Well, another year has come and gone -- another year of wheel-spinning and entropic inertia. We've had the killing of bin Laden, the slow cratering of the Pan-European economy, the political brinkmanship around the federal debt, and the nauseating crunch of the Romney machine-treads over a parade of GOP pretenders. All in all, aside from the last troops being pulled out of Iraq, there wasn't much to trumpet about in 2011. Unemployment, underemployment, and the general erosion of the value of labor, even skilled labor, are the main planks of the platform on which almost everything has been playing out over the last few years. Inequality, tepid consumer demand, and general economic stagnation can all be traced back to the epic changes in the worth of work, changes that have been decades in the making.

No matter how many band-aids we slap on the system -- fiscal stimulus, tax holidays, education reform, or creative business structures -- the brute fact is that the main strands of American business-as-usual just don't fit together any more. The interlocking ratios between labor, knowledge, money, politics, and power are now completely different than even just a decade ago. Relentless consolidation of control into the hands of the few, in both the political and economic arenas, have torn the old social contracts and compacts to shreds. In country after country, purely-business interests have captured every last space in which citizens used to have some autonomous freedom of movement. Banksters, bond-holders, lobbyists, corporate raiders, and other uber-'successful' types now rain scorn and scold down upon regular workers, and indeed entire countries, for not doing enough to prop up the very system of organized looting that has fucked them over for the last 40 years. We can pretend all we want that our salvation lies just one election, one unemployment report, or one corporate-earnings statement away. But the long-term, deeply-entrenched, systemic trends are just impossible to deny: stagnating wages (even for college graduates), declining labor-force participation, higher concentrations of wealth at the very top, inadequate retirement savings, unchecked health-care costs, environmental degradation, cultural disintegration, and a general, free-floating social anomie. 

Against that rosy backdrop, what might be in store for 2012? What are my predictions for the upcoming year? Well, predictions are notoriously difficult, as millenarians throughout the centuries can attest to. So instead, I'll float out an amalgam of things that I except to see and things that I would like to see. That way, if they don't happen, I can just say, "Oh, that particular one was just a hoped-for thing, not an actual prediction." Pretty sweet, right? OK, let's get to it.

• Mitt for a King -- Willard Romney (I like to call people what their Mama named 'em) will eventually squash all challengers. This is not exactly earth-shattering news. It seems to be the general MSM consensus now anyway, but it still needs comment here. I don't really buy the trope that the current batch of GOP contenders is so lackluster that people are just going to 'settle' for Romney as the least-worst. After all, conservatives have everything they could hope for in a batch of candidates: there's a corporate slickster (Romney), a self-proclaimed legislative powerhouse (Gingrich), a moderate internationalist (Hunstman), a cultural warrior (Santorum), a consistent true-believer libertarian (Paul), a Bushey, great-hair governor (Perry), a spunky Hillary-esque scrapper (Bachmann), and until a few weeks ago, a successful black CEO (9-9-9-inches Cain). There are plenty of able people in there (at least in the conservative worldview, especially in comparison to Obama's qualifications at the time of his election), so I'm not sure where the serial flirtations of the GOP faithful come from. Maybe everyone is still in thrall to an unrealistic Reagan ideal. Or similarly, maybe they are so used to TV and movie heroes that the faults and foibles of actual mortals have become unpalatable. Or perhaps there are just too many incoherent threads in the GOP tapestry, and they are not weaving together smoothly this time around.For the last 20 years or so, grassroots conservatives have been played for suckers by every opportunistic, bombastic, narcissistic, and hypocritical snake-oil salesman to come down the pike; and this perennial exploitation is starting to take its toll. The conservative now seems to want:small government (in tax matters) but big government (in military and morality); hands-off government (in money matters) but hands-on government (reviving school prayer and banning abortion); no government programs for deadbeats ('welfare') but government programs for others (Medicare and Social Security); an end to the Fed's easy 'fiat' money but also a sophisticated modern economy (which can't be run on gold). In essence, conservatism has become a schizophrenic mish-mash of backward-looking nostalgia and forward-looking capitalist boosterism, without a sense that the implementation of the latter is the main impetus behind the former. But enough on that. Mitt will emerge from this maelstrom as your Republican candidate for President.
• European Dissolution -- I am certainly not an expert in finance or international economics, but from everything I read, Europe is at an impasse. As it is currently constructed, the Eurozone severely limits what individual countries can accomplish. Not being able to turn on the printing presses in their own currencies, the struggling countries cannot inflate their way to better trade balances and reduced debt. Instead, the only way out is austerity, which is proving, unsurprisingly, to be contractionary. Much like China, Germany, the plowhorse of Europe, cannot accept that its own internal debt must rise in order for peripheral debt to decrease. So the 'producers' continue to lecture the 'leeches' about their profligate ways, a motif that is arising everywhere in the developed world as the powerful seek to vacuum up even more of the bodily fluids of the powerless. Unless the European central bank models itself after the Fed, and starts buying individual Eurozone countries' debt (essentially 'printing money'), then there will be no way out for Europe. The whole region will either limp along with anemic growth, having to control increasing public outrage in the streets, or a few of the 'deadbeat' countries will just say 'fuck it' to the whole damn thing, default, and go about repairing their internal economies via national currency inflation. My bet is the latter.
• American Inertia -- despite the radical promise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the United States will continue to limp along without doing anything of actual import, because the increasingly-useless mainstream media will be obsessed with Election 2012. This will give politicians enough cover to diddle around and make empty speeches and grandiose promises,  just long enough to bridge their way to the autumn electoral fetish-fest. I just can't foresee anything that will actually change people's frame of reference for approaching economic, social, and ecological problems. The total capture of public discourse by business imperatives renders any alternative view of social arrangements stillborn. There is no conceivable way for anyone to find a popular platform from which to launch ideas that criticize economic growth, maximized consumption, individual careerism, and technological progress. There is no space -- no atmosphere whatsoever for philosophical, ecological, or moral challenges to the socioeconomic status quo. There is only one language of power now, and it preaches that The Profitable is The Good. The American identity is so closely tied to this Gospel of Wealth that it will ultimately prove to be our undoing. A civilization built only on the ideals of the businessman is doomed to consume itself. 2012 in the US will thus be another year of overstuffed sleepwalking, as we medicate our psyches with drugs and gorge our bodies with frito-filled tacos. Official unemployment will likely hover around 8% through the end of the year, but declining workforce participation and general underemployment will hide a much starker reality. Economic growth will probably surge to 2.5 or 3%, which will make investors and CEOs happy -- but just as the last three decades have shown, that growth will not accrue to the bottom line of regular citizens. Inequalities in income and wealth will grow more pronounced, and wages for all but the most highly-skilled will sag. So.....more of the same in the good ol' US of A.
• Romney Wins -- against the general backdrop of American sluggishness, Willard will win in November. Obama is indeed a gifted orator and campaigner, and he will have a huge monetary advantage. But he has just not done enough to help make sense of the continued economic sluggishness, and the litmus test of "are you better-off than you were four years ago?" will not favor the incumbent. It will be close though. Killing bin Laden and getting the troops out of Iraq will draw a lot of independents and lefties back into the fold. But I just think that the Obama shtick will have worn too thin by next fall to bring him reelection. He has tried to be too many things to too many people. Perhaps the best symbol of this is keeping Timothy Geithner on while booting Elizabeth Warren to the sidelines. Obama talked tough about greedy bankers on camera, but he made sure that the people pulling his policy levers would never actually challenge the hegemony of corporate and financial interests. And of course, his justice department has not called any of the crooks who cooked our economy to account, except for one scapegoat dude, I think, who got a couple years in Club Fed. Yes, Obama will have tons of money, and he will probably come off pretty good in the debates. But I think Romney's game is too good this time around. He will get his own share of campaign cash, once the primaries are over, and he'll be off to the races. He could really solidify things by picking a dynamic VP and a solid cabinet, and then it will be lights out. [A personal note on this: as an avowed lefty-type, albeit of a decentralizing stripe, I reflexively fear another Republican presidency. But the last 3 years of Obama have been highly frustrating. I am becoming more convinced of Jesus' words in Revelation 3:16: "So, because you are lukewarm, and nether hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." Perhaps the best thing, in the long run, is to give the GOP total control for a couple years. And instead of fighting the opposition tooth and nail, as the Republicans have done recently, the Dems should just acknowledge the conservative mandate, and actually call on Romney and a GOP Congress to put their loftiest ideals into practice. Give them no excuse and no quarter -- just lay down and let them have their way. My guess is that Romney will try to keep things centrist and reasonable, but Boehner and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan will yank the country towards an Ayn Randian dystopia. And then we can all see, once and for all, that eliminating the regulatory state will not result in a magical shangri-la of flourishing entrepreneurs and sleekly beautiful Ubermenschen. Maybe a realistic liberal plan for the future has to be sewn in the burnt soil of conservative collapse. Maybe...]
• The End of Device Fetishism -- OK, this one probably falls squarely in the I HOPE category, but I've just had enough of the rapid, serial upgrading of phones, tablets, computers, TVs, and all that other electronic claptrap. I know this seems to put me in the luddite, old curmudgeon camp, but that's not really my point. I actually view the obsession with gadgets as the ultimate symbol of our cultural bankruptcy. It is one thing to welcome liberating technology, like the cell phone and the computer. But it is something else entirely to engage in restless adolescent lust after the latest devices on a regular basis. This 'device fetishism' has so many deleterious effects that it is impossible to do them justice here. But here are a couple examples. Device obsession squashes the social. No matter how many group video games you play with your 'gaming community,' the sheer physical fact is that people are cocooned in their own private simulacrum, oblivious to interpersonal and natural surroundings. People plugged into their iPods are not engaging in conversation, or hearing the ambient noises that are flowing and burbling all around them. Reading books and articles on a smartphone or tablet might seem like you're getting the exact same content as exists in paper books, magazines, and newspapers, but the different physical formats actually change the style of learning for the reader. The size and shape of a physical object like a book allow for a quick sense of the overall context of information, whereas the digital format erases almost all trace of breaks, segmentation, and separation. The sameness of appearance in digital formats tends to make everything seem like part of one overall stream of 'information,' having a uniform quality. Ideas, aphorisms, poems, essays, journalism, scientific studies -- these all become 'content' in the device-driven world. The scathing majesty of a Nietzsche aphorism looks exactly the same as the boilerplate John Grisham twist, or the ridiculous tweet of some jackass b-movie actor. The endless pursuit of upgraded devices is also, obviously, utterly unsustainable to a populace that is seeing its wages eroded and its debt levels swell. And finally, the manic replacement of G3 with G4, of LCD with plasma, of iPod XXX with iPod YYY is a completely adolescent fixation. Jealous, grasping, lusting peer-orientation does serve a cohesive social function, in a limited evolutionary sense. After children make the psychic break with their parents and begin to assume their own individual identities, the mimicry of peers in the teen years serves to provide actual social substance to the emerging person, as well as creating a social cement that will ensure the survival of the community (group selection is actually going through a bit of a revival in evolutionary biology circles right now). By the end of adolescence, however, the hyper-competitiveness and intense peer-orientation is supposed to give way to a new sense of autonomy, self-assuredness, and maturity. The grasping after external objects to signal one's worth or one's membership in the in-group is supposed to fall away, to be replaced by a new focus on higher questions of meaning, relationship, and community. For more on this relationship between consumption and the adolescent adult, see here). Needless to say, the device is killing us, in a larger sense -- a subject to which I will return in the coming weeks.
• Collective will be the new Cool -- Again, kind of a pipe dream, but I'm totally convinced that it's gonna happen sooner or later, either by choice or necessity (choice would be better). As mentioned 9 gajillion times before in this blog, the ratios amongst work, production, and reward will render the One-Person-One Job/One-Family-One- Dwelling social form unsustainable, and people will have to form more collective home bases from which to approach the wider economy and society. We're already seeing this now by default, as high school and college graduates have to stay with or move back in with their parents, in significant numbers. And as more and more baby boomers retire with insufficient funds, and if Social Security gets shaved down due to fiscal contraction (which seems fairly likely), expect seniors to move back in with their adult children in substantial waves. And culturally, we actually do demonstrate our deep longing for community, from workplace sitcoms to reality shows to the rise of hiphop 'crew culture.' In 2012, some brave voices will tie all of these loose communal strands together, and back them up with some solid evidence for the advantages of decentralized, localized economics -- and the result will be a new Community Chic.

OK, that's enough for now. Have a great New Year everyone, and here's to the fresh possibilities that each annual turn of the calendar brings. 2012 certainly promises to be much more exciting than the wet blanket year we just finished.

Oh yeah, and the Bruins repeat as Stanley Cup champions.

  

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

                --- Wendell Berry

I don't know if most people feel the same, but it seems to me like a lot of things are winding down. As I described many moons ago, the equations that make up the American Algorithm are just not fitting together any more. Things we learned growing up, adages about labor and education and family, don't pass the sniff test any more. Hard work doesn't necessarily pay off. Playing by the rules may not ensure even modest success. Even more importantly, violations of long-standing modicums of decent and responsible behavior, especially in business and finance, not only go unpunished, they actually and vastly increase one's chances of entering the controlling elite.

More specifically, the advanced form of capitalism in which we operate has become undeniably cannibalistic. Labor, whether skilled or unskilled, has been degraded. Even though we live in complex societies and economies, systems that require all manner of service and maintenance, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a comfortable living unless one possesses a narrower and narrower range of coveted, high-tech skills. Though we are all physical beings, living in actual corporeal space, surrounded by concrete environments and objects that need creation and tending, we have decided that only ethereal and abstract professions like financial derivative management and computer network programming are deserving of major reward. We wouldn't dream of telling our children that farming, tinkering, garbage-hauling, cobbling, or ditch-digging are worthy pursuits, even though these activities will always be around, and will always need to be performed by someone. 

No matter what kind of bargain our 'advanced' societies make with capitalism (the welfare states of Europe, the turbo free-markets of America, or the directed production of China), the relentless forces of various technologies and their evolutionary, financial offshoots are pounding away at any type of lifestyle that might bring personal dignity and ecological stability. In short, nowhere are economic forces actually serving the people. It's vice-versa. Even in the rapidly expanding economies of China and India, the middle classes are not actually swelling. The same forces that propel wealth and power to a small minority in the Western world are starting to work their diabolical magic on Eastern societies as well.

All around us is evidence that the whole damned thing is shot. Europe is a shambles, with countries and cultures that are thousands of years old being held hostage by the iron-grip of, gulp, bond markets. How is it that countries with millions of people and thousands of domestic industries can be declared too naughty to participate in the global game of borrowing, spending, and consuming? How can huge swaths of geography and demography be put in a financial 'time-out' and told to clean up their profligate ways, or else? How is it that bond vigilantes can plunge millions into an austerity, when almost none of the problems can be traced to regular people, workers, and citizens? Well, it happens because the universal Hoover that is consumer capitalism has already sucked out all of the excess value created by the labors of the many, and parked that cash in the Caymen Islands or Icelandic default swaps or Indonesian bonds, or some other god-forsaken place where it can do no good for the people that actually created that value in the first place.

