Getting it so completely, utterly, totally fucking wrong

 

 

So that thing where "You don't know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."?

 

This is "I went to the Wharton School of Economics and slept thru the lecture on "The Great Depression: Wha'happen?"  

 

From the link:

"But the country began abandoning them when it created a federal income tax in 1913, the president says. Then, “in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression. And it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy,” Trump said in announcing his tariff plan last week.

Referring to Smoot-Hawley, he added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone. It was gone. It was too late. Nothing could have been done — took years and years to get out of that depression.”

Getting the "Lesson of Hawley-Smoot" completely, totally fucking wrong and ass-backwards?

 

Y'think?

"Smoot-Hawley raised import tariffs by an average of 20% on thousands of goods, causing many top U.S. trading partners to retaliate. International cooperation on non-trade issues also declined, including on defense matters, helping clear the way for the rise of Hitler, Richardson said.

“There were some industries where they made profits,” Richardson said of Smoot-Hawley. “But overall, people in the U.S. and people around the world were losers.”

U.S. manufacturers saw foreign markets for their goods evaporate and output and consumer spending sank still further. Hawley lost the 1932 Oregon Republican primary in his district, and Smoot was defeated in November, as Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Hoover for the presidency."

Fuck me runnin'. If you wrote this as anything but "news" it would be dismissed as an improbable fiction. 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF

Weave Eve

On top of everything else - the threat to my income (Army pension, Social Security), my healthcare (Medicare, Tricare), my investment portfolio - that that orange lunatic proposes to take a hammer to, the idea that tomorrow millions of my supposed fellow-Americans want to force me to listen to the unhinged sonofabitch's goddamn addled "weave" for FOUR FUCKING YEARS makes me furious that you never seem to have a rocket-propelled grenade when you REALLY need one.

Rise of the Machines

Interesting Krugman column here.

Since it is behind the paywall let me summarize: Krugman starts out with Bob Gordon's summary of the "industrial revolutions" of the last 300 years. In Gordon's (and Krugman's) view these were and are:

1 - (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830;
2 - (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and
3 - (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.

Krugman then goes on to discuss his disagreement with Gordon that IR#3 - the digital revolution - has substantially run its course and will (or is already) yielding lesser and lesser economic gains. Krugman's primary issue with this is his conviction that the IT revolution has really not fulfilled its potential. He observes that

"...it turns out that there are other ways of producing very smart machines (and then details some of those ways) And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology."

I do not pretend to be especially tech-savvy so I am not sure of the actual practicalities of this. But I will defer to Krugman on the issue and assume that there is, in fact, a continued economic benefit to come. BUT...then he comes to what I consider the crux of the biscuit:

"Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

Canary, meet Coal Mine

Somewhat lost in the federal health care/war funding/global warming/wise Latina raree show was the sad little, noxious little budget deal worked out in California this Monday.It has to say something about who we Americans are and what we're becoming that the best idea that the Golden State's best and brightest (okay, we'll exempt Da Governator from that, but, still, We the People of California elected his Austrian ass) could come up with to "balance" the state budget was to rob their own counties and municipalites blind, to kick the poor and sick in the crotch, and to cut nonessentials like teachers, garbagemen, cops, paramedics and highway maintenence workers (in the state that practically invented Car Culture, no less...).

You can read all about it in the linked LA Times editorial, but even that supposedly liberal news organ seems to have developed collective amnesia about a couple of salient points.

1. The "we're broke, we just don't have any money, we HAVE to cut your food stamps (AFDC, Head Start, fill-in-the-blank...) or die, you silly Negroes..." meme goes all the way back to the toxic little property tax time-bomb the California GOP wired up in 1978, Proposition 13. We here in Oregon then devised our own little suicide pact, Measure 5, clearly on the conviction that if California was going to be Tom Fool and lead the best plan for us was to be Jack Fool and follow.

The direct result of this was to save Ma and Pa Goober a couple of hundred dollars a year on their rancho deluxe out there near McMinnville while giving Pacific Gas and Electric, Flav-R-Pac, and Megacorp Development an immense windfall of untaxable largesse, which, of course, they immediately rushed out to donate to the widows, orphans, disabled, and mentally ill that the now-tax-strapped state government had to chuck off the welfare rolls and out of the state institutions, colleges and job training programs they could no longer fund, so that the poor devils didn't have to beg for change at the top of the on-ramps of the roads the state could no longer maintain.

Not.

2. California compounded their own stupidity by then crafting a 2/3rds supermajority rule for passing legislative revenue measures, which has effectively prevented the state from passing any NEW revenue measures since 1996.

I love this little cartoon because of what it says about the mindset of the people who are fond of this situation. The cartoonist wants us to see that the Republican elephant is a simple but wise old soul, doing his math like a good householder and making his expenditures meet his income, and the Democratic donkey is a maddened policy wonk, all goofy for taxing everything moving to fund kooky-spooky crunchy granola frills.

But the cute little exercise fails when you realize that Jumbo's "a = b" is a logical fallacy. "a" isn't "a", it's "x", and "b" is "y". The animals in the legislature can - unlike the prudent household - change their income and outlays to meet their needs. So, in a sense, it's the donkey's frantic figuring that represents what a real government has to do: try and figure out what it needs versus what it wants, and then what it can take in versus what it would like to take in. The elephant isn't being simply honest; he's being simpleminded, he's using an axe to craft a budget rather than a woodcarving tool. Which explains a LOT about how Republican "governance" has gotten us here.

