A few words on the Arizona shooting

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

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

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

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

The Republicans & Their Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade

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

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

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

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

Congress Dances Up Against the Ceiling

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

Now, a word from Frank Sinatra:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And just outside the Capitol, the Real World

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

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

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

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

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

A Citizen's Guide to the Upcoming Budget Debate

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

1. It's a joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Historical Arc of American Real Estate Fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thought for 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My fearless predictions for 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Comeback Kid, Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Comes But Once A Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama Serenity Prayer

My favorite Disneyland thrill when I was a kid was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, which was a little scary, not too much so, with no nausea-producing, vertiginous changes in altitude or anything, just a ride through a kind of Gothic landscape of dark and vaguely spooky scenes. We should have a real life version of such a diversion beginning with the swearing in of the 212th Congress in about a month when the Republicans, with their huge majority in the House, man their battle stations. The Republicans already control the Senate, somehow, even if they only had, during the 211th, slightly more than 40 Senators, depending on which side of the bed Joe Lieberman got up on in the morning. They could have had 12 or 13 and they would have completely outmaneuvered Harry Reid. The Senate, as we all know, is the graveyard of good intentions. It does seem like a minor miracle that something so obviously right as repealing DADT could make it through that creaking, obsolete chamber, but thank goodness for such moments of grace.

Après ça, le deluge. Are you aware that among the new House of Representatives, only 35% can be counted as reliable votes for what us here liberals like to call a woman's freedom of choice? That's ri-i-i-I-ight. 53 of the new Reps are what the conservatives like to call pro-life.

Sobering, eh? Does this help put some of the Obama-pouting in perspective? Felt good, though, for a minute, didn't it? The lesser of two evils...think there will ever come a day when it's safe to move beyond such dreary calculations? I don't either.

Anyway, the chart above is from a recent New York Times article on the federal budget, which will loom large, early and often, in the Obama versus the Volcano 212th. For one thing, we'll have a debt ceiling "crisis" along about April. Mr. Mumbles & The Diva were not able to lift that sucker much above $14.3 trillion when they were "in control," and since we're currently at $13.9 tril, and we're adding to the national debt at about $2 trillion per year (never mind the "official deficit," that's the actual number), we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth, as General Buck Turgidson told the President in "Dr. Strangelove." You will recall, back in the glory days of Bill Clinton, that Newt (The Salamander) Gingrich had the creative idea of shutting the government down over a debt ceiling raise as a way of implementing his Contract On America over Clinton's objections. Only Clinton wouldn't blink, so the legend goes...now we have this group of Young Republican Turks suddenly in the ascendant, and the same opportunity presents itself, and instead of Clinton...see, this is where The Obama Serenity Prayer comes in. Lord grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change...

No O-Bashing, remember. That's done. Looking at that Kansas-shaped schematic up above, where do you suppose these New Republicans will want to slash and burn? Do you think they'll want to take a big chunk out of Defense and Homeland Security spending? Tee-hee. I sort of doubt that. Now, the problem for the rest of us is that it's not as if the Republicans don't have cogent arguments for fiscal responsibility. Take, for example, the commonly accepted definition of "insolvency" for purposes of bankruptcy law: a general inability to pay one's debts as they come due. Elegant, isn't it? Does that apply to the United States? Well, I suppose you could answer no with a straight face. We have about $2.2 trillion in income yearly, and about $3.7 trillion in expenses, but we're able to borrow the difference at rates kept fairly low by the simple expedient of buying more than half the debt ourselves (huh?).

This is by far the most creative Ponzi Scheme ever devised. We borrow money to pay our enormous debts, we borrow money to pay the interest on the money we borrow, we borrow money to do everything, and we mostly borrow it from ourselves. The Federal Reserve is now the single largest holder of American debt in the world, with over $1 trillion of our own paper.

More than China. Guess we have to change that old saw about borrowing "from China" to do this and that, huh?