And we certainly don't need to belabor the situation in the US. Epic unemployment, persistent stagnation, swollen stock markets alongside tepid labor markets, the surging coffers of the 1%. We all know how fucked up everything is here.

But aside from the Occupy Wall Street crowd, there really hasn't been much uproar. Much like the boilerplate criticism of OWS (which is actually both fair and unfair, depending on how you look at it), this is probably the result of no one really knowing what to do. "What's are the OWS's demands? What do they want?", everyone keeps asking. As if anyone really knows what the hell would fix everything (or anything).

We're all waiting around for something to kick in. We're waiting for low interest rates to spur lending and investment and hiring. Or we're waiting for school reform to take root and start creating the next generation of competitive American workers (because by God, we may be the most individualistic, screw the deadbeats, get-a-job-you-hippie culture in the world, but when it comes to global economic competition, we're suddenly all in it together to make us better than those brown and yellow devils who are out-competing us, fur fuck's sake). Or we're waiting for the government to give us a real jobs plan, with real training for the green industries of the future. Or we're waiting for the GOP to take power, so that we can finally shrink down the government, turning loose the furies of economic creativity and dynamism. Woop woop!!

No matter what form it takes, we're all waiting for something to happen, something that will save us from the excesses and failures of the system itself. This is a sure sign that we are ideologically exhausted, spinning our wheels and hoping against hope that the identical workings of the same system will somehow produce different results. Needless to say, this is supremely irrational. We are essentially hoping to hit the lottery.

The lottery is actually a good metaphor for our current state of affairs. As I'm sure we're all aware, the lottery is the ultimate regressive tax. Poor people are the disproportionate consumers of lottery products, sapping much of the earning power of the lower classes as a whole. The state has already gotten a lot of these people's money through the various 'sin' taxes: alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Then what's left of their meager paychecks gets scanned back into the government ledgers one grease-soaked Keno ticket at a time. And the scratch tickets?! Dear god, what an amazing advance in the technology of lottery looting. Throw some pretty pictures of baseball diamonds, Christmas trees, or corn fields on those tickets, and straight-up money-squandering is magically transmogrified into a 'game.' And games are good, right? Fantastic. Never mind that the odds of someone winning a substantial sum in the lottery, even just breaking even for years of ticket purchasing, are ridiculously small. As long as there is even the slightest chance that I might win, then by all means, let it ride!!

That's what our waiting around for external socioeconomic salvation is like: the lottery. We keep hoping that the same tired arguments that have been used for decades to rationalize the wholesale looting of America and the global push for reckless growth will suddenly, somehow, flip their functions around and do the opposite of what they have been doing all along. Stale platitudes from the right and the left are being relentlessly retread: trickle-down economics, educational 'reform,' public (quasi-public, at best, in its Obamacare form) health care, economic stimulus, quantitative easing, 'entitlement' reform. All these things are just fancy ways of saying, "Yes, yes -- we know that the economic fruits of the last 40 years of grassroots hard work and progress have been filched away to inflate private portfolios around the globe. And yes, we all know that those fruits can never be gotten back. But it's too late to cry about that now, so here's another way for you to change your behavior and your expectations, so that corporations and banks can begrudgingly agree to participate in the domestic economy again."

Well lucky us! How fortunate we are that the titans of business and government are working to discover new ways for us to receive less compensation for our hard work and overarching anxiety. They're the job creators, right?

In lieu of this ridiculousness, many are simply going with the regular, old-fashioned dreams of the actual lottery. All we really want is to hit the big one, quit work, and start traveling around the world. We want to check out of all the day-to-day bullshit and just get away from it all.

This is lottery porn, the self-titillation that comes with dreaming the wish-lists of unlimited wealth. And being a semi-regular purchaser of lottery tickets myself, I have to say that I almost never dream of things that I want to buy. My thoughts almost invariably leap to travel and escape, to beaches and leisure and cocktails. Now, I'm sure other people are different, and actually do plan out their Ferraris and 150-inch TVs and South Beach mansions and whatnot. But I would bet that an equal number just dream of the freedom that would come with winning, the freedom from an oppressive work life and degraded public life. For many, the lottery is just a ticket out of a way of life that is stultifying, undignified, and inhumane. 

Well, we're not all going to hit the lottery. We're not all going to get that golden ticket out of our current predicament. And even those that may hit it big and 'escape' will still have to live in the midst of a collapsing culture and civilization, as the glacial power of our current arrangements ground all of their compatriots' lives into dust. We will not all hit the mother-lode.

But we are, in fact, all each other's winning lottery ticket. We have the power to provide each other all of the security and comfort that would come with a gajlillion dollar payout -- and actually much more. After all, what is it that we all really want? As Wendell Berry asked, "What are people for?" I'm convinced that most people have relatively modest desires. We want to have security, shelter, dignity, and self-reliance. We want to live in humane environments and communities, with real power to shape the contours of our existence. We want dignified work, some of it complex, but most of it simple. And perhaps most of all, we want to be around people that we like and love, living in convivial and robust settings. 

That winning lottery ticket is available to all of us, which is why I tend to be bit more optimistic than some other Peak and Post-Peak commentators. I think that there is real potential for rapid change towards a more collective social form, one that will replace the One Person/One Job-One Family/One Dwelling structure that we have now (see the American Algorithm link above to read more about our current social structure). A more collective social form would be the biggest lottery hit of all time, because it would provide security, stability, and true freedom not just for a lucky few, but for millions.  

Here are some of my postings on what that way of life might look like.

Corporate personhood has emerged as one of the more contentious issues of our ongoing economic malaise. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision fully cranked open the spigots of corporate campaign cash, making political pay-for-play proudly and unabashedly explicit. In August of this year, the normally smooth and weathervanish Mitt Romney ran afoul of the haybale set at the Iowa State Fair when he informed an angry interlocutor that “Corporations are people, my friend.” And of course, the Occupy Wall Street movement is currently pushing the corporate personhood issue front and center, as it becomes undeniably obvious that the normal operation of big business is one of the primary mechanisms for the upward shunting of wealth and power to the infamous 1%.

But the identification of corporations as people has a much longer history in America. Some conflict can be traced to beginnings of our republic, when Hamilton and Jefferson clashed over the desirability of centralized public, private, and banking entities. There was also the festering resentment of the American colonists over the monopolistic and rapacious behavior of various crown corporations. The chests dumped at the Boston Tea Party, remember, belonged to the loathed East India Company, an early form of the corporation called a joint-stock company. But the true landmark events in defining business entities as people came in the form of Supreme Court rulings. Long before Citizens United, the Dartmouth College vs. Woodward decision in 1819 established that, for legal purposes, corporations are artificial persons afforded the same protections as natural citizens. The main issue in Dartmouth was the recognition of corporate charters as private contracts subject to the Contract Clause in Article One of the Constitution. Later, in 1886, the Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad decision further locked in the idea of the corporate person by granting equal protection under the 14^th Amendment, a section of the Constitution originally designed to protect freed slaves.

Since Santa Clara, the matter of corporate personhood has been essentially settled in the eyes of the courts. Certainly, subsequent rulings have allowed private business entities to be regulated by state and federal governments, but this has not eroded their status as individuals vis-à-vis the Constitution. The only real surprise is that it took 120 years between Santa Clara and Citizens United to officially codify the corporation’s dominance over our politics via the legal mechanism of cash as free speech.

With this long legal history, the battle to de-personify corporations is a losing proposition. Taking into consideration existing case law and the death-grip that big business has on our federal political system, the only real solution would be a Constitutional Amendment that explicitly limits protections to natural persons. Needless to say, people shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for this to happen. A much more promising avenue would be for people to become more like corporations. Just as business entities have piggybacked onto legal protections originally designed to help flesh-and-blood citizens, we American mortals should co-opt the strategies and structures that corporations have used to such great effect. We should turn the corporate tools of scale, specialization, centralized purchasing, and limited redundancy to our own domestic advantage. And along the way, we could perhaps find ways to grab legal shelters designed for corporations and bend them to our own benefit.

What would this mean for people to become more like corporations, and why would anyone want to do that? After all, one of the main pleasures of domestic life is that it is not like the workplace. The family is a “haven in a heartless world,” in Christopher Lasch’s memorable phrase. But the point here is not to harness the spirit of the corporation, which is single-minded pursuit of profit, but rather its collective form, which use combination, cooperation, and coordination to maximize efficiency. The simple fact is that the individual and the nuclear family are no longer adequate home-bases from which regular people can approach the wider economy. The old algorithms of work, wage, and household are no longer functional, and no amount of new debt, stimulus, or austerity is going to recreate the fleeting conditions of decades past. In the last 40 years, major trends in technology, globalization, finance and corporate structure have driven the real value of labor way down. Wages and salaries for virtually all sectors have stagnated or declined, except for a very small sliver of technical fields. And even those spheres will probably soon see the same eroding effects, as technology and globalized labor supplies eat into their temporary advantages.

We can talk all we want about job retraining, beefed-up technical education in our schools, or the new Green Economy with its fantastic new careers. But the brute economic fact is that economic growth no longer requires a large percentage of highly-skilled, highly-paid workers. Globalized and technology-based economies can churn out tons of stuff without having millions and millions of engineers and web designers raking in sweet salaries. This declining value of labor input is what helps push all of the surplus value up the chain to the tiny majority that controls larger and larger swaths of our total economy.

Like the long history of corporate personhood, it will not do us any good to swim against these long-term trends. Labor unions are not going to suddenly make a comeback and jack up everyone’s paychecks. Nor are we going to magically transform our gargantuan workforce into an army of bio-engineers and open-source programmers. And the Occupy Wall Street movement, noble as the intention might be, is not going to set off a powderkeg of political discontent that ends up forcing massive redistribution of wealth or FRD-style federal spending.

But what is doable is the formation of small domestic groups or co-ops, larger home-bases from which people can approach the economic and political spheres. Inside these domestic corporations, people can share revenue, combine and centralize their purchasing, specialize their labor participation, and group their investments. They could also pull members out of the outside workforce altogether, bringing functions like child care and eldercare in-house. Lighter forms of these domestic corporations might look something like co-housing, while more committed versions would involve outright cohabitation. The overall saving in housing costs would obviously be maximized in cohabitation models.

Now of course, collective living in domestic corporations would cut directly against the American grain of individualism and nuclear family predominance. But as permanent as our current arrangements might seem, they are really just the temporary flowerings of a style of capitalism that strives to maximize excessive, redundant and, frankly, unnecessary consumption. And there is ample evidence, from exploding legal and illegal drug use, to pervasive personality disorders, to chronic American obesity, that our current lifestyle is profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling.

The social support structures of the past are all but gone. Labor unions, small town economies, fraternal organizations, and traditional churches have all been eroded by the relentless march of turbo-capitalism and the hyper-individualized consumption patterns left in its wake. It is clear that beleaguered and exhausted citizens and workers need some sort of new platform from which they can intelligently and efficiently engage the workplace, the marketplace, and the political sphere. In a word, people just need some space – space to breathe, move, experiment and innovate. If we try to go it alone, as individuals, couples or families, we will never get that socioeconomic space opened up, and our levels of anxiety and depression will continue to mount. But if we can leverage the collective tools of the corporation to our own personal advantage as flesh and blood people, then new vistas of opportunity could open up for a more fully human economy and society.

For most of us, the Ark of Economic Collapse has been pried open. We stand, like Dr. Jones, strapped to a pole with our eyes closed, waiting for the shrieking wraiths of destruction to finish their cleansing task, after which we can resume our heroic stroll into the sunset of the American Dream. The evildoers who will reap the whirlwind of this economic rightsizing are various, depending on your political leanings. Conservatives envision the unwinding of New Deal, entitlement-fattened arrogance and dependence, while liberals dream of righteous comeuppance for an exploitative and rapacious 1%. But in all scenarios dreamed of by pol and pundit alike, we will somehow overcome this latest challenge, albeit an epic one, to eventually reach the far shores of recovery and growth -- as we always have.

With the dreary, dripping passage of time, the evidence is piling up that we're stuck in a gruesome economic straitjacket. The disenchantment with the Obama administration is running broad and deep, and even the staunchest stalwarts are struggling to keep the tattered hope-bunting attached to the beleaguered President's agenda. 

Hurricane (now Tropical Storm) Irene has put a drenching final touch on the surreal summer of 2011. With debt-ceiling games of chicken, stock market rollercoasterism, European insolvency (or is it illiquidity?), and general economic malaise buffeting us over the last few months, the familiar script of a natural phenomenon like Irene is almost welcome. At least with a problem like a hurricane, we know roughly what to do and how to react. We stock up on supplies, get our chores out of the way, and hope that the power stays on long enough to get through a good chunk of our Netflix queue. When the disastrous images start to roll in from the storm's landing points, we furrow our brows and call the relatives to make sure everything is okay. And then, more often than not, when the storm does not live up to the hype, we breathe a sigh of relief for the divine mercy. Or we chuckle that, once again, we got duped into panicking over another relative non-event. Damn that sensationalistic media!

Now, I'm not making light of the damage and suffering that hurricanes and other natural disasters can cause. I'm simply noting the familiarity of the script and the ensuing human responses.

When looking at the basic crappiness of our economic situation, however, similar comforting rituals are proving impossible to maintain. Oh sure, that doesn't stop our pundits and politicians from trotting them out. But it is becoming more and more difficult to find any type of familiar ideological mooring to which to cling, and it feels as if something truly awful is lurking around the next corner.
 