And so, here we are.

Imagine a nation in which a small handful of wealthy people live a First World lifestyle.

Their homes are nicely maintained, their roads well paved, their neighborhoods patrolled by polite, competent, professional police officers. They and their neighbors get First World medical care in daintily appointed medical clinics, shop at the best locations, dine, party, work and generally live as well as any human society in the 21st Century can arrange.

Then imagine that the bulk of the nation lives in precarious, decaying cities, towns and countrysides, prey to the collapsing, badly maintained public roads, buildings and utilities around them. Their lives are made more random by the capricious nature of their public "servants": seldom present and, when appearing, typically bribeable or even worse, merely indifferent. A fraying middle class lives squeezed between the wealthy, who despise them and the poor, who envy and hate them. Their political power is notional, their involvement in their own government negligible, they are useful only as fodder for the wealthy.

But you don't have to imagine this. All you have to do is travel south, east or west, to find dozens of impoverished Third World nations where this condition is the standard. Every craptacular little dictatorship or oligarchy the U.S. Army helped me vacation in, from Panama to Egypt and points between, featured this vast disparity between the rulers and the ruled. This wasn't a bug; it was a feature.Democracy cannot exist in a feudal society. It dies, or is killed, by the desperation, foolishness and ignorance of the peasants and the greed, venality and indifference of the nobles.

California has now chosen, rather than to even mildly discommode the wealthy, to disadvantage the disadvantaged. Rather than even attempt to close the gap between the rulers and the ruled, it chooses to allow the public weal to fall victim to private wealth.

There is a name for this sort of system.

But "republican", it's not.

Ever since the Elevation of Saint Ronnie, our public discourse has been dominated by the idea that "taxes are bad". In this sense, the conservatives that lost the Battle of Watergate won the larger war. They wanted to concentrate power in the nation's elite, and, largely, they have. They wanted to move the nation's laws - if they could not move the nation's people - to the right and, largely, they have.Well, California has reached the conservative state of grace; the state, and those in the care of the state, now exist to serve the needs of the wealthy. We shall see if the result is beneficial for the state and her people as a whole. We shall see.

(crossposted at MilPub)

Field Day

I'm living a sort of good-news-bad-news joke today.The bad news is that the business picture for my business hasn't gotten any better so, as advertised, my employer has cut the staff hours down to 24 per week.Working - or not working - a three-day week pretty much sucks. Getting by on 60% of your normal income isn't a good thing, either. But there's not much I can do about it at the moment, anyway, except try and look at the good-news aspect, which is that if I am going to have to take a day off without pay, today was a good day for it. The weather is gorgeous and my little boy's "Field Day" was today, so I got to go over and play with him and his little kindergarten classmates as they raced and jumped and wriggled and were otherwise as energetic and adorable as a clowder of kittens.After Field Day I went and had a delicious leisurely lunch at the Little Red Bike Cafe, absolutely a Cool Thing in North Portland, and spent the next several hours doing household chores, making phone calls to try and reduce our spending on things like insurance, cable TV and the Internet, and re-reading Diane Gabaldon's entertaining "Outlander", as much fun now as it was when I first read it several years ago. Watched part of a truly bizarre Johnny Weismuller "Jungle Jim" movie on TCM and taped the UEFA Champions League Final - I haven't watched it in hopes of luring Brent and his current inamorata Heidi over to see it this weekend, but...go, Barca!And then sat down to post this.At some point today a friend from this blog, Charles Gittings, is going to try and drop in. He's passing through between Seattle and California, where he's getting some medical work done, and his situation got me thinking of medicine, health care and the contretemps surrounding "health care reform".I think, and have thought for some time, that the way we distribute and pay for our medicine in this country is beyond flawed. It is, quite literally, insane. The notion that sickness and injury need to somehow become profit for everyone involved except the sick or injured person, from the insurers to the doctors to the hospitals, clinics, laboratories and hospices...that's lunacy. It's like making war for profit, or making love for profit. The incentives for misbehavior are legion, and the restraints on any sort of mischief, well...Atul Gawande has a good piece up at the New Yorker that looks at this as exemplified by the little town of MacAllen, Texas. It's not pretty, and it should make you think.

The bottom line is that sick people or injured people are going to need care. And only the most over-rich communities can afford such care without some limits on the amount and the cost. So in some way that care will be rationed. At the moment we have chosen to ration care by income. If you are wealthy, you can afford care without limit. Make a living wage and hold down a decent job - and remain relatively healthy - and you can still afford a lavish regime of treatmeent for your ailments.

Become old, or sick, or unemployed...well, one hopes that Illness will be merciful and Death will be kind.That seems fundamentally unjust. Does the elderly woman dying in her broken bed in her unheated shack love her life less than the elderly woman in her soft sheets and elegant bedroom? We seem to believe so, for we have set up a system that punishes the poor and rewards the wealthy. One suspects that this is a reflection of our political system, which empowers the powerful and disenfranchises the powerless.I wish I saw a change in the future. I do not. The forces arracyed against such a change are simply too strong.Oh, and the pictures are all from the Astor School 2009 Field Day. Go, kindergartners!

