F**king Brilliant

My contempt for Libertarianism is boundless, and this little video I found posted at dKos this morning encapsulates a dose of it.

When people rage against teh Central Government or piddle on the Government Schools or demand the liberty to impose their authority on others (ie: Warlordism) in a Regulation Free Market, I about puke.

And then when they start celebrating Ron Paul as the ideological key to the New America, I laugh and laugh.

He claims to be some kind of "Constitutionalist" but what he really is is a Confederate who disputes the entire history of Constitutional self-government in this country. He would go back to 1789 -- pre-1789 in fact -- and start the Government over; to him, pretty much everything the Government has done since Ratification has been in Error.

That may be, but it is not "Constitutionalism" to claim nothing but Error on the part of Government since the beginning of the Constitution. The absurdity of his position is plain. And yet there are always some who can't see it.

He's a Confederate; he does not believe in a Constitutionally Self-Governing Republic as defined -- and operated -- under the Constitution of the United States of America since 1789. He believes in the Confederation under the previous Articles, which proved even in its own time to be unviable as a nation.

In fact, it's more than possible to make a case for some other form of Government than we have, and that case should be made in my view. It may ideed involve reflection on the Confederation. The United States Government has become rotten and corrupted and Palace oriented, and the Constitution itself has provided the means and the impetus to that development. The nature of the Constitution of 1789 made the current Imperial State almost inevitable, and now that we are there, it's more than reasonable to evaluate it on the basis of the Public Interest. Is this what the People truly want?

The Government, for its part, doesn't really care what "The People" (a fiction in Government eyes) want. The practice of Government has long been to govern counter to the People and the Public Interest, and little or nothing has stood in the way of that practice. That practice of governing against the People's Will and the Public Interest was quite open during the Bushevik years; Cheney was (and is) proud of it.

The answer is not Libertarianism, however.

The video shows why.

If I can find some time, I'll try to expand on these thoughts (as I have tried in the past). The current situation is unstable. Under the circumstances, we should be thinking about and arguing over and considering options on a way forward. There is no going back, but we don't know what the best way forward is. The Government, to be sure, is busy consolidating its Imperial Grandeur, safe (it thinks) behind it's Palace Gates. Operating quite independently of us, We, the People.

How do we deal with that?

So it's come to this

This is in Victorville, CA; reports are that the same thing is going on or planned in Temecula. Spec homes in new developments demolished rather than completed or sold at a lower price:



The builder was Matthews Homes, a long-time California builder, the bank foreclosing on these properties was Guaranty Bank of Austin, and the destruction of these new homes shouldn't really be so surprising.

Many areas of California (and elsewhere) were vastly overbuilt during the real estate boom. There is a huge inventory of unsold and foreclosed new and nearly new homes throughout the state, and despite extraordinary efforts by the state and other interests and authorities, these homes cannot realistically be sold soon in this market. In many cases, the inflated mortgages have already been paid off on foreclosed properties through Private Mortgage Insurance, but the idle properties themselves are an expense (fines, taxes, upkeep, security, etc.) and rather than pay for the expense involved in holding these properties, owners of record demolish them. By doing so, they reduce inventory, clear the "nuisance" and the costs associated with it from the property and they make it possible to eventually rebuild if market conditions ever warrant.

And that's a big If.

Many areas of California have gone through repeated real estate booms/busts, and of course some of them have ultimately become very successful. Los Angeles itself is a prime case in point. But the outer fringes and most desert areas of California have had their occasional booms (or not as the case may be) only to see the projects ultimately abandoned and never revived. The skeletons of these projects are all over the state, if you know where to look and what to look for, some completely abandoned, others barely hanging on with a relative handful of hardy residents.

Victorville is not exactly a highly sought after location, but it is not by any means an abandoned railroad siding like many other places in the Mojave Desert. It "grew" very fast during the real estate boom, and it has suffered more than many other areas during the bust. How much of the "growth" can be sustained still remains to be seen, and one way to manage that "growth" is to prune the excess.

Demolishing houses that have already been paid for (or have already been written off as the case may be) in areas like Victorville -- where growth is not likely to return soon to the rates seen during the boom -- makes a kind of yucky economic sense, and we're liable to see more of it as the real estate market finds its bottom and stabilizes.

Still, it's shocking to witness.

Pushing Them Into Poverty

The World Bank declares that 50 million people world wide are being forced by the global depression into extreme poverty, and they call on rich countries to stop dallying and get with the program of assisting the worst off in the world.

There is no doubt that globally the depression has hit poorest the hardest and the consequences are barely recognized in this country.

The poorest Americans are hit hardest at home as well, and one thing that keeps getting ignored (among so many ignored items!) in the United States is that millions and millions of people are being pushed into -- or are being pushed back into -- poverty.

Current statistics show that around 6.5 million Americans are collecting unemployment insurance payments. A recipient is lucky to receive 1/2 their former pay while on unemployment, and in many cases they receive much less.

About half of those who are out of work don't receive any unemployment insurance payments at all, so the real number of unemployed is closer to 13 million. There are also an untold number of Americans who aren't employed but who do not show up in the statistics because they've given up looking for work and are now considered "out of the workforce." They may want to work, if there were jobs available, but there aren't any, at least not for them.

Added to those who are completely out of work are many millions -- at any given time between 10 and 15 million -- who can only find part time work and who are considered "underemployed."

Bob Herbert, in today's New York Times, picks up on a theme I've been hammering for quite a while: with these massive levels of unemployment and underemployment, really not seen in this country since the Great Depression, there are surprisingly no significant jobs programs to put people back to work quickly, and there are many in the field who are saying that the contraction in employment is essentially permanent, that many of the jobs people no longer have are not coming back, and further, many of those who are now unemployed cannot expect to return to the workforce. Ever.

Yet the highrollers continue raking in the Big Money, now out of the treasury coffers.

Herbert:

The folks who led the nation to this financial abyss are the ones being made whole on the taxpayers’ dime. We can look after them, all right. But we can’t seem to get credit flowing in any normal way again; we can’t stanch the terrible flow of home foreclosures; and we’re not doing nearly enough to address the most critical need of all: putting people back to work.

While Wall Street is breaking out the Champagne yet again, the rest of the economy is beyond terrible, and will be for the foreseeable future.

True. Everybody knows it. Nobody wants to talk about it. And more to the point, nobody who can do anything about it wants to do anything about it.

Many of these people who are being "shed" from the workforce (still around 600,000 a month) will never have a job again. Some of them became gainfully employed as part of the vaunted Clinton Welfare Reform -- when President Clinton demanded of employers that they find work for the many millions who would no longer be eligible for welfare. Employers stepped up to the plate, and jobs were found. But many of those jobs are disappearing and many of those who were employed as part of the Welfare To Work Program are now unemployed, and there are no other jobs for them, nor is there any welfare to take up the slack.

Homelessness is skyrocketing, and charitable giving is declining. The squeeze on the lower and middle classes is getting tighter and tighter, while the upper 1% continues to swim in champagne.

At some point, this situation will not be sustainable. Those on the lower end who have been "shed" by the depression will have little choice but to fight back if they intend to survive. And we can be certain that our Government, which has decided its survival is in serving the rich and the powerful almost exclusively, will find a means and a method to suppress any rising of the modern day sans coulottes crying out for a scrap of bread.

The surprising thing is that with so many currently unemployed, and with more and more added to the unemployment statistics every month, many of whom will never work again, there has been so little grumbling and so muted a rage among the masses up to this point.

The problem hasn't reached critical mass.

