Snapback

SUBHEAD: Historians will marvel at how this empire of grift kept its wheels turning after its engine died.

By James Kunstler on 21 October 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-snapback/)


Image above: Horse car, our future high-mileage compact. From (http://indike.blogspot.com/2008/09/most-feul-efficient-cars-of-world.html).

Well, at least the poobahs cleared a path to the annual orgy of Christmas, which, along with the S & P 500, have become proxies for the American economy. Lately, the Christmas season starts directly after Halloween, so, the whole fourth quarter of the year becomes a circus of ceremonial distractions. In the background, though, the nation grinds toward anguish, measured in soiled Justin Bieber dolls deposited in the landfills.

Historians who look back on these strange years of suspended consequence will marvel at how this empire of grift kept its wheels turning after its engine died. Being on the downhill slope is often enough to keep anything going. 

One might think the young people of this land would be seething at the eclipse of their futures, but it seems they have been successfully lobotomized with cell phones — when the endorphin hits lag between text messages, they can watch sitcoms, or porn.

You can be sure there will be a snapback from all this drift and anomie, and when it comes, the snap will be savage. Like the US economy, the Republican Party is dead but hasn’t gotten the news. It killed itself just as the Whigs did in the years before the Civil War, by splitting up into factions — one faction of “know-nothings” preoccupied with scape-goats opposed to a faction of sclerotic parasitical fat-cats too timid and greedy to engage in the emergencies of the day.

The Tea Party faction should change its name to the Cracker Party because it represents the interests of white southerners who are too dumb to know what these emergencies amount to. They are really more comfortable with the supernatural, hence their fondness for religions based on snake-handling, visitations of the dead, and motor sports. 

Personally, I believe they will eventually contrive to form their own break-away Cracker Republic and attempt to re-enact the Civil War. They will fail, and starve, and find themselves back in an even worse long-term depression than Dixieland experienced from 1860 to 1960, in a de-suburbanized wasteland of bare subsistence farming. Their highest art will be soup-making.

The non-Tea Party Republicans will just shrivel and vanish out of sheer irrelevance. This leaves the Democrats to become the focus of intense ire as they attempt to ‘splain why the nation’s affairs went to shit on their watch. A lot of them will end up being executed and plundered by the new kid on the block, the Savior Party, led by some charismatic character willing to ignore procedural protocols to clear away the debris left by his-or-her predecessors. 

Alas, the juice will not be there to permit the Savior to really control a territory as large as the continental USA. By juice, I mean money and oil. Thus, the nation enters its new dark age.

Who knows when that will get underway in earnest, though I think the folks who say 2014 are onto something. If you believe in cycles, which I tend to, then it rhymes nicely with 1814 and 1914, two watersheds when one epoch ended and another truly began. 2014 would logically be the year that China tells America to go piss up a rope. 

The message would be sent on the back of the envelope containing $2.7 trillion in official American debt paper. As Ole Blue Eyes used to say, this could be the start of something big.

Sentient observers of the current scene are clearly frustrated by the remarkable homeostasis that seems to rule the scene, these horse-latitudes of history where the air is still and nothing moves and the mind is exhausted by watchful waiting. 

Things will get lively, soon enough, so enjoy the holiday quarter of the year which is so soon upon us. Gorge on candy corn. When you recover from that, roast a turkey. Then make a nice figgy pudding. Then pop some bubbly and salute your loved ones. Then gird your loins for the new age of consequence.

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Better to throw than catch grenade

SUBHEAD: John Boehner throws then catches his own debt-default political hand grenade.

By Noam Scheiber on 15 October 2013 for the New Republic -
(http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115204/government-shutdown-2013-collapse-boehner-plan-ends-stalemate)


Image above: Detail from WWII combat watercolor by P. Archer. GI throws hand grenade as he faces fire. From (http://snyderstreasures.com/images/artworks/combat/CombatArtThrowGrenadeOA.jpg).

On Monday I wrote that the shutdown/default-threat/Republican extortion plot was essentially over—it was just a matter of Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, hammering out the final details of a deal whose contours were coming into focus. Once they’d reached a deal, it would pass the Senate with a fair amount of bipartisan support.

After which John Boehner would tearfully bring it to the floor of the House in defiance of the so-called Hastert Rule (requiring a majority of House Republicans to support a bill before it can come to a vote), possibly with some minor face-saving alteration that the Senate signaled it could accept.

Regrettably, I was wrong. As it happens, Reid and McConnell came very close to inking a deal Monday night, but then McConnell suspended their negotiations on Tuesday to give Boehner a chance at passing a bill, which promptly collapsed under the weight of his own ineptitude and your basic garden-variety House Republican lunacy, at which point Reid and McConnell resumed their negotiation over a deal that will soon pass the Senate and force Boehner’s hand. Which is to say, I missed the all-important “let’s briefly pause so Boehner can flail helplessly while the entire world looks on in horror before we officially end this thing” step in the process.

In retrospect, I’m not sure how I overlooked it. That final pathetic lurch is a tradition Boehner inaugurated during the fiscal cliff negotiation last December (recall “Plan B,” which Boehner also chose to euthanize before it came to a vote in the House). There was every reason to believe he’d observe that same sacrament this time around.

But don’t mistake it for anything other than what it was: the final spasm of a still-fresh corpse, the corpse being the GOP’s legitimacy as a political entity, to say nothing of its negotiating position in this particular conflict.

If Boehner had actually had the votes to pass a bill that reopened the government and raised the debt ceiling while enacting a few modest Republican priorities—which is to say, a bill that would have been taken seriously inside Washington and put Democrats in something of a bind—he would have done it days ago, in time to give himself some actual leverage.

As Boehner told his caucus, you’d “rather throw a grenade than catch a grenade.” But he didn’t have the votes. With his conservative members still lingering in a different dimension, and their peasant army of activists and moneymen declaring anything short of death to Obamacare a capitulation, it was utterly hopeless. Boehner, as is his wont, simply unpinned a grenade he knew he didn’t have the arm-strength to throw.

In the end, I’m rather relieved that this all happened Tuesday—still relatively early in the process as these things go. A few savvy congressional reporters lamented that we’d lost an entire day while Boehner took a final lap around the mental institution he runs, possibly pushing the resolution of the showdown beyond Thursday.

But if you size up the situation from a bit of a distance, you see that Boehner’s final farcical move almost certainly sped things up. Given that the House GOP almost always lurches away from the eventual solution at least once before swallowing its pride and allowing it to pass, far better to get it out of their system Tuesday rather than waiting till Thursday night, with only a few hours to go before D-Day.

