DCJFeb2009

Volume 56

FEBRUARY 2009

56. 6: WHY WE ARE IN DEEP DOO-DOO, PART III 2.28.2009

We ain’t done yet.

If we manage to avoid being swept away by an economic tsunami (Part 1) of our own making, or by a nuclear holocaust (Part Deux), much of which is of or own making (with some help from the likes of A.Q. Kahn), we are hardly out of a deep doo-doo destiny. There is another sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, again, mostly of our own making, and perhaps more imminent than those previously discussed.

It may come to nothing whether, as in Part 1, we sink into such an economic abyss if the likelihood of global war over access to fundamental resources triggers a nuclear cataclysm if the planet itself is transmogrified into an uninhabitable—for humans at least—stew of self-immolating gases. A touch melodramatic? Perhaps. But also perhaps temporally closer to a grim truth than most people are inclined to, and should, consider.

That the earth is warming is still something most people doubt or deny even as the beads of sweat form on their brows and the consensus of scientists as to its validity grows. It will not be easy to get those of us who, as the expression goes, already have a large “carbon footprint” to reduce our CO2 producing lifestyles, or those who have been long awaiting carbon’s goodies to forego its imminent blessings. Indeed, we may already be close to—or even past— the “tipping point” that will send us down a slippery slope to environmental disaster. Some scientists are of the opinion that we have come to the point where there is really not much our belated and insufficient efforts in the developed West to staunch the bleeding of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By 2050 we might be three or four degrees Celsius warmer on average, and the world we be a much different place as a result.

Perhaps we should have been more careful what we wished for. In the past thirty or so years we have been joined in our great quest to make capitalism the reigning economic model of the world by China, India, Brazil and other nations. Simply the success of China and India and the hunger for fossil fuels and iron of two and a half billion people will more than offset any countervailing effects technological changes in the developed world will make. They will make junk for us to consume, and eventually make their own cars; they will buy our debt so that we can buy their junk and give us the illusion of cost savings by taking our orders for it in the middle of he night with scarcely-disguised Indian accents. They, and much of the Southern hemisphere, have come late to the parade of capitalistic development and, not without some justification, they now want their share of it. Should they trust a country that refused to sign even the Kyoto agreements to reduce is own egregiously excessive carbon consumption? I wouldn’t.

At this stage of the matter, however, it might be too late for everybody. As there is unlikely to be the political will, the consumptive restraint, or the cooperative attitude,* short of an orbital change pushing Earth into a slightly cooler position, the accellerated self-cooking of the planet will likely proceed at an exponential pace. It is this last concern that has caused climate scientists at the IPCC.

Part of the scenario might hold. The tolerances of the Earth’s ecosystem have been forgiving within parameters that have allowed us to be overconfident and over consumptive. But there are tipping points rapidly approaching and when they tip there will be no setting things back, a new, and unrecognizable, Earth will come into being, until an unprecedented human die-off takes place.

How could that happen? The earth is already a couple degrees Farenheit warmer. To simulate the weather patterns you can put a pot of water ion the stove and start boiling it. If you could spin the pan you will see that there are waves that form, somewhat akin to the Temperate Zone wind patterns (jet stream) that circle the globe and put rainfall down where it usually falls—the Monsoons, the Great Plans, etc. But if you change temperature you will change the amplitude and frequency of the pattern. The variables of the growing season change, maybe becoming sorter, or hotter, or drier. This sort of thing as happened in the past, without the human assistance that we have today and is credited, for example, with bringing the demise of e Mycenaean civilization of the Peloponnese in Greece when rainfall began falling into the gulf of Corinth rather than on the hinterland of Mycenae, thereby reducing the population holding capacity if the region. This same “drying out” of Amazon rainforests (that have lost an areas the size of France in the past forty years), is also responsible for the longest drought on record in the Southeastern Unites States. Fires that have been “naturally” a part of the eco-system for eons in that area, and places like New South Wales in Australia are now raging longer and wider. The result of a landscape that emits more heat is to further heat up. Eventually, everything else becomes affected and we get new diseases, or spreading of old ones, assisted by famine and injury and stress of war. The prospect of inundation of many coastal low-lying cities (can you say “Arrivederci Venetia”) grows with huge chunks of both polar caps detaching and melting. Overused as the metaphor is, the “perfect storm,” a confluence of circumstances and events producing an unstoppable disastrous outcome, seems much in the offing.

Some doubters and deniers might use such cases to bolster the argument that current warming is just part of a larger cycle of weather and will revert at some point. But never before has there been as much human involvement. We are in deep doo-doo because too long has humankind allowed the betrayal of trust, the misuse of political power.

Just look at America alone in the recent political transition. No matter that the Obama administration, it its first efforts to make some socially synergistic policy toward rescuing the Bush-devastated economy by attempting to prime the fiscal pump with expenditures on infrastructure and alternative energy technologies and technological research, when the Republicans want nothing more than tax cuts and policies aimed at consumptive patterns that promise both economic and environmental doom—the same myopic, greedy, socially dysfunctional, world destabilizing policies that are the problem.