They still won't call it Torture

[From: http://mcncirce.com/history1.html  ]

The "Torture Memos" were released last Thursday, April 16 -- some wags said as a distraction from the Teabaggery -- and  brilliant minds all over the blogosphere went to work. The ACLU, of course, got its props for forcing the release of these memos that describe in excruciating, ugly detail just what is permitted to be done to American captives in the Great and Global War On Terror, and the efficacious results of said practices. Very Medieval.

All the witches confessed, don't forget.

The picture shows, among other common practices, what's called the strappado. As viewers of "24" will know, it is how you hold terrorists captured on the field of battle, and -- when necessary -- it's what you do to anybody else at all who crosses you or who might have "information" that must be extracted.

It's also called Palestinian Hanging because it is what the Israelis do (or are said to do) to the Arab captives they hold, routinely. It was commonly used at Abu Ghraib and at the other prisons run by Americans in the Great and Global War On Terror, and -- not to play favorites here -- it is a commonly used "technique" by all of our many enemies as well.

It is torture, plain and simple, common as dirt, and quite likely as widespread now as it was at any previous era in history.

Also shown in the picture is the Famous Waterboard. Which -- according to reports -- was used hundreds of times on American captives in the Great and Global War On Terror; it is the same torture for which American service personnel were courtmartialed during the Vietnam War and during the Philippines Insurrection. Japanese prisoners were sentenced to death for doing it to American prisoners of war during WWII.

And yet, still, even now, Our Major Mass Media will not call it -- or anything else done by our various services and their contractors -- torture.

It's the most amazing thing.

This is how the New York Times refers to waterboarding captives hundreds of times:

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

And this infuriates me. The whole world calls it torture, not just "top Obama administration officials" (like the President himself, e.g.), but the New York Times, in its wisdom, will not call it torture, nor, apparenly, will any other mainstream mass media outlet.

Since the Torture Memos implicate all sorts of people, including an array of Busheviks, sitting judges, CIA operatives, contractors and mercenaries, medical and legal professionals, and on and on, could it be that the NYT's interconnections with all those interests, all of whom might suffer irreparable harm if the Times took to calling these "techniques" what they are -- ie: Torture -- prevents the Times from using the correct term for fear that people they know and people like them might wind up before a tribunal somewhere?

I don't know.

All I know is that the continued refusal of the major mass media in this country to call a thing "torture" -- unless it is being done by our many enemies (under those circumstances, they have no problem using the right terminology) helps keep Americans befuddled and confused and deeply ambivalent about what's been done and what is being done in their names.

Re: Teabaggery

(Picture lifted from FDL --  I think. But who can recall? So many things...)

Organized by FOX "News" and a couple of right wing think tanks, hundreds of thousands turned out on April 15 -- some in clever little 18th Century get ups -- to protest "taxes and spending" by hollering about immigrants and the price of tea and hurling their teabags hither and yon. 

It was the Feel Good uprising of the season, kicking off the Insurrection and Rebellion activities to come.

Or something.

Ten thousand protestors were expected locally; news reports had it that around 5,000 assembled -- still a throng, though hardly a mass movement. They were harangued by radio personalities and FOX "News" presenters, by Republican state representatives, and by anti-taxers from far and wide. I half expected them to come armed -- as they proudly did during the 2000 Election Recount Protests (yes, they were protesting counting the votes, harangued and whipped to a frenzy by many of the same radio personalities and teevee stars), where gun-waving and flag-waving seemed to get equal emphasis. But so far as I know, armaments were mostly kept at home, and the protesters seemed to be having more fun than trying to raise hell.

Of course they said that about the Boston Tea Party, too. So I wouldn't put too much stock in how much "fun" appeared to be under way.

The Left Blogosphere, of course, made a point of mocking and deriding the Teabaggers, and of course they made much of the endless double-entendre "teabagging" provides. The form of "teabagging" I'm familiar with -- a sort of frat-house hijink in which the balls of the teabagger are placed on the head of or in the mouth of a sleeping -- or passed-out-drunk -- brother as a gentle form of good spirited insult -- seemed almost the appropriate metaphor for the actions of the multitude on Teabagging Day, for it seemed they were out more for highjinks than not. These people are not used to taking to the streets, after all, so most of them don't know the correct protocols, don't have the right gravitas for serious marches and sign carrying and full-throated chants. It's not really in them.

The problem for me with the Left Blogistan mockery of all this was the fact that there is still little or no recognition within the higher reaches of the so-called "progressive" blogosphere that the middle and lower classes -- regardless of their political orientation -- are drowning in debt, and their condition and position is made exponentially worse by all the trillions of dollars pledged and paid to those who are already among the very richest in our land (and overseas). There is little or no recognition that in all the frenzy to bailout and stimulate coming from Washington, very little -- indeed, almost nothing -- is being directed toward relieving that enormous debt burden the masses are struggling under, and in fact, that burden is increasing with every bailout.

Part of what the Teabaggers are responding to is the fact that essentially all the money in the whole wide world is being handed over to those who already have more money than God, and people like the poor schmuck in his 18th Century Revolutionary get up have to pay for it. 

Nobody is taking the schmuck's side at all -- except FOX "News" and the various right wing interests that are always on the look out for opportunities and found one in the inchoate rage of the masses.

Masses and rage that the Left (so-called) has avoided like the plague. The Left that never misses and opportunity to miss an opportunity...

I could go on, but we have to get to the Torture Memos before the weekend is out, and -- OT -- there are home hospice care issues that have tended to keep me well away from my own bloggery more often than not. 

Strangely

Not every topic you're not interested in is a distraction from everything else.

Not everyone you disagree with is a narcissist or a sociopath.

Banks are not your friends.

The media is not your friend.

Just a reminder, as if one were needed.

Lenin

Is there a Lenin in our future? A demagogue and a firebrand who will harness the rage and outrage of the American People and ride it like a tiger into a New Dawn? A revolution as it were?

Hard to say, though there have been and still are plenty of candidates on the right who would dearly love to capture the revolutionary ferment for themselves and precipitate their longed-for crypto-Fascist dictatorship of wealth and privilege and be done, finally, with the impediments of law and the constitution and the Public Interest.

But Limbaugh, Gingrich and the like are getting old, and though they may enjoy their demagogery for its own sake, and Gingrich for his part loves to parse and prate and come up with slogans that are supposed to pass for policy prescriptions. Few are listening.

Hannity? Younger. Fiery-er. Or Beck's untamed emotional fury?

Well, there are plenty of candidates on the right, almost none on the left, what left there is in this country. The absence of a Left or any (real) Leftist firebrands in this country leaves a vacuum, and it is filled by corporatist/imperialists like... well... Our President, His Excellency Barack Obama. He fills that vacuum very well, it seems to me, but there is no doubt in my mind that he's got no interest in building a movement and leading a revolution. The idea is absurd. His whole purpose in office seems clear: to further a neo-liberal program of loot and pillage to further enhance the power and wealth of the already obscenely wealthy and powerful, with occasional scraps and bones thrown to the masses to keep them tame or at least quiet.

For now his program is working. Whether it can continue to, as the real economy continues to spiral into the toilet and more and more real people suffer, can't be foretold. Things are not nearly as bad as they most certainly can get.

But every one of us is aware as never before of the suffering all around us if we are not already in that state ourselves. There is little or no succor available to most of those who have fallen through the gaping voids in the American "safety net", and as more and more Americans fall into the Abyss, their outcries are heard more and more clearly.

