Boomie of The Wastrel Show blog has endorsed McCain, praising him in many of her recent posts. So I wondered how she was taking Obama's victory. Apparently the blog's been taken down, which I find curious.
Neither candidate really was (or is) an advocate of frugality in government. Boomie might've considered Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. After Ron Paul (who endorsed Baldwin), he was the thriftiest-minded presidential candidate this year.
From Wikipedia:
Economy
Baldwin says he would end all federal income taxes and phase out the Internal Revenue Service.[34]
Regarding tariffs, Baldwin has made conflicting statements. In an interview, he said "what I would propose is an across-the-board, general 10-percent tariff on all imports and that would meet the Constitution's prescription for financing the federal government—duties, imposts, tariffs"[47] which, he claims, would also help keep jobs in the United States.[48] But Baldwin's website says that "a tariff on foreign imports, based on the difference between the foreign item's cost of production abroad and the cost of production of a similar item produced in the United States, would be a Constitutional step toward a fair trade policy that would protect American jobs and, at the same time, raise revenue for our national government."[49]
He has said that as president he would streamline the federal government, and tap oil reserves in Alaska, the Dakotas, and the Gulf of Mexico. He believes the United States should return to the gold standard.[34]
Showing posts with label presidential race 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presidential race 2008. Show all posts
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Monday, November 03, 2008
Election Eve
Kunstler's Election Eve column, with the really good stuff bolded.
November 3, 2008
A Nervous Nation
This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments -- like fifteen minutes before the closing bell -- at the direction of Mr. Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs.
Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death" endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr. Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion.
What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.
People are nervous not just because Mr. Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die -- as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr. Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco -- lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse-- they might just "get her done!"
Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans -- such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently -- in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia -- our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future -- will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic -- from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don't know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.
November 3, 2008
A Nervous Nation
This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments -- like fifteen minutes before the closing bell -- at the direction of Mr. Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs.
Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death" endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr. Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion.
What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.
People are nervous not just because Mr. Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die -- as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr. Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco -- lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse-- they might just "get her done!"
Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans -- such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently -- in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia -- our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future -- will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic -- from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don't know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Leslie-Walker in '08
James Wolcott has aptly called Sarah Palin a "Northern Exposure Karen Walker", but has he or anybody noticed John McCain's resemblance to Beverley Leslie, Karen Walker's sworn enemy?
Friday, September 05, 2008
Kunstler's View of the Convention
The Political Campaign Mini-Blog
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_campaign08.html
Sept 4
The Patriot Game - Wednesday
The odious soap opera in Minneapolis gets worse each night, this one like a Sandra Bullock movie produced and directed by the Devil. I tuned in for Rudolf Giuliani's keynote speech, a hyperthyroid exercise in oratorical thuggery, which led directly to the main event, Sarah Palin's acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination.
She quickly proved to be a confident podium performer, but the content and tenor of her remarks conveyed all the petty viciousness and insecurity of the Republican right-wing. As she spoke, the cameras panned around her rapt audience, affording snapshots of the dumbest white people in America, self-congratulatory in their small-town ignorance and brined in a dangerous jingo-patriotism that must make leaders in other nations cringe in amazement at the rhetorical recklessness being served up. Everything about her speech was small-minded, vindictive, smugly sarcastic, and shot through with falsehood (e.g. that the Republicans will "lead America to energy independence"). You wonder how much kool-aid these people have to drink to believe their own bullshit. In fact, watching Ms. Palin's performance, two notions came to mind and lodged there firmly: 1.) That the Republican Party has itself become a vector of terrorism, and 2.) that these are exactly the people I had in mind when I conceived the term "corn-pone Nazis" to describe the worst outcome of an over-stressed society.
In the aftermath, with the whole Palin family bathed in cheering before a giant televised waving flag, the true ethos of this phony spectacle revealed itself: this is the party of losers, and Sarah is their cheerleader. Deep down, Americans feel like losers. Our economy is cratering in an abyss of greed and foolishness. We're exhausting our resources in imperial military adventures. And we're stuck in a car-dependent living arrangement with no future. This bunch doesn't want to face the reality in any of this. They just want to "drill drill drill" so they can keep snowmobiling and rack up more credit card purchases of Chinese-manufactured salad shooters in the WalMart.
Here's an interesting question: if they win the election, will Sarah Palin and her whole family move to Washington when she takes up her duties? What will her husband do there? Who will take care of her "special needs" baby while the mother is learning how to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces and guardian of a nuclear arsenal (plus presiding over the senate)? Will daughter Bristol stay home in Alaska with her teenage husband and their new baby?
Tonight is the climax of this awful spectacle. John McCain gets to explain why the party that wrecked America deserves another term running things in the in the nation's capital.
Sept 3
Pretend-O-Rama in Minneapolis
What a sordid spectacle it was to watch the Republican dignitaries and delegates strain to pretend that John McCain's impulsive Vice-Presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was a great choice, and that the US economy was strong. But as one member of the club explained it, this election is not so much about issues as about feelings. I'll tell you what feeling is expressed overwhelmingly by the Republican script: insecurity. They know they are absolutely full of crap and that a big portion of the electorate is on to them. Hence, all the jingo-patriotism, including their scurrilous motto, "Country First," as if their Democratic opponents were foreign agents. There were moments last night (Tuesday) when the pretending and outright lying got so strenuous, I thought I was at a Pinocchio look-alike contest. These are the people who are locked into defending the mis-investments of the past, in every sense. They will not adapt to the emerging realities of the future, or even entertain the notion that it is necessary. They will also come to be regarded, as this campaign moves into the heart of autumn, and the banks start crashing, as the party that wrecked America. In fact, speaking of feelings, I have a feeling that the Republican party is so morally bankrupt that it might actually explode in factional war after this election, and maybe even blow up altogether. They are the Whigs of our time.