We don't need China. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. This is the great innovation of the Bernanke Federal Reserve. Well, actually he's responsible for two changes, both ingenious. The first of his ideas was to turn the Federal Reserve into the Ultimate Bad Bank. This is confounding his critics; he's driving them nuts with it. You see, when The Bernank launched QE One, where he bought up all that securitized mortgage crap from the Wall Street banks and others, everyone predicted disaster. All of that sludge would go bad, about $1.3 trillion worth of it. But what Bernanke knew, and no one else seemed to appreciate, is that it doesn't make any difference. The Federal Reserve cannot have a solvency problem because it makes up for bad assets on its books by simply hallucinating more "money." So once Bernanke had that insight, there was no stopping him, and certainly Obama does not know enough about such arcane finance to even try. Thus, Bernanke's Next Big Thing, his true Flash of Genius, was to extend this idea and allow the Federal Reserve to be the principal buyer of U.S. debt! Don't you see how brilliant that is?

So why would the Republicans want to cry wolf about the national debt? There is no national debt, not anymore. Why are we even paying taxes, that's what I don't understand. It's quite possible that The Bernank will think of that next, you know. The Dude is Santa Claus. He's got the beard and everything. He's got all bases covered. The national banking system is moving toward solvency because Ben has taken all of their bad debt off their books and put it on the Federal Reserve's, where it doesn't matter. He's solved our problem of insufficient income by declaring the existence of additional trillions with which to buy our own debt. He's done it all!

His critics, including his foreign critics, cannot figure out why he's wrong. It's like watching David Copperfield make an elephant disappear from a theater stage. That cannot have just happened, and yet it did. Since countries like China, Japan, the Middle East petro-states have so much invested in the dollar, they can't do much except go along with the gag.

Well, prophets are not much appreciated in their own time. Ben Bernanke is a stone genius, pure and simple. It's magic, what he's done. And if these rambunctious idiots soon to infest the House will just stay out of his way, everything will be fine forever. They need a Serenity Prayer of their own. There are no debts. There are no deficits. Lord, help us to realize that The Good Bernank has saved us, rising in the East (Princeton), and come to Earth to deliver us all. A true Judeo-Christian Christmas Story.

Will the Democrats Replace Obama in 2012?

Pretty catchy title, I think, the kind real columnists use. First of all, I want to go on record as saying I'm going out of the Obama-bashing business. No more. It's one of my New Year's Resolutions. I'm motivated by something that Scout said about Boo Radley; it's like killing a mockingbird. I can be as decent as Scout, I think (although that's tough, come to think of it). Barack's problem is that he's just not up to the job. Call it anything you like, inexperience, naivete, constitutional inability to be tough when tough is needed, fundamental confusion about what a chief executive is supposed to do - whatever, it's obvious the media got carried away in 2008 with the chance to elect either the first minority or the first woman President, and did not pay enough attention to the very specific attributes of the candidates in question, focusing solely on the "narrative line" and newsworthiness of this novelty. It was just too good for the networks and news outlets to pass up, and thus, once again, we got sold a bill of goods. There is a very real difference between an Image and an Actual Person, because it's the second version of reality that actually shows up in the Oval Office later, not the Virtual Hologram. There's no point in going over and over this obvious situation, and there aren't going to be any big surprises from here on out. It's all kind of painful to watch, actually.

The question is what the Democratic Party will do about it. Will they run Obama in 2012? My guess is that they certainly will. I base this guess on the party's traditional tendency to fulfill death wishes. The Democrats value things more than winning, a trait not much shared by their Republican opposition. The leadership of the Democrats is kind of like a mediocre college coach who prizes things like "attitude" and "sticking with the program" and "working his way up" to the starting rotation, et cetera, more than chalking up W's in the Win-Loss column. When it's your turn in the Democratic Party, then you get the Big Job. I used to write little parodies a few years ago about Mr. Mumbles & The Diva, based on the Congressional leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. If you can find two people in the country, in any line of work, who are less inspirational and effective than these two, then you should really submit their names to the Guinness Book of World Records. With substantial, sometimes huge, majorities in the House and Senate, these two stiffs were unable to make any dent in the Republican juggernaut. When Bush was President, Pelosi, who presided over the Constitutional body responsible for all budgetary appropriations, could not figure out a way to deprive Bush of the money he needed for the (a) Iraq War, (b) the Afghanistan War, (c) his Black Sites, or anything else. Although Bush and Cheney would admit on national television every couple of weeks that they were torturing people, Pelosi could not could come up with any argument that the failure of the United States to observe the Convention Against Torture (signed by Reagan), which requires the investigation and prosecution of anyone suspected of torture within a party-state's jurisdiction (and remembering that treaties are the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution), might at the very least be grounds for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Clinton was impeached because he horsed around with an intern and then didn't want to talk about it. The Democrats could not see their way through to impeachment when dealing with confessed felonies and war crimes. The Democrats play badminton, the Republicans play Rollerball.