Many of those who have lost their jobs are not going to be re-employed, ever. The industries or businesses they once worked in are gone and are not coming back. There are no jobs programs to put people back to work in part because there is no intention of re-employing many of those who are now "surplus labor". One of the caveats of Clinton's Welfare Reform efforts was a requirement that business and industry provide jobs for the millions who would no longer be receiving welfare. And the plutocracy stepped up (of course they had "incentives," but that's another issue.) Jobs were found for many people who had not been employable for much of their lives. It was the most amazing thing. Many of them stayed employed, even though they had never been considered stable workers before.

But now, many of these workers -- we might even expect most of them -- have been sloughed off, forced back out of the labor system, and more than likely most of them will never go back to work. But there are no welfare or other programs for them. Right now, many of them are winding up in the tent encampments that are springing up around nearly every major city in the country. "Hoovervilles" in modern dress. They are living on whatever charity communities can muster, but there is less and less of that as the need increases and the number of those who can contribute declines.

What happens in a few years when these encampments have grown with more and more "surplus" and dispossessed Americans, and nothing has been done to relieve their situation? Hardly anyone is even considering that.

But as the vaunted middle class continues to be devastated by the economic decline, more and more seemingly secure individuals and households will wind up in the camps, and what then? What happens when there is no work, no money, no more charity?

Do Americans just lie down and die?

In fact, Death is stalking the land even now, as the economic collapse forces governments and foundations and other institutions to cut back on or eliminate programs of medical aid to various populations, cutting them off from treatment, drugs and so on that have kept them alive, and they are dying. That's what happens.

Suicide and mass killing statistics aren't looking good. How much worse these factors can become before Americans are induced to do something about it is hard to gauge. Americans have been almost sublimely passive for many years now, no matter what happens, and though we wonder what might trigger them to action, nothing that has so far happened has spurred very many of them from their torpor. As a friend said, as long as they have their Big Screen TeeVees and their Take and Bake Pizza, they'll sit in their easy chairs and eat and be entertained and do nothing.

And that is just the way The Powers That Be like it.

But as more and more of them head to the tent-camps with their few pitiful possessions....?

Is there a Lenin on the horizon?

As the Russian Empire collapsed, there wasn't a Lenin -- not until he appeared, out of exile, seemingly out of nowhere, at the Finland Station in Petrograd and started haranguing the People. To act. To do something. To take control of their own future.

The rest, as they say, is History.

Too Late for Tumbrils?

I always had this notion of a Grand Parade of Tumbrils down Pennsylvania Avenue with all the hucksters and (neo)conmen who have been robbing and killing and raping with such utter impunity for years and years trussed up and hauled forth to their disposition on the steps of the Capitol.

But no.

We're still too polite for that.

It should be glaringly obvious by now that the Current Administration has no intention whatsoever of interfering in any way with the continued payment of extortion to the Masters of the Universe who order them around just as they ordered around the Busheviks in the Previous Regime.

It should be further obvious by now that the Current Administration has no intention of doing much of anything to provide more than minimal (and hard-to-get) aid and succor to the millions of proles who are down on their luck and out on their asses right now, nor for the millions more yet to be surplussed.

And the People continue to take it.

It may well be too late for tumbrils or any effective Peoples' Action against the looters and murderers who control this country with an iron grip.

Who could have imagined...?

Another New Mexico Story

"Salt of the Earth" (1954)

It's still one of the most inspirational Labor movies of any era, and it really puts to shame the languid indifference and/or passive argumentation that passes for "opposition" today.

That it is set in New Mexico, based on a real strike at a real mine in 1951, is a bonus. The movie deals with racial, ethnic and gender discrimination quite openly and productively; labor exploitation of course is central. But what moves people still is the fact that the strikers take charge of their own fate, they are prepared to suffer, be gassed, jailed, starved out, run over by rogue cops, etc. in order to achieve their objectives -- which they do -- and they are supported by hundreds of thousands of workers all over the country and the world.

Of course the picture was made by blacklisted Hollywood types who ran afoul of the Red-baiting of the post WWII era. But their work stands tall, today as yesterday, and it should be seen now as a reminder -- as a forceful reminder -- of just what "struggle" means.



Also available in a somewhat better version at Internet Archive.



"The People, united, will never be divided..."

Here in New Mexico, otra vez

About Albuquerque.

The Marrakesh, the Timbuktu of America, The City at the End of the World.

V. B. Price speaks of the Albuquerque he found in 1958, and speaks of the freedom, the liberation he felt crossing the Arizona/New Mexico state line on Route 66 (through one of the most baroque clefts in the mesas you could ask for, but he doesn't mention that) and I know just what he means. I feel the same liberation feeling every time I drive through that cleft. My heart soars. A big grin plastered on my face. "Home."

KNME has lots of online videos at its site. Worth spending some time exploring.

Here in New Mexico...

Well, not exactly. I'm back in California now.

I was intending to post while I was away in New Mexico last week, but discovered an internet connection was impossible to maintain for more than a few minutes at a time and my laptop was giving me headaches with frozen/nonfunctioning browsers. Rather than rassle with it and try to make it work, I let things stew for the duration, didn't even get off more than an email or two, and busied myself with chores and other business neglected since I was there in August of last year.

There was plenty to do, as there always is at that old adobe ranch house we picked up "cheap" in 2005. It needs fairly constant maintenance and attention which it doesn't get when I'm as tied up with other things (like hospice care at home), so coming back to it after so many months away made for many discoveries and a lengthening lists of items to take care of.

Starting with the landscaping. This was something that got put on hold when the nice lady we'd engaged to do the preliminaries, planning, cleanup and whatnot flaked on us and disappeared. I'm not all that surprised, actually. It was a challenge, to say the least, and I know she was frustrated at many turns as she tried to get helpers from Albuquerque and the local area to work on the trees, prepare plantings, lay out paths, get some gravel in and so on. But then, she kept saying she was hauling the cuttings and whatnot out to Bernalillo County's landfill in Tijeras, and she had to pay every time, and I thought that was kind of crazy because it was over 30 miles, and as far as I knew there was a recycle site not more than a mile away from our place where they took everything, including garden debris and cuttings, and they didn't charge. I told her about it, and she just seemed flummoxed, and continued hauling to Bernalillo. Yikes. After she got the high grass cut down and most of the trash taken away, she was gone. Left no plans, nothing, and we got a bill for all that hauling in addition to what we'd paid for the cleanup and the plans.

I understand from neighbors, however, that there is a man in the neighborhood who is interested in picking up where she left off. I've talked to him briefly, and when I have more time -- which I didn't have during this trip due to other priorities -- we'll get together and figure out what to do.

Well, let's hope anyway.

One of my priorities while I was there was taking care of some wiring issues, and to do that, I needed some wire nuts, a handful, you know, this sort:



common as the day, and you'd expect available most anywhere.

Only you'd be wrong. There's an Alco store -- something like a Woolworth's -- that has a modest hardware section, a few miles away in town and there was not a wire nut to be found. There were other sorts of connectors, but not what I needed or wanted, so I thought I'd go to the Ace Hardware and feed store a few miles away in the other direction. They always had what you needed though it might take some time to find it.

Closed. Shut down. Out of business. Oh.

Well, there were other Ace Hardware stores in other towns nearby; there was even a dreaded Wal-Mart no more than ten miles away, and surely they would have wire nuts, right?

Wrong.

Checked the Wal-Mart first; no wire nuts. The first time I went there a few months after it opened, for a shovel, they didn't have any pointed blade shovels, either. What exactly is the point of Wal-Mart?

The Ace Hardware that had been at the crossroads? Gone. Not even a sign that it had ever been there. Next town over, same thing. No hardware store.

