The Bond Traders With Their Hands On The Train Whistle

Obama almost acts controlled. As David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget director, remarks, where is his fortitude? He should be saying to Congress: “If you send me a bill that extends tax cuts for billionaires and yet doesn’t deal with ending the deficits, it’s going to get vetoed.”

I should watch more of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. I don’t agree with him all the time, and sometimes I strongly disagree with him, but I like his perspective because it is something other than strictly American. And I like it that he brings people on his show who will say uncomfortable things. Like Stockman, who is scathing on both parties.

As Stockman says, the Fed is playing a most dangerous and irresponsible game to avert reality, the reality that 30 years of debt-fueled binging have left the US financially and monetarily precariously fragile. If and when the bond traders of the world lose faith in the US fiscal process, the resulting sell off of US treasury bonds will be a catastrophe for US finances, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates and throw us into a Depression, or let it ride and watch government essentially implode.

Stockman also says these debt-fueled serial bubbles shifted wealth—the super-wealthy benefitted from them monstrously disproportionally. And he says that the previous party of fiscal restraint and responsibility, the Republican Party, shifted to tax cutting that became an ideology, even when it was demonstrated time and again that it didn’t work, but only shifted wealth upward and actually made deficits worse.

Stockman, who is writing a book on the financial crisis, says the panic was in Wall Street and the Treasury far more than anywhere else, and they showed who had the power, for they deceived us not only previously, but in what was ACTUALLY necessary to restore economic stability. The floodgates were released for them far past anything needed, and these floodgates meant they could return to their obscene profits and wealth transfer (they will hand out $144B in bonuses this year alone).

Anyone still in doubt about who has the real power? Still want to trust them? Believe it when they say the economy is recovering nicely?

Too, Well, Too

Things connect, and cascade. When a person is stressed, overburdened, working too much, not in control of much—that person is less tolerant, less considerate, of others. And so the person who needs a kind gesture doesn’t get one, the person who needs to get out of the parking lot can’t, the person who needs a friendly voice, to feel connected, receives only silence. And then that person transmits it along. And so it magnifies and extends throughout, a perverse butterfly effect. There is a price to be paid for our maniacal pace, our relentless push. This is a disconnected or mal-connected society with too great an emphasis on individualism or solely the nuclear family, and it is also a society where the fruits of labor often either never come or are withheld by economic, political, and social powers. We can mask it in various forms of escape or denial, but that does not change the reality. It is a subject for conversation perhaps we should have with and amongst ourselves.

Mississippi Turning

Watched a middle aged white woman wheel groceries out on a cart for a black mother and her young daughter. And no one thought anything about it apparently, except for the historian who smiled to himself at how wonderfully remarkable it was that this scene was so unremarkable.

The Invisible Train

Right now, the true size of our debt is about 15 times the official debt of $13 or so trillion. This is because Congress has labeled most of our liabilities something else to keep them off the books and somewhere (usually far) in the future. Social Security, Medicare, (and Medicaid in a way) were not corrected when we had the chance, but made instead massive Ponzi schemes.

As Professor Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University says, the International Monetary Fund and the Congressional Budget Office have both effectively declared the Unites States bankrupt or nearly so. To pay its obligations, the US must have, starting today, additional funding equal to the total present revenue of the whole federal government; every year we don’t adds that amount on to what is really our collective government credit card balance and necessitates even more obligation. To meet that total obligation, either we double taxation, or we mix some sort of increased taxation and reduced spending, since we obviously can’t cut spending to absolute 0. Of course, we could always ruin ourselves and print more money and cause runaway inflation that would destroy most all our systems. More realistically, we need to drastically simplify and restructure our taxation, health (not just “health care”), retirement, energy, and financial systems, all of which are messes and train wrecks in process. And that probably also means taking away some of the obligations within those systems, because the obligations as presently situated are neither realistic nor sustainable.

Spending more to “stimulate” the economy? Taxing less to “stimulate” the economy? Utter delusions, both of them, and promoted by those who don’t want you to realize they’ve screwed up. There ARE NO mostly painless “solutions” to what we’ve done. There is going to be pain. Deep pain. If we don’t want it to ruin us, we have to face up to it. NOW.

What Profiteth A Nation to Gain the Whole World And Then Die?