I always thought Pelosi seemed more like someone who should be walking up to you at a party in Pacific Heights with a tray of canapés than the leader of one of the world's great legislative bodies. Mr. Mumbles, on the other hand, was so completely intimidated by the badly outnumbered Republicans in the Senate that he would blanch and hide under his desk if Bill Frist or Mitch McConnell handed him a note reading, "We might filibuster that." That's all it took. So while the official line now is that Obama is too "bipartisan" or too accommodating, in truth it's the whole group of Democrats in Washington who don't know how to return fire.

It's possible the Republicans might bail them out in 2012 by running a lunatic like Sarah Palin or a cornpone empty suit like Mike Huckabee. I think this is the GOP leadership's great fear, in fact. This would represent a hijacking of the Republican Party by the Tea Party zealots. It's hardly impossible. A recent poll demonstrates that about 40% of the American populace really, truly believes that the universe was created in seven days by an omnipotent being. Forty percent. In such a country, just about anything is possible. However, I think it's too soon even for an open-air asylum like the United States for Sarah Palin to win a presidential election. The independents (the modern key to any election) would recoil in horror, weigh the real consequences of their self-indulgent pouting about Obama, and rush to the polls to give the O-Man another term. Sort of kicking the Apocalypse Can down the road a few years.

But if the Republicans can enforce their legendary discipline in their ranks and head off the Cuckoo Brigade, and run someone plausible, they'll probably win. In November, 2010 the Republicans pulled off the biggest midterm defeat of Congressional Democrats in the history of the United States (way to go Barack, Harry & Nancy! okay, that was absolutely the last time.) And that Republican winner (who might very well preside over the collapse of the American Republic) will, if s/he wins, defeat Barack Obama, who will advance to the Democratic nomination by acclamation, as the Democratic delegates shout out their approval in the form of a Voice Suicide Note.

Random Solstice Thoughts

The winter solstice will arrive in the Northern Hemisphere on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, at 3:38 pm Pacific Standard Time. The winter solstice was a big deal to the Ancients; Stonehenge and the Mayan Observatory at Chichen Itza are two examples of how attuned the old cultures were to the most basic celestial rhythms of the Cosmos. My guess is that Christmas occurs a few days after the winter solstice because the pagan celebrations on which the modern Carnaval do Consumidor is built reflect the anxiety of the ancients about the sun's steady descent in the sky. Will this be the year the sun disappears altogether? After a few days of watching it climb back up to a more reassuring azimuth, the pagans probably relaxed and threw a party, as only pagans know how. I would agree the sun's return is something definitely worth celebrating.

So I'm glad Christmas happens after the solstice, that millisecond, that flash when Earth, roaring along its orbit at about 70,000 miles per hour, passes Go and goes on to collect 365.25 more days. Up here where we live, way up above the Tropic of Cancer, the days begin to get longer and longer. The brain awakens, the mood lifts, the retina signals the pineal gland to cool it already on so much melatonin, and the next thing you know, it's all good. Happy Days are here again.

It's a shame we're not as attuned to these celestial rhythms, in a conscious way, as the ancient Mayans or Incans. If we were, if we paid more attention to what is actually going on in the Universe around us, I don't think we would have used December 25 as a guess as to when the Jewish kid was born in the West Bank region. Right when Northern humanity's energy levels are at their lowest and we most feel like sleeping, our culture demands that everyone crowd into Best Buy & the Big Box stores and line up for Chinese manufactured goods all at the same time. That's demented. If we're really going to do something that insane as a national pastime, why not in May or June, when we're up for it? You think there's maybe a good reason that brown bears just sleep this whole thing off?

