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In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction -- when untruth, delusion, and deception rule - politics is mere advertising,
which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public's wish-fulfillment fantasies. The
trouble at this moment in
history is that the American public's wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices
for action that they present.
President
Obama's historical role will be
seen as a wish-fulfillment
totem for late 20th century
progressive liberalism - the first black president. The Democratic Party
apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing
family in order to demonstrate the triumph of
social justice, which was
their great struggle of
the era. Evidence of that
is the striking divergence
from the get-go between Mr. Obama's Hope and
Change advertising and his
sedulous defense of pervasive racketeering at the highest levels of polity once in
office. Otherwise, you
must decide whether he was a tool
of the giant banks, or a
dupe-made-hostage to them,
or simply too clueless to understand what was required
in 2009 - namely the
break-up and reorganization of the banks plus hearty prosecution of their executives for massive swindling
(along with reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall
Act). I voted for him in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved
me, and also because of
the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition.
In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the
Wall Street privateers run
amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing "money" from
the Federal Reserve. He let loose
the demons of a high-tech totalitarian
"security" state with
every sort of electronic
surveillance, citizen data-mining,
and drone spying that
innovation allowed. He stood
silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after
the supreme court decided
that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate "personhood").
And of course, he continued
to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years,
US forces are unable to accomplish
the only aims of being there: to control the
terrain and to moderate the behavior
of the people who live there.
Hence,
the appalling spectacle of the Democratic
convention last week, with
its odor of ideological bankruptcy, stale rhetoric, and empty promises. The party seeks
only validation of its cherished fantasy: the social justice
of reelecting the first black president. And all it really has to offer is cheerleading to that end - with some social justice table-scraps
tossed to the lesser
totems of social justice politics: women, assorted ethnic minorities, and gays.
Meanwhile,
the "advanced nations" of industrial civilization all
spiral into coordinated disintegration, especially in
the realm where economy meets finance. Economy is about what we actually
do to stay alive: make things, trade things, grow things, run things.
Finance is supposed to be about maintaining the flows of accumulated wealth to support these things we do - with a modest service charge
for the financiers who do the work.
But in the great divorce of truth
from reality in our time,
finance is only about pretending to maintain these "capital" flows.
In fact, it has degenerated into a set of looting operations, swindles, frauds, and political dodges, and it is on the verge of blowing up.
There's
a fair chance that global
finance (and trade) will blow up this season leading to the US elections. The nations of Europe are stuck
in an intractable predicament.
The European Union can't
control the fiscal operations (taxing
and spending) of its sovereign members, and it only pretends
to be able to lend them the money to cover the interest payments on their previous loans. That shuck-and-jive is now
headed for a climax. But the situation is not materially different in the USA and Japan.
In one way or another, they are bankrupt, too, as are probably most of their commercial banks. China's banks are certainly a fiasco, since they are government-run, with no independent accounting oversight whatsoever. China does have a big cushion of US Treasury
holdings, huge stockpiles
of industrial metals and cement, and many new tons of recently-acquired gold. But they
are also hostage to the bankrupt West's lost appetite for
"consumer" goods, and tens
of millions of laid-off Chinese factory
workers could foment political upheaval in a delicate time of regime transition coming later this year.
The antics of the ECB, the US Federal
Reserve, and all the other central banks in conjuring ever more money-out-of-nothing draws us toward that event horizon where faith is
lost in a faith-based
money system. The only question really
is whether wealth destruction (deleveraging,
debt default) out-paces currency destruction (inflation). My
own guess continues to be that wealth
destruction wins that contest, with massive unpayable debt sucked into a black hole, and then all the advanced industrial nations waking up one oddly warm morning to find their standards of living destroyed.
As a
political matter in the
face of all this, the big
question is how we will reorganize daily life - the activities of
a whole culture - to comport
with the reality of a compressive contraction in economic reality. It also includes the shape and content
of the consensus we construct
to explain to ourselves what is happening. The obvious epic failure of the two major
parties in the USA to even begin
this necessary work may propel
this country into an historic political convulsion
to attend the financial implosion. Imagine, for
instance, if the failure of international banks leads to the rapid paralysis of trade supply lines and then to empty shelves in American supermarkets.
People complain about "the size and burden
of government," but our
problems extend to the
size and burden of everything,
beginning with the number of human beings now vying
to occupy the planet and moving to the size and scale of
every activity supporting them. Truthful political leadership would engage in preparing the
public for a long "to do" list of necessary tasks - from the return to Main Street economies
that will follow the inevitable collapse
of WalMart to the reorganization
of food production when
agri-biz style farming fails from scarcities
of cheap oil, phosphates, and capital for revolving
loans. Include also the rebuilding of
transportation networks not based on cars and airplanes and the painful
reconstruction of a monetary and banking system based on the rule of law.
This is the true work
of the future: the rebuilding of these systems. All the blather about "jobs" from
the presidential convoys is based on looking
backward to a way of life
that is ending: the age of giant everything, especially corporations. The days
of cubicle serfdom are numbered. Useful, gainful work in the decades ahead will be much
more about how you fit into
your local community. The
word "job" may even become obsolete
- a curious artifact of
the industrial past. Which party is preparing young people for
local agriculture and all the value-added activities around it? Which party understands that the national chain-store model of trade is doomed and Main Streets all
over America will have to
be re-activated? Which party understands that we're in the twilight of mass motoring and
commercial aviation? And what are they doing to prepare for the implications of that?
The two doddering parties want to promise more of what we've already got in a world that doesn't have anymore of that to give. The result is likely
to be that we will go through
all the noisy motions of the 2012 elections only to find ourselves plunged into a political crisis possibly worse than the Civil War.
Sidebar on How "Smart" We Think We Are
TV commercial seen during the Women's finals of the US Tennis Open:
Cadillac is bragging that
they have replaced the old dashboard knobs and toggles with a "smart" iPad-type control system. Has a car company
ever done something so fucking stupid? The whole point of knobs and toggles is that
you can keep your eyes
on the road while adjusting
things by feel. An
iPad you actually have to look at
to see what you're tapping on. Expect a colossal death toll from
buyers of the latest Cadillacs in the next couple of
years. I suppose there's poetic justice in the automobile age
winding down on a note of
such supernatural idiocy.
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