carrying Ronald Reagan's water? That's where the big impetus to deficit financing began, not "almost a decade ago." It was Reagan's administration which, after sharply increasing FICA taxes, began raiding that very surplus created, a wholesale thievery which continued until the system could simply not produce a surplus any longer. $2.55 trillion later, however. It was Reagan who decided to ignore Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the "military industrial complex" and switch the country over completely to "military Keynesianism." Granted, the deficits and the national debt are now totally out of control, and our only hope for funding ourselves is to engage in Ponzi schemes like the Federal Reserve's massive purchasing of our own debt. But this was a problem created over a three decade era, not just in recent years.

Ah well, I think in many ways Mr. Obama is a man for our season, a sunny optimist with a nice list of bromides and a charming way of delivering them. Americans don't really want to hear the truth anyway, and if we're going to be lied to, then we may as well hear it from such a natural crowd pleaser. He makes us feel good about ourselves, even when there's absolutely no reason to feel that way.

Preview of post-SOTU analysis

(On an MSNBC sound stage):

Chris Matthews: I'm top dog again. I run this place, not the ESPN guy. But I do want to say something about Keith before we start - he got real, and he paid the price. I hope we can all take something away from that.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Good point, Chris. That's where his sports background let him down - it's okay to sound critical, but within limits. You have to finish on a high note, that despite everything you just said, indicating that things can't possibly be okay, that everything is, in fact, okay.

Rachel Maddow: It is okay, but it's not really okay, but being able to say it's not okay means this is still the greatest country on earth.

CM: Thanks for saying that, Rachel. It's something we need to remind ourselves of - we don't get everything right, but in some completely nonquantifiable, unverifiable way, we get almost everything right so that we're okay.

L O'D: I thought the great thing about the speech tonight is that the President brought that fact home.

CM: What did you think of the Republicans and Democrats all mixed up in the seating? Optics, real?

L O'D: Real in an optical way. The optics were there, it's good, I think we're feeling better knowing that bipartisanship is not just an illusion but a seating chart.

CM: I got the old tingle up my leg looking at it. Jesus, what a country!

RM: It's significant, and the President is the main beneficiary. He waited this country out - he kept insisting we could overcome our differences, and his patience now looks visionary. The 100% Republican House vote to repeal his most important legislative achievement can be put in perspective now - just politics, but working together is the way forward.

L O'D: It is the way forward and I think you'll see a change in tone now. Barack Obama met the Republicans halfway, three-fourths of the way, seven-eighths of the way, three million nine hundred fifty seven-three million nine hundred fifty-eighths of the way, whatever - I'm not a mathematician, I'm a screen writer.

CM: It's thrilling. The tingle is really something tonight. I can't wait to take my pants off later.

RM: Obama said he could politic, or politick, doesn't matter, I'm saying this not writing it, pretty good, and I think he's proving that he knew something about himself that others thought maybe he had forgotten, but those Republicans sitting with those Democrats to me indicates that his message has gotten through and now we're going to pull together and become that competitive place he was talking about, going head to head against the best the world has to offer.

CM: In some ways I think Keith got out just in time, because his shrill tone just doesn't fit this new America we saw tonight, the one with Republicans and Democrats all jumbled up in the gallery, and it was thrilling to me, tingly, seeing that really the one thing everyone has in common is that they're just Americans, at the end of the day, and that's just it.

RM: Thanks for saying that, Chris.

(Fade out.)

There's No Escaping This Conclusion

Note to J.M.: I agree with you that the Republican "cross-sitting" (and thanks for that funny description) is probably not related to Congressional gay cruising. It just seemed somewhat out of character for the Republicans to cooperate with Obama about anything, although now when I think about it, quite some time back the President met with the Republican House Caucus for a Q&A and they positively gushed over him - like groupies or something. Which makes the spooky solidarity in everything they do all the weirder, but perhaps typical of authoritarian thinkers who love being part of a Movement. Anyway, I doubt that the gallery action on Tuesday night will look much like the Dom DeLuise scenes at the close of "Blazing Saddles," but who knows. Even if I'm right, it's important to quote Seinfeld at this point: not that there's anything wrong with that.