Whisper of the Axe

The house is quiet this Wednesday morning. The rain, which rumbled and hissed over our heads most of the night has ceased and the sky has cleared; there's even a hint of dawn over the houses across Amherst Street. I'm learning to enjoy my wife's upstairs workstation. Birdsong and light instead of the cold arachnidenous gloom. The coffee is hot, blatant in my mouth cut with the silky creaminess of the half-and-half.

I have a busy day today, finishing up work on a state highway project. And most of my week looks pretty busy as well.

But that's becoming unusual.

My business, like all businesses associated with development, construction and building, is in trouble. We're losing money, or holding our own. We're a small firm, and though we don't have the ugly overhead costs of some of the larger outfits, we also don't have the deep pockets. We're running harder to chase less work, and so are our competitors.

So I go to work now hoping to see new jobs on the schedule, hoping to see my week - shortened to four days - full to bursting with reasons for my employer to keep employing me. Fearing the emptiness of a blank week on my Outlook calendar. That fear is one reason I've been less and less motivated to post here. I'm worried, and worry is stopping my mouth with fear.

This should he a happy time. We're enjoying a beautiful spring. My little boy is learning to read and write, to play chess, growing strong and smart and loving. My little girl is a wonder; bubbling over with laughter like a ravenhaired spring of happiness whose reach lengthens every day. My wife is a lovely companion, helpmeet and partner, working, playing and loving me and her children. I look around me and I feel all bliss, like I could close my eyes and float weightless in a sea of love.

And then I cringe, feeling the cold kiss of that blade, the razor-edge of fright. What happens if business doesn't get better? What happens if my employers need to shed even more cost? Will I lose my job? Can we keep our house? What will happen to us?

My wife is a contractor - my value, as much as the salary I make, is in that I carry the insurance for the entire family - and if I lose my job we all lose our insurance. Now I read the political games the insurance companies, politicians, and pundits are playing about "health care" and my hands fist with anger. THIS is the reality of most people in America, assholes. If I lose my job, if something horrible happens to one of us, we will be devastated; we're one automobile accident away from poverty. And even if not, without insurance, how will I manage my deteriorating knees? Who will pay for Mojo's antidepressants? What about little Miss' dental work? What happens if my big Peeper falls and breaks something?

Who will want to re-hire a fiftyish geologist in an overpopulated geotechnical community, when a dozen can do what I do younger and cheaper?

Is this how the fathers of the Depression felt, looking at their children playing heedless of the ruin around them, feeling the clenching in their guts as they could only stand by helplessly hoping that the axe was whispering to another and not to them? Knowing that if - when - it struck it would cut down the children they loved as well?

There are times I can forget. Times I can join in the happy silliness of my children, or the quiet serenity of my bride, without a thought. But there are other times, and those times are increasingly insistent, when I feel the cold, crisp shiver of fear up my back, the sting of the steel, and I dread the moment that the blade of Hard Times will strike me dead.

Update 5/13 p.m.: Nasty day today. Nasty. Cold wind, driving rain. Rainy hand augering in the painful field. That, and working by myself most of the afternoon gave me way too much time to think about what I posted above.

Please don't feel like I'm buying trouble, or giving up, or curled in a fetal ball whimpering. I work for a good little company, my bosses are good engineers, terrific workers and aggressive marketers. Our overhead is low, we're very lean, and we should have a even shot at the work that's out there.

But...even the best companies don't always come in first. Even the best people don't always get the happy ending. And in this economy it doesn't take much...a missed deadline here, a slightly high proposal fee there...and then you're standing in an office with your hands tightly clenched, the intentionally bland face on the man telling you the bad news designed to defuse the frustration and anger he knows you feel.

Then the stunned drive home. The look on her face when you tell your wife what has happened. The smile papered over her tight eyes and drawn face.

Then the desperate round of fruitless applications. Bills shoved, unpaid, into a file. Slow disappearance of disposable things, slipped out in hopes that the children won't notice. Frightened glances at the shrinking bank balance.

Finally the "family talk". Coaxing a weeping child to choose what toys he can take. Holding back the tears as you touch the woodwork you lovingly crafted in her cheerful little bedroom, now echoing and empty. The truck and the boxes, the crying and the anger...the slow pull away from the curb towards an uncertain future.

One curse of an overactive imagination is the ability to see all this in excruciating detail while standing in a rainy field, under a gray lowering sky.

It may never happen. I will try like hell, I will HOPE like hell, that it never happens.

But right now my fears make it very real to me.

Can we get some face time for AIG execs here, too?

"Photographs of bankers who left Iceland after the financial crisis have a new use in the restroom of a bar in Reykjavik, the capital." (NYT photo caption)

Chill

Back at work after my first involuntary day off in ten years. That's not a good feeling.

My little geotechnical company is definately shivering against the cold winds of the Great Recession. Better off than some because our overhead is lower and our accounts payable smaller. Worse than others because our skillset is less diversified and our line of credit lower.

What's that they say about how a recession is when your neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose yours?

Mmph.