We are essentially painted into an operational corner, because of long trends in our economy, our politics, and our thinking. Here are the basic facts that are squelching meaningful discourse and action:

• Due to many factors (technological innovation, globalization, labor-power decline, labor-value decline, financial evolution, etc.), wealth and power are more concentrated than at any time since the Gilded Age. I know this an oft-repeated trope, but it is the crucial starting point for any analysis of our predicament. And I'm not even making a value judgment here (yet). I'm simply stating the obvious. The very top of the pyramid has almost unfathomably-more power and resources that the rest of us. And it's getting worse (or better, if you're in that top slice). The erosion of net worth is creeping relentlessly up the educational and vocational ladder, with larger swaths of the middle class dropping into the gaping maw of debt, default, and depression.
• Concentrated power has to be expressed somewhere other than the marketplace, if only to convince itself of its own inevitability. So the government and culture complexes have attached themselves to the swollen teats of the corporate/financial world, sanitizing the raw transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top with some fizzing streams of pop economics, junk philosophy, and consumption boosterism. Don't be deceived by the perennial pretendings of the right (and now the mainstream 'left') that somehow the 'government' is a separate entity from the 'private' business sphere. One look at the revolving door between corporate boardrooms, K-street lobby shops, and government agencies gives lie to that bit of campaign conceit. It makes for good stump shtick, but it has no relation to reality. Similarly, the idea that 'the media' and other culture outlets are independent entities challenging the more wholesome, boring, conservative business world is laughable. Keep in mind that the large media companies that give us news, magazines, movies, and TV shows are as intrinsically profit-motivated as any oil or pharmaceutical company.
• With Big Business, Big Government, and Big Culture melded into one huge econo-ideological complex, the channels of politics and social change are extremely narrow. Consolidated power has honed the electoral and policy processes into a finely-edged blade. Winner-take-all elections, unlimited campaign finance, district gerrymandering, closed presidential debate structures, constitutional constraints that inflate low-population-state influence --- these and other factors almost insure that no ideas outside the pro-corporate mainstream ever get a hearing. No third party can ever get traction, no matter how many people define themselves as 'independent.' Substantive policies that offend large campaign donors can't even get off the ground (think single-payer healthcare, which almost every other industrial country uses to keep costs way below ours; or mandatory, blanket mortgage refinancing, which would quickly eliminate the massive debt overhang that is strangling growth, but which would also, of course, necessitate huge shifts from debtors to creditors).

There are other long-term trends to consider (international trade, military waste, etc.), but you get the idea. The question for this post is: Considering the breadth of our current predicament, but also the straight-jacketed nature of our political process, what can we actually expect in regards to a way out? Will anything of substance actually happen to get us through this dark time?

Here is what I think we can expect, based on how certain things shake out over the next year or so. There are a few different ways we can go, not many more. None of them are very pleasant.

First, if the European monetary union disintegrates, all bets are off. The core countries like Germany and France will probably stagger back towards relative national health, but the overall failure of the experiment will reduce investor confidence for years to come. The peripheral countries, contrary to popular expectation, will also turn out okay, albeit with a much lower standard of living. With control of their own currencies again, they will be able to inflate/devalue their way to some sustainable level of health -- it just won't be very luxurious. 

From what I understand (which is certainly not much in the international finance arena), a European collapse will be a blessing and curse for the US. More investor capital would probably start flowing to America, as the number of global safe bets is reduced. But the prospect of long-term reductions in European demand, coupled with exhausted demand in the US, would also sharply reduce the possibility of global economic 'recovery.' Robust growth would probably push way out into mid-century (at least that's what the experts will say), and the Japanification of the world would be at hand -- i.e., stagnation. It probably wouldn't matter which party comes to power in the US, if global stagnation and European shrinkage take hold. The Dems and the GOP would probably just flip-flop from one election to the next, as the blame-game that is our electoral process winds out in all its inept glory. Elsewhere, I called this "Musical Chair Politics."

One other possibility, if Europe manages to hold together and limp along (or, god forbid, they turn 180 degrees from austerity to stimulus -- something I doubt will happen), is that things get so bad in the US that the people will start demanding government spending to create jobs. Now considering the current stance of the White House (in capitulation to the nonsensical right) that the government is like one big household that has to cut up its credit cards and live within its means, the idea that more stimulus will get approved seems outrageous. And in fact, I don't think it's too likely myself. But what happens if a few mega-shocks happen in rapid succession? Say that Bank of America and Chase become insolvent in quick order, and that the government refuses to bail them out. The stock market swoons for real this time, and large companies begin to drastically slash their workforces. Money start gushing out of the US to safer places, and businesses of all sorts and sizes start to fold, as financing and demand slow to a drip-drop. Say that by February 2012, unemployment has surged to 13%, mortgage foreclosures spike again, and retirement savings take another 25% hit from stock market contraction. Will people really continue to insist that the government cut spending even more? Will they decide that it's okay to wait around for a Republican government to take the reins in January 2013? Or might people finally demand that the government go into FDR spending mode? I think it is in the realm of the possible. And the long-term outcome might even be positive, if (and this is the biggest 'if' in recent history) the federal jobs programs are intelligently constructed for sustainable, low-impact vocations. But unless some Washington brain-boxes have this emergency plan under construction right now, what are the odds that a highly-pressurized Congress and White House will come up with something good? Recent events do not bode well for a positive outcome, even with the public breathing down the government's neck. More likely, massive federal stimulus will be opportunist, piece-meal, porkish, and backward-looking. The goal will be to get as many people back up to maximum consumption as possible, instead of something targeted to the redesigning of our communities and workplaces to create a more sane, sustainable lifestyle. Poorly-planned new stimulus would not be ideal, but it would be a little less unpleasant than the next option....

.... which is, straight-up austerity and the dismantling of the American welfare state. This is a more likely outcome, especially if Obama is a one-term prez, and Republicans sweep into majorities next year. Come election time in 2012, unemployment will probably still be in the 8-10% range, which will definitely be enough to unseat the Dems. The Blame Bush thing will have worn thin, and Obama and the Blue Dogs will pay the price for thinking that business will stick by them if they just stick by business. They will learn the hard way that campaign cash will flow to whichever party looks more likely to win. When there's blood in the water, corporate donors will not hitch up their britches and make sacrifices for the good of their Democratic buddies. They will continue to push for tax reductions and more favorable treatment -- no matter that these same tactics have already brought the country to the brink of collapse. 

In this scenario, the ascendant Tea Partiers will make uncomfortable bedfellows with the GOP establishment, and we could be in for some interesting civil wars on the right. Certainly, it will never get to the point where Ron Paul gets his wish, with small government principles actually being applied to the bloated military and corporate pork. On that front, the Bible-thumpers and the Golwaterites are in sync. But we could get to an interesting place where a President Bachmann or Perry has enough Tea Party support in Congress to force through a repeal of Obamacare, a gutting of Social Security, and a dismantling of existing government health programs (would the VA even be spared?). Corporate and other taxes on the wealthy could get slashed to minuscule proportions, which really would start to shrink government down to bathtub-drowning size. What would be the actual result of such a program? Would businesses suddenly bring all of their foreign operations back to the US, to take advantage of the 'competitive' tax structure? Would the decreased regulation spawn an eruption of small business activity, a la John Galt's hideaway in the Rocky Mountains? Would over-dependent Americans, who at first staggered around rubbing their eyes due to the government-support matrix cable being unplugged, finally start seeing the truth in the world around them, and become self-sufficient adults? 

Well, I doubt things would go like that, because the underlying mythology is hyper-nostalgic and simply untenable. We don't live in a Currier and Ives print or a Thomas Kinkade painting. Millions of unemployed and underemployed people are not going to suddenly start coopering and blacksmithing. Nor are they going to magically become credit-worthy, talented, independent entrepreneurs. The stuff of industrial production is much more mundane and pedestrian than the bootstrap idylls spun by Tea Party orators. One of the main reasons for our massive public spending is that we have yet to come to terms with the obsolescence of human labor and skill, vis-a-vis industrial capitalism. Not that skill and labor won't be important after capitalism, whatever that might be. But these conservatives who dream of a minimized government seem to think that centralized corporate exploitation will also magically end, and every free man will become a business titan. Unfortunately, without a welfare state tempering the worst of it, the brutal upward shift of power and wealth will increase, not disappear. John Galt's valley will be one huge Home Depot, with Johnny himself a team leader in the lumber department.

As regular readers of this column know, I would imagine that no matter which of the above scenarios play out, there will be no 'way out,' no 'recovery.' We're looking The Long Emergency square in the face, and no amount of stimulus or austerity will bring back the easy, hyper-consumptive social form. And that, actually, is a good thing. Provided that we can avoid massive social turmoil and violence, and that we don't turn to monstrous right or left wing regimes for rescue, we can actually look forward to a lower-intensity, more human lifestyle. We just need to find the right bridge to get there.

Granted, Eugene Robinson beat me to the punch this week, calling for liberals to craft a Big Idea that can compete with the conservative bumper sticker of "GUB'MINT BAD!" But to be fair to myself (I'm all about self-referential fairness, you know), I was banging this drum three years ago when I detailed the need for a New Narrative to transcend the partial and faulty stories told by both liberals and conservatives.

Robinson asserts, in his column and then on Morning Joe this week, that Republicans are winning the day on the debt ceiling debate because their message is consistent, simple, and powerful: taxes and government spending are bad, and should thus always and everywhere be reduced. This trope resonates with people, especially in a recession, because who really likes paying taxes? And when you see the clowns from both sides of the aisle mucking up this debt ceiling issue, who wouldn't agree that Big Gub'mint needs to be ushered gingerly to that Norquistian bathtub, post haste?

But as usual when liberals move from diagnosis to prescription, Robinson falls flat. What should the progressive response be to the big conservative idea? "I'd suggest something pithier: jobs, jobs, jobs. People may dislike paying taxes, but they dislike unemployment more."

Yeah, that's great. So brave.

Here's how that shtick plays out. Liberals say 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' and then move on to propose what? More stimulus of course, this time with robust jobs programs: direct government hiring, perhaps a new WPA, funding for retraining of the unemployed, infrastructure spending, investment in education, etc..

And what will the conservative response be? No f'in way! 

That's the whole point of this current deadlock. Behind the simple conservative idea of cutting spending is a more sophisticated economic idea (wrong, but still noodle-engaging) that a bloated public sector 'crowds out' private investment and stifles growth. Liberals aren't going to get more spending for the triple-jobs thing (jobs, jobs, jobs) when Republicans are using the very failure of Obama's first stimulus package as a major plank of their 2012 campaigns. More federal spending is a non-starter.

And it's not just the Republicans anyway. The Democrats are reaping the whirlwind of the Blue Dog, DLC motif. Clintonistas of all stripes made a devil's bargain for campaign cash, and they are now stuck with the corrupt system they helped erect. When Democrats walked away from the underdog and the downtrodden, throwing their hats in with Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big TelCom, and other big-balled corporate entities, they locked themselves into a relentlessly algorithmic, boa constrictor of a lie: the idea that economic growth and business profitability are equivalent to social health. Once you equate dollars with civic virtue, relying on the sultans of profit to bankroll your political livelihood, you end up where we are right now: having national discussions in the deadly arena of debt ceilings, quantitative easing, curve-bending, and other nauseating financial arcana. Larry Summers and Cicero are light years apart.

Unfortunately, the ship has probably long since sailed on getting anything except business-boosterism from our national leaders. There are a few radical stalwarts, to be sure: the Sanderses and the Kuciniches and whatnot. And there are plenty of great liberal ideas out there on how to return government to the peeps: public financing of elections, instant-runoff voting, term limits, rolling back corporate personhood, etc. But there's virtually zero chance that these will gain any traction at the federal level. The pro-corporate substrate is too entrenched, and serious people in serious suits have too many ways of convincing us that what's good for Walmart and Exxon-Mobil is good for America.

So a pithy slogan of "jobs, jobs, jobs" is about as anemic as you can get for a future liberal revival. The perpetual growth thing is sunsetting. A new progressive Big Idea will need to come from the wilderness, from the barely-trodden paths of Peak Oil, decentralism, re-localization, and human ecology. The name of the game now is how to manage contraction. We're going to need to learn how to deal with the winding down of all of our complex systems, a phase that Jim Kunstler calls The Long Emergency.

Realistic pessimism like this does not mesh well with the stagecraft and soul-sucking bullshit of national American politics. So don't expect a Big Idea like this to be birthed from the White House Press Room or the Senate floor. The next big liberal ideal will likely emerge from the smoldering embers of our collapsed crap-culture.

Ironically, if the Tea Party set gets its way in the current debt debate, and then on into 2012, and the government really starts to shrink down, the door could actually be open for liberals to grab the ball and run with a full-scale plan for sane contraction, and perhaps for a transition to a different type of society altogether. We can hope.   

 

 

 

Honesty. We want it from our leaders. We need it to have any kind of idea what the hell is happening. We deserve it as citizens of a democratic republic. But as Mr. Joel wrote, "everyone is so untrue."

Who would have ever thought that a summer could be defined by something as arcane as a vote on a debt limit? But it's happening. Republicans are essentially holding the country hostage, demanding that the rich keep their tax cuts, and that social insurance programs that help the poor and elderly get slashed (I refuse to use the stupid word 'entitlement,' as the term itself cedes the argument). Oh yeah, and the defense budget gets a double-digit increase, so no austerity for that crew.

Hovering above this ridiculous Washington puppet show are the portentous thunderheads of unemployment, economic contraction, and general ecological wind-down. The June numbers were just released, and the official rate is back up to 9.2%. Job creation is anemic, consumer spending is crippled, and businesses are sitting on piles of cash, unwilling to invest in growth amidst declining demand. The Fed sits off to the side, wringing its hands and furrowing its brow. QE2 is over, and suddenly inflation is the economic stalking beast. Never mind that wage growth, a crucial part of any inflationary spiral, seems about as likely as the Harry Potter finale finishing up with the ghost of Rodney Dangerfield poking his head in from the side and saying, "Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!"

Going back to the debt ceiling dust-up, let's at least give Republicans their due on something. When they say 'no tax increases and no new spending,' they mean it. Sure, Boehner may eventually have to torpedo his own future by giving in a little bit to Obama, but he's certainly playing a hell of a game if chicken. But there's also a very good chance that Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor are true believers to the end. They may actually expect the super-rich (now magically transformed into 'Job Creators') to suddenly open their gargantuan wallets and start hiring people out of the goodness of their hearts, even though no one has any money left to buy any more crap.

But I would actually bet that the GOP has something different in mind. They may give lip service to the idea that austerity in a time of deep recession will somehow spur economic growth, even though economists of every ideological stripe say that this is just not so. But more probably, they actually welcome a painful economic contraction, as that is the only real medicine for a country bloated on Big Gub'mit, easy credit, and reckless spending. Let's remember that the main story line of Atlas Shrugged, the urtext of many ascendant Republicans, is that a corrupt economy crumbles into chaos while a noble, virtuous, industrious elite repairs off to a secluded shangri-la to rebuild society from the ground up, one feed store and blacksmith shop at a time. At some point, we need to acknowledge that a consistent conservatism may see suffering, poverty, and death as the unavoidable consequences of weaning people off of the government teat. After all, programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Food Stamps actually keep people alive. If the elderly suddenly have less money and less health care, it's not like they will dust off their resumes and go back to work at the Dairy Queen to make ends meet. People will just end up eating more poorly and living in more squalid surroundings, which will send many to earlier graves.

I'm not using scare tactics here, really I'm not. I'm just saying that more of the money in social insurance programs goes towards direct purchase of life-sustaining commodities than if that same money were to be returned to wealthy taxpayers or invested in some business venture somewhere. You take that away, and there's simply going to be less health overall, and thus less life. And again, I think that this has to be the stance of a consistent conservative philosophy. You want to shrink down government until you can drown it in a bathtub? Fine -- but be honest with people that this will cause unpleasant but necessary pain for many, and for a long time. It's national castor oil, but ultimately it will prove good for us. That's just the honesty I want from the GOP. I don't agree with their assessment of things, but they can at least get some balls and tell the truth, and not hide behind the ridiculous idea that brutal austerity in a lite-depression will magically produce entrepreneurial flowers as far as the eye can see. 