Better yet, the fact that it happened before Reid and McConnell had finished their negotiation—with McConnell having suspended the negotiation to give Boehner a chance to embarrass himself further—strengthens Reid’s hand at the margin and allows him to strike a slightly more favorable deal.

All of which is to say, it’s hard not to be encouraged by this latest development. Boehner’s pathetically weak hand was always going to be exposed. On Tuesday, he did us the courtesy of completely exposing it before the last possible moment. I, for one, think we owe the House speaker a (tiny) measure of thanks.


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What Then?

SUBHEAD: Does congress really want to play games with the only thing that supports the market for US Treasury paper.

By James Kunstler on 30 September 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/then-what/)


Image above: Gunfight at the OK Corral on October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona between the Earp's and the Clantons. From (http://goodolewoody.me/2011/08/17/would-a-cowboy-president-promote-texas-justice/).

A theme in my 2005 book, The Long Emergency, was the counter-intuitive idea that the federal government, rather than becoming the omnipotent Big Brother Moloch so many feared, would instead spiral into impotence and become too incompetent and ineffectual to run everybody’s life. Another theme was that the USA was entering a political impasse comparable to the years that preceded the civil war, with many of the same old grudges playing out in disguise. 

What we’re seeing is an empire that had grown too quickly to even acknowledge it had become an empire, enter, just as quickly, the throes of contraction.

Hence, the great unacknowledged task before the leadership class is managing contraction. The radical Republicans, even in their Jeezus-driven transports of Dixieland retribution and John Bircher paranoia, come a little closer to recognizing the situation than the Democrats with their Leviathan problem — their nanny-state grandiosity. So, those red state radicals are gonna run that ole ‘possum up a gum stump now and see what happens.

What will happen is whole lot of uncertainty that will further undermine a faith-based economic system lurching on the fumes of legitimacy, especially where money and banking are concerned. The trouble with this kind of brinksmanship is that it is bound to produce unanticipated consequences. When the Carolina secessionists bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, they didn’t have in mind the carnage-to-come of Spotsylvania and Chancellorsville. Similarly, the genteel spectators who rode carriages out of Washington to observe the doings at Bull Run as if it were the NFL season opener. 

In short, neither the Union or the Confederacy had a clue that they were entering upon the world’s first extravaganza of industrial mass slaughter. So, one wonders if their descendents today realize that are toying with the financial suicide of an advanced technocratic society.

The merits of the case for or against Obamacare are almost impossible for even well-informed and educated citizens to parse. You start with a law roughly 2,000 pages long, cobbled together largely by lobbyists for the insurance and medical industries, both of them hideous rackets, and move to a labyrinth of 50 different state’s systems for administering the darn thing, and then consider the supposed beneficiaries, namely young people so burdened by college loans in an economy that only offers minimum wage scut-jobs that, from one day to the next, they probably don’t know whether to shit or go blind. 

They don’t even have the scratch to pay the opt-out tax, let alone purchase an insurance policy.

Beyond that kind of uncertainty is the certainty that a whole lot of things are primed to shake loose. One that deserves the anxiety it is generating is the question of US debt, which translates directly into the question of US currency, i.e., the fate of the dollar. Does the legislative branch want to play games with the only thing that supports the market for US Treasury paper — the dollar’s proxy — which is the generally-held notion that the full faith and credit of the nation stands behind promises to pay? 

Two-hundred measly basis points in the ten-year note is all that stands between the pretense of economic stability and some pretty serious chaos in the government / banking matrix. The one-two punch of the continuing resolution for appropriations and the imminent debt ceiling crunch may rip the fabric of our constructed financial reality and open a black hole into which the wealth of nations disappears forever.

Some observers think a government shutdown would be salutary, the beginning of a wholesale house-cleaning of federal agencies and pain-in-the-ass public employees who get paid too much, enjoy too many benefits, and work strenuously to impede honest enterprise. There may be something to that. But the current actions in congress are more likely to produce a kind of epileptic seizure of all economic activity, public and private.

If congress is really hot to de-fund something, I suggest they start with defunding suburban sprawl, which enjoys more direct government subsidy than even the medical racket. 

I bet that would not go over so well in the big red Nascar states of Dixie, where driving in a car to do anything has been more-or-less mandatory for decades. This is the kind behavior that is truly killing American civilization, but it’s the last thing we will pay attention to.

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Tea Party & OWS Agree

SUBHEAD: Tea Party stands with organized labor on Georgia anti-picketing law aimed at Occupy strategy. By Dave Jamieson on 19 march 2012 for Huffingon Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/19/tea-party-georgia-anti-picketing-law_n_1364785.html) Image above: From (http://dc.about.com/od/protestsandrallies/ss/TeaPartyProtest.htm). Subscribers to an Atlanta Tea Party email list received an alert Monday morning urging them to take a stand against SB 469, a controversial Georgia bill that would criminalize certain forms of mass picketing.

The email, which went out to 50,000 people, puts the Atlanta Tea Party with some unusual company: organized labor, environmentalists and the Occupy movement. The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Don Balfour (R), a Waffle House executive and Georgia Chamber of Commerce board member, would impose $1,000 fines on people who picketed outside the homes of corporate executives or outside some businesses, a tactic commonly used by Occupy groups, environmental protestors and unions in the midst of labor disputes.

Julianne Thompson, Georgia state director for Tea Party Patriots, told The Huffington Post that she and her fellow organizers don't see SB 469 as a political issue so much as a free-speech issue. Thompson spoke out against the bill at the state capitol Monday.

"When we're talking about the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, we're not talking about political right-versus-left. We're talking about right versus wrong," Thompson said. "If it's a violation of free speech we're going to be on the side of the Constitution. I'm happy that we've reached across party lines with regard to this issue." Although the bill's supporters have said the legislation would pertain only to labor unions, Thompson pointed out that it could be read more broadly, to include a "person" or "organization" whose picketing interferes with a resident's "right to quiet enjoyment."

"I think any organization on the right or left, whether it's a labor organization or the Tea Party or the pro-life movement, this will affect everyone," she said. Charlie Flemming, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, told HuffPost that the state's unions are happy to see Tea Party activists coming down on the same side as them.

"We may have disagreements about labor and other issues but the reality is we all agree this is our constitutional right to stand up speak out and protest," Flemming said. "I would certainly support their right to do likewise. So I think it's terrific."

The bill passed through the GOP-controlled state Senate earlier this month by a 34-18 vote. It has not yet come up for a vote in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. In addition to labor groups and the Tea Party, the bill has drawn the opposition of Martin Luther King, III, and the sheriff of Fulton County, Ga.