On an unrelated note, thinking about the Clear and Present Danger presented by the prospect of another Friedman book, I was moved to read again the two funniest book reviews I've ever read, both by Matt Taiibi and both about the hilariously misplaced self-righteousness of the "porn-stached" columnist of the New York Times, which I link here. Taiibi was born going for the jugular, I think, and when he's done with one of his literary demolitions his target is in the same shape as Carthage after the Romans: not a stone standing upon a stone.

http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html

http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

O & the SOTU

Ho-hum. Tuesday night we will hear President Obama's State of the Union speech. Although I don't have cable television anymore (it's a personal thing between me and Comcast - okay, I'll tell you what it is. See, for some reason my county granted Comcast an exclusive right to dig trenches in all our streets and to install cable so that Comcast, and only Comcast, can deliver cable TV. And what does a monopolist do when given an exclusive market? That's right. Well, mister, I'm not going to play that game. Sure, I could go back to satellite, but to tell you the truth, it's not bad not having TV. For example, I read on the Huffington Post that Keith Olbermann doesn't have a show on MSNBC anymore and you know what I thought? So what. It's not my problem. I used to watch his show once in a while, but after ten or twenty of those "Special Comments," which he would portentously announce during his show ["I'll have a Special Comment on that at the end of tonight's show"], he started to bug me as much as Glenn Beck and his pathetic stick-figure blackboard lectures. Olbermann, right down to the "good night and good luck" sign-off, was consciously modeling his show on Edward R. Murrow, but he did not have the gravitas to pull it off because he's essentially a jumped-up sports announcer trying to pull off a Tom Paine act.)

(Can't seem to get out of these parentheses for some reason. [Actually, I know the reason: it's because the idea of thinking about Barack and his upcoming Student Body President Nothing Speech is pretty boring.] Really, though, there's another, deeper reason that none of these cable shows actually work to mold public opinion, and that's the McLuhanesque explanation. What Olbermann was actually communicating was his anger - that's it. TV is pretty good at getting emotion across, which is why those dumb 60-second commercials can make you cry. But it's terrible at delivering information in a linear way that you can actually follow logically and retain usefully. A lot of the civil liberties issues that Olbermann used to yell about when Bush was in office [denial of habeas corpus, rendition, indefinite detention, military tribunals, the Bagram Black Hole, Guantanamo, targeted assassinations without due process, etc.] have all continued, or even been extended, under President Hologram. So where did Olbermann get with all that ranting and raving? Well, he made a lot of money. The "Special Comment" was his shtick and it was fun while it lasted.)

Bringing us back to the SOTU, I guess. Since I'm an Obama supporter, a campaign donor, I've received advance texting and email on this exciting, upcoming oration. It should be a real barn-burner. Deficit reduction! Working together! We're starting to get somewhere economically!

Ugh. This isn't working. The Hologram really has his work cut out for him trying to make such topics interesting. Maybe he should try the speech in "Special Comment" form. That would be fun, to see the O-Man get wild-eyed, flecks of spit at the corners of his mouth. Although certainly not very likely. What the media will focus on, I guaran-damn-tee, will be this novel "mixing of the parties in the audience" routine they're going to introduce. That will be the theme-meme-trope of 90% of the commentary. I have to say that the willingness of Republican members of Congress to go along with this bipartisan gag is a major coup for Barry. I can't figure out why they would do it, although I have a sneaking suspicion. I think it's because so many Republican Congressmen are gay. They want to meet some new guys. Sexual rationales can often explain the otherwise inexplicable. Worth considering, and perhaps it's yet another way the Imperial City of Washington is beginning to resemble the libertine omnisexuality of Ancient Rome. You'll never convince me a lot of those Republicans wouldn't like to attend next year's SOTU wearing a toga.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Globalization redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just read this book and nobody gets hurt

Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One hand is on the tightrope walker

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

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

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

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

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

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