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_campaign08.html
Sept 4
The Patriot Game - Wednesday
The odious soap opera in Minneapolis gets worse each night, this one like a Sandra Bullock movie produced and directed by the Devil. I tuned in for Rudolf Giuliani's keynote speech, a hyperthyroid exercise in oratorical thuggery, which led directly to the main event, Sarah Palin's acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination.
She quickly proved to be a confident podium performer, but the content and tenor of her remarks conveyed all the petty viciousness and insecurity of the Republican right-wing. As she spoke, the cameras panned around her rapt audience, affording snapshots of the dumbest white people in America, self-congratulatory in their small-town ignorance and brined in a dangerous jingo-patriotism that must make leaders in other nations cringe in amazement at the rhetorical recklessness being served up. Everything about her speech was small-minded, vindictive, smugly sarcastic, and shot through with falsehood (e.g. that the Republicans will "lead America to energy independence"). You wonder how much kool-aid these people have to drink to believe their own bullshit. In fact, watching Ms. Palin's performance, two notions came to mind and lodged there firmly: 1.) That the Republican Party has itself become a vector of terrorism, and 2.) that these are exactly the people I had in mind when I conceived the term "corn-pone Nazis" to describe the worst outcome of an over-stressed society.
In the aftermath, with the whole Palin family bathed in cheering before a giant televised waving flag, the true ethos of this phony spectacle revealed itself: this is the party of losers, and Sarah is their cheerleader. Deep down, Americans feel like losers. Our economy is cratering in an abyss of greed and foolishness. We're exhausting our resources in imperial military adventures. And we're stuck in a car-dependent living arrangement with no future. This bunch doesn't want to face the reality in any of this. They just want to "drill drill drill" so they can keep snowmobiling and rack up more credit card purchases of Chinese-manufactured salad shooters in the WalMart.
Here's an interesting question: if they win the election, will Sarah Palin and her whole family move to Washington when she takes up her duties? What will her husband do there? Who will take care of her "special needs" baby while the mother is learning how to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces and guardian of a nuclear arsenal (plus presiding over the senate)? Will daughter Bristol stay home in Alaska with her teenage husband and their new baby?
Tonight is the climax of this awful spectacle. John McCain gets to explain why the party that wrecked America deserves another term running things in the in the nation's capital.
Sept 3
Pretend-O-Rama in Minneapolis
What a sordid spectacle it was to watch the Republican dignitaries and delegates strain to pretend that John McCain's impulsive Vice-Presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was a great choice, and that the US economy was strong. But as one member of the club explained it, this election is not so much about issues as about feelings. I'll tell you what feeling is expressed overwhelmingly by the Republican script: insecurity. They know they are absolutely full of crap and that a big portion of the electorate is on to them. Hence, all the jingo-patriotism, including their scurrilous motto, "Country First," as if their Democratic opponents were foreign agents. There were moments last night (Tuesday) when the pretending and outright lying got so strenuous, I thought I was at a Pinocchio look-alike contest. These are the people who are locked into defending the mis-investments of the past, in every sense. They will not adapt to the emerging realities of the future, or even entertain the notion that it is necessary. They will also come to be regarded, as this campaign moves into the heart of autumn, and the banks start crashing, as the party that wrecked America. In fact, speaking of feelings, I have a feeling that the Republican party is so morally bankrupt that it might actually explode in factional war after this election, and maybe even blow up altogether. They are the Whigs of our time.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Cockburn vs. Clinton
Alexander Cockburn kicks knowledge and science like few others. In his latest column, he lays down a scathing rebuke of Hillary Clinton:
Monday, May 12, 2008
Kunstler vs. Clinton
I might add pictures later.--P.Z.
May 12, 2008
Monster of Ambition
I was pretty disturbed eight years ago when Hillary Clinton up and announced she was running for a New York seat in the US Senate. Say what? She didn't even live here after she quit Arkansas. Why didn't she run for the single non-voting District of Columbia House of Representatives seat (in a primary against Eleanor Holmes Norton)? Why? Because Hillary is a monster of ambition.
So, Hillary and Bill bought a piece of real estate in Westchester County, NY, and that theoretically qualified her to run for that senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face to the 15 million or so adult native New York staters who were also theoretically entitled to run for that office -- including especially the smaller but still substantial number of New Yorkers with serious qualifications. They all rolled over for Hillary, allowing the Clintons to maintain a major power base in American government when the Big Show of Bill's White House tenure was up.
Her run for president took off on schedule with a disturbing sense of inevitability. It was clear that she had internalized the arc of the women's movement to the the degree that the nation owed her a turn in the White House, since this was the logical symbolic destination of the Boomer political ethos: absolute equality above all other considerations -- Hillary gets to play, too! The American public seemed willing to go along with this national psychodrama. It satisfied a certain school days sense of morality. Then Barack Obama had to come along and spoil it all. The nerve of that... uppity Negro!
Or so, apparently, Hillary would have us believe, now that her campaign has run off the rails. In awful desperation she has so much as said that the Democratic party has to nominate her because non-white people are unelectable -- forgetting for a moment that Barack Obama is as much white as he is black.