From the Atlanta Tea Party email on SB 469:

SB 469 -- Also sponsored by Senator Don Balfour claims it is geared toward stopping mass picketing on private property ([even] though we already have trespassing laws). The bill at face value, [appears] to be geared toward labor unions, but the devil is in the details ... it clearly adds a "person or organization", which could include not only big labor, but also Tea Party activists, those protesting outside abortion clinics, or many other scenarios. Please see below ...

Under Sec. 5, Church groups and neighborhood associations picketing to protest a strip club in their neighborhood would also be subject to prosecution for the conspiracy and for the criminal trespass itself. Others who conspired with them in planning the protest who were not arrested at the site, would also be subject to criminal prosecution, including congregations. The penalty for criminal trespass is a misdemeanor -- up to $1,000 fine and/or up to 12 months in jail; The penalty for conspiracy to commit criminal trespass would be a fine of up to $5,000 and/or up to 12 months in jail.

Environmentalists staging a protest in a neighborhood protesting a proposed landfill would be affected by SB 469 with greater criminal penalties for conspiracy and criminal trespass, and criminal penalties of up to $5,000 plus up to a year in jail against any individual or organization that participated in the conspiracy to commit criminal trespass -- Sierra Club, Riverkeepers, etc. -- even if they did not themselves criminally trespass.

Civil rights groups, anti-war protesters, and others would also be affected. Martin Luther King, III has said of SB 469 that it would have stifled the civil rights movement in the 1960's if this had been law. It should be pointed out that the Bill would limit peaceful non-violent protests. Nor would it be limited to "mass picketing." This is not a right or left issue, it is a right or wrong issue. We may not agree with the all of the politics listed in the scenarios above, but we will defend their right to speak and protest, because this is America. If we destroy the First Amendment, we cease to be a free nation. [their emphasis]

We believe SB 469 is a gross violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and needs to be defeated. We will be testifying at the hearing today and will keep you informed!

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Waiting for the Storm

SUBHEAD: Armistice Day? No. We get Veteran's Day. The truth is extreme, to make it moderate is to lie. By Juan Wilson on 11 November 2011 for Island Breath - (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/11/waiting-for-storm.html) Image above: Aaron and daughter take a walk in the woods. A still from video below "Message to 2012 Obama Voters". Today was once called Armistice Day. It was first observed after the horror of The Great War (WWI) on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the years following to remind us of the sweetness of peace. After we repeated the insanity with World War II we made an adjustment to the horror. We renamed the day Veteran's Day - a day to celebrate soldiers. We continued to honor the military even after what I call World War III - the exchange of atmospheric tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs from the late 40's to the early 60's by America, USSR, Britain, France, China, et al. As we slide sideways into collapse we seem to be heading over the brink to a bigger World War. This one actually began back in the 80's but didn't get really moving until after 911. It now has engulfed Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya, Now we seem ready to garrison the region for a newer bigger conflict that will include moves on Syria and Iran. The lineup - America, Europe and friends (NATO) versus Russian, China, India and friends (BRICS). Recently I stumbled across a video on a Youtube site (http://www.youtube.com/user/StormCloudsGathering) that impressed me. It is connected with the website (www.WaitingForTheStorm.com). I read a few articles and viewed a few more videos. The man, responsible for the material, only identified as Aaron, appears young and seems wise beyond his years. He has integrated much of what is happening in the world into a coherent view that does not seem headed towards madness. That's a rare feat these days. He says of his effort.

Geo-political and social analysis. Chronicling the final days of the American empire, investigating how we got into this mess, and trying to avoid having future generations repeating our mistakes. The truth is extreme, to make it moderate is to lie.

I have made a link to Aaron's website on our "Truth Seers" menu listing. Below are a few examples of his work. Video above: The Dollar & Euro Collapse is Guaranteed". From (http://youtu.be/TfHEz4plxtg). Video above: "Let the 2nd American Revolution Begin?" From (http://youtu.be/vFoB6KKMESg). Video above: "The Occupy Wall Street and Teat Party Love Child". From (http://youtu.be/XyNNTmSCcao Video above: "The Chain of Obedience". From (http://youtu.be/6NcLNoxiPBk). Video above: "Total Collapse - Buildup to WWIII". From (http://youtu.be/X_KAj8O8qes). Video above: "Message to 2012 Obama Voters". From (http://youtu.be/Lq472IGvhtc). See also: Ea O Ka Aina: It's Aarmistice Day! 11/11/10 .

Rick Perry denies Texas is toast

SUBHEAD: Presidential candidate Rick Perry doubles-down on Climate Change denial to woo nutjobs.  

By John Laumer on 1 October 2011 for TreeHugger -  
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/10/texas-getting-barbecued-while-rick-perry-doubles-down-climate-denial.php)

 
Image above: The TExas Pride Barbecue Restaurant. From original article.
 
Where I live in Southeastern Pennsylvania garden vegetables lie unharvested, rotting in the mud. Lancaster farmers will be hard pressed to harvest their corn and uncovered firewood piles are ornamented with white fungus. We have it good compared to Texas, though. Farmers and wildlife in the Lone Star State face a bleak future brought on by sustained, extreme drought.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is more focused on fanning the flames of climate denial than addressing the loss and misery. No matter that the shadow of extreme drought roughly outlines his State's shape (see graphic below). Interviewers and presidential debate hosts dare not raise the obvious irony , lest they lower ad revenues by appearing to take the side of science and rational inquiry.

 
Image above: Map show all of Texas as the center of a large, long term drought. From (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/).


LA Times covered Perry's climate change double-down.

"Great," replied Perry, strolling with a hand-held microphone in front of a crowd at the Adams Memorial Opera House in Derry, N.H. "I'm ready for you this time."
Perry said that "just within the last couple of weeks, a renowned Nobel laureate" had said that it was "not correct" to say that there was "incontrovertible" evidence that global warming is man's fault. "There are scientists all across this country who are saying that," Perry said, adding to that his own conclusion that climate change science "frankly is not proven."

The scientist, whom Perry never named, is Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel laureate for work involving superconductors. A longtime skeptic of global warming, which he has described as "a new religion," Giaever resigned recently from the American Physical Society after it issued a policy statement that "evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."

Giaever told the London Sunday Telegraph, "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."

Echoing those words, Perry told the town-hall questioner: "He said there is not incontrovertible evidence, and here's my point. The climate has been changing ... for thousands of years, and for us to take a snapshot in time and say...'The climate change that is going on is man's fault, and we need to jeopardize America's economy [to fix it.]' I'm a skeptic about that."