A survey of international affairs academics by Foreign Policy lists the greatest threats to global stability today as “global climate change” (37%), and in ten years the greatest threat as “global climate change” (46%). The Scholars are in high accord that the Obama administration should be spending the majority of it budget in addressing climate change (55% of budget), but obviously don’t think that will happen.

Historically, mankind has migrated when its environment was unable to support it. There are already many places in the world—e.g. Saharan Africa—where life is environmentally precarious and mirrored in economic conditions. When growing seasons become affected by climate change huge migrations are likely to be set off in search for the basic necessities of food and water. Competition for arable land and water supplies will ignite wars of ethnic and geographic rivalries, not the least among the unstable nations of the Middle East.

Environmental Armageddon? Some, of course will welcome it—the Second Coming of Christ, riding down in a blazing chariot to fulfill some Revelation prophecy and take the “saved” back up to an air-conditioned heaven, leaving non-converso Jews and other sinners to cook in the flames of an earthly Hell. Ironically, that attitude—that the whole creation is some stage set for some silly End Times Biblical scenario— fosters the very hubris that will lead to the destruction of the planet. The typical fundamentalist “narrative” involves some sort of denouement, some Armageddon, or reckoning to account for the battle of “good and evil” in the world and the reward of the righteous. It is notable that many believers in the Second Coming, or the End Times, believe that it will happen in their lifetime. Hence, for them, the earth was not made “to last,” but is a temporary staging area for the afterlife and therefore will be or needs to e dispensed with. Such views would not place a great value upon the integrity of the plant, and maybe, even see its imminent demise as necessary for biblical prophetic fulfillment. Such people have little interest or concern with scientific explanations of environmental collapse or with modifying their behavior to avoid it. But is God going to welcome people who have doo-doo on their shoes?
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

56. 5: DISMAL SCIENCE 101 2.21.2009

Randomly rational thoughts on Economics and the fate of the nation

Following all the excitement and glitter and glamour of the election have you noticed how suddenly boring politics in America has become. Well, its “the economy, stupid”, or the stupid economy, or the stupid Bushies who ruined the economy. So now President Obama is like some guy push-brooming the gutters of Wall Street of the human trash and financial documents that aren’t worth the paper they are written on (even when those papers have presidents’ pictures on them.) The Bush aftershocks keep coming: more layoffs (600K last month, the most since that other Republican dolt, Ford, was stumbling around.)

Way back in 1962 I received a bachelor’s degree in Economics. A few years later, a third of my Ph.D. was devoted to urban economics and political economy. Those achievements don’t quite make me an “economist,” since I never really “did” economics beyond some economic base reports as a planning consultant. But I am much more of an economist than some of he right-wing clods and Libertarians from Mars who go to (anti) taxpayer meetings and think they know what the hell they are talking about. The supply of economic idiots well exceeds the demand.

I don’t admit much to my economics background these days. People might ask about “sub prime Ponzi hedge fund derivative swaps,” or some such Wall Street scam that is closer to “three card Monte” than economics. I tried to beat “three card Monte” once in Hyde Park, London, and lost five pounds; I think it cured me of ever trying Wall Street scams. Anyway, I learned that economics is more than just curves and carts and supply and demand.

People actually believe that Economics is actually more sophisticated and arcane than rocket science or micro-biology. It’s not. You can explain the fundamentals of economics to grade school kids. Give me a box of matches, a bag of pennies and I’ll show you (these days a couple of rats and roaches might add reality). We don’t do it in school, because it actually gives kids ADD. Kids today are only interested in their allowance anyway, or their Visa card limits.

You can also try to explain it with a lot of mathematical googah—which is one of the main reasons I decided not to continue studying econ. Vasilly Leontief, a Nobel Laureate in Econ and leader of “input-output analysis” once said that the whole sophisticated structure increased predictability perhaps a couple percent. Economic models have t make a a lot of assumptions about what people will do. They often assume that people will be “utility maximizers,” rather than people who will have a couple of drinks with Bernie Madoff. I hold with economic historian Robert Heilbroner who said, “Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.”

Ultimately, all economics is about utility. Utility, that’s the word you need to concentrate on. It’s the little seed from which it al grows.

Harf: “Hey, Gnurd, see this stone?”

Gnurd: “Yeah, so what?”

Harf: “Look, I cracked it and now it cuts meat off this Mastodon.”

Grurd: “Cool. I’ll give you my fire sticks for that stone.”

Harf: “OK, but I want options on future fire sticks from you at three per cutting stone.”

Gurd: “Deal. Whaddaya say we sell some of those futures to the others in the clan—we really don’t have to make anything.”

Harf: “Cool, and if somebody invents the knife, we’re still ahead.”

You see, in economics, you are supposed to actually make something that has utility, and when you take something you add value to it, which is how people use their talent and labor to get paid for their work. Try to sell something without utility—something useless—right. Maybe. Sure, now we’re talking something else about economics—rationality. Rationality means that you have to know something about utility; if you don’t you just might get “taken.” Investment banks do perform a function of moving money to places where there might be something being made that has utility—but it doesn’t have to be that way. They can get into the business of betting on the future of something and even taking out insurance on the bets. All investment is, in effect, about betting on the future, that the stock will appreciate, that your home value will always rise, that you don’t work for Enron or your job will not go to China or India, etc.