So what I eventually wound up doing was going all the way to the Lowe's on Juan Tabo in Albuquerque, on a crazy expedition for a handful of wire nuts. At least I knew they would have them, right?

Well, as I sought them out, I almost thought they didn't, every other kind of electrical connector imaginable, but not common wire nuts, at least not until the very end of the aisle, where finally I found them. Whew. Mission accomplished.

Of course by that time, I almost forgot what I needed them for.

But boy, it got me to thinking. Thoughts that had been in the back of my mind for some time, the sort of "What If" thoughts that nobody really wants to contemplate:

"What if things you take for granted are no longer available or easy and convenient to get? What do you do?" In New Mexico, this is a reality that people have been dealing with for centuries, so people who are adapted to the way things have long been in rural New Mexico rarely let the absence of something bother them too much.

They make do, find substitutes, or they do without. It's a way of life.

For a city boy like me it takes some getting used to, and sometimes I'm better at it than others.

An expedition like I did, for wire nuts, was silly, at bottom, and I knew it at the time, but I wanted to see what was happening to some of what we do take for granted as the economic collapse ripples through the country and what kind of impact it's having on rural areas in NM especially.

Locally, the impact was more pronounced than I at first thought. Not only was the Ace Hardware and Feed Store gone, but lots of businesses had closed -- well, "lots" in a comparative sense, not being so many to begin with. The losses left swaths of vacant business properties along the main road, some sporting For Lease signs, but some just boarded up or even abandoned altogether. Restaurants had closed -- I counted three that were no longer in operation, though one that had been marginal at best last year was apparently thriving now. Even the Flea Market appeared to be shut down, though I wasn't sure and didn't ask anyone.

The real estate market had essentially collapsed. Nothing was being bought or sold, only one property transferred in the last six months.

The grocery store was well stocked, and the in-store hot food and deli section was mobbed at lunch time, which I thought was a positive sign.

One gas station had closed and was completely gone -- as if there had never been one there at all. Others had changed hands, doing what looked like a kind of musical chairs -- the Chevron station had become a Conoco, the Phillips 66 had become a no-name discount station, Texaco at the truck stop had been replaced by Shell, etc.

I even found a new hardware store in town, next to the surviving rib joint, in what had been a small vacant building last year, so my expedition wasn't really necessary, but if I hadn't done it, would I have discovered what I did?

Some of my neighbors were doing very well on a comparative prosperity scale while others were having a very tough time of it indeed. A number of residences round about had been abandoned or were vacant, while one had burned due to arson, the culprit caught, tried and sentenced already. I realized our house had been in that same abandoned situation for years before we bought it, and it's now occupied only a few weeks a year, and the outside still looks pretty shabby because nobody's around to do the landscaping -- among other things. Thank goodness for neighbors who look out for us. There was a tagging incident last year, "4:20" (for which we're assuming the more benign interpretation), but it hasn't been repeated.

Wasn't able to do a complete assessment, but it appears the local population has dropped by some dozens, from a high of only 1,500 or so anyway.

And the future?

Remains to be seen, but we can say with some certainty that much of what we are counting on just won't be there, many of our assumptions will be challenged, and our expectations won't be met.

How we cope is the question.

The Plan

(Image from Despair, Inc., where you need to go to consider your ultimate Demotivator­® and then end your sorry existence on our overburdened planet and be done with it.)

So far as we can tell, the Recovery Plan now going forward in the United States does not intend to provide significant debt relief for households. Instead, the Plan will be focused on rescue for the banks and Wall Street, in what looks like a never-ending stream of multi-trillion-dollar bailouts that primarily benefit those individuals and interests that got us into this mess and appear to fully intend to keep us there indefinitely.

We, The People, are to be allowed to focus our attentions on getting out from under the debt burden imposed upon us (as well as that we have taken on ourselves) by cutting back on spending and devoting more of our income to debt service. Those who can't do it due to the contracting economy -- because of job loss or other conditions -- are to be permitted limited opportunities for debt restructuring, sometimes debt discharge, in bankruptcy.

Otherwise, it's pay till you drop. Whatever your creditors demand. And be quick about it.

The economy is tailspinning downwards because there is so little household spending, and so the Government is set to pick up the slack, or at least some of it, to keep the economy from complete collapse.

Government spending on programs and services is to increase substantially -- including aid to the states and to localities for various social services and to help them cover budget deficits due to declining local and state tax revenues -- and a sort of semi-public works infrastructure planning and construction effort is to get under way that is intended to put some of the unemployed (primarily heavy construction workers) back to work beginning sometime this year and continuing for many years to come.

So far as I can tell, there seems to be an effort afoot to restructure the workforce, essentially making some segments of the workforce "redundant", as they used to say in Britain, and potentially unemployable going forward. In other words, a lot of those who have lost their jobs and will lose their jobs in the current economic situation will not return to the workforce, by design.

This is in some ways a return to the way things used to be, pre-Reaganism and especially pre-Clinton Welfare Reform. The problem is that many of the social services and much of the public acceptance of a large body of "unemployables" no longer exist to handle the millions who are being thrust into this condition. Millions have lost their jobs, millions more will lose them. Millions of people have lost their homes, millions more will lose them. And many will not get jobs or homes back any time soon. And, at least for the time being, there will be few or no social services to assist the bulk of them.

By design. By intent.

I'd call this state of affairs Social Darwinism, social engineering on a grand scale, but when the People have essentially no opportunity to contest the situation, and no skills to do it with if the opportunities were there, it's more like an Imperial conquest of yore -- without the bloodshed. Yet.

So we can start imagining what the future holds, just what it is Our Rulers have in mind over the long term, and we can start thinking about what sort of society we want to emerge from the current crisis.

One of the aspects of the Reagan/Bush years that was so startling to me was the absence of any sort of Future Vision, especially during the Bush 2 Regime. That period is marked by a complete disregard for, indeed disdain for, The Future, as if it not only didn't matter, it wasn't going to happen. Period.

Now we're slowly shifting back to a Future Vision perspective that will allow us to imagine what will be and what ought to be even as we pick through the rubble of What Is.

All I'd say right now is that it is very unwise to leave envisioning the Future entirely to the Ruling Class. They've made such a cock-up of the Present, perhaps someone else -- We, the People, for example -- ought to take the lead in this endeavor.

Fiscal Responsibility

So they got together at the White House yesterday to go over the concept of Fiscal Responsibility and Entitlement Reform. Everyone had a grand time and Republicans got to bloviate the way they do about how Democrats are Spending Our Children's Future!!!, which is always good for a teevee soundbite or two.

Digby and Jane have been keening and rending their garments about how this whole thing is all about cutting Social Security, which doesn't have any kind of fiscal problem for decades, if then, while the Boy's Club, including Josh Marshall who did yeoman work to prevent the Bush Regime from fucking with Social Security, have either been silent or have been telling the Girls to pipe down, nothing is going to happen to Social Security. It's about reforming Medicare and Medicaid.

Only Helen Thomas broke the silence in the White House Press Room when she said, "Why are you messing with Social Security now?" And Gibbs, the White House spokesman, was tongue tied. Could not even issue a denial-denial.

We are so screwed, as they say.

See the chart up top? It's been making the rounds for some time now, and it shows how after World War Two, the Big One, wages and productivity tracked one another pretty well until about 1978. It was during that period that the Great American Middle Class was established on the premise that workers who were paid enough to make a decent living would in turn boost economic well-being for all. And so it was.

Then around 1978, wages and productivity diverged sharply, the gains from increasing productivity suddenly no longer reflected in paychecks. You will note that the wages graph is essentially flat after about 1978, with some periods of decline, especially during the Reagan/Bush years, while productivity gains continue to rise.