Perry is doing what his campaign contributors want. Only the broadcast media editors and executives can be blamed full on. It is they who let it go unchallenged, preferring the role of circus ring master for their on air staff. I want Walter Cronkite back.

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Punked World

SUBHEAD: Why are the Nascar morons and Jesus jokers the only people in this country who can mount an aggressive political movement?  

By James Kunstler on 26 September 2011 for Kunstler.com -  
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/09/punked-world.html)

 
Image above: Enthusiastic Nascar couple view of the pit. From (http://reallifemoron.com/funny-in-real-life/nascar-fans-are-hardcore).

Europe is a three-card monte game and Greece is the pea and for the moment I'd guess that the pea is under a walnut shell called France. Or the French banks, to be specific. Their vaults are stuffed with Greek bond paper that is giving the whole neighborhood a headache from a stench like unto rotting carp. Everybody else in the neighborhood has their own cache of deliquescing fish-heads, but they pretend the air is fresh and bracing. In fact, so exhilarating that they are avid to dump $3 trillion into a Euro bailout fund that will solve the problem of that fugitive aroma wafting down the boulevards.

Europe can really only put out stories at this point, and the $3 Tril bailout fund is just another story in a tedious string of them. Where are they going to get the money? From the machinists' union in Dusseldorf? The waiters and chambermaids in Munich? There's that rumored swap line opening from the Federal Reserve to the European Central Bank, but that's nothing more than a cheap loan window, and for a measly half a trillion ($500 billion - the late Senator Ev Dirkson is cackling in his grave). And where do those dollars come from anyway?

Who is supposed to pay it back, and how? What kind of collateral is Ben Bernanke going to hold - the contents of the south wing of the Louvre? One hundred million free dinners (wine and tip included) at Taillevent? This game of musical chairs with a hot potato is not fooling anyone, really.

All it's doing is dragging out the process of the civilized world getting right with reality. Reality has a ledger and is calling in its notes. The civilized world can't believe this is happening, so they pretend it isn't, with pompous ceremonials among the highest level banking officials, and hollow declarations of heroic actions that are not the least heroic because all they are designed to do is protect their fellow bankers. It's certainly not for the sake of the nations involved, because the standard of living in all these countries will take a painful hit any way you cut it.

This mummery could dissolve in tears any moment, or it might stretch out one more month, but by going this route the leaders of Europe risk all kinds of pressures in the other seams of the system, namely markets. They are testing a 60-odd years long supply of the one indispensable resource: confidence. They've already probably squandered the little that's left.

All signs point to a mega-Lehman moment when trust has fled and nobody will lend to anybody and business cannot continue. That'll be a freaky-deaky moment and it will be way worse than Lehman was. When it happens, what seemed financial will instantly go political. The rage of millions will shred the trappings of fakery, and for a while things will seem too real. The world has no idea how all this might resolve. What a show.

I can't imagine that the explosion in Europe will not affect the American banks - we've already shoveled hundreds of billions into the Euro bank vaults the past several years, apart from that new swap line. Anyway, Washington has ramped up a new game of charades to divert everyone at this end - another threatened government shut-down. If we don't cut this shit out, some Pentagon general is going to have to ride across the Potomac and call a time-out on the constitution. Financial chaos is not cool. Just so you know the sort of fate we are tempting with our shenanigans.

Speaking of the constitution, I'm getting a little sick of these corporate CEO knuckleheads who come on CNBC and complain that the US Postal Service is running at a loss, and therefore we should abolish it. There is actually little beyond all those post offices that holds the fabric of small town America together anymore.

And anyway, delivering the mail is one of the few actual government services that is spelled out in the US constitution in no uncertain terms in Article One, Section 8. It doesn't say the postal service must run at a profit, by the way. The food stamp program is not spelled out in the constitution and it doesn't run at a profit. Neither does the war in Afghanistan (if you don't count the drug money). Congress runs at a profit, but not in any way that the constitution provides for. Before long, a lot of people are going to want to abolish it.

In the meantime, can anybody answer this question: where is the Tea Party of Progressives? Why are the Nascar morons and Jesus jokers the only people in this country who can mount an aggressive political movement? Will somebody please step up and take the baton?

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McConnell - The Great Dismantler

SUBHEAD: Debt ceiling resolution gives GOP's Senator Mirch McConnell his strategic moment. By Howard Fieman on 2 August 2011 for Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/02/obama-and-mcconnell-debt-_n_916257.html) Image above: Kentucky's US Senator Mitch McConnell (center) and Republican cronies. From (http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/183118/20110719/analysis-mcconnell-plan-may-be-reckoning-for-republicans.htm). If you haven't noticed, this is Mitch McConnell's moment. And if you haven't realized it, this won't be the last. In fact, there will be many more, especially if -- as is quite possible -- he becomes Republican majority leader of the Senate after next year's elections.

In what amounted to a victory speech as the final vote approached on the debt ceiling he brokered, the senior senator from Kentucky reached what has been a career-long goal: to be this century's Henry Clay.

Only instead of being Kentucky's "Great Compromiser," McConnell is and wants to be the Bluegrass's "Great Dismantler."

A handsome portrait of Clay hangs in McConnell's spacious Capitol suite. But the two men represent diametrically opposing traditions. Sen. Clay wanted to be president, and used his eloquence and shrewdness in the service of constructing and protecting the power of the federal government. He championed the "American System" of national roads and public works, and spent decades trying to keep the Union from flying apart under the centrifugal stress of slavery, economics and ideology. He inspired another Kentucky-born politician named Abe Lincoln, and infuriated yet another named Jefferson Davis.

McConnell, equally as shrewd if not as eloquent, has a fundamentally different view. He sees his job, as he said on the floor as the vote began, to "rein in Washington" and "slow down the Big Government freight train." He mesaures success in terms of how much he can reduce the power, purse and reach of a federal government he has been a part of since he was elected at the height of the Reagan Era in 1984.

McConnell is a past master of channelling middle-class resentment at the power of government to gain power for himself in government. And he is one of the most patient and canny legislators and negotiators in modern politics: always superbly prepared, never given to rash actions or statements and a potent mix of brains and chip-on-the shoulder disdain for people with fancier pedigrees but fuzzier minds.

With the debt ceiling negotiations, he basically took the president to the cleaners. He used the energy of the Tea Party as a threat, and the weakness and division in the House GOP leadership to make himself the indispensable player in the final days. He proposed a fail-safe route to avoid default that played to the president's vanity (the idea of giving the president the power to decide debt-ceiling raises on his own) and then used the sense of trust to drive a hard bargain that took takes off the table. McConnnell also used his 26-year relationship with Vice President Joe Biden to smooth the pathway to a deal. As Rep. Charlie Rangel said, the GOP "mugged the president but let him keep his wedding ring."