A casino economy isn’t really about making anything of value. It’s about betting on the odds that there just night be demand (that is, effective utility) for something that might be made in the future. But it might not happen, in which case you lose, and the (investment) house–casino usually comes out because the boys running the bailouts from Washington are old Wall Street boys. Of course, in recent years these casino-houses have been screwing each other over by passing “bad paper” around like hot potatoes. No honor among thieves.

I also left Econ because it seemed to me that making kids economists also make they seems to make them homely or ugly. Being someone who has once again failed to win my local “Brad Pitt Look-Alike Contest” I can say that. I notice that when I took my Econ courses in college. Fr. E looked like Kermit the Frog, Dr. K like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Dr. G had the pallor of a cadaver. (Ironically, Dr. G, who gave me a “C,” ended up having his work reviewed by me as a consultant to the urban planning firm I was with for a while. Then he really looked dead.) Take a look: Hank Paulson looks like some perpetrator from a slasher film, Bernake has that goofy white beard and black tonsure, Paul Volker looks like a shaved Wookie from Star Wars, and then there is Alan Greenspan, a guy with face his mother loved (apparently to smack with a 2 by 4) who could be Milton Friedman’s slightly more ugly brother. Even our latest Nobel Laureate in Econ, Paul Krugeman has the surprised innocent expression of a gnome in the middle of a rectal exam. Have you noticed that the stock trading commercials n TV always features some serenely-trusty-looking type left over from Law and Order or some such show as their spokesperson, always talking about how their firm cares about you as an individual (like those guys they used to have in doctor’s white coats pushing cigarettes not all that long ago)? But it’s the uglies behind the scenes making the decisions with your money. Don’t trust the uglies because making lots of money is the only way they can get trophy wives, and they don’t care about you.

Back at college the one thing I learned was that you should never, ever, take a Micro-Econ course at 8AM (or maybe any other time). My eyes started crossing and supply and demand curves started wiggling around on the blackboard like the hairs in sink water. Check that, I learned something else in Micro—that economics is not funny. (Although economists can be at times. Galbraith: “Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”) The only funning thing that ever happened in Mirco is that one morning the college basketball star, who sat right in front of me had a cold, and in a panic sneeze reached into his pocket for a handkerchief that turned out not to be there. Instead, he mistakenly grabbed the in side of his pocket and ripped it out of his pants with a tearing sound that blended with the roar of his snuffled sneeze. It was so damn funny I nearly soiled myself. (OK, maybe you had to be there.) I can’t think of Micro-Econ without hearing that ripping sound.

A lot of that sneaky Wall Street stuff is not necessarily taught in university Economics departments, but to the greedy bastard children of Economics Departments—Business Schools. Economics is a discipline, a study that takes its name from how to run a household (oikos + nomos, if you want to go original Greek with it.). Business is, well, as Don Vito Corleone used to say, business—you screw people, or kill them if you have to. Business schools are about marketing, accounting, and profit; the difference between the tail and the dog. There is a major difference between the public interest and private interest. They do intersect a various points, but once you start believing that the public interest is the private interest you get . . . well, take a look around. There is a reason why Econ departments are in Colleges of Arts and Letters and Business schools are on the other side of campus—they represent different values about society. Be wary of pin stripes.

There is a fiction that people who make huge salaries, have stock options and bonus and bailout packages get these perks because they are “worth it” (even when they destroy the very corporations they head.) We now are ale to see what a great fiction that is. These a men who have used their political influence to skew the rules of financial behavior to their favor to engage in insider trading, dominate or influence boards of directors and stockholders and, generally, operate more like lobbyists and con men than people who care about their corporations, much less their country.

So now the news is all economics, all bad economics. But these guys will be back, you can lay money on it. They are “entitled”; we used to have aristocracies, now we have “econostracries.” “Let them eat cake has become “let them invest in derivatives.”

Will Obama’s bright star be diminished by the gloominess of the dismal science? All this news, the suspicions of back room deals and CEOs coming to Washington with veiled threats that if we don’t give them their yachts and executive jets they won’t give us their economic expertise to save the country and the world. How will this dashing new prez survive among the ugly money-grubbing number-mumblers? Don’t think for a minute that they will not find other names and ways to give themselves bonuses and perks to fatten their deposits in the Caymans. Obama is up against the greed that has replaced the utility of the American economic system. To start with I think he needs a good, sharp, mastodon cutting rock.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

56. 4: THE POLITICS OF DESPERATION 2.17.2009

On why the Republicans will not cooperate to save the economy, but need to make Obama fail, and the country be damned.

In his Lincoln’s birthday address in Springfield, Illinois President Obama connected Lincoln’s bold policies to keep the union intact with the necessity of government to intervene in affairs for the greater good. It’s a theme he will have to hammer home to a polity poisoned for nearly four decades on the Reagan shibboleth that “government is the problem.” In Lincoln’s time the South had its way with things, along with the complicity of northern states. It’s hard to give up an economy where you don’t have to pay your workers anything, not wages, benefits, not even respect as human beings. The South lost that one, thanks to Mr. Lincoln’s use of governmental force; then they swung into Jim Crow, the KKK and lynching, their politics of desperation. It was not without some success. Eventually, the last bold wielder of the power of government, Lyndon Johnson, had to tear down the grudging barriers, giving the political right an interlude, a “southern strategy,” based on fear and racism. Indeed, there was lurking, off to the east, the prime example of too much government, our Cold War nemesis governments in the USSR and Communist China.