Now the Dems, who are peddling just as much bullshit as the Republicans. President Obama is not a dick -- I'll stay away from that moniker. But he's proving to be as untalented at courageous governing as he is talented at campaigning. In my mind, his play-every-angle shtick has played itself out. He can't be all things to all people. And I'm not sure if he's more interested in his legacy or with fixing the horrific conditions that are laying waste to his country. There just doesn't seem to be any urgency in his presentation. There is a lot of seriousness, but no desperation. Urgency and desperation are absolutely necessary for him to connect with the terrified public, and I just don't think he can fake it. 

Aside from Obama, the Democratic party is adrift. Aside from stalwarts like Kucinich, Sanders, and Frank, the rest of the blue donkeys/dogs are pro-growth, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, etc. Democrats are simply not conversant with some of the most important liberal issues of the day: Peak Oil, economic contraction, and ecological collapse. Again, they talk a good game about Green Jobs, Green This and Green That -- but this is just a thin overlay, sitting on top of a stupendously conservative base ideology. They still subscribe to quaint ideas like full employment, economic growth, and maximum consumption. They expect housing values to 'recover' and everyone to go back to business as usual. All we need is some more stimulus, or a jobs program, or whatever. And actually, in the recent debt ceiling debate, Dems are moving closer and closer to the austerity-minded conservatives anyway, making the fake comparison of the government to a household, and how we all need to tighten our belts, etc. Again, no semblance of truth in these ramblings. It's just more of the same: political gamesmanship and relentless spin, more geared to raising money and winning elections.

So we're left with a summer of untruths, and with the slim hope that some cut-and-paste compromise will keep the bond vigilantes at bay for another couple years, while the country swirls slowly down the drain.

The Republic continues to hang by a few tenuous threads. As the corporate-based economy continues its insulated 'recovery,' the rest of us muddle through with depressed wages, cratered home values, uncertain career paths, and general free-floating national nausea. In a telling sign of the gulf that exists between the controllers of business and their salaried minions, the most recent Deloitte CFO Survey indicated that corporate chieftains are optimistic about the future, but do not plan on adding significant employee headcounts until revenue gains of 20% are realized.

What does this mean? It means that the incredible upward concentration of wealth has afforded big business a lot of breathing room to weather hard times. Let's remember that the economy has trebled since 1980, but regular households are in the exact same spot as they were in that first year of the Reagan ascendancy. The loot has moved upwards, Gilded Age style, and for a while, the cloud lords allowed the unwashed to purchase a piece of the dream via extra household breadwinners, maxed-out plastic, and cartoon-valued McMansions.

But that overleveraged fantasy is now toast, and large companies have reeled in that portion of the red carpet that used to roll out of the luxury boxes into the slob-strewn mezzanine. Big Bid'ness doesn't need to prop up domestic employment or demand any further than is absolutely necessary to turn a healthy profit. And in today's world of globalized production, large labor surpluses, and tax-haven stashing of cash, the masters of the productive universe are plenty satisfied with the way things are now. And let's not forget that high-flying Wall Street finance, the prime mover of the recent collapse, has emerged virtually unscathed and pure of heart, occupying around 30% of the economic landscape while actually contrubuting less than 10% to overall national productive value.

Ironically, as I covered in my last post, the blame for the Great Recession has now been slight-of-handed off of free-wheeling, unregulated finance, and onto the very central government that prevented full-scale collapse. In this revisionist interpretation, the quick recovery of large corporations is ample evidence of the general health of the business world vis-a-vis Big Gub'Mint. In reality, of course, the horrid federal government pulled the 'business community's' nuts out of the thresher with bailouts, buyouts, trillions in discount-window money, and every other manner of subsidy and tax incentive. The toxic waste and future risk created by the reckless private sphere were sucked up into the federal maw, and then laid at the feet of the American taxpayer, rotting and diseased.

This is the background against which Paul Ryan and President Obama are now playing chicken with their alternate budget proposals. Each side engages in Kabuki finance, pretending that their 10 or 12 or 30-year plans are really something more that just annual placeholder shots in the dark. I've always had a hard time understanding why our national politicians are continually putting forth these long-range scenarios, when it is obvious that every Congress and Administration starts from scratch with a new vision anyway. So what's the point? It is as if every President and Congressional leader has to create the temporary illusion that they are more than just a rented lackey for the permanent Washington power structure. They need to delude themselves that they are more long-lasting than the armies of lobbyists and thinktankers who swarm the Hill decade after decade. So lofty prognostications are made about America in 2050, and about how awesome it will be in that future decade, if we can just enact the benificent budget under consideration. It's all bullshit.

So now we're in one of those narrative dead ends, where each party is squirming around in the same ideological cocoon, selling us the tired shtick that their opponents are so obviously wrong about everything. We've got Paul Ryan and other Republicans pounding the lectern with their 'seriousness,' promising everyone that this time, finally, they will be the ones to succeed in shrinking government, cutting spending, and returning Ayn Randian producers back to their lofty perch. Memo to these GOP true believers: the 'producers' already control everything, and they get plenty of juicy pulp out of the 'parasites' with the current status quo. 

On the 'other side,' Obama and the pseudoliberals promise that their seriousness is the real McCoy. See how 'the economy' is already getting better? That must mean that the adult policies of the current administration are working their magic, even if the bulk of us workers are mired in a perennial state of lagging indicator-ness. 

Nothing good will come out of the current budget battles. Sure, we'll probably get some 11th hour compromise, and each side will be able to posture as the mature ones who softened their hard stances to save Grannie Pureheart from losing her prescription for restless brain syndrome. The conflict will provide a built-in excuse for straying from ideological purity, as well as a rallying cry for raising lots of lucre for the next round of electoral horseraces.

What is also likely, however, is that we'll get a significant rightward movement in the makeup of the federal budget. It will probably not actually shrink very much, because that is not really anyone's goal. But the money will slosh away from social insurance (stupidly and Orwellianly mislabeled 'entitlements') and more toward straight-up pork for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and Wall Street necromancers. After all, if the John Galts of the world are to be convinced to stay and save us puny, parasitical wage-slaves, we'll have to shovel as much cash as we can into their awesomely-righteous endeavors.    

  

 

First out of the gate, check out this fantastic piece in the Nation, "Beyond Austerity." The author, William Mitchell, does a really nice job of traversing the broad range of issues involved with government austerity policies: fiat currencies, inflation, credit crunches, the fallacy of 'crowding out,' and more. I haven't seen the Fiscal Stimulus vs. Neoliberal Monetarism clash described better than this.

Sorry for the delay in posting -- been a busy year so far. Well, not so much busy as just covered with endless layers of snow and ice. The mid-winter doldrums are in full force, and I find myself looking at tropical vacation prices on Expedia for a couple hours a day.

OK, let's get to it. Before we get to all that positive stuff that I was promising a couple posts ago, we should look at all of the deficit busting stuff that's swirling around out there. Now that we have a wonderful mixed government, 'working together' has become the mantra of the major parties. So Obama pays a visit to the US Chamber of Commerce, to soothe the sensitive nerves of the country's plutocrats. And Speaker SprayTan is suddenly impressed with the Socialist President's willingness to roll up his sleeves and tackle the 'tough choices' of government waste.

The news cycle pundit winds are carrying the public discussion towards these general themes: cutting spending, tackling 'entitlements,' reigning in public unions and pensions, and dismantling Obamacare. As usual, the dreaded albatrosses of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are tossed about as the biggest threats to our future. I saw some GOP knucklehead bragging about the pie chart that he was handing out to freshmen Congressional reps, showing how these dreaded entitlement programs were going to drag down the entire national budget within a few years. Of course, aside from Ron Paul, Joe Scarborough, and the usual raft of lefties, very little is said about our military entitlement programs, which guarantee to private contractors endless no-bid contracts, occupation-industrial dollars, and virtually no fiscal oversight.

Obviously, government budgets are in trouble at almost every level. The federal government is running a large debt. States, many of which cannot legally run deficits, are slashing everything in sight, demonizing public unions in the process, as if their legal, signed contracts are now somehow greedy graft. Localities are struggling to keep cops, teachers, and firefighters employed. And I would imagine that the pothole-to-pristine pavement ratio is the worst that it has been in decades.

So what's really going on with government spending? Don't we need to tighten belts everywhere? Do we need to raise the retirement age to 80?

First, let's look at federal spending as a share of US GDP, for the last hundred years or so.


Obviously, the relative size of the federal government has been slowly growing, as compared to the entire US economy. And yes, we do see a spike in the last few years. But much of that surge has been, well -- the actual surge. We have probably spent, conservatively, $1.2 trillion on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan -- and it doesn't look like we're rushing out of either place any time soon. In a global context, the US represents around half of the world's military spending.

Even so, the size of the US government as a share of GDP is not outlandish, in comparison to other countries, industrialized or otherwise. We're essentially in the middle of the pack, spending more than African countries, South American nations, and Japan, but less than most of the European social democracies. But of course, it's the increasing debt that is really the problem, as we're hearing all over the place now. Here is the history of the US deficit, again as a share of GDP:




Again, we see an uncomfortable uptick in the last 10 years or so, and likely an undeserved projections of a decline over the next few years.

So we've got a slowly growing federal sector, and an accompanying federal deficit to go along with it. Why? Well, we've obviously hit a rough patch for tax revenues. But in general, federal revenues are also growing along with the spending. They're just not growing at the same rate:



Notice the significant trough that appears with the Great Recession. Not a surprise. Less growth, less tax revenue. But the government cannot contract with the lost revenue, as contracts and commitments must be honored through time. Thus the deficits and burgeoning federal debt.

As far as how to fix the deficit and reduce the national debt, I really don't have a horse in the race. In general, I think that the federal government should, and will, shrink. Long-term unemployment and underemployment will completely restructure the labor market for good, and the 'natural' rate will probably settle in the 10% range. That's the official number. The real ratio, including discouraged workers and people in the prison system, will probably settle in around 20 to 25% -- for a long time. It will eventually dawn on us that this huge swath of people is not just lazy or under-trained. Rather, the nature of technology and production will simply make full-scale employment an untenable basis on which to construct our social, cultural, and economic institutions.

We really do need to start shrinking all aspects of federal spending, using the concept of subsidiarity: that is, functions should be performed at the smallest level possible, while still preserving efficiency. But if the direct financial size of government shrinks, the legislative, judicial, and regulatory functioning needs to become much more creative and bold, to preserve some equity and fairness as power is devolved.



 

 

When liberty comes with hands dabbed in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

                                 -- Oscar Wilde

But I say to you -- love your enemies, bless those cursing you, do good to those hating you, and pray for those accusing you falsely, and persecuting you.

                                -- Jesus (Matthew 5:44)

A couple years ago, I posted a piece called "All the Rage." I posited some reasons why rage seems to have become the leitmotif of American political discourse. I threw out some thoughts on Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart (yes, there is a lot of liberal rage out there too, lefties), but I really didn't get at some of the most important topics. Well, now that I'm so much older and wiser (and wider), I'll take another go at it.

Of course, standard boilerplate entrance to the subject: the crazed, evil murders in Tucson from January 8th, when Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd of people in front of a grocery store, killing 6 and injuring 13 more.

I actually don't have too much to say on this particular subject. I generally agree with the conservative trope, because the shooter was clearly insane. He just as easily could have opened fire on a bunch of nuns or a boy scout troop, had the psychological trigger been slightly different. There's no need to lay the actions of a lunatic at the feet of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. However, I also agree with a couple of the standard liberal takes on the situation: background checks for gun purchasers should be more vigorous; large, semi-automatic clips should be heavily regulated; and the total abandonment of funding for public mental health will inevitably result in more of these catastrophes.

But of course, the real political haymaker coming out of Tucson is the whole issue of "civil public discourse." Even though we can't blame Loughner's actions on watching too many episodes of the O'Reilly Factor, it is certainly fair game to take stock of the lack of compassion and cooperation in our mainstream media and among most of our national leaders. Is all of the name-calling and overblown outrage a major driver of the public's anger? Or is it merely a reflection of the dominant mood of the masses themselves?

In my view, the source of the public's rage is not manufactured. It is real, and is a symptom of other underlying conditions. Rage is a byproduct. It is churned forth from even deeper emotional stirrings: feelings like anxiety, jealousy, impotence, inadequacy, ignorance, etc. In its current public incarnation, I believe that most of the rage comes from one basic fact: while the US economy has roughly doubled since 1980, wages and household income have been virtually flat for the vast majority of our workers. People are working longer and harder, and playing by the rules, and they just keep falling behind. The bubble economy is toast, and people see nothing stretched out in front of them but years of debt servicing, rising prices, and dwindling options for their children.

Into this swamp of discontent wade our two main political parties. Theoretically, it would be great if our leaders could show strength and courage in helping their electors through hard times. You know, Churchill, Roosevelt -- nothing to fear but fear itself -- that kind of stuff. Give us some type of realistic national goal toward which we can aim. Tell us the truth, whether it's comfortable or not, and treat us like adults. 

Unfortunately, in the age of $200 million campaigns, 50-to-1 lobbyist-to-Congressperson ratios, and post-Citizens United fundraising rules, it is impossible to deny any longer that the GOP and the Democrats have become unsalvageable water-carriers for big business. There is only one acceptable sociopolitical worldview left in Washington, albeit with two different hues. There may be different proposed ways to get there, but both parties envision a return to robust economic growth, pro-business trade policies, pro-wealth tax structures, maximum consumption, etc. 

Sure, the parties portray themselves as ideologically opposed. Republicans have recently taken up the Ayn Rand-Grover Nordquist banner, vowing to bring fiscal restraint and spending freezes to the federal government. Sure. And Democrats are painting themselves as the technocratic, adult saviors of the economy, pulling society back from the brink of depression, a situation that was caused by GOP recklessness. 

In reality, reality itself is driving the bus now. The brutal equations of the American Algorithm are tightening their grip on our unsustainable way of life, and the Dems and GOP are surviving by telling just-so stories to fulfill their only remaining functions; which are......raising cash for campaigns, winning elections with those funds, and delivering legislative largesse for the largest donors (see my Midterm Post-Mortem for more details). 

In this electioneering context, we can see that the two major parties have taken a dangerous gamble by harnessing free-floating public anxiety over the economy, and turning it into campaign rage. Instead of looking at the big picture of our myriad predicaments, and making some stab at an overarching plan to put America on a truly sustainable path, both the GOP and the Dems are content with demonizing the opposition and blaming them for obstructing the true path of righteous recovery. The key here is that neither policy program can really work. The John Galt, starve-the-beast dream and the glittering, green progresso-topia are both impossible to fulfill, given the ratios of labor to technology to ecological collapse. 