The spectacle of Hillary's un-making has been pretty horrible to witness, the efforts to stage her as a lumpenprole Nascar mom drinking boilermakers while celebrating her latest hunting exploits. (How worried is Hillary about making her mortgage payments, or filling her gas tank?) Naturally, the final act of this nauseating play takes place in Hillbilly Heaven, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky, where Hillary expects to make a big "statement" about exactly whom voters will go for. She'll win big and the effort will symbolically disgrace her.
She's carrying on now like William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial -- an obvious, gibbering loser unwilling to shut up and go home, even after every measure of consensus from the bailing super delegates to the cover of Time Magazine has made it clear who the preferred party nominee will be.
I hope New York voters will not fail to remember this ghastly final act of the 2008 primary season. I hope a bona fide New Yorker will step up and challenge Mrs Clinton for the senate seat she will return to for the next several years. I hope the Clintons will move offstage and do something else -- enjoy their millions... make even more money... use it to "go green" or something....
Back around the year 2000, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return (despite the two-term limit) as Emperor Bill the 1st. He almost made it. I voted for him twice in the 1990s, but the new script addition wasn't so appetizing. It would have been one of the stranger occurrences in all of modern world history. The political "death" of Hillary and Bill is a story of Shakespearean dimensions. It seems to be ending as farce, though. Who knows, before the day is over, Hillary may yet put on a pair of overalls with one suspender and have her picture taken sucking on a jug of moonshine likker. Of course, irony has been the Boomer's intellectual stock-in-trade.
Whatever America's fate may be in these very trying times of peak oil and climate change, a consensus seems to have formed that we can't afford to leave the same old cast of characters running things.
May 12, 2008
Monster of Ambition
I was pretty disturbed eight years ago when Hillary Clinton up and announced she was running for a New York seat in the US Senate. Say what? She didn't even live here after she quit Arkansas. Why didn't she run for the single non-voting District of Columbia House of Representatives seat (in a primary against Eleanor Holmes Norton)? Why? Because Hillary is a monster of ambition.
So, Hillary and Bill bought a piece of real estate in Westchester County, NY, and that theoretically qualified her to run for that senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face to the 15 million or so adult native New York staters who were also theoretically entitled to run for that office -- including especially the smaller but still substantial number of New Yorkers with serious qualifications. They all rolled over for Hillary, allowing the Clintons to maintain a major power base in American government when the Big Show of Bill's White House tenure was up.
Her run for president took off on schedule with a disturbing sense of inevitability. It was clear that she had internalized the arc of the women's movement to the the degree that the nation owed her a turn in the White House, since this was the logical symbolic destination of the Boomer political ethos: absolute equality above all other considerations -- Hillary gets to play, too! The American public seemed willing to go along with this national psychodrama. It satisfied a certain school days sense of morality. Then Barack Obama had to come along and spoil it all. The nerve of that... uppity Negro!
Or so, apparently, Hillary would have us believe, now that her campaign has run off the rails. In awful desperation she has so much as said that the Democratic party has to nominate her because non-white people are unelectable -- forgetting for a moment that Barack Obama is as much white as he is black.
The spectacle of Hillary's un-making has been pretty horrible to witness, the efforts to stage her as a lumpenprole Nascar mom drinking boilermakers while celebrating her latest hunting exploits. (How worried is Hillary about making her mortgage payments, or filling her gas tank?) Naturally, the final act of this nauseating play takes place in Hillbilly Heaven, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky, where Hillary expects to make a big "statement" about exactly whom voters will go for. She'll win big and the effort will symbolically disgrace her.
She's carrying on now like William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial -- an obvious, gibbering loser unwilling to shut up and go home, even after every measure of consensus from the bailing super delegates to the cover of Time Magazine has made it clear who the preferred party nominee will be.
I hope New York voters will not fail to remember this ghastly final act of the 2008 primary season. I hope a bona fide New Yorker will step up and challenge Mrs Clinton for the senate seat she will return to for the next several years. I hope the Clintons will move offstage and do something else -- enjoy their millions... make even more money... use it to "go green" or something....
Back around the year 2000, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return (despite the two-term limit) as Emperor Bill the 1st. He almost made it. I voted for him twice in the 1990s, but the new script addition wasn't so appetizing. It would have been one of the stranger occurrences in all of modern world history. The political "death" of Hillary and Bill is a story of Shakespearean dimensions. It seems to be ending as farce, though. Who knows, before the day is over, Hillary may yet put on a pair of overalls with one suspender and have her picture taken sucking on a jug of moonshine likker. Of course, irony has been the Boomer's intellectual stock-in-trade.
Whatever America's fate may be in these very trying times of peak oil and climate change, a consensus seems to have formed that we can't afford to leave the same old cast of characters running things.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Kunstler's Tongue Lashing
I've heard about Obama's 'bitter' comment only in passing. If voters' delicate sensibilities can be bruised by his phrasing, imagine how Kunstler's latest (reposted below in full) could pulverise them. The especially fiery parts are bolded.
April 14, 2008
Slip of the Tongue
Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between. As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it).
A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off working at the WalMart.) I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his remarks. It compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He might have added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also neurotically hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to shut down the Nascar tracks by executive order in the interest of national energy security.