American workers were not being rewarded at all for their productivity increases, yet productivity continued to rise. This would ordinarily indicate that Americans were facing a reduction in their standard of living, but in fact, that isn't what happened, at least for most households. Instead, they mostly maintained their standard of living or even improved it during this time of flat or declining real wages.

They did so by putting more and more people into the workforce. The two income household is now standard, whereas during the Post-War period it was a rarity. One income, during the period that wages and productivity gains were tracking fairly well, was generally sufficient for a household's decent standard of living.

It's almost impossible now.

And now that we are deep into an economic recession that looks fair to become a global depression, two income households are becoming less and less feasible as employers shed workers by the millions.

Maintaining a decent standard of working- and middle-class living is becoming more and more difficult.

And yet the rich are still swimming in more money than they know what to do with.

It happened because all the economic benefit of the productivity gains of the last 30 years have gone to the upper 2% or 3% of the wealthy. Everyone else has been taking it in the shorts. Or going very deeply into debt (a problem I have addressed in other posts.)

Most have never grumbled, never complained, but now that it's becoming harder and harder for workers to find work of any kind, and it is more and more difficult for workers to maintain -- let alone improve -- their standard of living in any way, grumbling is starting.

And the Rich, for their part, see a Disaster Capitalist way to improve their own economic standing at the expense of everyone else, how drôle, by stealing Social Security funds outright, and by restricting or reducing access to entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. In Crisis there is Opportunity.

The fact that workers allowed the situation to deteriorate this far is telling. The union movement ground to a halt and reversed course, workers didn't demand better pay for increased productivity, and too many became content to use debt to finance what their incomes didn't allow them to pay for right away. So long as the illusion could be maintained that they weren't really being robbed, workers were happy enough most of the time.

But now that the veils are falling away, workers are feeling put upon. The fact that reductions to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are On The Table for discussion and potential action, while there is no talk at all of redressing the historical imbalance of wages vs productivity gains is illuminating.

There is an active generational theft going on, but it is not theft by the boomers from their offspring, far from it. It is theft by the rich from the present and from the future of everyone and for many generations to come.

Rather than discussing cutting Social Security and other benefits at a time like this, the discussion should be focused on increasing benefits substantially, doubling SS payments for example, and extending Medicare-type coverage to everyone.

This would start the process of recovering the productivity gains that have been stolen from workers during the last 30 years.

The economy would not necessarily "recover" -- which is to say, go into another unsustainable bubble phase -- but would start to settle down and stabilize. There would still be a problem of excess workers which could be partially addressed by lowering the retirement age to 55, and increasing wages for workers.

Two things are called for: confiscatory taxation for the rich, significantly increased wages and benefits for workers.

And an end to boom-and-bust bubble economies.

Americans would be consciously reducing the workforce to reflect and respond to a changed economic reality; they would be ensuring that the generational theft of productivity gains we see reflected in the chart above was recompensed by increasing Social Security payments and extending basic medical care benefits to all Americans. They would ensure economic stability over the long term by increasing wages immediately and maintaining wage levels in the future that track with overall productivity gains.

Bovine Indifference

After a while, it all becomes completely surreal.

I think it is fair to say that the economic situation is perilous for millions of Americans and becoming so for millions more by the day. Our Betters are very busy looting whatever remains of the treasury before the final crash. They are doing it with the active connivance and contrivance of the Congress of the United States of America, an institution which long ago lost any viable connection with the People of the nation. It serves its own interests first, the interests of the Plutocrats and Oligarchs second, the Presidency third. The People? Not at all. Well, except to fool them and pretend to be their friends.

And for the People's part?

Bovine indifference.

Except for the little sparks of faux populism, like the foolish ranting of CNBC's boy on the trading floor, Rick Santelli. Oh, that gets plenty of play, all over the cablenets, broadcast teevee, the hate radio dial, and the blogosphere both left and right, because this is the ONLY form of "populism" anyone will be allowed to see or express.

You have to hate the Middle and Lower-Class Losers, even if you know you're being robbed by the Plutocrats.

It's a brilliant ploy and it is working.

Maybe bovine indifference to it all, and airy surrealism to boot, is the right answer to the chaos forming all around us.

Dali, anyone?

Next up on the NeoLiberal chopping block

Social Security and Medicare, of course.

There is an Entitlement Reform confab hosted by the White House on February 23, featuring such long time friends of Social Security as Jim Cooper, Judd Gregg, Kent Conrad, and so forth, to be spearheaded by Peter Orszag, OMB Director, whose plan for SS has long been to cut benefits and raise retirement ages.

No doubt the privatizers will re-emerge from their long hibernation (at least since George Bush's failed effort at privatization in 2005), and once again, Josh Marshall will lead the charge to "Leave Social Security Alone!" Right? Right?

This "Reform" confab has been on the agenda for quite some time, and yet, oddly, Josh has been almost completely silent on the issue. Quite the contrast to his constant drumbeat against the Bush Privatizers. Digby and Jane have been the clearest and loudest -- and most suspicious -- voices in the Blogosphere regarding the Obama campaign for "reforming" entitlements.

But the NeoLiberal plan pretty much requires the gutting of Social Security, the elimination of Medicare. It's all part of the package of Restructuring.

The bovine indifference to what is going on -- despite all the people running around with their hair on fire -- is truly astonishing...

More to come.

So the Big Guys are finally figuring out

that there's a Big Problem at the American Household level. (h/t to bystander at Greenwald's Place).



Reference material:

Krugman's NYT clolumn "Decade at Bernie's"

"Tracking the Household Balance Sheet" at the Baseline Scenario

Bill Moyers' disscussion with Simon Johnson

[It's really impossible to overstate the blind indifference and the gross incompetence of what passes for most of our Economic haute monde.]


Throughout this economic meltdown, it has been astonishing to me how utterly and completely -- and apparently deliberately -- ignorant economists and economic policy makers and general commentary about the economy in the blogosphere has been about the growing plight of American households.

That plight is easy enough to quantify, and it's been in plain view to anyone who would deign to look for years: household income has been flat or declining, household savings has been zero or negative, household debt has exploded -- based largely on phantom assets in real estate and pensions.

Real estate foreclosures have been a leading indicator of the household debt problem for years. And years.

And nothing is done about it. Nothing (much) is in the works.

Yet trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars are being paid or pledged to bail out the banks, and now hundreds of billions are pledged to be paid directly to corporate contractors as part of the "stimulus."

It is alleged that $50 billion is being set aside to deal with the foreclosure problem, but we've heard similar allegations over and over and over again throughout the tumult, and ultimately nothing is done on behalf of homeowners facing foreclosure, except that many of them get fleeced yet again. So people have a right not to believe any promise they hear now that "help is on the way." More than likely it isn't and it won't be.

And yet, as some are coming to realize -- too late, oh well, ha ha -- had there been help at the household level when the crisis first emerged, many of the titanic global issues (not all of them by any means) that we're facing now would have been mitigated or eliminated.

Of course Americans have to reduce spending, and they have done that smartly and substantially. Lack of household spending will continue for so long as households are crushed under a massive debt burden with no increase in income and no debt relief in sight.

That's where we have been stuck for (seemingly) years.

What to do about it? Easy:

increase household income substantially ($7.50 a week won't do it), and/or

relieve household debt.

Neither of which is in the cards in our lifetimes.

Or so the graybeards insist. And why is that?