Compounding this is my work history. MY first employer was a lovely man who couldn't manage to run a business more complicated than a pushcart. We would staff up like mad during good times and lay off like an Italian infantry battalion retiring under fire during bad. It was not uncommon for us to be asked to take unpaid days off just so we could make payroll during slow months.

Perhaps the worst example of this I remember is some time in the late 1990s. Two of us staff people were in the field working a job up in the Sandy River valley near Marmot. It was the end of the day, we had a problem that needed the project manager's input, and so we called back to our shop - a vividly remember standing out in the pasture with the old-fashioned "brick" cell phone to my ear. We each had a company cell, and in succession we both failed to get the office number, receiving instead some sort of recorded message about calling the GTE Mobilnet business office at 503-such-and-such.

Cursing the damn cell company and their crappy coverage we piled into the company rig and headed back to Portland. As luck would have it we got into the office just as our company accountant/office manager had stopped off at the front desk on her way out. We both whined loudly about the damn phone service until we noticed her look.

"Ummm...actually, guys, it wasn't a problem with the phones." she said in an undertone. We just looked at her.

"We...we didn't pay our phone bill last month. Or this month." she continued, a look on her face like someone admitting that one of her parents had been jailed for unnatural acts with farm animals. "They turned our phones off today."

Jim and I just looked at each other, appalled. I looked back at the office manager.

"Is there anything else I should know about?" I asked hesitantly. She looked around to see if anyone else in the office was listening before replying.

"You, unh, you didn't use the gas card, did you..?"


So you can understand - times like these give me a very familiar, very sick, uneasy feeling. Because when your neighbor loses his job...

Fear Itself 2: Fall of the Masters of the Universe

I'm not as smart as Paul Krugman.

I know, I know, it's hard to believe. Sometimes I don't believe it myself.

But then I do something like wash my cell phone because I forget I put it in my pocket and I get that face-palm moment of "Fuck, goddam, I'm an idiot..!" and I fall to earth.

So I could drone on and on about the Great Recession and how we, and the greedy, venal rat bastards we elected helped make it, smooth it's way and sell it to each other as the Bestest Most Wonderfullest Shiny Pretty Thing Evah. I could give you chapter and verse about how a nation, a people and an economy that deliberately warps itself away from growing and making things into spinning paper profits into more paper profits is in a mug's game and will, as surely as picking up skeevy people in sleazy bars, come to grief sooner or later.

But why? Paul Krugman (the guy who is smarter than me) has already done it. Just go and read his column for this Friday.

Here's his money graf, and the reason I'm increasingly unhopeful for and unimpressed with my country and the so-called "leaders" who run it by proxy for the Rich, the Well-Born and the Able:"But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules. As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good."

The bottom line on this entire debacle is that the point of the past 20 years has been to transfer wealth from the bulk of the population to the top 1% to 10% that have the ear of the congresscritters and the wealthy insiders who serve at the top of most of the executive agencies.

It's worked.

Despite the "populist rage" at things like the AIG bonuses, what odds what ANY of these malefactors of great wealth will lose so much as a nickel? Or that they will spend so much as a night in jail?

Watch. I'll bet that Madoff's family walks away with millions, that the very same Wall Street Masters of the Universe that engineered this immense derivative and securitization Ponzi scheme will still be beavering away, spinning money from nothing, years from now.

Nothing will change.

Except we just won't know about it because there, under the bridge where we'll be huddling out of the cold rain, we won't have CNBC, we'll be sleeping on the newspapers instead of reading them and, anyway, we'll be too fucking busy trying to eat bark to care.

Fear Itself 1: Is it the Apocalypse?

Like all of you, I've been watching and reading the business news - which has become just "news", more or less, which says something ugly about our economic situation, when you think about it - with the sort of grim displeasure that an old Roman noncom must have received the news from the frontiers in the latter parts of the 3rd and 4th Centuries AD. The situation is not just bad, it's the kind of bad that promises to be irretrievably bad; unresponsive to remediation short of further disaster, sure to bring further woes in its train before any glimmer of hope will emerge.And I understand, to a fair extent, how and why we got here. Which is where, so far as I can tell, I differ from about 94% of the Republican Party and 101% of the wing of the GOP who gets their "news" from Rush "I'm the boss here, bitchez!" Limbaugh - these idiots apparently still think the problem was that we didn't let the geniuses at Bear Stearns and AIG package MORE derivatives and mortgage-based securities. Normally the issue of "what shall we do now" is the most difficult place to find a place to stand in a shitstorm. This time, with a fairly clear view of the bottom of the porcelain funnel cloud and the recognizable sight of Saint Ronnie's ass centered thereon (symbolizing his stated conviction that regulation of natural monopolies and oversight of traditionally larcenous financial grifters was a pile of used food), the 27% of the American public that still believes that there were weapons of mass destruction hidden in the pool cabana out behind Saddam's place in Tikrit is unwilling to even hint that we might be in trouble because for the past twenty-nine years we treated our nation's economy like a slush fund for malefactors of great wealth and a Nigerian-oil-minister-style confidence scheme.

But the point is that we have a pretty good idea where we're going and why we're in this handbasket.