The president thinks that the "super committee" that now will be appointed will be able to -- and will -- recommend revenue increases and even tax cuts when it has to report Nov. 23. There may indeed be some loophole closings, but don't count on it.

Was the president listening today when McConnell discussed the "super committee" group of 12, which will include six Republicans and six Democrats? McConnell called it the "cost-cutting committee."

Game on.

McConnell's whole career has been about skillfully tapping anti-government resentment and turning it into deals and power. That is how he began his rise in Louisville and Kentucky.

In 1974, Louisville -- a border city on the Ohio River in the Border State of Kentucky -- was sullen and divided in a way it had not been since the Union Army occupied it during the Civil War. The issues in many ways were the same: race and the power of the federal government. In the summer of 1974, a federal judge had ordered the widespread use of busing to integrate -- in fact not just in law -- the public schools in Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County. Well over 100,000 students were involved, but so were decades of de facto segregation.

In the working class neighborhoods of the city and its suburbs, anger at the order -- even occasional street protests -- was widespread. McConnell, originally born in Alabama, hailed from one of those neighborhoods. He wasn't a protestor or anti-busing leader by any means. He had worked for moderate GOP Sens. John Sherman Cooper and Marlow Cook, and had been an attorney in the Ford administration.

But he knew the neighborhood folks, as well as their fears and resentments. When he ran successfully for County Judge (the chief administrative job) in 1978, he ran strongly in places where he could make the case that government had too much say in local lives, and that services needed to be decided by families and neighbors, not by distant powers downtown or inside the Beltway.

That was the Reaganesque message he took statewide when he ran for Senate and won with the Gipper atop the ticket in 1984.

It is a straight line from there to the floor today.

And we may not have seen anything yet. As patient as he is remorseless, as deeply political as he is lawyerly, McConnell built a machine in Kentucky. It is crumbling now -- the incumbent Democratic governor is up by 25 points in new polls, and Sen. Rand Paul of the Tea Party is hardly a faithful ally -- but Mitch is moving on to do the same thing in the Senate that he did in the state years ago.

Meticulous, tactically focused, he runs a tight ship in the Senate and keeps a very close eye on the GOP's Senate election process. Here's the key statistic for 2012: of the 11 seats considered to be in play by handicapper Charlie Cook, nine are held by Democrats. The Democrats currently hold a 51-47 majority, with two others caucusing with them. Do the math. The GOP is within reach.

The Great Dismantler is on the march.

.

Tickling the Dragon's Tail

SOURCE: David Ward (ward.david7@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: We are all coming to realize is that the global economy is delicate, hungry, but there is no brain.

By PeakSurfer on 11 June 2011 for Peaksurfer Blog -  
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2011/06/tea-baggers-tickle-dragons-tail.html)
Image above: Luis Slotin tickling the dragon's tail in Los Alamos. From (http://tomsviewpoint.blogspot.com/2011/03/chernobylwikileaks-japan-and-reality.html).
 

Outside the Fukushima plant and for some distance at night, can be seen the intermittently sparkling blue glow of re-criticality, as the melted fuel from four reactors, moderated by fresh water pumped from fire trucks, puts on a light show of ionized air over the coast of Japan.

This is a requiem display, a salute of fireworks, because Japan, mortally wounded, is dying the same way the Soviet Union did, killed by the nuclear dragon it thought it had tamed.

This same light show was once observed in 1946, with fatal consequences, by physics students working in Los Alamos on advancements to the atomic bomb. Louis Slotin, their 35-year-old Canadian instructor, had been the criticality math whiz of the Manhattan Project and had personally assembled the core of the Trinity device.

His method of establishing critical mass values was very bold, not to say reckless. Slotin would push fissile masses together slowly until they displayed early onset signs of criticality to clickity-clacking Geiger meters.

On May 21, 1946, Sloton demonstrated his technique, which Richard Feynmann had by then coined “tickling the dragon’s tail,” to the six star-struck students in his lab.

Using his bare hands, Sloton slowly moved a screwdriver out from between two beryllium half-spheres lined with uranium reflecting neutrons back to a 3.5-inch-diameter (89 mm) plutonium core. At exactly 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell.

The room flashed iridescent blue and Slotin, reacting heroically, used his other hand to knock the spheres apart. He died horribly, nine days later, from the exposure, but he saved the rest of the people in the room, not to mention everyone within a 5 mile radius of Los Alamos.

The idiotcracy that staged a palace coup in the US Congress last fall is now tickling the dragon’s tail of the full faith and credit of the United States. Refusing to give up tax breaks for the rich and powerful, the Exxons, BPs and Haliburtons, the tea-baggers and their millionaire Republican allies are demanding elimination of medicare, privatization of Social Security, and a blather of deep social welfare cuts that any impartial accountant (the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, or the Office of Management and Budget,for instance) recognize as not only ineffective (pushing the USA into far greater, and more expensive, problems down the road), but purely political gamesmanship.

The goal of that game, for millionaire Republicans, is to get as close to the brink as possible, elicit as many concessions for the wealthy as possible by beggaring the poor, and then to pass a new debt ceiling and repeat the process.
 

The goal of the Tea Baggers, for whom nuance and strategy are not strong suits, is to play to the cheers of the Colosseum as they give thumbs down to federalism and separation of powers and toss the Moorish President to the lions.

The US is now officially without a fiscal budget, living on holdover spending, mere wax and string that runs out on August 2nd.

The millionaire Republicans want to strike a deal on August 1st and ham it up for the cameras until then. The Tea Baggers want to strike a deal on August 3rd, if then, to give both the Democrats and Republicans a taste of the lash. Neither have any idea of what kind of dragon the tail they are tickling belongs to.

The US Treasury is limited by Congress to borrowing up to a debt limit, originally established in 1939. Since Congress originates all federal activities requiring funding, such as insanely expensive foreign war adventures or sending rockets up into space, Congress has to annually increase the debt limit to keep up. 

The last increase was in February, 2010, to $14.294 trillion. George W. Bush increased it 8 times, moving it from 57% of GDP to 84% of GDP. Under Obama, it has risen to 97% of GDP.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that Congress does not have the power to void a government bond, so if any loans come due, it is obligated to pay them or default. Here is what happens if the Tea 

Baggers’ screwdriver slips:

There would be widespread banking collapse, not just in the US, but everywhere dollars are traded as the currency of choice for oil and other commodities. If economic transactions are halted, then trade and supply-chains break. The longer goods are stalled in the pipeline the more consumables and perishables decay in transit and storage or are consumed by present holders or returned to sender. Pipelines and machines rust, factories close, unemployment and starvation turns to riot.