We do have steep geo-political risks in this world. But we now have unacceptable economic and ecological risks. In fact, on a weighting chart, we are all off-kilter. We are spending our wealth—more than our wealth, actually—to insure our national defense against much less likely threats to our very survival than the threats we have to those two FOUNDATIONS. Instead of spending so much time looking at the structure built on top, shouldn’t we be looking at what holds that structure up? Because what good does it do to quest for the best structure when all that supports it is cracking and giving way? We have been insanely off-focus.

Attempting to Reach Perfect Security Destroys Economic Foundation—Leaving No Security

We are spending $900B a year—that’s 30 percent of expenditures, but 52 percent of revenues (because we borrow and deficit spend)—on “Defense.” To “defend” our nation from what may sometimes seem just a couple thousand religious fanatics, a lot of whom are hiding in caves in Pakistan, and many of the rest we may be creating by policies of economic and political exploitation? And making a lot of American multinationals and contractors rich in the process? And forgetting that all that money for “Defense” was taken from the productive sectors of the economy (or worse, borrowed), because government isn’t itself an economic producer but is instead a consumer?

I say this not because we need to bash government anymore; nefarious forces have been doing that enough for their own immensely selfish and twisted reasons, and we do need government to reassert our will against them. And we do need to defend ourselves from real threats; they are out there. No, I say this because we need to do it far smarter, far less frivolously, and far more strategically, and in the process we need to face fiscal reality, something we are not doing by any relevant yardstick (or meter-stick, for the rest of the world who have jumped to the intuitively and scientifically superior metric).

Our Framers would be aghast at the size and decades we have had this much and this kind of military, and how much money we have spent. A few of the many reasons they and those who followed them shrunk the thing after every war before the 20th century was both its economic impact and its danger of warping the democratic process and foreign and domestic policy (the Framers were great students of history). While we may have had good reasons for making different decisions than they would have, we do not give ourselves the hard review. We have become too accepting of “how it is.”

We need a new strategic plan for the country, one that all people are aware of (at least in general) and behind, and we need to get cracking on implementing it. We have narrowly defined "defense" and "security" for far too long. It is time for a more holistic approach, one that recognizes that economics and environment are FOUNDATIONS of security. And maybe, just maybe, that also means thinking about the collective good.

Power Exercised

Notice how severely the true powers deal with anyone or anything that even remotely threatens their power: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39995283/ns/politics-decision_2010

Who gets elected matters little. Because they now know they will only STAY elected if they do not upset the moneyed controllers.

Democracy For the Few

Today, people are exercising “choice” that is often meaningless: Democrats who are reactive or fumbling, Republicans who are belligerent or obstructive, Tea Partiers who are mad with no plan. This mask-flipping sideshow will do little to impact the true powers who cynically feed it all. These true powers? The corporate and financial ‘elites,” and their allies. The sideshow is just that, a show. These “elites” have already put into place what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “The Great Decoupling” of them from the rest of us. 75 percent of Americans make $50,000 or less (often a lot less), and those Americans have largely been abandoned by the elites who are at the top of the other 25%. Those elites love for you to get angry at politicians, and chuckle when you think that favoring one party over another will make much of a difference. It won’t, other than to make it worse in different ways.

So confident and seemingly secure in their power are they that they fully expect you to either 1) not understand what is happening, or 2) to comply out of fear, intimidation, or perceived helplessness. They blithely and uncaringly TELL you that high unemployment/low paying employment is a new structural reality beyond their (or anyone’s) control, and that globalized free market forces have permanently altered things and you can’t do anything about it.

It doesn’t take much examination to realize they are lying. This is a system they have moved into place and carefully manipulated. That system is a construct, not an inevitable fixture, and they are manipulating and perverting the market, not operating honestly in it. The laws, the interpretation of laws, and the interpreters of those laws, largely favor them, and they constantly work to keep it that way. Labor is increasingly commoditized and controlled, and they already control the capital and much of the choice land, plus many of the vital information avenues. Statistics are manipulated too, and a media they largely control or direct spouts those statistics as if they are real and meaningful.

We don’t have real capitalism here, we have Robber-Capitalism. After every demonstrated failure of that Robber-Capitalism (past Depressions of the late 1800s and 1930s especially), populist and progressive forces have moved for change. But they have not studied their enemy well, and so those forces have eventually faded. However, their enemy has studied THEM well, and learned from history, and now that enemy does the things necessary to deflect, gut, confuse, enfeeble, disorganize, dis-empower, divide, distract, misinform, unbalance, and depress those forces before they gather traction.

“We the People” are going to have get wiser in this fight.