It's been illuminating to see how almost nobody has come to Obama's defense in this matter -- hardly anyone in the press, anyway. It shows what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is (close to zero). In the background of these sad and sordid campaign doings, the financial sector -- and the dog's-body economy that the wagging financial tail used to be attached to -- is whirling steadily down a big wide culvert, along with the rest of the debris shaken loose by the spring rains. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd have been putting together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious because they don't seem to take into account the basic fact that nobody knows who the lending parties to all those distressed mortgages really are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing" companies who send out the default notices.) So when they say that the government will "negotiate down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who exactly did they have in mind as the negotiating partner?
These are issues that would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy center stage of the political conversation -- not whether a cohort of Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God to shoot all the Mexicans.
April 14, 2008
Slip of the Tongue
Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between. As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it).
A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off working at the WalMart.) I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his remarks. It compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He might have added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also neurotically hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to shut down the Nascar tracks by executive order in the interest of national energy security.
It's been illuminating to see how almost nobody has come to Obama's defense in this matter -- hardly anyone in the press, anyway. It shows what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is (close to zero). In the background of these sad and sordid campaign doings, the financial sector -- and the dog's-body economy that the wagging financial tail used to be attached to -- is whirling steadily down a big wide culvert, along with the rest of the debris shaken loose by the spring rains. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd have been putting together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious because they don't seem to take into account the basic fact that nobody knows who the lending parties to all those distressed mortgages really are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing" companies who send out the default notices.) So when they say that the government will "negotiate down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who exactly did they have in mind as the negotiating partner?
These are issues that would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy center stage of the political conversation -- not whether a cohort of Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God to shoot all the Mexicans.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Ron Paul Scales Back Campaign
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124885.html
Ron's message in full:
February 08, 2008
Message from Ron
Whoa! What a year this has been. And what achievements we have had. If I may quote Trotsky of all people, this Revolution is permanent. It will not end at the Republican convention. It will not end in November. It will not end until we have won the great battle on which we have embarked. Not because of me, but because of you. Millions of Americans -- and friends in many other countries -- have dedicated themselves to the principles of liberty: to free enterprise, limited government, sound money, no income tax, and peace. We will not falter so long as there is one restriction on our persons, our property, our civil liberties. How much I owe you. I can never possibly repay your generous donations, hard work, whole-hearted dedication and love of freedom. How blessed I am to be associated with you. Carol, of course, sends her love as well.
Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.
I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.
In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.
Sincerely,
Ron
Ron's message in full:
February 08, 2008
Message from Ron
Whoa! What a year this has been. And what achievements we have had. If I may quote Trotsky of all people, this Revolution is permanent. It will not end at the Republican convention. It will not end in November. It will not end until we have won the great battle on which we have embarked. Not because of me, but because of you. Millions of Americans -- and friends in many other countries -- have dedicated themselves to the principles of liberty: to free enterprise, limited government, sound money, no income tax, and peace. We will not falter so long as there is one restriction on our persons, our property, our civil liberties. How much I owe you. I can never possibly repay your generous donations, hard work, whole-hearted dedication and love of freedom. How blessed I am to be associated with you. Carol, of course, sends her love as well.
Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.
I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.
In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.
Sincerely,
Ron
Thursday, January 31, 2008
This Will Not Come to Pass
3 February update: This is a link to Green Greenwald's article in The American Conservative.
Giuliani is also a hothead, as this "oral history of Giuliani's temper," published in the February issue of GQ, makes abundantly clear.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Saturday, January 05, 2008
The Iowa Aftermath: Biden, Dodd, Gravel Out
From Politics1.com:
In response to weak finishes, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel all ended their White House campaigns on Thursday evening. With the contest moving to New Hampshire and South Carolina -- states Obama is now likely to win -- Clinton will make her real stand against Obama in Florida and the 22-state national primary on February 5. Also look for the Clinton campaign to quickly go negative on Obama.
Update: I found this blog by chance just now. Penned by an Iowan, it has a local perspective on the recent Iowa caucuses.
In response to weak finishes, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel all ended their White House campaigns on Thursday evening. With the contest moving to New Hampshire and South Carolina -- states Obama is now likely to win -- Clinton will make her real stand against Obama in Florida and the 22-state national primary on February 5. Also look for the Clinton campaign to quickly go negative on Obama.
Update: I found this blog by chance just now. Penned by an Iowan, it has a local perspective on the recent Iowa caucuses.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Hauoli Makahiki Hou!
James Howard "Janus" Kunstler reviews 2007 and forecasts 2008 as only he can:
Dec 31, 2007
Forecast 2008
For the tiny fraction of people who actually pay attention to real events -- those, for instance, who know the difference between Narnia and Kandahar -- the final hours of 2007 leading into the fog-shrouded abyss of 2008 must induce great racking shudders of nausea. Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.
...On the ground out in the heartland, in the anxiety-drenched, over-valued beige subdivisions of California and the ennui-saturated pastel McHousing tracts of Florida (not to mention the pathetic vinyl outlands of Cleveland and Detroit) a mighty keening welled forth as mortgage rates adjusted upward, and loans stopped "performing," and "for sale" signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with the rolls of yellow foreclosure tape, and actual ownership of the re-poed collateral entered a legal twilight zone somewhere north of the Florida State Teacher's Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils' investment portfolios. What a mighty goddam mess was left out there by the boyz at the Wall Street genius desks, who engineered a magical system for eliminating risk from the capital markets -- only to see it leak back in from a million holes and seams and collapse the greatest bubble ever blown.