The longer the down time and the wider the scale, the harder the re-boot once the idiots see what they have done. The dollar ceases once and forever to be the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, instead of getting everything in the global economy at a discount, the US pays top dollar to buy, say, Swiss Francs, so it can pay for its addictions.

FEASTA’s David Korowicz, writing last month on large-scale risk management, said, “The wonder of our globalized economy is that in all this globalized integration and complexity there is no one in control…. 

So, while national economies may have an individual character, they have no autonomous existence in anything like their present form outside the globalized economy, just as an arm, lung or heart cannot declare independence from the human body.” Korowicz was underscoring the point that we are all coming to realize: the global economic body is delicately interconnected, and hungry, but there is no brain.

In the US, a Zombie Congress is dragging itself through the angry streets in search of fresh blood. It may, in the end, have to settle for consuming its own. This dragon does not like to be tickled.

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Jared Got a Gun

SUBHEAD: The shooting took place in a strip mall in a city of strip malls - many of them failing financially.  

By James Kunstler on 10 January 2011 for Kunstler.com -  
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/jared-got-a-gun.html)

 
Image above: Tea Party rally during midterm campaign in spring 2010. From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/will-the-tea-partys-legac_b_558444.html).

Did anyone else notice that Speaker of the House John Boehner did not shed a tear when issuing his statement about the massacre in Arizona that killed, among others, a nine-year-old girl and left Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords maimed?

The new Speaker notoriously weeps when recounting his own youthful travails rising to fortune in business and power in government. He handled this incident like a news-caster at a Midwestern TV station reporting rush hour traffic.

I doubt that the young shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, will turn out to be affiliated with the Tea Party or any other established political faction. The evidence he left in a few YouTube videos evinces the thought disorder typical of post-adolescent onset schizophrenia, but with a remarkable twist. He was preoccupied with thoughts about currency, money, in particular how money is created. In the text-and-music video available here at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGRCEIxU96A&feature=related), Loughner writes:

Every human who's mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency....

If you create one new currency then you're able to create a second new currency.

If you're able to create a second new currency then you're able to create a third new currency.

You create one new currency.

Thus you're able to create a third currency.

Does this begin to sound sickeningly like the policy of the Federal Reserve and the thinking of its chairman, Ben Bernanke? Is the monetary behavior of top US officials now so disordered that it is showing up as mental illness in young people?

You are wrong if you think I'm being facetious.

Loughner had a few other obsessions: control, sleepwalking, the "scam" of higher education, and terrorism.

For more than one generation it has been difficult for young American males to develop successfully into men. They even dress like babies at 25. Their vocational options these days tend toward corporate slavery of one kind or another. Flipping burgers for a despotic fast food chain. A job in a cubicle. At best, a job in a cubicle making a lot of money by swindling fellow Americans. If they manage to get through college, many face a lifetime of tuition loan debt slavery.

The rewards of entering the realm beyond college are paltry-to-miserable. Solitary cab rides to the mall. A burrito and a Big Gulp. Later, back home, an hour in the virtual company of the Kardashian sisters via the E-Network on your parents' cable TV. Where are the initiations into manhood? (Try the channelized dry-wash, courtesy of the Barrio Blue Moon boyz.) I'm convinced that the reason video games and movies aimed at young males in America are devoted almost solely to fantasies about super-heroes and supernatural power (especially the power to kill) is because adolescent boys feel so impotent, so powerless, so unlike real men. The adults in this culture do not furnish any meaningful alternative scripts. That's the market's job, I guess.

When confused and disturbed young men do act, they sometimes act out the scripts of violent retribution that the video game and movie business so lavishly supply to them. This is a culture, lately, with no room whatsoever for tenderness. Look for a moment of tenderness in the popular video game, Carmageddon. The Speaker of the House's moments of tender reminiscence are reserved for himself. This used to be known as a condition called feeling sorry for yourself. It was considered, if anything, un-manly.

I don't know if the ambient political mood of the USA is any more poisonous now than it was for about a decade starting in the 1960s, when all those assassinations changed history: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, plus Lennon and the attempts on Ford and Reagan. The Baby Boomers produced more than their share of lost souls. Myth still shrouds the doings of Lee Harvey Oswald, since he was bumped off so quickly, but other shooters have been around for decades. Surely plenty of people from FBI agents to forensic psychiatrists have plumbed the depths of Sirhan Sirhan and Arthur Bremer over their many years of incarceration, and all they find are a couple of human black holes yielding nothing that illuminates their acts.

I doubt that the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the many others who attended her meet-and-greet will lead to anything like more civility in politics. The country faces grave problems and most of the political noise rises not from the agony of facing them, but from the desperate efforts to avoid or deflect them. The deliberations at the highest level in Washington sound these days like the tortured reasoning of Jared Lee Loughner - for instance the hiring of William Daley from JP Morgan to run a White House that is hostage to JP Morgan.

One thing the shooter surely accomplished: it will now cost elected officials hundreds of millions of dollars more every year to imagine they can protect themselves with new layers of security. Not just the assignment of federal marshals, but the deployment of all sorts of "high-tech" equipment and procedures, since we are now in the techno-rapture phase of the long emergency, which features massive amounts of magical thinking.

Will history notice that Jared Lee Loughner was struggling to puzzle through the mysteries of currency and of who controlled what in this world, even while he was being tossed out of a community college that he was extremely conscious of being scammed to pay for - a government-supported school that affected to prepare young people for a career spent in a corporate cubicle in order to fork over the weekly paycheck to pay back college loans.

From their website:

At Pima Community College you have access to an affordable, high-quality education. Our Costs and Payments section will familiarize you with tuition for credit and non-credit classes, as well as with payment methods.

Don't let a lack of funds keep you from reaching your goals! There are options available to help you cover tuition, including:

Federal Financial Aid - you should apply, don't assume you're not eligible!

Veteran's Benefits

Scholarships and Grants

Work Study Programs

The shootings of Congresswoman Giffords and all the others took place in front of a Safeway Supermarket in a strip mall in a city of strip malls and housing subdivisions - many of them failing financially. It must be unbelievably difficult for a young person to make sense of such an incoherent environment and such cruel swindling culture.