Much of this edifice of the right wing has crumbled, brought down by the failure of Vietnam, the self-destruction of the USSR and the East Block, and the re-construction of China under the new “Asian values.” The substitution of long “little hot wars” for big cold ones proved insidious for the damage they inflicted on the quality of life on the home front. And, finally, with a dimwit who wielded executive power through fear, fiscal profligacy, and rampant laissez-faire-ism, the global economy has been brought to its knees. People losing their homes, jobs and pensions could not ignore the realities. The election of Barack Obama was made up of different, and somewhat potentially-conflicting parts: Part hope, for a politics that stressed unity rather than divisiveness; but part desperation, for a politics government by intelligence and rationality, rather that fear and blind faith; and part disaffection for the manipulative politics forged from Reagan to Rove.

There has been much written of the “end of that era.” Some pundits are saying that this election might have ushered in—countering Roves’s notion of a thousand year Republican Reich—an enduring Democratic government. But that might be more hope than a ringing mantra of “yes, we can” can bring to pass. The Republicans, however, see the possibility of this. They see that, if Obama can deliver on his “yes, we can,” if he can extract us from the greasy slope of Iraq/Afghanistan and put the economy on a healing, growthful course once again, that they will be the “back benchers” in perpetuity. They lost the White House and they lost more ground in the Capitol. But the margins weren’t overwhelming.

Somewhat oversimplified, the Republican choices are as follows: A) be good politicians who put country above the party and help Obama set things aright, B) play the ideological card and call it incipient “socialism” and do your best to cause him to fail. Option B, of course, promises a better chance to be back in power in a round or two, even if you have to cause more economic misery than your party has already caused (of course you do what you know best how to do).

The Republicans still have their friends in fossil fuel energy, the Wall Street bonuses boys, and the greedy CEOs, they still have Big Phamra and Big Insurance who are heavily-vested in a health care system that leaves about 50 million Americans uncovered; they still have Big Defense who are heavily vested in making a lot of weapons they we can’t use in wars fought in urban neighborhoods or mountain caves. All the elements for their flirtation with fascism are still there. They need to keep these “friends” close; lose them and all is lost. But they must also not appear to be willing to sacrifice even the loyal “useful idiots” to their cause of regaining power because, if the election proved something else, it is that some of those idiots might be willing to affect a “live and let live” posture regarding their “values” issues in order to get back into their homes and jobs. Republican pols will beat the old horse of incipient socialism and, as that political chameleon, John McCain invoked, putting the debt for a the stimulus package on the "backs of future generations"—left unsaid is that we are already overburdened with the debt of Bush’s Iraq war, money thrown into desert sands and the accounts of war profiteers.

So the early outlines of option B seem to be showing through. Suckered in by their false overtures to bipartisanism Obama “took for the fake” and got himself set up for a unanimous negative vote from the Repubs when his stimulus package went before the House. Not an auspicious start for a guy who has played a lot of street ball; but at least he knows where the drawling honkies in the hood are going. Obama might gain some political leverage from trying to characterize the policies he is recommending as a non-zero-sum games—but they are not, politics is not, and Republican politics is assuredly not—zero sum. If Obama wins—something that Republican garbage mouth liar Rush Limbaugh has publically wished against—then the Republicans win only if they have capitulated. If Obama loses, the Republicans win without qualification. So they will be obstreperous, and stupid, such as Judd Gregg, who first voted for the elimination of the Department of Commerce, then lobbied to be its Secretary under Obama, then bailed out because he can’t support the stimulus policies (he first endorsed) because they don’t fit “who I am.” (Betcha he as a “wide stance” too.)

So much for Obama’s brave new world of bipartisan politics. Of the two objectives—bipartisanism or putting American’s back in their homes and jobs—bipartisanism comes in third. There was not even a nod in the direction of bipartisanism in the first three quarters of the Bush administration, and after the 2006 elections Bush dusted off his veto and signing statements. Republicans see politics through the metaphor of war; it is best that the Democrats not try to see it as a re-constitution of Woodstock. It’s a game that, unfortunately, has to be played by the rules of the lowest common denominator. In short, the Republicans do not want to share power, or responsibility of any failed policies they can bring about. That’s how they play the politics of desperation. The sooner Obama dumps the phony bipartisan Republicans he sooner he can pull his spending compromises from his legislation and any other concessions to these back-stabbing sleazeballs. The sooner Barack Obama learns—or accepts—that and starts using his elbows and some tripping and shoving, the sooner he can bring a winning game from the courts to the Capitol.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

55. 3: WHY WE ARE IN DEEP DOO-DOO, PART DEUX 2.12.2009

Over 25 years of guiding and escorting tours of Americans to foreign countries on four continents I occasionally heard my fellow countrymen expression sentiments about the places we visited that amounted to “why can’t these people be like us?” Sometimes this was just missing the way we Americans have become accustomed to things, but there were enough times in which such utterances were clearly expressions of cultural superiority. I often wondered why these people were traveling in the first place if they wanted everywhere to be like home. Sometimes I think that America would prefer that the world be like an American city, a city with ethnic neighborhoods where they can get a good pizza, deli sandwich or burrito, but where they are always in control and outnumber “them,” and where the residents of such places are like quaint “guests.”