In the background, the US dollar sank to record lows against the euro and the pound sterling, the price of oil jumped 56 percent across the year just grazing the $100-a-barrel mark, drought punished the American southeast and Australia's grain belt, floods ravaged Texas and England, the polar ice shrank dramatically, but the US escaped any major hurricane action for a second year in a row. Except for the murder of Mrs. Bhutto just a few days ago, the international scene was supernaturally quiet. Even Iraq fell into a torpor, variously attributed to utter exhaustion among the warring factions or to the US troop "surge" under general Petreus. Iran got a surprise clean bill-of-health on its nuclear bomb-making activity from America's own investigators, to the consternation of Mr. Bush & Co. The non-human denizens of Planet Earth didn't have such a good year. Honeybees, Yangtze river dolphins, and house sparrows took big hits, and Al Gore went up another suit size (as well as winning part of the Nobel Prize for his Powerpoint show). Which brings us finally to the heart of the matter: what's coming down the pike starting tomorrow, January 1, 2008?
Down and Dirty I shudder to imagine how things will play out now as we turn the corner into 2008. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my little walnut brain can't imagine any scenario in which the US economy doesn't end up on a gurney in history's emergency room. It's not necessary to rehash the particulars of the Greenspan bubble-blowing disaster. The outcome is what concerns us. The web cables have been blazing for months with arguments as to what form the workout will take. There's little disagreement about the fundamentals at the housing end of things.
The housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually, the median price of a house will have to fall back to the median income, and it has a very long way to go, perhaps 50 percent. Until that happens, houses will be generally unsellable. At the same time, of course, an anxious finance sector will be offering fewer mortgages and on much more rigorous terms, so there will be far fewer qualified buyers even for distress sales. And the median income itself may soon not be what it has been. The whole equation has changed. As the painful re-pricing process plays out, many owners/sellers will be upside-down and under water in what they owe on the mortgage in relation to the value of the house they occupy. Quite a few may have lost jobs and incomes along the way. Most of these unfortunates would be better off just mailing in the keys and walking away. But in so far as these awful liabilities are peoples' homes, full of all their stuff and their childrens' stuff, not to mention being the repository of all their previously-imagined wealth, as well as their hopes and dreams, walking away is psychologically more easily said than done.
Surely in this election year, schemes will be advanced to bail out these poor suckers. But the beneficiaries of such a putative bail out would be far outnumbered by the home-owners still making mortgage payments, plus property taxes jacked up during the recent orgy by greedy public officials, and I don't think this majority would stand for the unfairness of seeing their neighbors simply let off the hook on their obligations. Perhaps the one thing that congress could do is change the insane law that treats foreclosures like some kind of bizzaro capital gain and piles additional huge tax demands on people who can no longer afford to buy their kids a frozen burrito. The issue of what to do about the dispossessed will be so politically red-hot that it could upset the election process --but I get a bit ahead of myself.
One thing the public doesn't get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle -- it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won't be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America's dwindling manufacturing economy. This stratagem ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil, which not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital.
But to return to my point, something like 40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion -- everything from the excavators to the framers to the sheet-rockers, and then the providers of granite countertops, the sellers of appliances and furnishings, and cars to service the far-out new subdivisions, and so on. This is the end, therefore, not only of the production "home-builders," but perhaps everything from Crate and Barrel to WalMart, too, eventually. By the way, the housing collapse was only one phase of a more generalized real estate debacle, because the commercial side of the business has also begun a nauseating slide into non-performance and equity destruction. In other words, we built way too many strip malls, power centers, and office parks. God knows what will happen to the owners of these white elephants, or the mortgage and lien holders of these things -- but as one wag remarked to me some years ago as we both gazed upon a forlorn abandoned strip mall outside of Tulsa, "...we don't need that many evangelical roller rinks...."
What happens out there on the housing market scene will certainly redound in banking and finance and whatever still constitutes the US economy generally. The fears and uncertainties surrounding all credit-backed tradable securities derive first from the millions of troubled home mortgages dangling slowly in the wind. These fears and uncertainties will multiply as defaults commence in commercial real estate, and desperate individuals next enter a wave of credit card default, all of it, too, securitized and sprinkled all over the world. None of this stuff has yet been priced into the public disclosures of the many troubled banks and bank-like companies holding it. Nor does anyone really know how this is affecting the hedge funds, and their staggering leveraged positions in things that are looking more and more like quicksand. I can't imagine that quite a few major banks will not collapse in the first half of 2008. It is hard to escape the conclusion that many hedge funds will also blow up, given the unsoundness of their counter-parties' positions, not to mention the frailty of the bond reinsurers. But the death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system -- meaning a period of destructive chaos followed by a set of severely different institutional arrangements, with untold loss of imagined capital wealth along the way and big changes in everyday life. The world has never really been in a situation like this before and it is impossible to say what it might lead to. But there is no doubt that the American public has enjoyed an artificially high standard of living in relation to the value of what we actually produce -- fried chicken, hair extensions, and the Flaver Flav Show [Flavor of Love, actually--P.Z.] -- so the conclusion is pretty self-evident.
Others have said (and I concur) that 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the "modern" way-of-life. There is every reason to believe that the world has arrived at its all-time oil production peak -- and some statisticians would even pin-point the exact moment as July 2006. Since then a few new and crucial story-lines have emerged to allow us to understand what is happening out there on the world oil scene.