Is there a serious economist in the building who can explain why household incomes cannot rise substantially (say so that they can make up, even partially, for the productivity gains of the last 30 years?) and why household debt cannot be substantially relieved (say on a scale equivalent to the gambling debt relief being applied to the banks and Wall Street?)

Most economists won't even deal with the question at all let alone provide an answer. The notion of doing something to ease economic distress at the household level doesn't even occur to them, so they have no answers, cannot rationally contemplate the issue.

It is too foreign to them.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is largely due to the Triumph of Milton Friedmanism and Neoliberalism -- which, in circular fashion, has brought us to this crisis.

And that is why conditions will continue to deteriorate for the middle and working classes, and why the economic predators will continue to be fed and funded and treated like Royalty.

Well, they are. Aren't they?

Neo

photo by Brett Kaffee for MRzine, 2005

During the Bush regime, we were under constant assault by the NeoCons whose world-view and principal interest was frankly imperialist, corporatist, and warmongering. The United States was attacked by shadowy forces, whether domestic or foreign (ie: the Anthrax Attack was almost certainly domestic, and from within the government itself, no less; the whole question of what really happened on 9/11 is so filled with murk and mystery, we'll probably never know, any more than we "know" the full story behind the assassination of President Kennedy.) The United States thence entered into an overt imperialist phase, which strangely and strongly resembled the nation's late 19th Century imperialist adventure, including mindless torture and slaughter of Natives, mass detention camps, and the overthrow by force of foreign governments.

Corporations thrived as never before; the stock market soared, no-bid contracts to service the various wars ensured favored companies enormous profits, and pallets of $100 bills were flown around and handed out with abandon, the fabled "Money for Nothing."

Back home, American households seemed to do relatively well, though not quite as well as during the Clinton Era, but much of the seeming prosperity at home was driven by two things: immense government deficit spending on war and security, and an almost unprecedented housing bubble that enabled millions of people to either purchase homes (that subsequently they found out couldn't be paid for), or to take out equity that had built up in their homes as prices rose to help them afford to maintain a "decent" lifestyle.

Interest rates were low, unemployment was relatively low, wages were pretty much static, inflation stayed low (except for a number of energy price spikes that foretold what was to come), taxes were cut again and again, the defict ballooned, the wars were far away and plasma teevees kept the masses entertained and passive.

Economic trouble was on the horizon. Many observers in and out of the dismal profession of economics issued dire warnings, but few were listening, and even those that did listen were trying to cash in before the crash.

And now the crash has come.

We're in the opening scene of what looks to be a very long play. Where's Eugene O'Neill when you need him?

Neocons managed to get us into imperialist wars, and for all practical purposes, they succeeded in changing our form of government to an Autocracy with dependent though ostensibly co-equal legislative and judicial branches.

Now that we're well into the crash, however, the Neoliberals are on the rise, and just as the Neocons got away with murder, so will the Neoliberals attempt to.

And so far, they're doing just fine.

Rather than having me go into a long dissertation on the Neoliberal transformation of the United States, I'll let some others explain it better than I can.

The picture above is from a 2005 article that describes how the defeat of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua enabled the imposition of Neoliberal economic "restructuring" which led to the delightful scene above. It's well worth reading to brush up on Neoliberal practices in the Americas that caused so much disress and fostered so much evil in the name of "freedom," until the People had had enough and mostly threw off the shackles of privatization and reclaimed the social good.

To follow on, watch or listen to this Democracy Now! segment from Friday, February 13, 2009, featuring Robert Kuttner and Michael Hudson discussing how the United States' "financial recovery" really depends on the institution of Neoliberal economics, and how at root, it is all completely fraudulent.

And then, take some time -- quite a bit of time -- and digest this long article by Michael Hudson in Counterpunch, from February 12, 2009, that very clearly describes how we got here, who many of the players were, what is planned for "recovery," and what will really be necessary to revive and stablize the economy.

We're in a fine pickle.

All this high stepping and baton twirling....

...for what?

Public enthusiasm continues to be constrained for this Stimulus Bill. In fact consumer confidence has plumeted. And people expect the Depression to last at least five more years.

Why?

Could it be that this Stimulus simply doesn't acknowledge the dire straits so many households are facing. All it provides is (perhaps) $15 a week this year and $7.50 a week next year to workers who can't qualify for the AMT "fix".

But AMT "fix" beneficiaries will receive anywhere from $500 to $5,000 (in addition to the $400 in payroll witholding reduction); first time homebuyers, $8,000; $2,500 tax credit for college tuition and expenses.

The Earned Income Tax Credit will be increased $600 in 2010.

There is no incentive, at all, for working class people to spend significantly; in fact, given the way this stimulus is set up, all the incentive is concentrated at the high end, primarily in corporate board rooms, secondarily in the households of the upper-middle class. The working class, if they are smart, will hold on to every dime they can get their hands on for absolutely as long as they can.

Combine that with the bailout of the Financiers, to the tune of several trillion dollars, mostly to pay off their gambling losses, and we have a perfect storm of -- continued decline, right into Depression.

How is it that the Stimulus Managers completely missed the plight of the working class and the lower middle class? How could they be so blind?

Much cleverer people than me point out that they didn't miss anything. They don't want to give any kind of spending support to the working class right now, they don't want average household spending to pick up for the most part, because it would be inflationary.

Furthermore, macroeconomists insist that substantial payments to households do not spur spending; instead, such households typically pay down debt or squirrel the money away in savings. The brainiacs use the experience of last year's stimulus payments as examples.

Only their example is flawed. At least in my own household, I can tell you exactly what happened to the $1,500 we got in stimulus funds.

$300 went to pay debt (primarily incurred to cover previous house and car emergencies -- some of which were documented on this blog.)

$1,200 (and quite a bit more) went to pay increased expenses, including doubled cost of gasoline, higher insurance premiums, and 30% - 50% higher food costs.

In other words, there was inflation last year, substantial inflation of gasoline and food prices -- basics for most households -- and people had to pay the higher prices, they had no choice. As it happens, they had some money to do it with.

Nothing was added to savings in our household; more than $3,000 net was taken from savings last year to pay higher expenses, despite our efforts to economise, and we've still got a substantial debt load -- though not as high as many people's because we have always lived rather frugally.

Yet macroeconomists will insist -- no matter what -- that the $15 a week per worker starting in July will have the greatest simulative effect of any of the other tax breaks in the stimulus bill because workers will spend the money immediately without thinking.

The unemployment insurance extensions, the food stamp supplements, the welfare supplements, the state stablilization funding, the educational funding, and some of the other direct program support in the stimulus will all help individuals -- as they fall through the holes in the shredded safety net -- and that's a good thing for those who have the opportunity to make use of those things.

The spending and infrastructure programs in the stimulus will help the economy keep going at a reduced but potentially sustainable level (cf: Japan) for some time, barring the unforseen (Israel attacks Iran, an asteroid collides with Colorado, etc.)

But there will be nothing substantive to encourage spending by households, at least not any time soon, so as to at least try to curb the inflationary pressure increased spending would have at this time. Also, nothing substantive will be done to relieve household debt loads, at least not in the near term.

And many more trillions are still going to be paid to the banks and the Wall Street swindlers.

So despite all the high stepping and baton twirling by the administration and the Congress over the Wonderful Stimulus they've managed to craft and pass, the People are not buying it.

Most of them won't see or feel any benefit.

Nothing to cheer about.

$10 $7.50 a Week!

Well.

Geithner's "Plan" to give more trillions of dollars to the banks and Wall Street to pay off their gambling losses is a real dud, apparently. It is a Big Rock Candy Mountain for the economic predators who have been effortlessly feeding on the passive American People, but it comes with some strings, including "transparency," and -- as we know -- the Masters of the Universe cannot stand exposure of any kind.