Naïve chauvinism is somewhat tolerable among American tourists; but as foreign policy it is serious, deadly and wrongheaded. Regrettably, it is also what characterizes much of American foreign policy.

I’m writing this for Barack Obama. He’s a smart guy and I won’t likely be saying anything that has not crossed his mind already. But I hope, now that he is in power, that he will consider such points again. (By the way, Mr. President, I am completely paid up in my taxes.)

So here goes. My understanding is that you intend to take the troops released from Iraq after you shut down that Bush blunder and send them over to Afghanistan, where things are not going all that well. Before you do that, I would like you to consider this. We have already killed a lot of Al Qaeda and Taliban—enough Al Qaeda to be able to say that we have avenged (at least numerically) the Americans who were killed on 911. We have probably killed a lot more of them. We could, on that score (apt word), call it a day in Afghanistan, and pick up and go home, victorious. But, if our objective is to exterminate AQ, we are going to be there forever. And we are not going to be victorious.

Now this is not rocket science; just a little history/anthropology (which means it was well over the head of Bush and Condi Rice.) Many peoples have tried to conquer Afghanistan (the only reason I can think of is the heroin). Most recently, the British didn’t win (and couldn’t add it to their empire), the Soviets didn’t win (and lost their empire). And we won’t win. It’s not that complicated really; a lesson it seems we failed to learn with our experience in Vietnam. These people are there for the duration, and for them that is forever. They have no other place to go; they are already home. They are fighting for everything they have. We are there as long as the politics at home allows it. The Afghans, like the Vietnamese, will outlast us. The only way we can beat them is to completely annihilate them, and that probably means nuking the country (then, in a few thousand years after the radiation subsides, we can grow our own heroin). Maybe we think we can pull this off anywhere because we did such a good job of wiping out Native Americans. But look, even they are getting some revenge with their casinos scalping all those grayhaired seniors out of our ineritance.

As sort of a sidebar, this is also the problem of the so-called “Holyland.” The Israelis are regarded, an with good historical reason, as “invaders” in the homeland of the Palestinians, a people whose ancestors, the Cananites, probably have an older residency there than the Hebrews (Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, hailed from Ur, in Mesopotamia—today he would be an Iraqi.)* However one feels about Zionism, and the Jews meriting the “right of return” after the Roman induced diaspora and the pogroms and the holocaust, the Palestinians feel they got screwed out of their homeland and will not likely ever give the Israelis true peace.** America is mixed up in this one, too; nothing like having foreign policy incompetents, influenced by American Jewish Defense bond buyers and whackjob American Christian Zionists hoping to convert Jews at the “End Times.” Ya just can’t make this crap up.

So this is the lesson that countries that want to ram their religions and/or political systems and cultures down the throats of other peoples by invading and occupying their homelands. They will find a way to beat you down. They will weaponize themselves as martyrs to their faith and cause and do everything they can to take you with them. Eventually they will make things so miserable and expensive for you that you will want to go home. Your pride will goeth before your fall.

The recent, peaceful, elections in Iraq will be touted by the American right-wing as a vindication of the Bush years of spending a trillion dollars and killing five thousand Americans and a hundred thousand Iraqi. To them it will be a public relations coup. But it will have been purchased with enormously expensive baksheesh, buying off sheiks, warlords and politicians. My money is on a reversion to sectional and sectarian hostilities—probably nudged and supported by Iran—that will eventually make its way to a sharia system. There is the oil to fight over; it's not about democracy.

The Iraqis will at least be a relatively learned people. The Taliban is already busy blowing up schools for girls, and the boys will not need to know much to grow into old men who use young girls as virtual sex slaves and shoot them in the head at soccer games as half-time entertainment. There is no question that the continuance of this sort of culture is an odious blot on human rights. But America (and the First world in general) does not have an antidote for such cultural dilemmas and references to protecting human rights ring of hypocrisy when circumstances such as Darfur, Zimbabwe and the Congo are all but ignored.

The world had a lot of respect for us (not so much admiration), and we have lost a lot of that. Some of it was going to go away anyway. We still have a lot of money and power, but we promote a governmental system and then operate it like a bunch of jerks, “electing” the likes of George Bush. Think about it: Bush wants to turn many countries into democracies. Then they see Bush, head of the word’s most famous democracy. It’s a freakin’ contradiction—Bush/Democracy.

But America’s easy, halcyon days are over. It’s all going to be harder in the future. China and Russia are not so much the big, fearsome enemies as they are cases of “be careful what you wish for. We wished they would stop being communist. Neither didn’t, but they changed enough to become big problems for us; one controls huge amounts of energy and the other makes all our crap and finance our stupid wars. The easy 25 years after WWII are done; Argentina, India, the EU, along with the old East Block and China are for real. To be cliché about it—the global playing field has leveled out. Just at the time we needed to be smarter—after the turn of the century—we put one of the most stupid men on the planet in the most powerful position.