Whether or not we can do something to prevent the coming economic train wreck is, IMO, a matter of real uncertainty. The current pileup is pretty unforgiving in its indictment of the current economic paradigm that the wealthy and the well-connected have conspired with the Party of Wealth to foist on us. Turns out that basing an economy on paper profits, irrational consumer spending, the enrichment of a tiny minority while flatlining income for the rest and exporting living-wage jobs was not a good idea - whooda thunk it? But the same bunch of chipmunk pesterers and bloviating fatheads who helped get us into this mess has a vested interest in keeping us from rejecting their True Belief.

And we aren't much more help - we'd rather cling to the fantastic promise of becoming superrich than face the reality that most of us will die in debt. It's no coincidence that the rise of the Moron Economy has coincided with the insane popularity of idiotic fairy tales like "American Idol" and "Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire" and the other yes-I'm-a-mouthbreather-but-I-could-still-win-the-lottery forms of entertainment. We've become a nation of fatuous fantasizers, of credulous couch-potatoes, who would do well as the slasher-fodder in a Wes Craven flick, persisting on opening the closet in the darkened hallway and stomping off into the woods when we should know enough to get in the Plymouth Fury and just drive like hell to the biggest town close by.

So by being stupid ourselves and electing people who kept telling us that stupid was the new smart and what the hell was so great about being smart, anyway, we've driven ourselves into the Hellmouth of Economic Reality, and we pretty much deserve the hiding we're gonna get. For those who tried to prevent this from happening, who kept their expenses low and the cash reserves high, well, hopefully they will ride it out. But the rest of us? Sauve qui peut, mon ami.

Thing is, you remember how this all started as the "subprime mortgage crisis"? And how we're still hearing about how the big problem is that housing starts are down, and that real estate values are dropping like a paralyzed park pigeon?

Well, the whole "housing starts" thing got me thinking as I listened to another report of gloom and doom in the construction industry on the radio the past week. And it made me start to wonder, not about the coming Great Recession which, when you really look hard at it, is just another 19th Century "panic", the sort of thing that Keyenesian economics and New Deal regulations were supposed to head off until we decided to spend our national treasury killing brown people because the hate our freedoms and that regulation was for pussies.

No, it was the notion that "housing starts" were and are a fundamental indicator of economic health.

Because my little family lives in a house built in 1922.

It's not a nice house for 1922, like some of the lovely mansions up on the West Hills, in Laurelhurst or Irvington. It's a little 1920's shitbox, slapped together to sell to a grocer or a windowdresser or a ladies' hatmaker. The construction is average, with the exception that the lovely straight-grain fir reminds us that before we cut all the damn trees down we could use good wood for common dimension lumber without a thought.

Nope, it's the 1920's equivalent of the identical little cottages in Levittown, the sort of place that exploded in the late '40s and '50s as everyone wanted their own home.But here's the thing: it's perfectly sound. Replace the roof every twenty years, stay ahead of the dry rot and keep the footings dry and the damn thing'll last another eighty-seven years. Or more. Theoretically, my son could take over the house from us, raise HIS kids in there, and then deed it to his oldest to raise their kids in. Or not; hell, for all I know the Peeper may be a swinging batchelor until he dies, throwing Wesson Oil parties for the grannies down at the Catholic retirement home next to Roosevelt High some time in 2088...the point is, Mojo and I can happily live the rest of our lives in our little house. And one of our children can, after us.

We don't NEED a "housing start" for the next eighty years or so.

Okay, one of the kids will...assuming that his or her spouse doesn't come with a house from THEIR parents. But we could, if we tried and if we wanted to, live perfectly comfortable lives without ever needing a contractor to build us a new house. And if we did, there's half a dozen similar little houses for sale right now within ten blocks of our own.

So. It would seem that to need a "housing start" what you really need is more people. Families with four kids instead of one or two. Immigrants moving in from another country. A constant stream of people moving out of rentals into homes.

That seems insane to me and let me explain why.

Maybe it's the scientist in me, but that kind of limitless population growth - as translated into "housing starts" - seems, in the long run, unsustainable.

Let's think about it. Almost every natural system has checks and counters. Get too tall, stay too short, and Nature usually has a way of sorting you out. The slowest gazalle becomes Cheetah Chow; the fastest dies of starvation in the dry season because it needs so much more grass. Sardines have mackerel, mice have cats, lemmings have cliffs. And we see the counterexamples every day. The cougars and wolves keep the deer numbers down. We kill the cougars and wolves, the deer explode, the browse is devoured, the deer starve.

Now, it seems to me, we have built a life system - not just an economic or industrial setup but an entire way of life - that centers around living off of things that depend on having more people to make and sell and build new stuff for. I'm the same as most of the rest of you. If nobody builds that house, that shopping center, that Wal-Mart, that pornographic knicknack store, nobody hires a soils engineer to give them foundation recommendations, nobody hires me, I don't get paid and I starve.

But the notion that we just keep building houses, mining copper for wires, making clay into bricks and lime into concrete, oak into furniture, more and more, for ever and ever..? It just seems impractical, when you think of it that way. Certainly the notion that we won't overrun our petroleum supplies, when we know it takes something like ten-to-the-third years to turn biomass into keratin and then petroleum versus something like ten-to-the-minus-third years to locate, prospect, extract, refine and consume it...drill, baby, dr...hunh?So over the next couple of weeks I want to explore this notion that, while what we're experiencing in 2009 may be just a typical swing in the business cycle, we really need to examine our entire industrial society and the economic foundation it's built on.