Granted, "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" is not going to have quite the same feeling in June, although they celebrate Christmas in Los Angeles and Honolulu in December, so how impossible can it be? Anyway, not to come off as a Grinch or Scrooge, but I think non-stressful approaches to the Solstice/Christmas are better for the soul. No one feels much like working, which is probably more attributable to the pineal gland being in overdrive and the shortage of natural Vitamin D production than reverent thoughts about the birth of our Savior. Naturally, being unnatural in our habits, we fight against these perfectly logical responses to short, dark, cold days, and force ourselves to waste this ideal time to take it easy by substituting a different hamster wheel for the one we've been treading.

As Thoreau wrote in Walden, a philosopher, to be worthy of the name, has to do things differently, not just talk about it. Thus, heeding my secular patron saint, no perfectly healthy fir tree dies to adorn my living room. I listen to Christmas music, but I try to be selective. I burned out a long time ago on the usual Xmas tunes sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Rosemary Clooney, or even Mel Torme. I downloaded most of Dave McKenna's "Christmas Party" onto my iPod, and plugged that into my car's stereo. That's a nice way to drive around the rain-slick streets. Dave's swinging piano, with that inimitable walking bass, can make anything sound like fun.

It's a good time to see friends and shoot the breeze. For the last few years, I've taken a walk on Christmas Day up on the Bolinas Ridge, a couple of thousand feet above the Pacific. Not too many souls out and about on that Solstice + 4 day in December. For some reason, it seems that Christmas is often a very mild and calm day around here, no matter the weather in the periods immediately before and after. I wonder if that could have something to do with the sun's azimuth suddenly doubling back on itself, providing a minute of additional sunlight for the northern atmosphere and disrupting jet stream patterns which had adjusted to the steadily diminishing solar energy. Where's John von Neumann when you need him, anyway?

So Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men, Women & Children. These simple facts about life on Earth are really far more important, in the grand scheme of things than macroeconomics or the other diversions we constantly occupy ourselves with. Try checking out of the Carnaval do Consumidor sometime. Black Friday, as you may know, is so named because retail stores finally start making money (go into the black, in other words) for the year the day after Thanksgiving. Thus, without this frenzied insanity, it seems very likely the whole awful Consumer Society would thrash about for a while and then die altogether. It's amazing how momentously great things can be accomplished through the simple agency of doing...nothing, exactly when you most feel like it.

Half of what I say is meaningless

Wow, an actual person validating my own preconception:

"The whole country is now seeing the story that Michigan has been living with for a long time," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial. "We have kicked the can so far down the road that now all we have is a cliff to fall off."

"The recession merely revealed a reality that has been with us for a long time. We faced a growing gap in education and skills that we tried to fill with debt and credit, which gave us the illusion of growth."

I have long thought that the Official Story, that the "financial crisis" was itself alone responsible for our current economic disaster, was a case of whistling past the graveyard. The quote above was from a recent Reuters article which delved deeply into U.S. economic history from the 1960's to the present in a more comprehensive treatment of the origins of the American dilemma than one ordinarily encounters. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BF28720101216 ("Is America the Sick Man of the Globe?") [Note to TJR: a witty play on the old line about Turkey, huh?]

(Those are Diane's pictures, by the way, posted in her honor. Help me out on this, but I think the ring on Diane's left hand is on the middle finger, right? Just checking.)

Reuters goes into a lot of detail about the decline in American manufacturing in the decades since our economic heyday 40 to 50 years ago. At one time, for example, manufacturing accounted for 28% of our GDP; today that number is 11%. In the 1950's about 15 million Americans were employed in manufacturing, a number that has never been surpassed although the population has nearly doubled.

During Reagan's benighted reign, the graph lines representing "financialization" and "manufacturing" crossed paths, with the fast money boyz in the ascendant and the blue collar guys, the backbone of the economy, on the way out. About 40% of corporate profits now are attributable to the FIRE section (finance, insurance, real estate). It used to be that an American worker with only a high school education could nevertheless achieve a middle class standard of living for his family through the engine of American manufacturing prosperity, but those days are long gone. To keep the game going, we substituted debt in all its myriad forms - mortgages, lines of credit, credit cards, the national debt, until we reached the point that total societal debt reached 130% of total GDP. And then the entire house of cards began to teeter and, finally, to collapse.