One story-line is that only "demand destruction" among the world's poorest nations has kept the oil markets functioning "normally" among the OECD nations and the rising Asian players. Even so, oil priced in US dollars more than doubled in 2007. It remains to be seen whether demand destruction in a wobbling US economy -- with the suburban builders crippled -- will keep oil prices from jumping into the uncharted territory beyond $100-a-barrel. But two other forces are in operation now. One is the growing oil export problem, soon to be a crisis. It now appears that exports, in nations with surplus oil to sell, are going down at an even steeper rate than production declines. Why? They are using more of their own oil. The population is growing robustly. The Saudi Arabians are building the world’s largest aluminum smelter and many chemical factories. This takes a lot of oil. Russia, another big exporter, saw its car sales jump by 50 percent in 2007. Mexico is depleting so rapidly, and using so much more of its own oil, that it might be out of the export game altogether in three years. That will be bad news for the US, since Mexico is tied with Saudi Arabia as America's number two leading source of oil imports. Remember, the US now imports close to three-quarters of all the oil we use.
The second new factor on the Peak oil scene is "oil nationalism." It is prompting countries like Norway and Russia to husband more of their own resources as the awareness hits that they are past peak and might want to keep their own motors humming further into the future. Oil surplus nations are also trending more toward selling their oil on the basis of long-term contracts with favored customers rather than just auctioning the stuff off on the futures market. This makes oil a much more important element in geopolitical power politics. Note that the US may not enjoy "favored customer" standing among many of these nations.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, predicted at a major conference in October that the US is much closer to encountering a problem with chronic spot shortages of oil (and gasoline, of course) than the public realizes, and Simmons says that this supply problem will be extremely disruptive in every imaginable way -- economically, politically, and socially. Most of the commentators I take seriously see the price of oil oscillating in 2008 between $80 and $160-a-barrel. Simmons says Americans will keep sucking up the price increases, but they will probably freak out over spot shortages. I have no idea how presidential election politics will play out in 2008. It must be obvious that so many nasty pitfalls lie out there in the months ahead that something's got to shake up the current scripted mummery among the contenders. The current batch of candidates will soon find their story-lines and pre-cooked messages out-of-date as the nation faces crises in finance and energy (at least). Given the uneventful geopolitical scene of the past 18 months (since the Hezbollah-Israel War and up to the murder of Mrs. Bhutto in Pakistan), odds are that the US will have more rather than less trouble from the rest of the world in 2008-- especially if our own financial recklessness trips up the global economy. Back in the early days of George W. Bush, even before 9/11, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return as the Emperor Bill the First. [Hattie might not like the following.--P.Z.] The joke doesn't seem so funny anymore with Hillary off and running. I never liked the way she muscled her way into a US senate seat -- sending the message, in essence, that there was not one genuine New York resident qualified for the job. But there is so much more about her I dislike now, starting with her presumption of dynastic entitlement to the annoyingly phony way she nods her head (like one of those old "drinky-bird" toys) to put across the idea that she is a fabulous "listener." I write this a few days before the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primary. New York's Mayor Bloomberg is suddenly making noises again about entering the race as an independent. That might lead to a situation as fractured as the one in 1860 that saw a multi-party scuffle send Lincoln into office (or the election of 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt made a credible run on the independent Bull Moose line). At the moment, I'd like to see both John Edwards and Barack Obama roll on. The mere thought of a president Huckabee gives me the chilblains, and the rest of the Republican pack I would not want to have as my county supervisor. [Too bad he doesn't make an exception for Ron Paul, whose advocacy of withdrwal of American forces worldwide must seem to him prudent.--P.Z.] In any case, whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck. In the immortal words of TV's erstwhile "Mr. T," I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess. There will be a whole continent full of bankrupt, re-poed, and idle former WalMart shoppers, many of them with half of their skin tattooed and many of that bunch all revved up to "roll heavy and gun up" against the folks who screwed them.
Which leads me to my penultimate observation of the moment: 2008 will be the year that celebrity wealth goes into hiding. [Cf. Paul Fussell's observation that "Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide. It's a pity."--P.Z.] A land full of people crying into their foreclosure notices will take a dim view of the Donald Trumps and P. Diddys luxuriating out there and may come looking for scalps -- though in the case of Mr. Trump they'll be sorry they woke up the wolverine that lives on his head. Basically, though, I'm not kidding. Conspicuous displays of wealth will be so "out" that Mr. Diddy might take to club-hopping in a 1999 Mazda. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have to double-up living in a minuteman missile silo to keep the angry mobs of fans-turned-vengeful-berserkers away.
Okay, my final comment. After being chastised endlessly about mis-calling the DOW in 2006 (I said 4000), I have learned my lesson about making numerical predictions for the stock markets. So let's just say there is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over. That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.
Dec 31, 2007
Forecast 2008
For the tiny fraction of people who actually pay attention to real events -- those, for instance, who know the difference between Narnia and Kandahar -- the final hours of 2007 leading into the fog-shrouded abyss of 2008 must induce great racking shudders of nausea. Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.
...On the ground out in the heartland, in the anxiety-drenched, over-valued beige subdivisions of California and the ennui-saturated pastel McHousing tracts of Florida (not to mention the pathetic vinyl outlands of Cleveland and Detroit) a mighty keening welled forth as mortgage rates adjusted upward, and loans stopped "performing," and "for sale" signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with the rolls of yellow foreclosure tape, and actual ownership of the re-poed collateral entered a legal twilight zone somewhere north of the Florida State Teacher's Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils' investment portfolios. What a mighty goddam mess was left out there by the boyz at the Wall Street genius desks, who engineered a magical system for eliminating risk from the capital markets -- only to see it leak back in from a million holes and seams and collapse the greatest bubble ever blown.