A society that habitually and incessantly lies to itself is apt to choke to death on its internal contradictions. Jared Lee showed an unusual concern for language and literacy. His videos were all words, no pictures. I wonder if the word SAFEWAY flashed through his brain when he pulled the trigger.
 .

Unrestrained capitalism will fail

SUBHEAD: Collapse inevitably happens when false gods are worshipped. Unrestrained capitalism is a delusional idea. Image above: The Invisible Hand of the Future meets the BP oil spill. From (http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/06/invisible-hand-of-the-free-market-man). By Michael Byron on 19 October 2010 in OpEdNews - (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Unrestrained-Capitalism-Ca-by-Michael-Byron-101018-796.html)

Conventional wisdom holds that the existential challenges of the new century will be met almost effortlessly, if only we simply stand back and let the "magic" of the market operate. For example, declining availability of petroleum will lead to higher prices, which creates enhanced incentives to explore for additional oil leading to greater supply. If this enhanced supply is not forthcoming, or is not available at a reasonable price, then the market finds a substitute for it--ethanol perhaps. Certainly given profit incentives, the "invisible hand" of the market will conjure up some kind of cheap "unobtanium" to substitute for petroleum. All that is needed is for government's "heavy hand" to be deregulated out of the otherwise free market and presto, voila, we're saved!

We, citizen-consumers need do nothing, except perhaps join the Tea Party to force government off the back of industry so that all of this can actually happen. Magic "power words", all animated by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" are ritually invoked to explain all of this: "incentive", "substitutability", "deregulation". So relax, vote corporatist, and have another bag of chemical-laden cheese puffs. The future is in good, if invisible, hands--right?

Err...well...no. Actually the relatively near future will be unbelievably awful. It is a future of collapsing ecosystems, evaporating economies, and gyrating weather. Worse, the longer we remain lulled into a false sense of security, the more probable this terrifying future becomes, and the more the possibility of averting it--or at least mitigating it--recedes. Why?

The world economy and population have been expanding for about 500 years--from Columbus to the present era of globalization. Initially this process of expansion placed only local burdens on the Earth's carrying capacity. Now this burden is planetary. It exceeds our biosphere's adaptive capacity. Species are becoming extinct at a rate unseen since the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago.

Our entire planetary economy is based on one assumption: Oil will always be cheap and plentiful. A corollary to this is that if it was not cheap and plentiful, market forces would effortlessly find a substitute for it. Yet this is nonsense. Oil exists in finite quantities, at some point its production must begin to decline inexorably. Its price must concomitantly, rise equally inexorably. Burning coal reserves might provide a brief respite at the cost of tipping the planet into a hothouse equilibrium 10 or more, degrees, Fahrenheit, warmer. Goodbye to coastal cities, reliable climate for agriculture, reliable rainfall for drinking etc. Then coal goes into decline.

As you can see from the above graph, global oil production has flat-lined since 2004. We are now at "peak oil." Even prices near $150.00 per barrel in 2008 could not significantly increase production. Clearly, market forces cannot increase production. They cannot minimize prices except by means of allowing high prices to trigger long term recessions which themselves reduce demand.

No near-term substitutes for oil are on offer. This is because the universal laws of physics do not answer to the human invented "laws" of economics. There is no adequate substitute for petroleum in a gas-powered civilization. Substitutability has its limits. These are defined not by the "laws" of economics, but rather, by the iron laws of physics--the cold, hard equations which govern the physical universe.

It gets worse. Our economy grows by borrowing. Money for growth is ultimately backed up by the belief that more wealth will exist in the future, than exists at present. So long as this is the case, then gimmicks such as fractional reserve banking--wherein much more money is loaned out by financial institution than is actually available on reserve at the institution--can usually work. Sure, the loaned money does not really exist, but it will--in the future. Without future economic growth, this is no longer the case.

Without growth in the energy supply, future economic growth cannot occur. Also, environmental limits such as climate change would constrain future growth because of its impact on the food supply. Infinite material economic growth on a planet of finite resources is simply not possible due to energy constraints, resource constraints, and environmental constraints.

We find ourselves living at that point at which these constraints are reached. Researcher Robert Hirsch in his new book The Impending World Energy Mess calculates that global oil production will begin its inexorable decline from its present plateau in 2-5 years. This estimate is consistent with that of many others. At that point when decline manifests, we can expect mass panic.

Once we drop off of the petroleum-supply plateau, the economy will implode as investment capital--based on the assumption of future growth and wealth--vaporizes. Unfortunately, rather than facing reality squarely, we can also expect instead crash programs to liquefy coal as a gasoline substitute, like Germany did in WWII, simply to buy a few more years of the status quo. Burning more coal will drive global warming into overdrive, creating, among a multitude of intensifying problems, the conditions for crop failure, and leading to mass famine. It will have done nothing whatsoever to address the underlying, fundamental problem of hydrocarbon energy depletion.

Once Americans lose their relative material comfort all hell will break loose. Neo-fascism is likely to emerge rapidly, beginning with a search for scapegoats: Moslems, liberals, unions, gays, feminists, Democrats etc. All of these will be said to have somehow traitorously sabotaged the economy. Next, the national government itself will soon fragment as the chaos accelerates and the lack of available energy reduces the government's ability to maintain its control over large regions.

Internationally, global war is the nearly certain result, as existing great powers seeing their impending doom and use their military assets to preserve their access to oil. Of course, this will further destroy and expend irreplaceable material and energy assets, while wasting the last remaining time available to work constructively for solutions to our multitude of intensifying problems.

Somehow, the much worshipped "invisible hand" will have failed to rouse itself and "save" us. The few rich (those favored by the invisible hand) are rapidly getting ever richer while the rest of us...well you know about this side of the equation don't you? The rest of us get backhanded by the invisible hand.

Viewed in the bigger picture, this looming civilizational collapse is likely a...well if not exactly a good thing , then at least a necessary and even a liberating event. We are about to be liberated from ever-intensifying national and global tyranny. The planetary biosphere is about to be liberated from the prospect of unrecoverable devastation. Not because we successfully opposed the market-worshipping cult, but rather because the cult's own internal illogic of endless growth amid finite resources was self-dooming.

Of course, even as our self-inflicted collapse approaches, our market-worshiping overlords, and their deluded Beck-ite minions will chant "incentive", "substitutability", "deregulation" even more frantically. Alas, these incantations to their golden calf of false assumptions about unrestrained capitalism won't bring back their vanished wealth.

Collapse is what inevitably happens when false gods are worshipped. Unrestrained capitalism is a delusional human belief system. Reality is not.