Because, as the lemmings would tell you, if you realize that you've exceeded your resources only on the way off the cliff, it's probably too late.

Whisper of the Axe

I'm getting a little chill down the back of my neck.

First, there's the very real possibility that we're looking a some sort of global financial "panic" of the sort no one living has seen, the kind of thing that used to smash people's lives back in the 19th Century with some regularity but were suppressed by Keynesian economic policies for much of the 20th.

Paulson seems panicked, and Bushies are paralyzed by their insistence that capitalism MUST and shall be preserved from Big Gummint, even as it craters. What does this mean for wage slaves like myself and Mojo and our kids? THAT'S the scary thing - I have no idea. Should we start stockpiling canned food? Update our resumes? Learn to eat bark? What!? It's the not knowing that's so damn scary.

Second, there's the increasingly ugly, evil and insane tone of the McSame campaign.I don't mean the usual ugly, condescending, authoritarian crap that I expect out of Republicans, the sort of thing that tells you that Tailgunner Joe wasn't an evil, vicious fascist out to smear honest Americans but just deeply, deeply misunderstood. What I find especially frustrating is that the news reports and the punditry are trying to paint this as McSame and Bible Spice playing to the "crazies", when ISTM pretty obvious that these people aren't "crazy". They're the plain, "normal", ordinary people who vote Republican. And the McCain/Palin plan seems to be to encourage them to let their inner lynch mob out.

And we're still stuck with THIS jackass.

Christ, we're SO fucked...

Update 10/13: From Matt Yglesias:

"The entire Eurozone seems to be following Gordon Brown’s lead and working to recapitalize the banks by having the government take an equity stake in firms that need assistance. This is how Sweden successfully resolved its banking crisis in the 1990s and it appears to be the right thing to do. Here in the US, Hank Paulson seems to be edging in that direction, but he’s already wasted weeks trying desperately to find another solution and even now sort of seems to be dragging his feet — playing a very dangerous game on behalf of fealty to conservative ideology."

I'm not sure we can wait until January to get shut of these stupid bastards. Impeach!

Deja Vu All Over Again

I won't comment on the Senate's "Right Back At'cha, Muthfukas" version of the Big Bailout (aren't revenue bills supposed to originate in the fucking House, or have I just been smoking crack again..?) beyond what Stewart has to say about the Republican arguments in favor of this monstrosity:

I should reiterate that, while I think that Monday's House clusterfuck was a good example of the desuetude of our Republic, I do NOT think that either the original House version OR the Senate "Pickapecko'porkypeppers" version are actually good bills. Both of them leave WAY too much wriggle room for shenangans like the easing the "mark to market" (a.k.a "they're my assets and they worth what I want them") rules and the issue of how this money "buys" these dud loans/mortgages/who knows what. There are several better ideas floating around out there, including this one and this.

It's also depressing to be right, but I pretty much called it that the Congressional Dems would be too craven to write their own, left-wing bill and shove it to the Bushies and their Republican enablers in Congress to either spit out or choke down. It's depressing to be reminded that in the ultimate fighting ring of U.S. politics my party is sort of the Matt Roloff of all-in fighters.

The Tarpeian Rock

After all the shouting and tumult died; after all the whipping and hectoring and Bushie rhetoric and McCain posturing and Obama opining and Palin fucking cluelessness and idiotic Republican "revolts" and Democratic quivering and bloviating from the usual talking heads; after all the "compromising" and deal-making and softening of punitive measures against the poor CEOs that orchestrated this mess......the "bailout" bill died in the House this afternoon.

Ezra Klein sums it up here. But the bottom line, for me, anyway, is that this is a defining moment in American history. The problem is clear, the solutions available. All that was needed was fourhundredsomething individuals to figure out a way to stop vying for petty advantage - to put their nation's fortunes first, and their own political fortunes second - and they could not do it. Our Chief Executive is plainly a gormless idiot. And now our Congress is exposed as a cabal of puling fools and cretinous timeservers, more worried about their acess to the malefactors of great wealth and their filthy lucre and the tools of power than their nation's well being. As Paul Krungman says:

"I don’t think the Dem leadership was in a position to craft a bill that would have achieved overwhelming Democratic support, so make or break was whether enough GOPers would sign on. They didn’t....So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch. As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes."

Even though my damn representative voted against the thing, make no mistake. Sixty percent of the Democrats gritted their teeth and voted for this ugly baby. Sixty-seven percent of the GOP whined and held their breath and drummed their heels and voted no. They chose their policies over expedience, the best over the good. The damned meeching traitors should all be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock.

So everything from here on is just the long imperial sunset. Our economy is showing signs of breaking. Now our political system has shown it is broken.