Sure, we'll likely get smaller government and a greener economy -- but this will happen on the planet's terms, by default, and not by some super-heroic ideological wunder-platform. But for fundraising and publicity purposes, this is not a good story for our political machines to admit. Instead, the non-functionality of their policies needs to be explained via obstruction and sabotage from the other side. 'If only those d-bags would stop blocking everything, we'd already have XYZ by now.' In this respect, I would imagine that both Obama and the GOP are actually relieved to have a split Congress. Now, as conditions for ordinary Americans continue to deteriorate, even amidst the thriving of the plutocracy, each side can throw up their hands at the intractability of partisan politics and obstruction. This is indeed a dangerous game to play, and public rage will just continue to build.

As infuriating as the above scenario is, it's hard to really blame our major parties for the quagmire. Sure, each side is playing us for fools; but there are long trends at work here. The Dems and GOP are really only fulfilling the destiny laid down by American political evolution. If we really want our major parties to function differently, then we would need to make huge changes in electoral structure (proportional representation), electoral machinery (instant runoff voting), campaign finance reform (full public funding of elections), and legal definitions of corporations (limiting Bill of Rights protections to natural persons). If changes like that are not made, then the parties will continue to function as they do.

The final piece of the puzzle in our discussion of public rage is the punditocracy. We're talking here about the Rush Limbaughs, the Keith Olbermanns, the Sean Hannitys, and even the Jon Stewarts. Of course, there is a broad spectrum of tactics and outlook here, from long hours of redundant talk radio time to tightly-crafted sketch comedy. But the key common denominator is the fusion of entertainment, politics, and education. 'Now wait a minute,' you might say. 'I get the entertainment and the politics, but what's the deal with education?' 

The educational component is really key to unlocking the rage-increasing potential of punditry. We all know the discouraging calculus of the entertainification of politics: shorter and shorter sound-bites, the rise of confrontational styles to boost ratings, the blind spots when it comes to critiquing advertisers, the general business-friendly avoidance of pro-union or anti-consumerism material, the horse-race mentality of election coverage with its perennial jerking off of the swing voter. The list goes on.

But in the world of pundits specifically, there has been this fascinating turn to teaching and education, a portrayal of opponents as ignorant, and of oneself as enlightened and 'in the know.' Think of Glenn Beck's blackboards; or Sarah Palin's smirking superiority over the wisdom of the common man; or Keith Olbermann's bloviating attempts at reincarnating the weight of Edward R. Murrow; or Rachel Maddow's highly-cultivated wonkishness. Not content to simply be news readers and entertainers, our pundits are now our digital professors, conducting seminars on the Constitution, or health care legislation, or the true mind of John and Jane Q Public. And the books -- god, they turn out a lot of books.

So what gives? Why are pundits not satisfied with calling the other side a bunch of big fat idiots any more? Why the turn to chalkboards and pie charts? There's a couple things going on here. First is the desensitization of the viewing public to conflict and spectacle. Sure, berating the bozos on the other side of the aisle is fun at first. But eventually, it gets old. After all, talk radio and cable news are not as inherently-entertaining as other cultural artifacts. People who like conflict and confrontation can find a lot more inspiring stuff in sports, daytime drama, American Idol, blockbuster movies, Survivor, and the like. You can only call Obama a socialist so many times before the listener says, 'OK, I get it -- now what? What else you got for me?' 

The second, and more important, phenomenon is that pundits suffer from the same ideological impotence as our two major parties, as described above. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann suffer from the same  kind of narrative defect, largely because they are themselves part of that same electioneering-industrial complex that exists only to fuel the horserace. In this sense, the pundits turn to education is both a mirror image of, and a direct conduit into, the political partisan strategy of blaming the other side for obstruction. In Washington, there is too much professional decorum to actually accuse your opponents of being stupid, but that same restriction does not apply in the punditocracy.

Because the audience for punditry has no official legislative responsibilities themselves, beyond voting, the educational project also serves as a kind of secular calling. People who think that their opponents are not just wrong, but also ignorant, can take up the cross of righteous pedagogy. This is especially evident in the Tea Party, a wide-ranging movement of cranks, patriots, and Medicare-dependent boomers, united perhaps only by the belief that they have the most direct intellectual link to the founding fathers, and are thus responsible for educating the ignorant liberal classes about the true meaning of America.

In a very real sense, this faux-educational harnessing of American free-floating rage is perhaps the most dangerous development of all, with regards to the possibility of civil public discourse. Why? First, because it completely destroys the real importance of intellectual training. Sure, people may get information from Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow. They may get a lot of it. But what is the overall context for that information? True education is a grueling endeavor, a lifelong project. Beyond just childhood schooling and college, which themselves must be of high quality (and mostly aren't), real intellectual development in adulthood requires some very specific commitments. People need to approach learning with a totally open mind, especially when it comes to physical and social sciences. Contradictory material and results cannot just be swept under the rug. Diverse data need to be incorporated into malleable models of reality. One has to be forever willing to change one's viewpoint, based on new experiences or information. True education requires setting aside large blocs of time, to ingest a significant volume of stuff, like books and journals and lectures. And perhaps most of all, a proper education spawns, (gasp), a more tolerant view of diversity. As one learns more, the intellectual tent gets bigger.

None of these facets of education are fed by the fake teaching-stylings of the pundits. And in fact, the opposite things usually happen: interaction becomes more course, minds become narrowed, time for understanding opposing parties dwindles to nil. Smugness is augmented to ridiculous proportions, as intellectual wannabes pretend that their 10-minute chalkboard seminar on the religious leanings of James Madison has transformed them into a virtual 10th Justice of the Supreme Court. The frustrations over having a shitty job, an underwater mortgage, and a halved 401K are salved by feelings of moral superiority over those poindexters from Cambridge. As Quint said to Hooper, "Well, it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don't have the education enough to admit when you're wrong."

If we really want some type of education on the problems we're facing in this country, we had better not look to our corporate politicians, or to their remora-like appendages, the suddenly-professorial pundits. We're going to need a lot more intellectual heft and boldness in our policy prescriptions than this cohort can deliver. 

 

Last time, I made a pledge to look at things in a more positive, constructive light in 2011. Instead of constantly harping on unemployment, economic contraction, political corruption, and other bread-nuts of awfulness, why not examine some of the good things that are actually happening out there? After all, there's gotta be something positive going on somewhere, right?

OK, OK, I know -- that title is just ridiculously sensational, but I couldn't resist. It's got a good ring to it, though, doesn't it? 

Last time, we looked at how the emerging Tea Party movement will likely make a large impact on federal policy in the upcoming years. As the economy continues its 'jobless recovery,' the stark disparity between what is good for Big Business and what is good for regular people will become more undeniable. The Republican establishment will finally find itself unable to co-opt the rage of the conservative base, and the resulting outcry for a downsized federal government will gather momentum. Ayn Rand will continue her unwarranted return to prominence, as politicians of all stripes ride the Tea Party waves of unrest, and calls for cutting off the parasites and leeches will become louder and shriller. Unfortunately, if the political winds carry us towards this John Galt style of downsizing, the results will be gruesome, and the American experiment will quickly be rent asunder.

So what looks like a common sense middle ground alternative to partisan extremism is in actuality a dangerous radicalism itself. The irrational desire for theological laissez-faire to be true, regardless of what economic history and experience actually demonstrate, is likely to result in pathological scapegoating and pretzelish rationalization, as the hoped-for capitalist utopia fails to materialize. A crueller culture will surely emerge, with the swelling poor (the former middle-class) having to find new ways of eking out an existence, cobbling together spotty official employment and black-economy enterprises. The Ayn Rand set will surely say that this pain is just transitional, as wide swaths of over-dependent Americans get weaned off of their socialist laziness.

As we have seen many times on this blog, you could drive a tractor trailer through the blind spot in this type of conservative thinking. The idea that Big Government is on one side, hampering the entrepreneurial activities of righteous businesses (of all sizes) on the other side, is utter nonsense. Big Government and Big Business have essentially fused, and have designed an all-encompassing system that rewards and consolidates their own bigness. To think that shrinking down the federal government will somehow fix the problem of concentrated private power is the highest level of delusion. The corporate power-set will find ways to preserve its position, regardless of the explicit 'size' of the government itself. Tea Party downsizing will not in and of itself reignite a broader spread of resources.

That being said, I do think that we are headed for profound downscaling in our economy and society. Government at all levels must shrink, as will most other arenas of centralized power. In this sense, our ways of organizing will become more medieval and dispersed, and the local community will take center stage in the next American chapter. Readers can peruse other pieces in this blog (especially the posts on Community Living) for a fuller picture of what these arrangements might look like.

But the question for this series of posts is: In the present Tea Party moment, when all of the momentum is towards downsizing, what should liberals propose as the proper role of the federal government? Right now, Obama and other Dems are really lost at sea. They're taking a huge gamble that the return of economic growth will (shit, must) eventually trickle down to the hiring process and get people back to work. In short, they're desperately clinging to the notion that the current recession is just another chapter in the normal business cycle. Sure, it's a bad one, and a long one, and is the result of some disastous policy trends. But certainly, if that Holy Grail indicator of GDP continues to nudge upwards, how can the labor markets and our global partners/competitors not respond in a positive way? After all, almost everyone, even China, wants the US to return to full economic health, so that global inventories will have someplace to go.

It is only in this light that Obama's seeming wishy-washiness makes sense, especially on the issue of the Bush-era tax cuts. As this past week demonstrated, it's starting to look like the Dems will acquiesce on these cuts altogether, extending them for everyone for at least a couple years. Sure, they know that this will blow a huge hole in the budget. But I think that they're so convinced that economic growth will finally spark job creation that they are willing to take the tax cut hit because they think that overall revenues will rise as 'the recovery' takes hold. Then of course, they will ride the tide of economic rejuvenation to electoral triumph in 2012, despite all the Republican obstruction.

A dangerous gamble, and I'm fairly sure it will fail. We just had a horrific November jobs report --job creation was anemic, and the baseline unemployment rate went back up to 9.8%. And perhaps even more telling, almost 42% of the unemployed, a full 6.3 million people, are long-term -- that is, they have been out of work for over 27 weeks. What we're seeing is that corporations and other large businesses, especially banks and financial companies (gee, how did that happen?), are able to do perfectly well without rehiring at significant levels. This seems to portend a long future of scaled-back labor ratios, a full-blown rearrangement of work within our culture and economy.

So what should liberals be looking at for policy recommendations? What is realistic in today's political landscape? Well certainly, pleadings of Paul Krugman notwithstanding, more stimulus is off the table. That ship has sailed, and things would have to get to Depression-Era desperation levels for another significant stimulus package to happen. And even then, who knows? Also, as we're seeing, significant tax increases on the wealthy and on large corporations are not going to happen either. Let's keep in mind that almost everything that everyone talks about with regards to this crisis would be utterly moot if the United States was willing to engage in so-called 'class warfare' and tax the super-rich at rates that make sense. If the wealthy and powerful were taxed at levels that even remotely correspond to the value that they take out of the national economy, then we'd be fine. But of course, the main result of the federal government's capture by corporate America is that tax and business law is explicitly written to shunt money upwards. It's just not conceivable that all of this pro-corporate legislation will be scrapped by the very politicians who continually surf the waves of corporate cash into office year after year.

So with stimulus and tax hikes off the table, what's left for liberals to espouse? A difficult question to be sure, and I'm certainly not qualified to answer fully, being a layman. But here are some ideas:

• Push for military downsizing: Dems should capitalize on the government waste theme and extend it to the bloated military. Dig up all of the relevant global stats on the ridiculously outsized US military footprint, and pound it home that shrinking this down is the responsible thing to do. Dems should team up with Republican allies like Ron Paul to add bipartisan credibility to this endeavor. I don't think that liberals will find a more conducive time to get this message across.
• Get tough with the Fed: the Federal Reserve contributed plenty to the current crisis, especially with Alan Greenspan's refusal to see the housing bubble for what it was. Anti-Fed sentiment is currently high, but the Fed certainly isn't going to be abolished any time soon. So Obama and leaders from both parties of Congress should make it clear that the Fed needs to start taking action to get more money into the hands of local banks and businesses. How can they do this? I really don't know. But clearly, the Fed's flooding of the big banks and investment companies with cash is not resulting in this money filtering down to borrowers at the local level. Our politicians should play hardball with the Fed, and demand that money be directly loaned to local credit unions, thrifts, and other small-scale financing organizations. The public already sees the Fed as a kind of secretive arm of Wall Street. Dems and Republicans should threaten to turn the Fed loose to the dogs of popular rage unless their policy path is altered to aid the struggling masses.
• Pass Real Mortgage Relief: The current Republican script is calling for everyone to sacrifice for the health of the American economy (of course, in my cynical opinion, they really don't mean this. When they say 'everyone,' they don't actually mean the rich and powerful. They only mean the 'everyone' who did something wrong in their eyes, like taking out a bigger mortgages than they could afford, or applying for a ninth credit card to pay for groceries). But taking them at their word, let's say that they really do mean that everyone should sacrifice. Well then, banks need to take a hit and repeg their mortgage holdings to existing property values. Yah, I know that this would result in massive losses for the banks, and they would throw everything they have at stopping it. And Republicans could likely play it off as class warfare or some other gobbledegook. That's why the Dems should aggressively push it as a proposal to restructure all outstanding mortgages, not just for people in trouble. One of the biggest talking points of the Tea Party and its followers is that good, upstanding taxpayers are footing the bill for the deadbeats (think of the ubiquitous HONK IF I'M PAYING YOUR MORTGAGE bumper stickers). That's why this mortgage restructuring should be pitched as something for everyone, paid for by the irresponsible and reckless Wall Street banks that got us in trouble in the first place. And as an added gain, the banks writing down their mortgages could recoup their losses by a program of staggered federal tax cuts. This would have the added rhetorical bonus of fitting in with the overall Tea Party tax-cutting program. Again, is this likely to happen? No, but Dems could make real hay  with it in the eyes of the public, and might be able to at least leverage a different, lesser deal.
• Beef Up the Small Business Administration: Public discourse in the age of the Tea Party is all about small businesses. They are praised as the biggest job creators, as the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the nation, and as the incubator of the crucial American values of hard work and sacrifice. Is some of this overblown? Of course. Most small businesses fail, not due to draconian federal taxation, but simply because they are poorly run. Or they're just bad ideas in the first place. But in any case, the exaltation of small business will continue, and liberals should take advantage of this opportunity by explicitly calling for the transfer of government largesse from Big Business to Small Business. In other words, join in with the Tea Party crowd in highlighting the massive troughs of pork and subsidy that go to prop up large corporations. Make a specific plea for these subsidies to be cut in half, with the remaining being shunted directly to the Small Business Administration, to help local companies thrive. This should be paired with the above point on pushing the Fed to aid small business. Again, this might be portrayed as class warfare by some, but if Dems continually point out the qualitative difference between Big and Small business, then they should be inoculated.
• Empty the Prisons: Say what? Yah, I know, it's weird. But the true unemployment rate of the United States is masked by the steady rise in the proportion of our citizens who are incarcerated (we're currently the world leader in imprisonment). As mentioned many times in this blog, our prisons are largely dumping grounds for the economically superfluous. If you include even a conservative estimate of the economically-imprisoned, then we're really looking at a full unemployment rate of close to 20%. Dems should put a full-court press on portraying our prisons as massive government waste, as corporate subsidy through non-conventional channels. Pound home that these people need to be returned to the wider society so that they can contribute economically, instead of being a drain. And in the spirit of paying for every spending proposal, Dems should take existing prison budgets and come up with a five-year plan to move 75% of that money to creating bridge programs for getting convicts back into the mainstream. And again, these programs could be dovetailed with the small business initiatives above.
• Massive National Zoning and Rent-Law Changes: Think of the condition of many of our cities and towns. They are hollowed out, with empty houses and storefronts everywhere. In Detroit, large sections of the city are abandoned completely, returning to scrub grass and wild sumac. With the disappearance of our manufacturing and farming cultures, the socioeconomic infrastructure that went along with these ways of life is all but gone. But our laws surrounding land usage and zoning have essentially stayed the same, so that it has somehow become, surreally, more lucrative to leave land and lots empty, instead of lowering rents to get tenants in. In almost every case, the landowner or landlord can make more money from depreciation tax breaks than from simply lowering the price. This becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop that spreads disuse and neglect to entire regions. And before you know it, there's a development dead zone, and nothing can be brought back at all, even if there were some demand. This needs to change, and it could be changed, relatively cheaply. Washington should work with states to craft unified policies on land use, wielding eminent domain to get their programs enforced. Unused land, lots, and buildings should be turned loose to public lottery if improvements go unmade, or if property sits vacant for a relatively short period of time. Regular citizens should be able to win these properties (paying small, nominal processing fees), and then they should be hooked into the small business programs mentioned above to help them occupy the new areas in an economically-viable way.

