Happy New Year

"Some Assembly Required" is worth quoting at length today:

New Year's Day is an arbitrary and mostly fictional marker. It is common to pretend that some clear divisor has been set between what was and what will be. But that is a fiction mainly used to peddle prognostications that turn out to be as false as the occasion. 
  For my part, I believe that more of the same will predominate, as always. History creeps in when we're not looking. We're told that the good times will continue, but most Americans won't know what the pundits are talking about. If times are so good, why are the majority of Americans worse off? The reality is that there has been little if any recovery over the last four years. Or eight, to give Obama his due.
More of the same: the global economy will not seize up suddenly and leave us all to starve in the dark, but it won't change much for the better, either. Wars and atrocities and inequality and rape and torture will all go on, and go on being ignored. So will the hollowing out of the American middle class, as what once were government prerogatives of a self-governing people continue to be treatied away to international corporations. 
  Police will continue their extra-juridical execution of lower caste young men and the streets will pulse with ineffective protests – because protesting in the streets will not change the balance of power. Dying in the streets in large numbers might, but not any time soon.
The number of Americans trying to survive without a job will continue to increase, the effective standard of living for most of the population will continue to decline. The dollar is not going away and neither is the euro; high priced oil will return as fracking starts to subside, and climate change will continue to be ignored as we not-so-slowly burn our way to oblivion. The world’s finite supplies of petroleum, along with most other resources on which our extractive civilization depends, will continue depleting while we continue our blind faith in forever.

More of the same. We'll call it progress.

Right!

Of course, you don't.

Ya Know . . .

. . . my man James Kuntsler can sure turn a phrase. I wish I had half his gift for invective. Alas, entertaining as the language might be, and it certainly is, we also have to come to grips with the fact that it's all true. This is what's truly unfortunate. Pick your issue--there are plenty enough here--and then think about the fact that they all beset us, not just that awful one you just picked. (Source: here)

Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth.

Happy Thought of the Day

      If we weren't such a stupid people in thrall to our "smart" phones, we'd be rebuilding the US passenger railroad system for the day, not far off, when the grand entitlement of Happy Motoring rather suddenly vaporizes for a significant chunk of the population. The lack of interest in that project is really something to behold. Politicians who systematically "de-fund" the rail corridors, which is the case here in the Northeast, do it because they are as clueless as their constituents about what's really coming down. Rather, both the politicians and the public place their bets on "self-driving cars" powered by an as-yet-to-be announced sovereign replacement for liquid hydrocarbon fuel. The net effect of that stupidity is that your children and grandchildren will lead lives in which they rarely travel more than ten miles from home.

                                                                                                                --James Howard Kunsler

Harpooned--A Continuing Series

Bullets from the latest "Harper's Index" in the November 2012 number of Harper's. Given as usual with little or no comment.

• Portion of the total U. S. corn crop that goes to make ethanol: 2/5
• Average number of square miles by which the Arctic sea ice decreased each day this summer: 36,400 [how often have you heard "global warming" during the current political debates?]
• Estimated number of gallons of raw sewage spilled off the coast of Tijuana following an August pipeline break: 5 million
• Portion of U.S. workers age 50 or above who plan to delay retirement because the financial crisis: 1/2
• Projected worldwide surplus of low-skill workers by 2020: 93 million
• Projected worldwide deficit of high- and medium-skill workers by that time: 85 million
• Portion of people residing outside the United States who say they like American pop culture: 2/3
• Who say it is a "good" thing that American ideas and customs are spreading: 1/4
• Percentage of Americans in 1992 who believed gun laws should be stricter: 78
• Percentage who believe so today: 43 
• Rank of "I don't know" among the most common answers Republicans give when asked why black voters support Democrats: 1
• Rank of "government dependents" want "something for nothing": 2

A Rare Double Dip

It's highly unusual for me to post twice to the blog in one day, but I've got to make an exception here. First, because I didn't post yesterday and I missed a day last week with my brother and sister-in-law visiting. And second, because I just read this, and I'm revolted, disgusted, and chagrined, but not at all surprised. Let me list for you the key items on the Republican agenda. (You can read the source article here.) Now, remember, these are the oh-so-earnest people who trumpeted their desperate concern for the burgeoning deficit and their unswerving and fierce commitment to job creation for all those Americans still suffering under- and unemployment from the now two-year downturn in the economy.