But imperial evenings can be long and luxurious, and I plan to stretch mine and my chidren's as far as I can. I hope you are well placed for yours. Because, like Ezra, I can think of nothing as appropriate as this:

Update I, 9/30: Many, many observations and amendations in the comments section. What appears to becoming clear to me is that:
1. The primary reason for the failure of politics here was an attempt by the House Republicans to ratfuck the House Dems in an election year.
2. The House Dem leadership, with which I typically hold little brief, appears to have, for once, outtricked the Republicans and let them sink a bill that they otherwise MIGHT have wanted with their stupid politican tricks.
3. There does seem to be some legitimate groundswell of hatred for this bill. The problem I see with it is:
..a. The opposition from the left seems to be based on fairly hardheaded suspicions of the Wall Street shenangans that got us into this mess, but
..b. The opposition from the right seems to me, frankly, delusional. You people are worried NOW about "government interference in private business" when it was your messed-up deregulation and inattention that CAUSED the mess? You want to abolish the capital gains tax? Why? You want to "solve" this using private commerce?

WTF?

Frankly, my personal opinion is "fiat justicia, ruat caelum"; let the damn larcenous banks and hedge funds and investment houses fail. Let the theiving, greedy petty men and women who helped engineer this disaster go broke, and then the adults will move in and sweep up the pieces.

But. But.

We saw this before - the Nineteenth Century was filled with these "boom and bust" cycles. And I suspect that this time, as before, the malefactors of great wealth and their wealthy enablers in business and politics will get away just fine. It will be the farmer who needs a loan, the small grocer looking for a mortgage, the individuals who need jobs but will lose them when these businesses fold, that will be hurt. The oligarchs will just sell off a yacht or three.

I wish I thought that the righteous anger of the American people would cleanse these moneychangers out of the temple. I don't. I think that the NEXT "bailout" (thought they'll get wise and call it something different) will be WORSE than this one. That's what happens when you're the mark and the people who are supposed to be your "leaders" are in on the con.

Update II, 9/30: I have to agree with Krugman here:

"But putting myself in Barney Frank or Nancy Pelosi’s shoes, I’d look at it this way: the Democrats could start over, with a bailout plan that is, say, centered on purchases of preferred stock and takeovers of failing firms — basically, a plan clearly focused on recapitalizing the financial sector, with nationalization where necessary. Maybe such a plan would have passed Congress; and maybe, just maybe Bush would have signed on; Paulson is certainly desperate for a deal.
But such a plan would have had next to no Republican votes — and the Republicans would have demagogued against it full tilt. And the Democratic leadership cannot, cannot, be seen to have sole ownership of this stuff. So that, I think, is why it had to be done this way. I don’t like it, and I don’t like the plan, but I see the constraints under which Dodd, Frank, Pelosi, and Reid were operating."

But what does it say about our "democracy" that the adults in the game have to play by these idiotic rules?

WooHoo!!

So it turns out that our bank - and the bank my company uses, too - has failed.WhooHoo!

But the FDIC has our back, right? This isn't 1929, we don't have to run down to the North Portland WaMu and get our money in cash to hide under the mattress or lose it, right?

WhooHoo!

But...what's backing up the FDIC..?

WhooHoo?

(Author's Note: I think one of the really open questions nobody is talking about is the potential effect of the massive consolidation of the banking industry occurring during this immense-public-failure-of-lassiz-faire-capitalist goat-rope. Now that WaMu is J.P. Morgan Chase and everyone else is Bank of America how close are we to having a monopolized banking system? What wil this mean for commercial and personal credit and finance? Will this make credit more difficult for struggling small businesses and individuals? To me the bottom line is: we don't fucking know. As John Travolta famously says in "Look Who's Taking: "Could be lunch meat! Could be peaches! Who knows?" But it COULD be one of the single most life-changing and long-lasting effects to result from the latest blowup of the "free" market system. And yet there has been little if any discussion of this in the Roman circus that is the "mainstream media".)

WhooHoo!

SPQR III: Tribunus plebis

Our primary ballots came in the mail this week.

Somehow the august solemnity of exercising the Franchise seems sorely diminished when its accomplished by hastily augering pencil marks in paper ovals amid the shoved-aside litter on a dining room table surrounded by rioting children. Somewhere in the back of my head I recalled an apocryphal tale of early Federal New England where the act of voting was surrounded by the stern dignity of classical republicanism to include the town selectman tolling the bell and announcing "James Otis has now voted!"

I'll be quite open and tell you I voted for Obama.As I discussed earlier, I have little or no illusion of where we stand in the process of desuetude of our Republic, and I don't have any real hopes that any current office holder or aspirant will reverse the ever-steeper descent into autocracy.

I'm just tired of "Democrats" who think that Jim Carville is the Ideal they should aspire to. Democrats whose philosophy is that they need to become more like, well, Republicans in order to get elected. It wasn't the ludicrous "massacre of Sarajevo" lies or the gas tax pandering or the generic Clinton air of having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. I'm tired of Clintonist triangulation. After eight years of corruption, mendacity, crony capitalism and plutocracy I want a Democratic candidate that treats the GOP like the treacherous, ci-devant hillbilly-aristos they are; lovers of authoritarian and religious conformity, torturers and enablers of torture, war-lovers and bankruptors of the public purse. Traitors to the Revolution, the anathema of everything the Constitution and the Bill of Rights stand for. I want a Democratic leader who will treat the Coulter/Limbaugh/Cheneyites like a Provo, and an armed one at that.