The markets tanked.

The reviews were one big Raspberry.

Meanwhile, you and I will be privileged to accept the $10 $7.50 a week in payroll tax withholding reduction as our share of the Recovery. If we can keep a job, that is. And assuming the reduction remains in the Congressional bill once the conference committee gets through cutting out more pork and nonsense.

"Entitlement Reform" is next on the chopping block, meaning that the Social Security and Medicare problems will be dealt with, no doubt through some form of privatization and benefits cuts and restrictions that will help ensure the continued impoverishment of the masses for the benefit of the rich and the well-connected.

The wonder of all of this Neo-Liberal economic restructuring that's proceeding apace is that the American People are so passive, whereas peoples all around the world are rising in anger, bringing down governments, forcing the Masters of the Universe -- so intent on further looting and pillaging -- to back off.

Even if it is only temporary, it is something. Naomi details some of the turmoil below.

But in the United States, it's become almost unheard of to take action of any kind against the predators who believe they have a Constitutional and God Given right to plunder at will.

The Geithner "plan" will ensure these people have endless plunder so long as the nation endures, and the Obama "Recovery plan" will ensure that favored corporate and financial interests will have guaranteed profits for the forseeable future.

Some people will be put back to work or will stay on their jobs to be sure, but many more will not. There simply will not be enough work for so many people to do. Wages will likely decline further, yet consumer level prices may continue to increase, even though producer prices may fall more than they already have. One of the ironies of this situation that is barely noticed by the economic brain trust that's operating the levers of the Machine is that despite all the falling wages, falling demand, and falling producer prices, the cost of living -- consumer prices -- which started up in earnest last year, continues to rise. So the average household is getting squeezed from both ends: falling income, higher costs.

The fallout is terrible and is spreading. In my own neighborhood, numerous small businesses have closed, and a whole slew of car dealers are simply gone. For Lease signs are everywhere, and finding retail and office tenants is almost impossible.

Unlike many areas around here, the foreclosure crisis hasn't severely impacted housing in this neighborhood. Most of the impact here happened a year or more ago, when a few houses went to foreclosure and auction, but everything else stayed relatively stable. Home prices in this neighborhood have actually increased slightly despite the downturn, but that all may change suddenly if the State of California continues its spiral into insolvency, which looks to be certain given the intransigence of the Republican caucus in the Legislature.

It may be a financial tightrope for those who have homes, but the number and the presence of homeless is growing substantially. Little encampments are springing up everywhere there's any shelter from the weather, and there are far more ragged people trudging the streets. Services are being cut back everywhere, despite the charitable inclinations of so many people who still have money and time to give.

The city and county are laying off people; the State has instituted unpaid furloughs two days a month and will send out layoff notices to 20,000 or more workers starting next week -- assuming there still is no budget.

The State budget is expected to be cut in all sorts of areas -- if there ever is a resolution to the impasse in the Legislature -- and one of the most prominent areas of cuts is expected to be in In Home Support Services, a program that provides needed services to the elderly and disabled throughout the State at relatively small cost to the State and localities. Workers are paid between $8 and $12 an hour, depending on locality, to take care of people who can't take care of themselves in their own homes rather than in institutional care. It costs something like $10,000 a year or so on average to provide In Home Support Services to elderly and disabled residents in their homes, whereas institutional care costs $55,000 a year per patient or more.

But for some reason, the Governor and members of the Legislature -- and the media -- have glommed on to this program as a money drain that must be plugged. They want to cut the hourly rate of pay, further restrict the number of hours workers can be paid for, and they want to make qualifications much stricter for individuals who use the program.

It's part and parcel of the Neo-Liberal Restructuring, no doubt. The old and the incontinent are simply a drain on everyone else. If they can't carry their own weight or pay their own freight let's let nature take its course.

Still, as more and more individuals and households are pushed out into the cold, I'll bet the People will not rise.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the Reagan Revolution and its aftermath is that the People of the United States, once feisty and obstreperous, became pacified, to the extent that even when they took the streets in great numbers -- as they did in 2002 and 2003 to protest the coming Iraq War -- they did so with extraordinary courtesy so as not to disrupt the comfort and convenience of their rulers.

Practically no other people on Earth are as passive as Americans today.

But why should they get upset? $10 $7.50 a week adds up, you know. And that Big Rock Candy Mountain could be just around the corner.

Oh Moon of Alabama

What Naomi said:

Its message was simple enough. You--politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit--are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We--the rabble outside--are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model--this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

...Here in Canada, politics is markedly less YouTube-friendly--but it has still been surprisingly eventful. In October the Conservative Party won national elections on an unambitious platform. Six weeks later, our Tory prime minister found his inner ideologue, presenting a budget bill that stripped public sector workers of the right to strike, canceled public funding for political parties and contained no economic stimulus. Opposition parties responded by forming a historic coalition that was only prevented from taking power by an abrupt suspension of Parliament. The Tories have just come back with a revised budget: the pet right-wing policies have disappeared, and it is packed with economic stimulus.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

Greenwald suggests on Bill Moyers' program that "disruptive" tactics might be necessary in the face of the burgeoning economic crisis.

And I put up a video of a Kurt Weill classic, "Alabama Song", to get us into the mood...

Show us the way to the next whiskey bar.
Oh don't ask why...

Clunk

The Susan Collins Plutocrats' and Kleptocrats Rescue and Relief Bill of 2009 is wending its way through the Senate with passage expected by Tuesday. Conference committee with the House is already meeting, so it is expected to be approved by the House with only minor tweaks the same day or by Wednesday, then go to the White House for the President's signature with much fanfare, bi-partisan comity, and everybody will pat themselves on the back for a Job Well Done and go on Holiday.

And of course, this bill won't solve the economic crisis. But we're told it is better than nothing, a first step only, and we should get behind it.

More and more citizens are saying, "No."

As I've explained many times, the problem is very simple: the economic crisis is largely the result of the collapse of household spending that is due to households' crushing debt burden, flat or declining household income, job insecurity and/or job loss, and for many people, housing insecurity. Households can't and won't spend on non-essentials under the circumstances even if they have disposable income, which fewer and fewer do.

The first step in fixing this problem is to "rescue" household finances. I have proposed it be done through a substantial direct payment -- a minimum of five figures, six figures would be better -- to every household to be used for specific purposes, including paying down debt, purchasing fuel efficient vehicles, weatherizing and improving energy efficiency of homes, etc. Any amount not spent for these purposes in six months reverts to the government for recommitment.

Macroeconomists insist that paying down household debt doesn't serve any useful -- ie: stimulative -- economic purpose, and they would be right if only small amouts are ever made available to households for that purpose. I'm proposing a large amount be made available per household, enough, hopefully, to clear most if not all debt households currently struggle under. Assuming these households still have income (not an easy assumption in times like these), clearing all or most of their household debt would then free up hundreds or in many cases thousands of dollars a month now spent on debt service to be used to purchase goods and services that these households cannot purchase now due to their debt burden and other matters.

If individual household spending increases by hundreds or thousands of dollars per month quickly, the overall benefit to the economy would be massive and immediate. The plunge we're experiencing right now would halt and quite possibly would begin to reverse. Relieving household debt starts the process of recovery. It isn't the recovery itself, nor is it the entirety of what needs to be done.