So what are these Republicans about? Well, they are all about cutting government spending. Everybody knows that this is going to provide jobs, right? That government spending is why the country is experiencing a so-called jobless recovery, i.e., more money for the filthy rich fat cats, in fact, more than before. And nothing for the middle class and working people but more squeeze on their already-scrimped budgets. So here's the GOP program to fix things for these suffering people. Ready? A spending bill that will eliminate these programs:

• the National Endowment for the Arts
• the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• the National Endowment for the Humanities
• Title X birth control and family planning
• Americorps
• the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• the Energy Star program and work on fuel efficient cars

When did the arts and humanities and PBS get redefined as something a civilized society should not support? Well, friends, these things have been anathema to the religious Right for a long time. They are secular, you see, and by definition anti-God. Moreover, "people who support Republicans see little value in the arts, science, or education. Republicans have successfully made the connection between arts programs and the liberal elite, and in fact, eliminating programs like PBS and the Arts are programs that Newt Gingrich targeted in 1995." 

And it's certainly no surprise that the Republicans are kowtowing to the energy industry--why else go after the Energy Star program and fuel efficient cars? This is payback for all those millions of dollars the Koch brothers have poured into GOP coffers. And lest you think the liberal elite, whom the Republicans hate with a burning hatred, is the only target, be aware that Title X is aimed almost solely at low-income people.

From the article again: "The Republicans’ efforts are little more than a culture war meant to destroy an entire way of life in America at the behest of the energy industry and religious right. Republicans promised to create jobs during the midterm campaign, but the reality is they are only interested in eliminating programs that help the disadvantaged and enrich the oil industry. Although the American people said their priority was economic recovery and job creation, Republicans have not made any attempts at either."

We're in for the Bush years on steroids with these people. This is not what the American people voted for in November. But the American people were never the ones the Republicans were intent on helping.

Related articles

• Eugene Robinson: Budget cutting with a cleaver (commercialappeal.com)
• CBPP: RSC proposal would "eviscerate vital services" (dailykos.com)
• James Wagoner: The Trojan Horse Republican Congress (huffingtonpost.com)

And Now the Nopes

Continuing from yesterday with the same source, here's a list of predictions of science fiction writers for 2010 that did not come to pass. Just as an aside, you could probably list 100 things here. These guys are wrong more than they're right.

• Flying cars--possible technically, but not socially
• A Moon base (supposed to have this before the turn of the century or a couple of years later. The new target date for such a base is now 2069. I'll be 126 years old then, so I don't think I'll be around to see it.)
• Anti-ageing pills (I'm not sure I would want to take them, if they existed. Little teeny repair robots courtesy of nanotechnology may be coming, but would you trust them messing around in your aorta?)
• Trips to Jupiter (a long way off, at best)
• Nuclear holocaust (This is the one I'm most happy about seeing on the list. The possibility of a general exchange of these weapons between the forces of light (USA) and the forces of darkness (USSR) is no longer with us, but now we have to be concerned about little gaggles of madmen [and women] terrorists who are itching to get hold of a nuke. And then use it.)
• Virtual reality (We're a long way from Neuromancer.)
• AI robot butlers and self-driving cars (Would be nice, don't you think?)
• Computer overlords (no apparent danger of this for a long, long time. Humans will probably make the planet uninhabitable before something like this comes to pass. But maybe if not, the world will be perfectly habitable for them.)
• Commercial supersonic air travel (My God! Can you imagine the airport and security hassles that this would cause? Actually we had this at one time--the Concorde. But the return of such elegant, hyper expensive birds is to say the least, not likely soon.)
• Cheap, clean, unlimited energy (" Nikola Tesla’s dream of free and unlimited electricity seems even more impossible today than when he first proposed it in the early 20th century. Many of the wars on this small blue marble we call home are in large or small part over energy resources. Global climate change is intrinsically linked to the ways in which we produce energy. Whether it’s gas for your car or electricity for your house, we all spend a lot of money on energy. A limitless, non-polluting, inexpensive (or even free) energy source could completely transform humanity, taking us out of the energy dark age we live in now, and leading to a true peace on Earth and good will between all mankind. That’s my wintertime wish for the future. Do you have one?")

Yeah, I have one. World peace. If we did not spend such staggering amounts of money devising ways to kill fellow human beings, resources would be ample to hurry a lot of these unfulfilled predictions into reality.