Diane Ms. Swonk, who graduated from the University of Michigan, a fine public institution just like my own alma mater, no doubt has seen first hand the ravages of the hollowing out of the once mighty United States, the epicenter of which is in Detroit and its environs. (Ms. Swonk: if you're Googling yourself and come across this post, that's a fairly recent photograph of me taken in the subway in New York City, although I now sport a rather dapper [if I say so myself ((hey, I guess I just did!))] mustache. So try to picture...) Where was I? Okay, so the point being that...

The point being that in the face of this huge catastrophe, at last brought to full fruition, our political and media institutions are so bereft of new ideas, and so fundamentally dishonest, that they just won't face these awful truths. The weekly pep talks from Tom Friedman are a case in point. He calls for a "reset" et cetera blah blah blah, or whatever computer-tech-derived term he thinks is cool at the moment. The timeline for our recovery is always ludicrously short, as if decades of neglecting education and technological innovation (and training workers to participate in such new fields, such as alternative energy) can be remedied between his Wednesday column and his Sunday cerebro-spasm. Congress and the White House are the same way; it's all tax breaks all the time, or an extension of unemployment benefits, or a crash program to fix as many potholes in the roads as we can immediately fund. Beyond these largely empty gestures, both political parties appear to believe that solutions to real world problems can be fixed by adherence to a particular "ideology." This is so fundamentally nuts.

Without the infusion of trillions of dollars in borrowed and printed money from the federal government, the American economy would, right now, reflect the real further deterioration in our circumstances which has occurred since September of 2008. The elected leaders act as if they are doing us a favor by perpetuating the illusions of "recovery" through goosing the Dow Jones via Federal Reserve injections of fake money or dumping trillions of hallucinated largesse on the vast legions of the unemployed. Anything, anything, to avoid facing the truth. Simply keep denying the basic econo-thermodynamic laws. Never admit that those old jobs, the ones that supported the middle class of my youth (and Di-Di'sMs. Swonk's) are gone and are not coming back, and that the huge cohort of blue collar unemployed workers have no employment prospects for the future. Congress (with notable exceptions, such as Bernie Sanders) cannot admit that without admitting that in essence that economic policy in this country, for a very long time, has fundamentally betrayed the American commoner, the real worker, the foundation of our once-great economic edifice.

When you think about what is really going on, and how we got here, you can see how pathetic the "Keynesian stimulus" ideas of pundits such as Paul Krugman really are. The federal government cannot run yearly budgets of $3.6 trillion against income of about $2.2 trillion and survive forever, and anyway, returning to an economy built on an illusion will not last. I don't understand why Krugman and his ilk can't see that. They imagine that early 2007 or so was some halcyon period in American history, and if we could just get back there... Instead of seeing it for what it really was, the end of the line for a failed economic theory (the empire of debt). Even if we could re-employ all those disenfranchised folks by getting their Best Buy "sales representatives" or Wal-Mart "greeter" jobs back, it could not last, because the actual earnings of Americans (on which we are now going to have to rely) will not support the level of consumption that temporarily made such jobs possible.

These stimulus advocates propose making the situation worse as a way of making it better. Flooding the system with borrowed and printed cash is not going to lift America's educational standards from 15th in the developed world to its former competence. That would require a re-recognition that public education is a positive good, a necessity, of a functioning economy, and such a realization is nowhere to be found. Instead, the American economy will be the victim of our decades of cultural and educational neglect for years and years to come, as the ranks of the hiring pool are filled with victims of our lousy schools. You don't clear out such problems with a short-term "stimulus" jolt, no matter how many "reset" columns Tom Friedman writes. News cycles are one thing, the cycles of Reality quite another.

Sometimes I feel very alone, except for, well you know...I'm not trying to come off like Winston Smith to her Julia, and anyway, I'm not sure the Eurasian authorities will even let me talk to her at this point, but