Moreover, during the Bush years, the very countries he has declared as enemies—North Korea and Iran (both of the “axis of evil”)—have become stronger, and nuclear weapons have proliferated, not diminished. The potential for a detonation by a terrorist organization has increased, not lessened along with the possibility setting off a full-scale confrontation between major powers.

With Obama we might be able to get back our respect and fend off economic disaster and nuclear risk brought on by those eight years. But we will never get all the way back t some mythical “morning in America.” It never could be sustained, even without Bush, because some of it is historical, structural, in the cards.

That feculent whiff coming from your shoes up to your knees—that’s deep doo-doo, dude. Get used to it. Part III is coming.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
*The question of an appropriate homeland for the Israelis was considered in these pages sometime ago in DCJ Archives No. 4. 7: “. . . and they shall be let to the land of corn” The Cornhusker Solution.
**Every once in a while, since the Holy Land is holy to three major religions, the Christians like to get into the act. They like to come into the Holyland and kill off some Muslim infidels, so they can be free to persecute those “Christ-Killers” themselves.

55. 2: WHY WE ARE IN DEEP DOO-DOO, PART 1 1 2.7.2009

Elsewhere in these pages I have discussed the subject of systems and how they go bad. (See Archives No. 41.7: Systems and Traditions) In this piece I would like to get a bit more specific and address our “system,” that entity called America, which, I would allege, you could find many Americans would insist is exceptional, somewhat, if not actually, God-given and fated to be some self-righting ship of destiny (remember the hype about the Titanic?) that will sail on to the “end times” on a messianic wave. We are an historically myopic people who have been around for only a couple of centuries in a resource-blessed land we ripped off from the Indian-genous peoples. We don’t have a long range view. But we are now ruled (the people who run government business and social institutions in America) by a generation whose parents survived the Great Depression and WWII, and who we have called “the greatest generation,” in spite of the fact that they have raised the creeps who have given us what promises to be an even greater depression (while hey go to the casino or invest with Bernie Madoff). They are our parents, bless them. But the “greatest”?; let’s leave that to history or the people inured to “top-ten” lists.

Americans are people who like to be left alone. We still have the residue of our agrarian past and rugged individualism—traits that sole politicians like to allude to when they are anti-taxes, pro gun control, and ignore when they want to control your sex life. We like to believe that we have a great system, one that is composed of Christianity, Capitalism, and the Constitution, a system of belief, enterprise and governance that is uniquely self-reinforcing, a three-walled bastion that can repel anything history throws against it. Yes We Can! Americans want that system to guarantee their progress and safety, insure that “our kids will have an even better life than we enjoy.” They don’t want to “do government” every day; they want to do their jobs and go fishing, play golf or veg-out in front of the Super Bowl with nachos. They want their political leaders to keep things running, securely and smoothly (with no taxes), and their banker to keep their money safe, they want to live with people just like themselves, but want the right to own a veritable arsenal of weapons in case somebody threatens any of it. They would rather spend their money on NASCAR, monster truck races, season baseball tickets, or a trip to Las Vegas, than on union dues or charitable donations. They really liked Reagan’s “morning in America,” a place that only ever existed in the addled recesses of the Gipper’s Hollywood mind.

So that’s the “establishment shot,” as they say in Hollywood. But “morning in America” is long gone, and the sun looks like it is going to set earlier than we anticipated. (We had an anomalous interlude of about 25 years after WWII, when we had the world pretty much to ourselves, but that was over with our messing with Vietnam and our addiction to foreign oil.) After building one of the most successful countries ever Americans have managed to screw themselves. There are two somewhat interrelated ways in which they have done this. This is the economic part.

America has a bad case of a social disease that we usually attribute to less developed countries: Corruption. When those of us who travel and live abroad encounter it we usually assign it to “the cost of doing business” in those places. The mordida in Mexico, baksheesh in the Middle East, cumshaw, or quanxi in the Far East. As s tour guide and escort I paid off guides and officials in a variety of places to make sure things went more smoothly, or to get somebody out of a jam. I also recognized that there was a bigger, more systemic level of corrupt activity, the kind we see erupt occasionally, as in Sichuan when the earthquake brought numerous schools that were unsafely built because officials were on the take. [See Archives for my review of No. 50. 5: WILL THE BOAT SINK THE WATER?, by Chen Guidi & Wu Chuntao (2006) 5.31.200]. But it is not just China; it’s pretty much everywhere.

Corruption is what happens when systems are unbalanced. It's how the people on top stay on top, and it’s how the people at the bottom have to pay up to keep from falling completely through the bottom. It rots a country.