I don't have one of them, but Obama is the closest I could find.

And that in itself is perhaps the best place to start a discussion of the wretched state of American politics.

It's not difficult, really, to understand what is needed for a sound Republic.

Peace, first and foremost, because in war the first demand is for force and leadership, and from the the demand for the Leader. Authoritarian, monarchical principles have always advanced further during wartime than any other time in American history.

Prosperity, then. Specifically, the broad-spread prosperity of a wide and deep middle class. Smallholders, freeholders, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, farmers. People owning their own land, their own homes, their own lives. Beholden to no master, not wage-slaves, fearful and insecure, but proud and in dependant. Not poverty-defeated. The poor, insecure and fearful make bad defenders of their own freedoms.

Knowledge, too. Knowledge of the world and the matters of gravity in it. The ability to discuss and debate, reason and argue these matters.

Ignorance is the toxin of liberty.

Civility and respect, for ourselves and each other and the nation that we make up. A nation that has no civic virtue - public virtue as distinct from private - cannot maintain civil independence.

And yet, look at what our "leadership" has overseen, and through its actions, engineered.

Wars, in particular overseas wars, in pursuit of chimeric enemies and dubious victories. In fact, a permanent war footing, with a monstrous "defence" construct larger than anything in human history. Internal "wars" like the so-called "war on drugs" and the war on illegal immigrants, created and funded to billions, creating a vast population of voteless, hopeless felons without a single debate on the efficacy of their campaigns or the victory conditions of these "wars".

The systematic hollowing of the nation's manufacturing base, offshoring, the creation of an economy based on service jobs and consumer spending. Fiscal policy crafted around not the creation of goods but the creation of "wealth" that has resulted in a succession of bubble economies, each bursting in a coruscation of public bailout cash and leaving behind yet another soap-scum of enriched malefactors of great wealth. The concentration of agriculture into immense corporations of great economic and political power and few moral and political scruples.

I hope I need not detail the decline of public knowledge that has returned us to the days of the yellow pressand the scandal sheet, where Fox "News" is considered, well, news and the public press spends more time discussing haircuts, bimbos, lapel pins and preachers than it does what our political leadership actually does.
And civility...Despite what is sold to the public, this drive to the bottom, this coarsening and deadening of the public soul hasn't been demanded by the People, which, in its lazy and inchoate way, seems to want something more inspirational, more adult, more challenging. Not enough to demand it, mind you. But enough to thrash feebly, like a salted slug, under the ceaseless lashing of moronic punditry and celebrity gossip that passes for public comment in the fora of 2008. We sense, in our dim insulation between "American Idol" and worrying about our household finances, that our "leaders" are not doing anything beyond posturing and posing, bound by their debts to wealthy contributors and their promises to powerful lobbyists. The recent Crocker/Petraeus hearings on Iraq were the perfect example. Given the record to date of lies, mistakes, stupidity and egotism you would have expected the legislators to have hammered on the representatives of our current pointless tactical-victory-and-strategic-confusion "plans" in that benighted land like Jove of the Thunders.Instead we watched as our representatives of the People in Congress behaved like the Tribunes of the Plebs of the title. No one was hurled from the Tarpean Rock. Instead our elected nobility postured. They puffed and wheezed and in the end neither we nor they learned anything more, anything really useful, to help us make informed choices about what our nation is doing in our names or planning for our patrimony.

And that is the perfect position for a Potemkin Government. They don't care because they don't have to. It's not about us, or what's happening in the World. What matters to our "leaders" is who is the Alpha Cheney, who gets what and how much inside the Beltway. The Senate is arguing precedence and patronage as the barbarians howl outside the frontiers and the citizens fall into servility and fear.

And I confidently predict that we will not - until we are willing to abandon our comforts and stake our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor - receive anything better.

Our national history has been a record of give and take between what our President would call "my base: the haves and have-mores" - that combination of wealthy and well-connected that desire most their own enrichment - and those whose desire it is to spread power and wealth as far amongst the people as possible. The have-nots pushed in the 1840s, the have-mores pushed back after the Civil War (to the apogee of the Gilded Age). The excesses and corruption of that era saw the rise of the progressives and the muckrakers...but it was only the Crash and Depression that saw the plutocrats exiled for a generation, as programs like the New Deal and the GI Bill helped leaven American society.

In the past thirty years we have seen this cycle turn again, with the rich and the well-born shoving cash and influence into the system. The gap between rich and poor in this country are as wide and deep as any time since the 1890s.This is not a coincidence. It has been engineered by those we have elected, as surely as Cicero engineered the emasculation of the Senate and the People of Rome. And, like Cicero, those doing this surgery are sure that they are doing what is best for themselves and their country, since what is good for the Waltons, the Koches, the Bushes and the Walkers IS good for the country.

I only wish that this was news. It's not even new to the blogosphere: Fabius Maximus (as always), got here two years ago and said it better. Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark.

Update 5/12: Just in case you thought I was exaggerating when I accused our legislators of bought-and-paid-for whores for their big contributors who spend much of their time in precious Beltway kabuki theatre instead of addressing real issues there comes a news item too insane to have been invented. And here it is.

We Are Truly So, So Fucked.