Well, that's enough for now. But you get the drift. Democrats need to find a way to harness the rising popular desire for downsizing, tax cutting, and budget busting. They just need to turn the smaller pools of money toward endeavors that actually stand a chance of helping people, instead of just throwing them on the pyre of Ayn Randian insanity. At every step, Dems should work with sympathetic conservatives, including Tea Partiers, to get real proposals on the table. And Dems should be ready to plead their case in every public forum possible, showing how they have a true decentralizing agenda that will work. Liberals should portray themselves as the smart devolvers, with things of real value to contribute to the one-sided Tea Party platform.
 
Of course, this will necessitate Obama and his buddies finally giving up the idea that economic growth will someday magically kick in and return us to the former life of full employment and maximum consumption. That truly is a Utopia, in that it exists nowhere.  

 

Last time, we looked at the problem with this emerging trope: 'Americans are tired of conservative and liberal extremism, and they're looking for the Common Sense Middle Ground.' We saw that this is really an electioneering ploy by the two major political parties, which have no remaining purpose other than running campaigns and delivering quid pro quo largesse for large donors. The common sense middle ground myth is a convenient cover story for supposed partisan gridlock, when in actuality our federal politicians constitute a brutally-efficient machine for shunting money and power upwards to our Gilded Age power elite. And finally, we touched on how this idea that the two major parties have become polarized by extremism (when really they are in lockstep on the main policy imperatives of economic growth, full employment, and maximum consumption) is a distraction from a more important potential divide: Ayn Randian, Tea Party dystopianism vs. a yet-to-be-fully-articulated approach to purposeful, community-centered decentralism.

The winds of the Long Emergency are picking up strength, and an array of historical trends will soon impose a much more austere, limited future for us. And in these circumstances, what is decidedly not needed is a more cautious, middle-of-the-road approach. We really do need to break out of the bi-partisan consensus on what constitutes economic recovery, in favor of a much more radical, 'extremist' approach to our predicament. The big question is whether we will steer towards a John Galtish dream for a simple laissez-faire utopia that can never exist in reality, or towards something that makes more sense, given the conditions that are likely to exist on the ground. So let's get at it.

In January, the victorious Tea Partiers from the mid-terms will assume a high-profile position of power in the new Congress. Even though they will have to work with 'establishment Republicans,' the general drift of the American populace towards Tea Party sentiment ensures that these new Congressmen and Congresswomen will get more media attention than they deserve and a non-proportional share of political power. As many on the Left have pointed out, this might create a conundrum for the Republican power-brokers. How can the GOP harness the rhetorical popularity of the Tea Party, but not get swept up in the actual consequences of their program, which would strip down the federal government and likely lead to a lot more economic misery? Let's remember, as the Republican Young Gun Eric Cantor admits, recent history demonstrates that the GOP under Dubya was just as willing to swell the size of the federal budget as were the Dems. So how do establishment Republicans accustomed to swollen rivers of federal cash adjust to the Tea Party push for smaller government? Will the Tea Partiers just get co-opted by the entrenched system of lobbyists and graft, and get with the program? Will downsizing and deficit-cutting fervor get swept aside by the practical exigencies of reelection fundraising and the complexities of navigating the corporate-owned halls of Congress?

I don't think so. The Tea Party has more momentum than most people might think, and as economic conditions continue to stagnate and deteriorate, their platform of grievance will resonate even more. And sure, the Tea Party might be a scattershot collection of sprawling, unconnected organizations; but that is certainly only temporary. I think that the new Tea Party contingent in Congress will actually fuse with the establishment GOP structure, and the result will be a solid, purposeful drive towards an Ayn Randian program of tax cuts, deficit reduction, social insurance gutting, and general government downsizing.

How will this happen, when the results will almost certainly be increased unemployment, accelerated home foreclosures, surging poverty, and a basic collapse of middle class economic security? How can the GOP actually spin the privatization of Social Security, the dismantling of Obamacare (I don't see any way that Obama's medical plan survives the new conservative arrangement of public opinion), and the cascading collapse of government services at all levels, as every tax base fizzles in a relentless feedback loop of decline?

I think it happens through an Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged' rationalization narrative. Say what? What does a sprawling, 1950s-era dystopian novel have to do with our current situation? Quite a lot, I think. First, a quick recap of 'Atlas Shrugged' (for a longer treatment, check out my old post, "The Capitalist Rapture"). In a quasi, near-future America, the heroic John Galt, an unbelievably brilliant, handsome, industrious, and charismatic businessman, sets up a secret utopian community in the mountains of Colorado, and begins luring other great businessmen away from mainstream society to come live in his capitalist Eden. He does this because the wider American scene has become corrupt and irrevocably-spoiled, thanks to a huge socialist government. All of the successful captains of industry, the true masters of the universe, are being bankrupted by the unproductive leeches of need. The true motor of the world, in Rand's telling, is rational, self-interested, creative production. The enemy is the meddling complex of Big Government: force, need, and the tyranny of mysticism. John Galt, after heroically trying to make the world see the folly of interference with individual agency, finally gives up on the whole rotten parasitical thing, picks up his marbles, and retreats to his mountain lair, where he and his awesomely-righteous brethren will rebuild society after the wider American landscape goes to hell and collapses.

Now in my view (see link above to the full treatment), "Atlas Shrugged," which Rand called her most important work (after its completion, she stopped writing novels, and turned to the role of public philosopher), is staggeringly mediocre, and is riddled with historical ignorance and philosophical naivete. She vastly overestimates the novelty and importance of her own ideas, but she tries to make up for it by endless repetition of the same simplistic, banal concepts.

But surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, some of our mainstream political leaders actually find value in Rand's formulation, and truly believe that it is a valid, useful depiction of how the American future will unfold. Alan Greenspan has been the highest-profile disciple of Rand, but Clarence Thomas is also an admirer, and her novels continue to rank high on many lists of the world's most important literature.

Amongst the Tea Party set, Ron Paul and Young Gun Paul Ryan are even more relevant Rand Fans. Ryan especially, as a significant power-broker in Congress, is instructive (he's the probable new Chairman of the House Budget committee). He sees the ultimate battle in America as one of Individualism vs. Collectivism, and the latter has polluted government and society to such an extent that it will take decades to purge the system. Ryan wants to exorcize this collectivist poison by privatizing Social Security, changing Medicare to a private voucher program, and freezing all non-military federal spending. Ryan sees this project as taking decades, and as ultimately very painful. But that is the John Galtian price to pay for building a society based on looting the productive for the benefit of the parasitical.

As I noted in my longer treatment of "Atlas Shrugged," there is a strong element of apocalyptic rapture thinking in Rand's formulation, a la the "Left Behind" books. The idea of a small, righteous remnant, persecuted by the lazy and sinful, percolates all through this movement. When confronted with the messy maelstrom that is typical of a huge national conglomerate of 300 million people, there is a powerful temptation to cut through all complexity by retreating to a comfortable ideology, wherein the masses will crash and burn, and ultimately, magically 'go away.' And those that are left will reinhabit the planet in a righteous, spotless way.

Now of course, Randian disciples cannot so openly fuse rapture thinking and John Galt schaudenfraude over societal collapse. Practical politicians cannot hope for the absolute pauperization or straight-up elimination of the parasitical masses. So they ultimately must rationalize the pain that will come out of systematic dismantling of the welfare-state as just a necessary bridge to a more mature, fulfilling future. Once we come out on the other side, stripped of our dependence on collectivist boondoggles, we will morph into an economy of powerful, productive, rational citizens. We won't be able to look for handouts and giveaways any more, so we'll have to sink or swim by our own sweat and brainpower.

This is how I think the Tea Party dismantling of the non-military side of the federal budget will unfold: as a necessarily-painful process that will transition us from collectivist dependence on leeching government giveaways to a more 'American' economy of sleeve up-rolling and gumption-packed bootstrapping.

Of course, this prescription will be disastrous, because the diagnosis is wrong. But as the economy continues its decline for regular people (as opposed to corporate profits, which are already recovered to high levels), it will be harder and harder for establishment pols to hold off the sea change of opinion for deficit reduction, tax breaks, and government downsizing. Unfortunately, there will be no capitalist Shangri-La on the other side of this purging of collectivist structures. Heroic, entrepreneurial individuals have never been the story behind capitalism or economic growth, and they won't be the future foundation for a laissez-faire American Atlantis. But in order to counter this drift towards Ayn Randian apocalypse, we will need an equally 'extremist' interpretation of our own, one that goes far beyond the irrational desire for a return to a hyper-consumptive 'normal.' We'll need to recognize the decentralizing trends that are ultimately unavoidable, crafting another vision for life after bloated central governance.

Next Time -- Part 3: Waxing Medieval.

I was watching "Morning Joe" the other day (great show, by the way -- lots of great guests from across the ideological gamut -- one of the few talking-head shows that has actual liberals), and Joe Scarborough kept hewing to this theme of the common sense middle ground. The idea here is that the American people are tired of ideological extremes, and want sensible, responsible decisions from the center (or the center-right, in Scarborough's take). This trope is also starting to be picked up as a Republican talking point, under the banner of this language: "it's time to start having an adult discussion about the country's problems." 

"Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all."

--  Hooper (Jaws, 1975)


Just because there doesn't seem to be anyone else doing any post-election analysis, I guess it falls to me to interpret what happened. Man, I wish those lazy pundits would pay attention to elections once in a while. Not a peep out of 'em. It's like the Mid-Terms never happened.

OK, enough with the lame jokes (you can see why I don't make a living as a comedy writer). On to what actually went down on Tuesday (and beyond, for some of the closer races).

First and most obviously, Tuesday was a repudiation of something. But of what? Was it liberalism in general that was rejected? Or just incumbents? Or maybe the "socialist" Obama agenda? Or was it just one giant, steaming pile of "NO" flung at the gates of Washington? Is this a sign that the country is continuing its sensible, rightward tack, finally giving up on the utopian dreams of FDR and the flower children? Or are the people just so pissed with everything coming out of our capitol that they will simply vote for anything that seems different, and against anything that smacks of the familiar?

Liberal analysts will point to several rationalizing/hopeful factors to sidestep the notion that the country is rejecting Lefty-ism. Sitting presidents always lose seats in the mid-terms. Sure, Obama's party did much worse than usual, but economic conditions on the ground were more to blame than anything policy-wise. To wit, the actual approval rating of the GOP (24%) is worse than the ratings for Obama and even the Democratic party. On the ideological side of things, the Progressive Caucus in the House actually did very well (only 3 out of 80 seats lost), unlike the compromising Blue Dogs, who got sliced in half. This allegedly shows that Democrats would be better off veering left, not right, to actually present some kind of coherent alternative to the GOP.

All of these justifications and explanations from the left do make some sense. But it's also hard to ignore that voters went for Republicans at every level. The GOP picked up 11 governorships, and also gained control of more state legislatures than at any point since 1928. And this bodes doubly-ill for Democrats, as we're heading into the Congressional re-districting phase, which should lock in more GOP dominance for the next decade.

Even so, it really does seem to me that people were voting with their feelings of economic terror and helplessness, and against all of the circumstances that are strangling the life out of the American spirit, as opposed to any particular party. Americans are saying, "Look, we are totally f'ed, and we're tired of the runaround we're getting from all of our leaders. Just do something to fix this. We don't know what, or how, but just do it." 

Underneath all of this frustration and rage has emerged one single idea, the most important trope of the mid-term elections: Things are economically bad, so we have to tighten our belts and spend less. This idea has many facets, of course. There's the assertion that the housing bubble was caused by spend-happy Dems using Fannie and Freddie to force deadbeats into mortgages they couldn't afford. There's the idea that the TARP and the GM bailout were extravagant and wasteful funnelings of taxpayer money to corrupt and incompetent businesses. Also, the Obamacare monstrosity and the Obama stimulus are seen as taking yet more money from the pockets of regular Joes and transferring it to poor losers and crony-laden local projects. 

Whether or not these interpretations are accurate (they generally are not, in my opinion), they do have the powerful ring of common sense. It is easy to project the finances of an individual or a family onto the national economic scene. 'Hey, I know that I can't spend more than I make forever, so how can the United States do it? Sooner or later, the credit card company cuts me off, so I need to either start making more money, or stop spending what I don't have. Right?' 

This is a powerful analogy, and the Republicans and Tea Partiers especially have wielded it masterfully. Their message to the voters was to throw out the big-spending Dems and restore some fiduciary responsibility to Washington. If the 2010 mid-terms could be summed up in two words, those would be "fiscal conservatism." That's what everyone in the national spotlight wants to be seen as now: a Fiscal Conservative (regardless of one's Social Conservatism or Liberalism).