Americans do not believe—although they are coming around—that they have a corrupted country. The people at the bottom are excepted from this view. They understand that they are being screwed. Want an example. How about drugs. The people at the top can afford he more expensive drugs, like cocaine. Well, according to Federal drug possession penalties you have to be caught carrying 5kg (11 pounds) of it to get the same penalty that someone carrying 50grams (1.76 ounces) of cheaper crack cocaine. Your average Wall Street or CEO snorter does not carry eleven pounds of coke around with him; so is there any wonder that our prisons are chock full of poor black sand latinos doing “not less than ten years . . . not more than life” for one and three quarter ounces of their stuff. Fourteenth Amendment, my sweet bootie! Hey, and prisons are good business, too. Drug War Facts reports that, in 2007, for example, 872,720 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses: 97,583 for trafficking and sale; 775,137 for mere possession. That’s what we are spending enormous amounts of our tax money on—arrest, conviction and incarceration of these people, rather than rapists or terrorists, etc. Of course, busting stoners is easy and fun. But, most Americans do not see this as corruption, whatever they see it as. Most are ignorant or approving of it.

But what might be getting Americans more aware of our corruption is the exposure of the economic meltdown ignited by the Bush/Wall Street nexus. There is perhaps no better (to me at least) illustration of how corrupt we have become than in the machinations of the last days of the Bush administration of Henry Paulson and the $350 billion bailout. This is American taxpayer money that went to failed banks and financial institutions with almost no oversight or conditions, and for which there is virtually no positive discernable economic impact. However, billions of this money as been allocated to the maintenance of astronomical CEO salaries and bonuses paid to top level administrators—the very people whose incompetence, greed and shady dealings have ruined their financial institutions and the national economy, and trigger world wide recession. These are the people who lobbied for de-regulation and tax cuts for their businesses. But we don’t get to the real “gotcha,” the corruption of the American system, until we see that the American taxpayer bailout money gets re-cycled into the lobbyist and political contribution “system” that really runs the country, to militate against unions, regulations and controls, and push for more tax cuts and less oversight, in other words, more of the same. If you watched the Republican debate and vote on the Economic Stimulus legislation you can be assured that much of Congress has already been corrupted.

So if our scared Capitalism is so corrupted how about the two other legs of the three-legged stool of Christianity and the Constitution. While this nation is founded on principles that are related to Christ’s regard and respect for the individual and for the equality of mankind that also influenced Enlightenment philosophy, American evangelical Christianity is a sick joke, perverted and corrupted to give divine approval of greed and intolerance, and demonstrative of it in the disgusting blatant materialism of the money-grubbing prayboys that operate it. American Catholicism can’t, or won’t control the perversions of their predatory priests. This is Christianity that would make Christ puke.

Which leaves the Constitution, the document that defines American Democracy. Wile the document itself has not been corrupted, it has been treated like toilet paper by the Bush Administration. The balance of power between the branches of government has been upset by the arrogation of power to the executive to declare war (with a separate “off the books” budget that loses and squanders untold billions on mercenaries, bribes, and sweetheart deals for favored contractors); the perversion of the Military and Department of Justice allow torture, rendition and illegal surveillance of both Americans and foreign alleged terrorists and combatants, to ignore Congress through the use of “signing statements,” and to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues who corrupt the interpretation of the document through conforming it to an ideology that gives undue influence to religious organizations and lobbyists that have tripled in number, and diminishes the rights of women and workers.

It is yet to be seen whether America has made a move that can right itself, or whether the degree to which economic class, special interest and ideological have so insidiously corrupted our “system” requires the equivalent of another American Revolution—one that will have to throw more than some tea in the harbor.

56. 1: THE COMFORTS OF WILLING SUSPENSION 2.2.2009

I have made much in these pages of the claim that religious belief is based on nothing but a need to fill in the unknowns of life with something, a narrative, a reason, a meaning. The fear of the unknown inclines us to accept “plausible” narratives that are, shall we say, comforting. The most comforting element is that this life is not the end of life, that Jesus, or some other prophet has come to tell us that there is some sort of “eternal life” awaiting us; if we just abide by some rules and behaviors and we will be with our loved ones again in some golden city, or picnicking with virgins alongside rivers of Cabernet Sauvignon (rouge, ou blanc?).

I don’t completely dispute this notion. But eternal life might not be anything like we have been told or have imagined in our rather fairytale ways. Maybe there is some other dimension into which our consciousness goes, but it is something well beyond what we have imagined. “Intelligent design” advocates are always making the case that the universe is such a complex phenomenon that it could not have come into being without some sort of higher intelligence involved. They expect that you will substitute their notions of God for that “intelligence,” and fill in the biblical narrative for its motivation. Their premise is complexity, bit their conclusion is pure simplemindedness. They want us to stay stupid because that’s how they get away with selling their nonsense.

Here I want to make two related points about this scenario. One is sort of positive; the other negative. First is that there may be some need that we humans have to create the illusion that there is a scenario, a narrative to our existence. People will tell you that they could not abide atheism because they would find it too depressing to go about thinking “this life is all there is.” When we are little children we might create imaginary friends to fill in loneliness in our lives, or to have “someone who completely loves and understands us.” Later, maybe Jesus or some other deity, or a saint steps into that role. Even in a purely secular sense we do this. We go to the movies and willingly “suspend” our disbelief so that we can identify with a protagonist and let our feelings get into the story. Little vacations from the reality of our lives can be part of the comfort we need to deal with the hard parts. Moreover, sometimes that imaginary part is very fantastic and supernatural. Fantasy makes up a large part of our movies, television and video games. Throw in pornography and the proportion really jumps up. So it isn’t too much of a cognitive leap to, or from, religion.