Prepare for the storm! Prepare also for liberation. Next time we won't get fooled again--right?

.

The Corn Pone Nazis!

SUBHEAD: Not a pretty sight. Glenn Beck and Sara Palin working the mob in Washington DC.

Image above: The Glenn Beck crowd near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, August 28th. From (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/sc-dc-beck-rally-20100828,0,6808932.story).

By James Kunstler on 30 August 2010 in Kunstler.com -

(http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/one-lump-or-two.html) Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper, Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene). Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them. Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].) Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously. Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far, neither of which will change anything about how we do these things. Why Mr. Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery. Even the former communists atRussia Today laugh at the idea that he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these days -- the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his current job ends. My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of it -- for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison -- that said system will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it unravels... the sublime feeling of having gotten something wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know this. This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy, foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out -- just as the tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning western-style democracy. Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good. In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke, the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy as a result. The bigger mystery in all this -- if I may perhaps engage in some nostalgia of my own -- is: what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?

Image above: Mashup of Glenn Beck rally poster detail by Juan Wilson.

.

$100 to Punch Alan Grayson

SUBHEAD: Dan Gainer, a right wing wingnut, offers money for someone to punch Alan Grayson.

By Laura Bassett on 20 July 2010 in Huffington Post -  
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/20/dan-gainor-right-wing-med_n_653252.html)


 
Image above: Congressman Alan Grayson with Monopoly money tie. 
 
Prominent conservative media critic Dan Gainor has offered $100 to the first member of Congress who punches "smary [sic] idiot" Alan Grayson (D-Fl.) in the nose, reports Media Matters. When fellow conservative Jim Geraghty responded (via Twitter) that Gainor should offer that $100 to Grayon's opponent instead of "financ[ing] violence," Gainor tweeted that he was joking, although he would "love to see the video."

The outburst was prompted by comments that Grayson made on the House floor last night regarding unemployment: namely, that Republican lawmakers are "taking food out of the mouths of children" and "trying to revive the America of desperate straits and cheap labor" by blocking the passage of legislation that would extend unemployment benefits. Gainor tweeted that Grayson is "a caricature of a Congressman," in addition to offering cash for a physical assault on him.

Gainor is the vice president of the Media Research Center, a $6 million-a-year organization that has been praised by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Newt Gingrich, and he is often cited, interviewed and otherwise taken very seriously by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander.

But Grayson is not one to back down from a media brawl. He told HuffPost: "I think he's overlooking something important: I punch back.".

Worse than 1789

SUBHEAD: This summer in the Hamptons where, like Versailles in 1789, the elite mega-wealthy of today cavort shamelessly. By August, it's possible that the entire country except for the editorial board of the New York Times will be members in good standing of the Tea Party.

By James Kunstler on 2 May 2010 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/05/worse-than-1789.html)

 
Image above: An estate in along the beach in South Hampton, Long Island. From (http://sumanandsharmila.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/the-hamptons/).  

Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach's Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment "products" as "one shitty deal." Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called "family" newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it.

And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer Films classic, The Horror of Dracula, where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow bloodsuckers.

It's hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started. It seems to me lately that the crack-up we've entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class.

The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris.

The French Revolution actually got off to a better start than it is remembered for. A progressive opposition put together a new legislature, the National Assembly. They undertook the writing of a constitution.

But it all fell apart rather quickly since the dim-witted King and his cohorts didn't really get into that old changing times spirit and their lack of cooperation -- not to mention their decadence -- provoked the more violent factions of the common people to form that kraken of politics, the mob.

What a god-damned mess it turned into -- a revolving cast of mob masters, each worse than the last, whipping up the crowds to ever more horrible enormities of human vivisection -- a political process that had gone hopelessly out of control.

Despite the agile precedent of their friend, the new USA, quickly resolving its own rebellion into a functioning government of law, France opted for a bloody clusterfuck -- which went on for eight more years.

The France of 1789 and the USA of today have a few important elements in common: a striking inability to sort out any national problems, an arrogant, depraved ruling elite resistant to reform, and an intellectual underclass motivated by blind fury. Some signal differences: most of our even theoretically best-intentioned "leaders" -- i.e. elected officials, business, education, and media figures -- are unable to articulate the problems we face, which go way beyond the mere distribution of political power or even wealth.

In fact much of the so-called Left, especially the faculty intellectuals, are preoccupied with esoteric sideshows around wealth, power, and the ridiculous "politics" of gender. Paul Krugman and David Brooks have no more of a clue about the implications of Peak Oil than Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

The resounding message of Senator Levin's hearings on Goldman Sachs last week is that Wall Street is a shitty deal for America. Okay, now everybody knows it. Nobody has an excuse for not knowing it. The machinations ongoing over a financial reform bill seem to be leading to a rather feeble outcome. The only people who are excited by it are -- surprise! -- a bunch of economists, who will soon be relegated to the dumpster of discredited professions along with necromancers, alchemists, and magnetic mesmerists.

My guess is that something lame will pass, it will be instantly denounced as yet another fraud, and then the next move is probably the stock market's. A return of volume will signal a return of cratering equities as all the indexes give up their hallucinated gains of the past year, and all the pension funds and college endowments and banks who flocked there in the desperate search for yield will find that they were hosed.


By August, it's possible that the entire country except for the editorial board of the New York Times will be members in good standing of the Tea Party, and it will have split into a dozen warring factions. By then, too many other destabilizing events will be in motion. The hangover of the British election will reveal the fatal insolvency of the UK, torpedoing the pound -- a huge event that would certainly trigger a cascading fiasco of credit default swap obligations. I don't see how the global financial system emerges from that in any form recognizable to someone watching the scene in the first week of May, 2010.

In the background of all this, something wicked this way comes in the matter of oil prices and availability. The eco-disaster underway from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is looking every hour more like an event horizon that will rock the whole industry and, with it, the developed world. At the moment, oil is over $86 a barrel (and gasoline over $3 for regular at the pumps).

I continue to wonder how it will all go down this summer in the Hamptons where, like Versailles in 1789, the elite mega-wealthy of today cavort shamelessly in a semi-private fantasy-land of status vamping for the Vanity Fair shutterbugs.

The Hamptons are not defensible -- unless you count privet hedge as an effective fortification. Any bloody-minded gang of unemployed, grievance-maddened mudlarks can creepy-crawl down the Sunrise Highway to Gin Lane with firearms bought at the WalMart (and modified to full-automatic in the garage).

What if hundreds -- thousands! -- of them get the same idea? Louis XVI and his homeys probably never thought the mobs would scale the ha-has of his fabulous estate, either.

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