In another stream of analysis, a la Paul Krugman and other liberal economists, what may be personal financial virtue (living within one's budget) is actually disastrous when writ large on the macro-economic canvas. The common sensibility of belt-tightening will actually tank the economy even further, when all of the large variables come into play: e.g., inflation, international trade, currency valuation, aggregate demand, financial liquidity, etc. 

For these thinkers, shrinking the government is exactly the wrong thing to do at this juncture. Just as with the Great Depression, the country is trapped in a vicious cycle of demand destruction, where people with no money are not buying enough stuff, which causes businesses to lay off more people, which creates more people with no money to buy stuff. In this scenario, the federal government must step in directly to put money in people's wallets via public spending on jobs and infrastructure projects. The key here, in this view, is that fiscal austerity via tax cuts and program cuts will simply put more money in the hands of people who won't spend it: i.e., the already-rich. Tax cut money has a much weaker economic multiplier than stimulus money paid out in the form of wages. And spending cuts, even if virtuous in the long run, are doubly-dangerous in a low-demand landscape, as public sector jobs are lost, and those subsequent unemployed then move to the less-productive side of government spending, unemployment insurance.

So which view is right? Are we to spend or cut our way out of our current morass? This is not the place to debate the merits of Trickle-Down/Austrian economics vs. Keynesianism, mostly because I am not equipped to settle such disputes. But suffice it to say, as I look at it, the American economy has grown like gangbusters for the last four decades, and the proceeds of that growth have undeniable drifted upwards, and not trickled down to the masses. In a globalized economy with transnational corporations moving their assets and profits around at will, the idea that more tax and program cuts will finally and magically make businesses hire American workers for awesomely-compensated jobs seems quaint, at best. As I detailed in last week's post, there is a stubborn myth that a stand-alone entity called "the government" has been taxing and regulating small businesses to death, squelching the creativity of entrepreneurs and the "business community" in general. And of course, this is bunk. The reality is that the federal government, thanks to campaign fundraising laws and electoral structures (winner-take-all formats), has become a hybrid proxy for Big Business, which has diametrically-opposed interests to smaller businesses.

OK, enough of that discussion. I beat those things to death in every post. What will actually happen now that the GOP controls the House? Will we see two years of gridlock, followed by a new President in 2012? Or maybe gridlock and then another round of incumbent purging, with the Dems moving back into the driver's seat? Will the Tea Partiers actually make life uncomfortable for their Republican brethren, forcing more austerity than pork-laden careerists are ready for? Will, God forbid, Obama, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell be able to (gasp) work together to craft some actual solutions for the country that will satisfy, however partially, all parties involved? 

Well, I wouldn't hold my breath. Returning to the Jaws quote at the opening of this post, the analogy of sharks to our two main political parties is apt. Due to many different long-term trends (electoral structure, campaign finance laws, the dominance of TV culture, the rise of partisan, for-profit journalism, the general ignorance and short attention span of the American public, etc.), our national Democratic and Republican parties are now miracles of political evolution: all they do is run campaigns, raise money to fund those campaigns, and then deliver the legislative goods for those who financed the campaigns. And that's all. We never really get the things we hope for from government because our leaders are not in the business of crafting virtuous, public-minded legislation. They are in the business of getting themselves re-elected to deliver rewards to those who pony up to get them re-elected. Every campaign slogan and trope is simply a (usually thinly) veiled message to moneyed benefactors that the public trough will be open for them, in some fashion. The Democratic messaging for federal spending promises contracts for corporations through the front-door (military-industrial complex, anyone?), while the GOP tax cutting winks that profits for corporations will be tucked in the back. Either way, large business entities and their lobbyists will make sure that they win, and regular people lose. That's why large companies hedge their bets and just give money to both parties. That way, they're covered, no matter what happens in any particular cycle.

Of course, the humongous conceit behind both major parties, a myth so profound that no one dare question it, is that economic growth and full-employment are the optimal states to which America can, and will, return. For liberals, this means that our current predicament is just a "liquidity trap," as Krugman calls it. Once consumers can pay down their debt, hopefully helped along by a new round of government stimulus, the salad days of maximum consumption and growth will return. On the conservative side, tax cuts and the shrinkage of the federal government will eventually return money to its appropriate places (families, businesses, and local government), which will then spark the magical alchemy of entrepreneurial, Ayn Randian wealth.

In my opinion, neither of these narrative hopes for a return to "normal" is legitimate. I believe we are heading for a future of much less overall market activity. The global economy of the last few decades has been overwhelmingly built on fraudulent, unfair, and over-leveraged foundations, not to mention the borderline-sociopathic psychology of consumption. We have put economic imperatives ahead of all other considerations, to the epic detriment of our ecologies, our psyches, and our bodies politic. We have created unreal and unreasonable expectations about the nature of economic life, and the ratios of labor to compensation to consumption are simply unsustainable.

There will be no return to a normal, robustly-growing economy, green or otherwise. Our major parties, having become electioneering appendages to big business, do not have, in their very nature, the ability to tell the truth or propose novel approaches to our situation. Return to growth is their only motif, and it is a woefully-inadequate one to the entropy-driven future we're facing. 

So I don't know exactly what will happen in the new Congress. But my guess would be, not much, either way. The way things are structured, sweeping change or sweeping non-change are mostly the same thing, as far as regular folks are concerns. We're hosed, regardless.

 

 

 

 

It's mid-October, and the midterm elections are dominating the airwaves. Tea Party candidates are whuppin' ass in some places, gettin' whupped in other places, and sometimes just holding their own. But the general consensus is that anti-incumbent fever is going to carry the day in November, moving the Congress further right, and perhaps officially red.

"Look...at the seven lessons of school teaching -- confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over this time the training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s, the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle class as well. "

-- John Taylor Gatto
(3-Time New York City & One-Time New York State Teacher of the Year)


With the release of the movies "Waiting for Superman," a documentary film from the director of "An Inconvenient Truth," the country is all abuzz about the education crisis in America. This latest iteration of an old theme has been stoked by various other fuel-logs. NBC is doing an "Education Nation" week of features, highlighting the appalling condition of American pedagogy in comparison to our international competitors. Oprah is running the usual string of inspirational stories (hey, who knew that Tony Danza is now a real, honest to goodness teacher?). Bill and Melinda Gates have been joined in their educational philanthropy by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who is donating $100 million to the Newark public schools.

Of course, if one wanted to be cynical, it could be pointed out that the schools have been "failing" for decades, and that no matter how many times we circle around to cover this 'disaster,' nothing fundamental ever seems to  change. Politicians get to fire up the public on an emotional issue for the next election cycle. Networks get to run a spate of controversial and inspirational stories about overcomers, overachievers, and intrepid system-buckers. And the isolated, usually privatized, success stories get far more attention than they deserve, considering the general impossibility of scaling their approaches to broader levels.

But aside from that cynical stuff, let's look at the major features of the latest education-catastrophe discourse and see what's really in there.

Union Bashing -- "Waiting for Superman" is generally negative in its portrayal of teachers' unions. This dovetails with the general conservative tilt of talk radio and the pro-business mainstream press. All unionization is bad, because it rewards fatcat teachers, cops, and firefighters with bloated pensions, undeserved tenure, bogus overtime rules, etc. What these freeloaders need is market discipline. Let them earn their pay and face the consequences if they get no results. Sounds sensible, right? But really, this has nothing to do with wanting to improve education or hold teachers accountable. It's just flat-out resentment that the tiny remaining sliver of unionized workers (about 7%) has been able to carve out and preserve some decent wages. The whole point of a union is that every single worker shouldn't have to bust their ass all the time just to barely tread water. The owners of capital get to sit on their tushes all the time, making money from credit default swaps, capital gains (now extremely under-taxed), collateralized debt obligations, property rental fees and the like. Why shouldn't unions claw back a little semi-soft cash for the working man and woman? Back when larger portions of American workers were unionized, even just 20 years ago, this would have made sense to more people. But now that we've all been pummeled into service-sector wage scales for three and a half decades, we have so internalized pro-capital values that we begrudge any union that 's been able to hang on. So we drink the corporate Kool Aid that tells us that teachers unions are inhibiting good old fashioned American entrepreneurial gumption. By golly, if we just turn those honest businessmen loose on the travails of our schools, they'll be ship-shape in no time. Which brings me to...

Market Fetishization -- Charter schools, standardized testing, classroom technology, market-pegged teacher salaries: these are all species of the same genus. They all send the message that financial and business motivations are the only ones that can be trusted. If something doesn't make money, what good is it? If schools can't survive the purifying fire of market discipline, then they don't deserve to survive. Dinosaur approaches to education should step aside, allowing true competition and innovation to work their magic. Of course, the added bonus is that schools that are run like businesses can churn out pupils who are already prepared to grab the brass ring of the "future economy." And that leads us to....

Panic Over Falling Behind -- perhaps the most disingenuous and ridiculous part of the current educational hysteria is the worry of "falling behind" our international counterparts, especially in math and science. Now, are American kids doing poorly in comparison to the brainboxes from China, Japan, India, Canada, and the like? Probably, I guess. But do we really think that decades of huge macro-trends in technology, globalization, international finance, corporate legal structure, and international trade agreements are all going to be overturned by getting our kids' pre-calc and chemistry scores up? In case anyone noticed, we have pushed all of our chips in on a hyper-consumptive, service-sector-heavy way of life. Our landscapes, our architecture, our mores, and our culture are all predicated on gobs of de-skilling and non-practical symbolic knowledge. As our waning skills are replaced by both foreign labor and domestic technology, the ratios of necessary labor to overall production will totally unravel. This is the logic of the current 'jobless recovery': companies just don't need to rehire at old wages or levels to keep making money at roughly the same clip. Yes, we may eventually face total demand destruction (and thus a nasty second recessional dip, maybe even a depression), but that's another story. For now, all we need to say is that the hyped-up panic over falling behind other nations' kids is just another ploy for shoveling more money into the maws of corporate universities and their benefactors. Which brings us to....

The College Racket -- Now, I went to college and beyond, so maybe I'm speaking out of school here (pun intended); but I'm sick and tired of seeing every schmaltzy, motivational educational piece on TV revolve around a spunky, hard-working inner-city kid who overcomes three generations of crack addiction or whatever, to fulfill their dreams of going to RPI on a full scholarship. Again, don't get me wrong, college can be great for a lot of students. But there is such a relentless and desperate pressure to get kids to college -- it's as if there are no other avenues to a successful, rewarding life. The ubiquitous admonition of athletes, movie stars, and singers is for kids to "believe in themselves and follow their dreams." But those dreams always seem to involve going to college, as if there is no other way of living in the world without that degree. And unfortunately, that seems to be exactly the point, especially in the "escape the mean streets" motif that so dominates the discourse of our abandoned cities and rural areas. College as the only real way out thus serves as a surrogate for any deeper discussions about urban development policy, zoning laws, predatory lending and property rental policies, etc. Schooling thus carries an outrageously unrealistic set of expectations for social improvement, with college-bound diamonds in the rough being singled out for nonrepresentative media coverage. Add to this the absurdly high prices of private university tuition, and the likely collapse of state-funded public colleges, and you're looking at shoehorning millions of kids into a bleak future of heavy debt-servicing.

Failed Schools or Failed Society? -- As mentioned above, schools get overloaded with unrealistic expectations for social improvement. As a nation, we have essentially created "a way of life that has no future," as Jim Kunstler likes to describe it. We have gambled that cheap oil will always be available, that a hyper-consumptive lifestyle is normal, and that the environment will always be able to absorb the by-products of this social form. We have built oodles of massive, ugly sprawl, believing that private physical space filled with lots of nifty doodads would make up for the loss of dignified work and social capital. We have allowed corporate ideology and language to push out all other sources of value, at least as far as political and social action go, so that the only 'qualified people' left in the public sphere are businessmen, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, pundits, and military men. And perhaps most importantly, we have allowed wealth and power to accumulate into so few hands that no real alternatives to our destructive way of life are ever heard.

Sure, I would love for all schools, whether public or private, to be real havens for childrens' self-discovery and intellectual development. I would also like to see schools teach civics, comparative religion, local history and ecology, small business practices, philosophy, ethics, and many other things. But as long as the only purpose for schools is to create fodder for overpriced universities or crappy service-sector jobs, then a broad curriculum for creating well-rounded American citizens will never happen.

In our current conditions, we're demanding that crappy schools improve their delivery of people for service to a much shittier society. And as long as that is the case, I would rather see public schools close altogether, leaving education to for-profit enterprises, homeschooling, and integrated community learning. Integrated community learning is the best option here, as it would embed children in multiple work and service settings, allowing them to learn real skills in their local areas. Integrated community learning is a form of deschooling, which cannot be fully covered here. Suffice it to say that we need to create economic and social settings that we are not ashamed to put our children into from a very young age. Once we do that, the specialized institution of the school can be left by the wayside.

Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

A couple of quick plugs up front:

• Check out Joe Bageant's excellent book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, as well as his great website, www.joebageant.com. Think of him as a kind of Thomas Frank ("What's the Matter with Kansas?" -- http://tcfrank.com) on steroids. Lots of good stuff on the culture wars, the economic collapse, and peak oil.
• I also recommend Morris Berman's Dark Ages America (see his blog at http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/). This is a careful but wide-ranging book about the long-range, lockstep developments in American foreign policy, economy, culture, and domestic politics that have brought us to the brink of imperial burnout. Definitely worth checking out.

I'd like to build on a recurring motif of Berman's to get into our discussion here. Repeatedly in Dark Ages America, Berman emphasizes that past decisions and developments really matter, and that they tend to close off possibilities for the future. So we may hope for all of these great things (green jobs, local food production, energy independence, rebirth of the middle class, etc.), but the pathways laid down in economic and social structure over the last few decades or centuries preclude their emergence. The result is a kind of hopeful agonizing, where justice and sanity and humanness are always just out of reach. We know exactly what we want, and may even have working models of our desires, in small scale. So we have some workable charter schools, or local food co-ops, or employee-owned businesses, or whatever. But expansion to the whole society or country never seems to get off the ground, because we are too locked in to prevailing ideologies and physical realities.

The great Jim Kunstler coined this phenomena "the psychology of previous investment," and he uses it in his brilliant analysis of the stubborn American clinging to the energy-sucking and soul-destroying byways of the suburban sprawlscape. But as we flail around this summer, caught on the horns of BP perfidy, Afghanistan quagmire, collapsing federal and state budgets, and 10% unemployment, political and cultural exhaustion are all around us, and the tired reformulations of past failures are becoming more threadbare by the day. How did we get to this point, and what might come out of the looming election cycle this autumn? Are we legitimately painted into a corner by the psychology of previous investment, and the socioeconomic realities on which that rests?