The objection that increasing household spending power quickly is inflationary has some merit. Last year, for example, households received varying amounts of stimulus payments, from $300 to $2000 or so, and during the period these payments were being distributed, commodity prices, food prices, and particularly gasoline prices went up by substantial amounts. For many people, these higher prices for food and fuel, generally considered necessities, consumed the entire stimulus payment and then some. Yet despite those facts, economists insist that most people actually used their stimulus amount to pay down debt or squirreled it away in savings. Maybe when those checks came, that's what they did with them, but they were spending an equivalent amount or more to cover the higher costs of food and fuel. In other words, inflation was eating up all the stimulus payments and more.

And there is certainly a risk that providing much larger additional payments to households will be even more inflationary.

But we're in a deflationary spiral right now, and from a Keynesian point of view, that's much worse, both short term and long term. Inflation can often be controlled. Deflation is another matter.

Ironically, deflation has not reached the household level, where many prices for goods and services are still rising. Yet household income is declining, and household spending has collapsed.

Susan Collins' Plutocrat and Kleptocrat rescue bill will cut taxes for people on top of the economic pyramid (again!) but will do almost nothing for the masses in the short term, and it will provide only the potential for improving the lot of the masses in the long term through reemployment on some of the infrastructure projects that will be funded, or through derivative reemployment. What it ensures is that certain reliably Republican sectors of the economy (ie: the rich, big business, heavy construction, nuclear power, coal, etc.) receive substantial tax cuts, contracts and subsidies in both the short and the long term, while the People are allowed to Hope things will get better for them... eventually.

The most economically disastrous features of Mrs. Collins scrub bill are the removal or sharp reduction of funding for education and supplementing budgets of states and localities, which, if not corrected immediately, will cause additional millions to be thrown out of work and cause many educational, social service and medical programs operated at the state and local levels to shut down.

I assume Mrs. Collins knows these are the immediate disastrous consequences of the removal or reduction of state and local educational and budget supplement funding, and I assume those are the consequences Mrs. Collins wants. But lets not just blame Mrs. Collins. The White House had a hand in this revision, too, and it is said that Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President, personally rewrote the bill to remove or substantially reduce state and local budget supplement funding. Thanks Mr. President!

That being so, the bill that will emerge next week, hailed as a Bi-Partisan Rescue and Recovery bill, will actually be an economic restructuring plan, a Shock Doctrine project, intended to shift as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible from the masses to the Plutocrats and the Kleptocrats while doing as little as possible to relieve the suffering of the masses, and in many cases actually deliberately increasing that suffering on the theory that doing so will make them even more domesticated and compliant.

When people realize what's really going on here, the anger that is seething under the surface may well explode. Our rulers believe that there is nothing the People will ever do, nothing they can do, to overcome the Powers That Be, and so far, they've had no reason to think otherwise. But as the economic pressure grows on the masses, the ruling class could be in for a real surprise.

What's so very disheartening about all of this is that the Obama administration and the President himself, have so badly bungled leadership, and they have shown themselves to be fully and completely in the tank for the interests of Plutocrats and Kleptocrats. To some people, that's not a surprise. To many others, it's devastating.

This is not the Change we can believe in.

Oh Fiddle De Dee

It's sad.

The so-called stimulus plan has stalled in the Senate where, as we speak, Susan Collins is leading a crack bi-partisan team of Senators to "scrub" the bill of all "unnecessary" spending, pork, and frivolity.

Meanwhile, public support for it has collapsed, and a desperate plea has gone forth from the White House to activate the Obama List and generate massive grassroots support to call and fax and email the Senators to back the bill. Please.

A little late. In fact, probably too late.

Some sort of bill will pass, to be sure, but given the way the stars are aligned, it will be a Republican bill primarily designed to protect the rich and to enhance corporate interests, secondarily to screw The People.

Same as it ever was.

Yesterday, I spent some time at various sites putting forth my considered opinion of what was wrong with the so-called stimulus bill and what was necessary to gain public support for doing something.

The problem, as I see it, is that the bill -- whether the House or the Senate version, and most definitely what will emerge from Republican (erm, excue me, "bi-partisan") surgery -- doesn't deal with the situation millions of households are facing, more every day, as the economy tailspins into oblivion. They are being crushed under a increasing burden of debt -- even if they don't buy anything else on credit -- and they fear losing their jobs, their homes, and any shred of dignity they might have left.

No bill so far proposed does anything about that in the short term.

Meanwhile, more trillions are proposed and pledged and paid to the banks and to Wall Street to pay off their gambling losses -- essentially without strings.

The People see this and throw up their hands in dismay.

I was accused of being an ingnernt slob for proposing that the priority should be household debt relief not banker and Wall Street debt relief. I was told that anything the Government spends is "stimulus" by definition. I was told that because I obviously knew nothing about macroeconomics, and therefore could not appreciate the beauty and truth of the stimulative properties of the massive spending programs in the stimulus bill, I had nothing to contribute to the discussion but "more BS."

"More BS" because I was focusing on the situation American households are facing, and how to deal with that to gain substantial public support, and not on what economic theorists believe is the "best practice" -- which generally ignores households and ordinary people in favor of a Grand Plan of some sort.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with the spending plans that are being proposed, as long as we understand they are essentially long-term economic restructuring programs, not "stimulus" programs for the short term.

Household economic distress has been building for years, ever since the forclosure crisis reared its ugly head, and for all these years, despite repeated and growing pleas, nothing has been done about it. Nothing is being proposed in the current bills to do anything about it, apart from a really insignificant payroll tax witholding reduction amounting to about $10 a week. That's it.

People who are burdened with crushing debt, in danger of losing their jobs, their homes -- or maybe they've already lost them -- rightly say, "WTF?!"

Especially when the Congress and the President are preparing to unload yet another few trillion and change on the banks and Wall Street and they are rightly furious.

The brainiacs who put together the programs under consideration have no clue.

What is needed is to deal with the household situation first, and they won't do it. They want their Grand Plan for Economic Restructuring adopted, and then, "maybe next year," they'll consider household relief.

Or maybe not. No, make that "probably not," because macroeconomic theory says that "debt relief" is not stimulative and doesn't help in economic restructuring in any case. Macroeconomic theory doesn't deal with households (even though their spending is 70% of the overall economy), consequently, what happens to American households is of no immediate interest or consequence for Grand Planners.

When I pointed out to one of these brainiacs that household debt relief (as opposed to banker/Wall Street debt relief) can potentially free up thousands of dollars a month per household immediately for them to spend on goods and services they can't purchase now, and that this is a priori "stimulative", I was told that stimulating spending at the household level is absolutely not what is wanted right now. That would run the risk of "reinflating the bubble," in other words, inflation, and we can't have that. No, what is wanted is the overall restructuring of the economy, and the Best Practice is to spend massively on programs and infrastructure that will serve the eventually restructured economy -- and let households drown.

At least a shred of honesty appeared for a moment.

This explains rather clearly why there has been no substantive effort at all at the policy level to stem the tide of foreclosures, to maintain employment, to relieve household debt, and so on, while there has been extraordinary effort to make sure that the gambling losses of the banks and Wall Street are covered, and to ensure that only certain aspects of the economy are propped up -- ie: those that support the rich and corporate interest, first; favored affinity groups second.

And now the Senate bill is being massaged to take out even the affinity group support, and it will probably pass and then be reconciled with the House bill, on Senate Republican parameters, and then go to the White House, where with much fanfare, the Incoming will declare a Bi-Partisan Triumph, and no one will be happy (except the rich and the powerful, who will chuckle at how they once again pulled the wool over the rubes' eyes), and the economy will continue to be sucked into the typical corporate Shock Doctrine Black Hole.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...