In the background, the US dollar sank to record lows against the euro and the pound sterling, the price of oil jumped 56 percent across the year just grazing the $100-a-barrel mark, drought punished the American southeast and Australia's grain belt, floods ravaged Texas and England, the polar ice shrank dramatically, but the US escaped any major hurricane action for a second year in a row. Except for the murder of Mrs. Bhutto just a few days ago, the international scene was supernaturally quiet. Even Iraq fell into a torpor, variously attributed to utter exhaustion among the warring factions or to the US troop "surge" under general Petreus. Iran got a surprise clean bill-of-health on its nuclear bomb-making activity from America's own investigators, to the consternation of Mr. Bush & Co. The non-human denizens of Planet Earth didn't have such a good year. Honeybees, Yangtze river dolphins, and house sparrows took big hits, and Al Gore went up another suit size (as well as winning part of the Nobel Prize for his Powerpoint show). Which brings us finally to the heart of the matter: what's coming down the pike starting tomorrow, January 1, 2008?
Down and Dirty I shudder to imagine how things will play out now as we turn the corner into 2008. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my little walnut brain can't imagine any scenario in which the US economy doesn't end up on a gurney in history's emergency room. It's not necessary to rehash the particulars of the Greenspan bubble-blowing disaster. The outcome is what concerns us. The web cables have been blazing for months with arguments as to what form the workout will take. There's little disagreement about the fundamentals at the housing end of things.
The housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually, the median price of a house will have to fall back to the median income, and it has a very long way to go, perhaps 50 percent. Until that happens, houses will be generally unsellable. At the same time, of course, an anxious finance sector will be offering fewer mortgages and on much more rigorous terms, so there will be far fewer qualified buyers even for distress sales. And the median income itself may soon not be what it has been. The whole equation has changed. As the painful re-pricing process plays out, many owners/sellers will be upside-down and under water in what they owe on the mortgage in relation to the value of the house they occupy. Quite a few may have lost jobs and incomes along the way. Most of these unfortunates would be better off just mailing in the keys and walking away. But in so far as these awful liabilities are peoples' homes, full of all their stuff and their childrens' stuff, not to mention being the repository of all their previously-imagined wealth, as well as their hopes and dreams, walking away is psychologically more easily said than done.
Surely in this election year, schemes will be advanced to bail out these poor suckers. But the beneficiaries of such a putative bail out would be far outnumbered by the home-owners still making mortgage payments, plus property taxes jacked up during the recent orgy by greedy public officials, and I don't think this majority would stand for the unfairness of seeing their neighbors simply let off the hook on their obligations. Perhaps the one thing that congress could do is change the insane law that treats foreclosures like some kind of bizzaro capital gain and piles additional huge tax demands on people who can no longer afford to buy their kids a frozen burrito. The issue of what to do about the dispossessed will be so politically red-hot that it could upset the election process --but I get a bit ahead of myself.
One thing the public doesn't get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle -- it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won't be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America's dwindling manufacturing economy. This stratagem ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil, which not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital.
But to return to my point, something like 40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion -- everything from the excavators to the framers to the sheet-rockers, and then the providers of granite countertops, the sellers of appliances and furnishings, and cars to service the far-out new subdivisions, and so on. This is the end, therefore, not only of the production "home-builders," but perhaps everything from Crate and Barrel to WalMart, too, eventually. By the way, the housing collapse was only one phase of a more generalized real estate debacle, because the commercial side of the business has also begun a nauseating slide into non-performance and equity destruction. In other words, we built way too many strip malls, power centers, and office parks. God knows what will happen to the owners of these white elephants, or the mortgage and lien holders of these things -- but as one wag remarked to me some years ago as we both gazed upon a forlorn abandoned strip mall outside of Tulsa, "...we don't need that many evangelical roller rinks...."
What happens out there on the housing market scene will certainly redound in banking and finance and whatever still constitutes the US economy generally. The fears and uncertainties surrounding all credit-backed tradable securities derive first from the millions of troubled home mortgages dangling slowly in the wind. These fears and uncertainties will multiply as defaults commence in commercial real estate, and desperate individuals next enter a wave of credit card default, all of it, too, securitized and sprinkled all over the world. None of this stuff has yet been priced into the public disclosures of the many troubled banks and bank-like companies holding it. Nor does anyone really know how this is affecting the hedge funds, and their staggering leveraged positions in things that are looking more and more like quicksand. I can't imagine that quite a few major banks will not collapse in the first half of 2008. It is hard to escape the conclusion that many hedge funds will also blow up, given the unsoundness of their counter-parties' positions, not to mention the frailty of the bond reinsurers. But the death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system -- meaning a period of destructive chaos followed by a set of severely different institutional arrangements, with untold loss of imagined capital wealth along the way and big changes in everyday life. The world has never really been in a situation like this before and it is impossible to say what it might lead to. But there is no doubt that the American public has enjoyed an artificially high standard of living in relation to the value of what we actually produce -- fried chicken, hair extensions, and the Flaver Flav Show [Flavor of Love, actually--P.Z.] -- so the conclusion is pretty self-evident.