Let's start by looking at the Obama administration, and so-called liberalism in general.At this point in the Obama reign, a general theme on his style has emerged: he's a big-spending, triangulating technocrat, unable or unwilling to rock the boat in any meaningful manner that might make a real difference. Sure, there are different variations on this theme, depending on which side of the aisle you're on. In conservative circles, Obama's spending is obviously part of an overall socialist agenda, designed to change America into (gasp!) a European hell-state. On the left, the socialism thing doesn't play -- but I do think that there is a general feeling emerging on the left as well, that Obama is simply spending too much money in the wrong ways: continued war, a monstrous health-care "reform" package, toothless financial regulations, etc. 

Certainly it is the case that the havoc wreaked by Dubya has almost totally crippled the current administration. In the public's perception, Obama now "owns" all this stuff, especially the economy and the wars. But reality does not operate according to the ebbs and flows of the pundit sphere. We are absolutely handcuffed as a nation by the trillions of dollars flushed into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the trillions whisked away to offshore bank accounts via years of tax cuts for the wealthy, and by the basic inability of Bush's economic team to warn of the looming housing bubble disaster. These are irreversible and fatal events, and there may be nothing salvageable in the long run, no matter how many things Obama tries.

Consider the three signature items of the current adminstration: the stimulus package of 2009, health care "reform," and the financial reform bill just recently signed. In each case, there was a dire need to roll back epic dysfunction, and bold solutions were called-for. But instead, in each case, what was delivered was overly-complex, critically-compromised, fundamentally pro-corporate, and depressingly conventional. At no point were courageous, risky, novel approaches considered. At no point were lobbyists and corporate lackeys kicked out of the process and told, "shut the f*!# up, you've had your decades at the public trough, it's time to do something for the good of regular people." Instead, the psychology of previous investment was in effect all along the way. The old saw about what's good for the "business community" being good for America was baked into the stimulus, health care "reform," and financial regulations. Corporations had both elbows on the table the whole time, with their forks and knives thrust towards the pile of money at the center.

What we needed was smart, targeted stimulus that acknowledged new economic realities: rebuilding of local self-sufficiency, especially in manufacturing, transport (railroads and canals), and food production; a national project in green power generation, applied through rejuvenated municipal power plants; and a robust chain of federal retraining/placement facilities to transition people away from service-sector and sprawl-building sectors to the new jobs needed for the projects mentioned above. From health care reform, we needed a single-payer system, the simplest and most cost-effective way to provide service for everyone, as every other major industrialized country in the world has demonstrated. And from financial reform, we needed the quick reinstatement of Glass-Steagall (separating investment banks from deposit banks), a financial transaction tax (an easy way to cool down gaming and speculation), and hard stances on CEO pay, too-big-to-fail breakups, and laws repealing corporate personhood.

Of course, we did not get these things, because of the straitjacket of existing ideologies and processes. National politicians need lots of money to run for re-election; corporations provide that money; mainstream media (corporations themselves) perpetuate the illusion that corporate interests are American interests; big business thus gets the biggest seat at the Washington budget table, and actually help craft the legislation. That's why we get a trillion dollar a year military, far larger than anything we might conceivably need -- it's good for business. The stimulus we so badly needed last year was converted to tax cuts and a hodge-podge of pork-laden, "shovel-ready" projects that provided just a wisp of economic activity before being rolled over in the tide of recession. Instead of single-payer health care, we were treated to an absurd smorgasbord of forced private-policy purchase, new assistance programs and bureaucracies, and an utter lack of price-controls on drugs and overall system costs. And of course, with the new financial rules (especially if Elizabeth Warren is spurned as the consumer protection czar), there is nothing with teeth for big corporations to fear -- just more studies, more governing agencies and programs, with the massive loopholes that always ensue.

So all in all, the Obama administration is really stuck in a hard place. Their toolbox is just not equipped with anything truly novel. They keep crafting hugely-complex, pro-business packages that endeavor to preserve the fallacy at the center of the American experiment: that economic growth is necessary at all costs, and thus that pro-business policies will eventually accrue to the public good. You get the feeling that the Obama team is now sitting around saying, "OK, we've given the business community everything it could possibly want, when will they start investing and hiring to get things going again? Give us that goddam recovery already!" The psychology of previous investment completely blocks out the possibility that we are in a qualitatively different situation, and that the cavalry of consumer over-borrowing and over-spending is not riding over the hill.

The ugly truth is that Obama has really spent his capital and opportunity-window in the wrong way. The spending that he has done within the pro-business, status quo framework has not produced economic results, at least as far as the general public is concerned (10% unemployment is what it is). So American people of all stripes are now worried about the federal deficit and national budgetary bloating. Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now demanding that spending cuts or no-new-tax pledges be included in legislation before they will approve it. And there is just a general feeling from Americans that we are overstretched in many ways, and that we need to stop throwing federal money at everything, since it hasn't seemed to have done much so far. And really, they are right.

This brings me to another point on liberal economists and stimulus. Paul Krugman and Dean Baker (among others), economists for whom I have great respect, and who (especially in Baker's case) warned of bad mojo well in advance of the recent collapse, are calling for more federal stimulus. They emphasize that the destruction of the housing bubble has pulled so much demand-side money out of the system that no amount of business-as-usual activity will get things moving again. Like the Great Depression, we're in a death-spiral of stagnation and contraction, and thus we need another huge round of federal stimulus to bring life back to the American economy. Their arguments are persuasive, and their diagnoses are spot-on. But there is something missing.

If the goal of more stimulus is simply a return to the hyper-leveraged, overconsumptive, sprawl-building of the last four decades, then it will absolutely fail. As evidenced from many posts on this site, I believe that the underlying algorithms  of work, housing, and consumption are on their way out. The One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form is not sustainable in the long run, possibly even the short run. The realities of Peak Oil, technological unemployment, and ecological collapse are going to necessitate a collective lifestyle, one where people are forced or drawn out of the formal economy to perform more functions and services in-house, for larger groups of cohabitating people. Decentralization and devolution will be the new rules of the game, so the trends towards localization of production will continue. Unless a new round of federal stimulus makes these goals explicit, it is not worth doing, and it would not pass public muster anyway. 

So that is the real challenge ahead for Obama. He must realize that the pro-corporate pork he has been shoveling his cronies is not going to catalyze a recovery of a way of life that is on its way out. He needs to have the courage to tell the American people about the new realities of energy, economy, and ecology, and then lay out a plan for real, transitional stimulus, as well as a legislative revolution in property taxes, zoning rules, and eminent domain standards. If Obama can't articulate the need for the United States to start transitioning over to a new kind of arrangement, then the harsh winds of reality will do it for him, and us.



 

Hard to believe that we're almost to the end of June already. Where does the time leak away to? 

First of all, a quik plug and plea. Some friends and I are starting a new website this summer, hopefully going live in August or September. Here is the beginning of a multi-page plug that we wrote up, explaining the project.

Let’s face it, our lives are awash in crap: shitty TV, shoddy politics, decrepit physical spaces, throwaway popular culture, and a cratering economy. Navigating all of this detritus on a daily basis is both exhausting and bewildering. And paradoxically, as information (‘content’) proliferates on the internet and through other forms of digital media, the looser our grasp becomes on what is truly real. After the day’s Facebooking, Second Lifing, Tweeting, Grand Theft Autoing, and American Idoling are done, is there any energy left to really explore what it means to be a citizen, a partner, a parent, a person, a man? Does the sum of all this digital effluvia actually add value to our lives in the long run?

Amidst this proliferating atmosphere of disposable and disorienting culture, a few of us have decided to attempt something a little different. Our vision is to create a place that gathers quality creations from a core group of interacting contributors on a broad array of subjects that are decidedly non-trivial. By emphasizing true substance and real personalities, we hope to offer a stark alternative to the dominant media motifs of the day: throwaway content, empty celebrity, and hyper-insulated pseudo-communities. We want to birth a clearinghouse for ideas, images, and discussions that actually builds knowledge, character, and discernment. And of course, we’ll have a lot of fun along the way....

The name of this new website is Oysterwagon, a moniker that is explained in the full version of the pitch for contributions. We're hoping that many people will join in to contribute to the site, so if you would like me to send you the full version of the Oysterwagon kickoff pitch, send me an email a jeremy@postpeakliberal.com, and I can forward it to you. Basically, we want as many people to get involved, on any level, as we can. So hop on board the Wagon. (If you already have articles, pictures, stories, poems, or other material that you would like to contribute, send them along to theprojectdesk@gmail.com, and we'll give you immediate feedback)

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Okay, now on to other things. Periodically, when nothing really specific inspires an idea for a posting, I like to just do a kind of intellectual reset, a recapitulation of my understanding of the big picture. One of my biggest frustrations with liberal columnists and writers is that there is almost never a unifying theme or narrative that runs throughout their work. One day there's a column on unemployment, then the next something on indigenous rug makers in the Sudan. Then there will be a piece on gender inequities in the workplace, or something on green design. Now obviously, to be a liberal is by definition to be interested in a broad variety of subjects; to be open-minded. And clearly, you can't write about the same thing every day or week and still keep readers interested. But still, I think that liberals need to more explicitly weave a unifying narrative through their disparate pieces of work. Some kind of grand idea has to snake its way through more liberal thought. One thing that conservatives get right is the constant pounding away of the same theme, so that everyone is on the same page with unified talking points. Obviously, I think they go a little overboard, and generally their talking points are wrong. But liberals would be well-served by understanding the power of repetition and the galvanizing force of the Big Idea.

So with that in mind, let's do a Summer Reset of the big picture.

Looking around us, there are a lot of things to be worried about. Oil continues to spew into the Gulf, wrecking ecosystems and destroying generations of maritime culture. Our multi-front war in the Middle East will soon enter its second decade, with fairly little to show for it except bumper-crop profits for military contractors and ruined narco-terrorist states. The global economy is in rough shape, with low-wage powerhouses China and India replacing the decaying high-wage US and Europe as the prime movers. The national economy of the US is still mired in recession, with a higher 'natural rate' of unemployment settling in for a long visit, and car-centered suburbia collapsing as a viable way of life. Deadly toxins are parking themselves in at alarming levels all across our food chain, with unknown results for human health and reproduction. Bees are disappearing, whales are on their way to massive dieoffs, temperatures are surging to new highs all across the globe, American children are facing epidemic rates of diabetes and obesity, etc., etc., etc.

Thinking metaphorically, we're really looking at a set of Concentric Circles of Collapse, or Russian Nesting Dolls of Catastrophe. We've got an interlocked set of problems, with each smaller area of trouble embedded in a larger one. Our individual bodies are in tough shape (disease, obesity, mental illness), but that situation is set within the larger problems of high-stress work and over-indulgent consumer culture. Those problems are in turn embedded in a hyper-leveraged economic system that was built on suburban sprawl, deindustrialization, overreliance on service industry jobs, and unsustainable borrowing. Moving further out in our set of concentric circles, the whole consumer capitalism arrangement is massively unsustainable, drawing down natural capital and resources at an alarming rate, and ruining the planet in the process. And that is probably the largest level of catastrophe: the decline of virtually every natural system on earth. Accelerating extinction of species, global warming, the collapse of global fisheries, fresh water depletion, topsoil exhaustion, heavy metal saturation of living tissues across the food chain, etc. 

With such a bewildering array of crises, it is no wonder that neither liberals nor conservatives can craft any kind of coherent course of action. It is much easier to retreat into scapegoat narratives of moral and spiritual collapse, or to dream dreams of technocratic mastery and future perfection. Neither of these strategies can do much good, and as long as our mainstream thinkers are mired in these delusions, we'll lurch from trouble-spot to trouble-spot, and the general pattern of decline will continue. Jim Kunstler calls this the Long Emergency, a long stretch of general devolution and decentralization. I highly recommend Kunstler's website and his books. He is our greatest contemporary commentator.

 

In general, I am in full agreement with Kunstler. Peak Oil is kicking in for good, as the easy oil is gone. The Gulf disaster is the perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Surface deposits are gone (or in politically-volatile areas), so we're drilling a mile into the ocean and then two miles further down. This kind of drilling can never be made trouble-free and cheap, no matter how many 'fail-safes' we put in place. So we're in for a rough patch in the coming decades, as the suburban sprawlscape becomes prohibitively-expensive and ultimately gives way. The mortgage implosion, especially in states like Florida, California, and Arizona, is the leading edge of this devolutionary iceberg. 

Also, I am heartily in agreement with most hues of greenie-culture, which sees the key to our future as local economies, green products, cooperative businesses, renewable energy, and the like. We really do need a kind of moon-landing type of effort to create a green energy/green jobs America (It's just too bad that we're blowing all of our cash on a trillion-dollar-a-year military and other Rube Goldberg projects like the non-reforming health care reform that lumbered through Congress this year). I love farmers' markets and hybrid cars like any other NPR-lefty. 
 
But I diverge from most other commentators in that I think that none of our green dreams of sustainability will happen without a dismantling of the basic social form of modern culture and economy: One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. This social form is the building block of consumer capitalism itself, and is thus the foundational source of almost all of the higher-level problems that we're facing. This social form literally creates and energizes dysfunctions all through our various economic and political systems. For example, the pressure for 'full employment,' for everyone to have a fulfilling and substantive job, over-monetizes all of our social functions, destroying older, non-market ways of providing goods and services. Another example is the American Dream itself: the desire for a mini-British manor for each nuclear family spawns the hyper-wasteful and spiritually stultifying suburban project. You would be hard-pressed to find a better way than suburbia to waste resources and spawn juvenile, copycat consumption. The One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form also puts incredible pressure on the educational system, as it must forever produce qualified and productive workers, even if the overall labor-to-production ratios are on a long-term trend towards de-skilled work and automation. Because we're locked into this one way of working and living, there is relentless pressure to increase everything, all the time: higher wages, economic growth, bigger financial returns, more products (regardless of need), increased turnover of trends. We don't know of any way to be except to grow, which is a bad recipe for a finite planet and finite life-spans.

I firmly believe that this social form has to be transcended before any of our society-wide projects can succeed. There are not going to be meaningful market-jobs for everyone in the near future, so individual identity will have to be hung on something other than career and achievement. Many are living this new reality right now, as unemployment and under-employment are carving out deeper, permanent trenches. 'Success' will have to be redefined to mean something other than how much money one makes. Similarly, the atomization and fragmentation of dwellings will have to end. The home-improvement porn of cathedral-ceiling sitting rooms that no one ever sits in will have to go. The Extreme Home Makeover ridiculousness, where teenagers get larger rooms than what 40% of families (extended) around the globe have for their whole house, will need to be tossed aside.

In short, we will have to live more collectively. The fetishism of house and product will need to end. Consumption, and thus production, will need to be drastically curtailed. Economic contraction will have to become the new ideal for our politicians and economists. In the current arrangement, the economy has to grow, because everything hangs off of maximizing consumption, to drive the need for full employment and servicing of the single-family dwelling. But if people start living more collectively, pulling services out of the money economy and back into the household economy, then the full-employment, economic growth imperative can be broken, and we can start tackling some of those wider, concentric circles of collapse.