I have not thought about my own willing suspensions for some time. I remember that, as a kid, I had a little rubber Indian that brandished a tomahawk, who was a “friend” I invested with a personality. I also used to imagine myself as a tiny person who lived in a Christmas tree ornament and could travel about among the branches and lights. I always seemed to imagine myself as a very small creature, never a giant hero. I think I, unknowingly, preferred to be the observer, and would not have liked the loss of privacy in being a giant. Soon I was reading books and listening to the radio, and my imagination proved to be my favorite human faculty. But my imagination never really latched on to biblical narratives; I never imagined myself hanging out with the “Galilee Kid” and his gang of Twelve. And I didn’t identify with any of the saints, many of whom, even then, I thought were whack jobs. Frankly, religion’s fantasyland struck me as rather third-rate.

But I am digressing into my reverie. The second point I want to make is that this need for a narrative, comforting though it may be, is somewhat delusional. It puts us—we humans, “made in the image of God,” as we like allege—at the center of the whole of creation. Here we humans sit, our period of existence a veritable nanosecond of the periodicity of the universe, thinking that we are the reason for it all. No wonder that the Creationists want to compress the period of creation to six-thousand years—then everything begins with us. How convenient.

I admit that we are pretty amazing concoctions of carbon atoms, that the earth as a place to live, beats the hell out of Jupiter or Mars, and that we are damned clever at shaping our world to our needs and desires. The story of our “six-thousand years” itself is fascinating, wonderful (and horrible), even the part religion plays in it. But we are also in denial that we just might not be the center of the universe and the motive for its creation.

Are we? Look at the universe from the “intelligent designer” premise again. We could be an “accident” of life-conducive conditions that permuted from possibilities of billions of stars and other galaxies. It’s just as good a hypothesis as God sitting somewhere figuring out how to put the legs on a preying mantis before he has to rest on Sunday. If we regard ourselves as a particular, and exceptional, expression of creation we might just be in for a big surprise. God could look like ET, and not Johnny Depp. If there is all that evident complexity and its concomitant possibility in the universe, how is it that we believe, with such certainty, that the narrative we have from the Bible, that its story of creation (which we know enough already does not hold up to the evidence), that the “new covenant” offers certain “eternal life” and that—rollicking to that big final scene with all the explosions, Jews converting to Christianity, Armageddon, and that stuff—the Book of Revelations is how it is all going to play out to some Rapturous conclusion. Wow, what a movie!

But people believe this stuff, with certainty. Not all religions, but the Western Christian modality, involve a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At some point in the future—and some people believe it is imminent in their lifetimes—the earth will no longer be (as they believe it was never meant to be) our abode. At some point, like so bad Rambo movie it will conclude with that explosive ending.

Does this mean that we are, or something is, supposed to ruin the planet. That’s the narrative for the Rapture types, the believers in the Book of Revelation. The Revelationists have a ready answer—when the Armageddon comes—it will because “it is written,” because it is the fulfillment of prophecy. The two candidate endings—thermonuclear annihilation, or ecological disaster—are just awaiting one trigger or the other. Why care about world peace or environmental integrity when the final act of the Biblical play calls for a fiery finish. Sorry, but I have a problem with that scenario, however comforting it might be to the simpleminded. It turns the earth into a “means to an end,” something that is not really a part of us, but apart from us—something to be used, and used up, not respected and husbanded (biblical term), but to be subdued by the multitudes. I don’t like the Biblical script very much.

Someday everything and everyone we know will be dead and gone. The earth will likely, at some point plunge into the sun and become, again, part of a cycle of creation/destruction that doesn’t give much of a damn for what our biblical prophets conjured. Although by then the earth might not be habitable anyway. Meantime, religions, as some do, might want to find a good reason for taking better care of this creation. Although religions have not had much use for science, and even seen it as the enemy of faith, it is science that is telling us just how fragile this “complex” of variables actually is.

Disrespect for the earth’s ecosystems, often with the “blessing” of religion, is a problem that may be reaching—if it has not already reached—disastrous irreversible proportions. Greenhouse effects have already raised average temperatures one percent, a variable that has shown to result in snow and ice melt and permafrost damage in excess previous predictions. With less reflective snow the process becomes compounded and cumulative. The major religions are tied into economic systems—indeed benefit from them—that are far more a part of the problem than the solution. Ignorance of, and a combative attitude by, religion toward science only give more support to the notion that global warming and its concomitant problems are “debatable” or simply cyclical.*

Nuclear proliferation, the other sword of Armageddon continues, with more and more of states that have religious regimes or religious grievances with other faiths, leading the way in terms of acquisition and threat. Muslim Pakistan, Hindu India, Jewish Israel, have joined the Christian good ole US of A with the capacity to ignite and/or conduct a worldwide nuclear holocaust.

It appears that we have managed to set up the Biblical narrative of both willing suspension and self-fulfilling prophecy. How comforting.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
*See Bill McKibben, Think Again: Climate Change, Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2009