Others have said (and I concur) that 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the "modern" way-of-life. There is every reason to believe that the world has arrived at its all-time oil production peak -- and some statisticians would even pin-point the exact moment as July 2006. Since then a few new and crucial story-lines have emerged to allow us to understand what is happening out there on the world oil scene.
One story-line is that only "demand destruction" among the world's poorest nations has kept the oil markets functioning "normally" among the OECD nations and the rising Asian players. Even so, oil priced in US dollars more than doubled in 2007. It remains to be seen whether demand destruction in a wobbling US economy -- with the suburban builders crippled -- will keep oil prices from jumping into the uncharted territory beyond $100-a-barrel. But two other forces are in operation now. One is the growing oil export problem, soon to be a crisis. It now appears that exports, in nations with surplus oil to sell, are going down at an even steeper rate than production declines. Why? They are using more of their own oil. The population is growing robustly. The Saudi Arabians are building the world’s largest aluminum smelter and many chemical factories. This takes a lot of oil. Russia, another big exporter, saw its car sales jump by 50 percent in 2007. Mexico is depleting so rapidly, and using so much more of its own oil, that it might be out of the export game altogether in three years. That will be bad news for the US, since Mexico is tied with Saudi Arabia as America's number two leading source of oil imports. Remember, the US now imports close to three-quarters of all the oil we use.
The second new factor on the Peak oil scene is "oil nationalism." It is prompting countries like Norway and Russia to husband more of their own resources as the awareness hits that they are past peak and might want to keep their own motors humming further into the future. Oil surplus nations are also trending more toward selling their oil on the basis of long-term contracts with favored customers rather than just auctioning the stuff off on the futures market. This makes oil a much more important element in geopolitical power politics. Note that the US may not enjoy "favored customer" standing among many of these nations.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, predicted at a major conference in October that the US is much closer to encountering a problem with chronic spot shortages of oil (and gasoline, of course) than the public realizes, and Simmons says that this supply problem will be extremely disruptive in every imaginable way -- economically, politically, and socially. Most of the commentators I take seriously see the price of oil oscillating in 2008 between $80 and $160-a-barrel. Simmons says Americans will keep sucking up the price increases, but they will probably freak out over spot shortages. I have no idea how presidential election politics will play out in 2008. It must be obvious that so many nasty pitfalls lie out there in the months ahead that something's got to shake up the current scripted mummery among the contenders. The current batch of candidates will soon find their story-lines and pre-cooked messages out-of-date as the nation faces crises in finance and energy (at least). Given the uneventful geopolitical scene of the past 18 months (since the Hezbollah-Israel War and up to the murder of Mrs. Bhutto in Pakistan), odds are that the US will have more rather than less trouble from the rest of the world in 2008-- especially if our own financial recklessness trips up the global economy. Back in the early days of George W. Bush, even before 9/11, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return as the Emperor Bill the First. [Hattie might not like the following.--P.Z.] The joke doesn't seem so funny anymore with Hillary off and running. I never liked the way she muscled her way into a US senate seat -- sending the message, in essence, that there was not one genuine New York resident qualified for the job. But there is so much more about her I dislike now, starting with her presumption of dynastic entitlement to the annoyingly phony way she nods her head (like one of those old "drinky-bird" toys) to put across the idea that she is a fabulous "listener." I write this a few days before the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primary. New York's Mayor Bloomberg is suddenly making noises again about entering the race as an independent. That might lead to a situation as fractured as the one in 1860 that saw a multi-party scuffle send Lincoln into office (or the election of 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt made a credible run on the independent Bull Moose line). At the moment, I'd like to see both John Edwards and Barack Obama roll on. The mere thought of a president Huckabee gives me the chilblains, and the rest of the Republican pack I would not want to have as my county supervisor. [Too bad he doesn't make an exception for Ron Paul, whose advocacy of withdrwal of American forces worldwide must seem to him prudent.--P.Z.] In any case, whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck. In the immortal words of TV's erstwhile "Mr. T," I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess. There will be a whole continent full of bankrupt, re-poed, and idle former WalMart shoppers, many of them with half of their skin tattooed and many of that bunch all revved up to "roll heavy and gun up" against the folks who screwed them.
Which leads me to my penultimate observation of the moment: 2008 will be the year that celebrity wealth goes into hiding. [Cf. Paul Fussell's observation that "Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide. It's a pity."--P.Z.] A land full of people crying into their foreclosure notices will take a dim view of the Donald Trumps and P. Diddys luxuriating out there and may come looking for scalps -- though in the case of Mr. Trump they'll be sorry they woke up the wolverine that lives on his head. Basically, though, I'm not kidding. Conspicuous displays of wealth will be so "out" that Mr. Diddy might take to club-hopping in a 1999 Mazda. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have to double-up living in a minuteman missile silo to keep the angry mobs of fans-turned-vengeful-berserkers away.
Okay, my final comment. After being chastised endlessly about mis-calling the DOW in 2006 (I said 4000), I have learned my lesson about making numerical predictions for the stock markets. So let's just say there is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over. That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Tancredo the Frado Out! Cynthia McKinney In!
LewRockwell.com says Good riddance to Tancredo, who had the nerve to badmouth Ron Paul. More on Tancredo's resignation at Politics1.com, which also notes Cynthia McKinney's announced candidacy as a Green. Her candidacy was a much-discussed possibility for months and now that it's official, voters have an alternative to Clinton and Obama.
Frado explained.
Frado explained.
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