Related articles

• The Greatest Inventions Nikola Tesla Never Created [Io9 Flashback] (io9.com)
• 3 reviews of Nikola Tesla (rateitall.com)

Index III

From the latest number of Harper's. Snippets from the "Index":

• Rank of "disappointed" amoung terms used by Americans in an October to describe their feelings about the government: 1
• Rank of "sucks": 4
• Percentage of bills proposed by the last Congress that became law: 3
• Percentage change in spending by independent political groups between 2006 and 2010 midterm elections: +310
• Portion of these funds in 2010 that came from organizations not legally required to disclose their donors: 1/2
• Percentage of such groups to supported conservative candidates: 80
• Percentage of developing nations whose economies have grown faster than the United States' since 2001: 89
• Number of countries which United States has a trade deficit: 77
• Percentage change since 2007 in the amount of venture capital raised annually in the United States: -55
• Number of offshore oil and gas leases approved by the federal government since 2005: 4,603
• Number of offshore wind projects approved since then: 1
• Chance that an American teen suffers from a severe emotional or behavioral disorder: 1 in 5
• Amount the state of California spent last year on each minor in its juvenile-detention system: $224,712
• Amount spent on each student in the Oakland public school system: $4,945
• Number of drug and alcohol addicts who've been sterilized since 1998 in exchange for payment from a US charity: 1.325
• Amount the charity pays per sterilization: $300

Is this a great country, or what?

Related articles

• Other Things That Are Equal To Congress' Current Approval Rating (13%) (theawl.com)
• With Wealth Highly Skewed Toward the Top, US Ranks 12th in New Measure of Human Development (alternet.org)

I'm Not Ready for This

Not to worry . . . this one is in shallow water. Right.

Another oil rig is on fire in the Gulf of Mexico and has already produced a sizable slick on the water. Off the Louisiana coast. West of the mouth of the Mississippi. I suppose this one is not as alarming to some since it's in "shallow" water, 320 feet. All the heartburn I had about the last disastrous spill still is with me with this one. As a displaced Louisianian, I take these oil spills personally. And even if they get this fire out quickly and contain the spill quickly too, I'm still pissed off. I think these kinds of events--that are happening all the time all over the world--are just more warnings, insistent warnings, that we're trashing the Earth as if there is no tomorrow. When in fact the tomorrows we're headed for are not all that encouraging.

Along with this story about the latest spill is this one from a German military document reported in the magazine Der Spiegel about what the arrival at peak oil will mean for all of us. In short, it will not be a  good thing. Not one of the consequences of shrinking oil supplies are going to be good. In fact, they could lead to "mass-scale upheaval" with the next 15-30 years as the world's economic foundations are increasingly eroded. International trade would be crippled by transportation costs. So shortages everywhere and collapse of the industrial supply chain. "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse." The worldwide economic crisis would in turn call into question the political institutions that created the economic systems. Another way of saying that democracy could not survive a crisis like this. The situation would be made to order for totalitarian, repressive governments and grave internal and external political crises all over the globe.

James Kuntsler, who I talked about the other day, has been warning about peak oil and lamenting our blindness to its consequences for a long, long time. I have absolutely no reason to believe that this latest evidence of a national government getting extremely nervous about peak oil is going to have the slightest effect the U.S. We have far more important things to worry about--NFL season opens Sunday! Besides, say many, peak oil is just a hoax. There's plenty of oil.

Seems to me this is just a variation on the biggest hoax of all: Tomorrow is going to be just like today.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Jonathan Kim: ReThink Review: A Crude Awakening -- Why We Spill (huffingtonpost.com)
• Richard Stuebi: The Petroleum Industry: Past the Tipping Point? (huffingtonpost.com)
• 'Peak Oil' Movement Prepares for the Worst (nytimes.com)

It May Mean Nothing at All

Draw your own conclusions about this. A study by a couple of UCLA professors into "subtle socioeconomic responses to detailed information about power consumption" indicates that conservatives don't really have much taste for conservation. They tend to doubt global warming, too. I'm not surprised. Are you?

Back . . .

Just back from a quick visit to my "homeland"--south Louisiana. I was down there to make a presentation to the Deep Delta Civil War Symposium, a group I've spoken to several times now. A few random thoughts spurred by return to Oklahoma.

General P. G. T. Beauregard, C.S.A.

• I'm a professional historian, but I increasingly find the historical disputes in whatever area of history you want to talk about are not all that engaging anymore. I made a presentation about General P. G. T. Beauregard. I spent a lot of time preparing it, and when I finished it was like, so what? What does it matter what I think about him or anybody else, for that matter? Not when BP is killing the Gulf of Mexico while I'm talking and they're all listening about events that happened almost 150 years ago. I know I have to go to at least one more of these symposiums--I wrote "symposia" and the program flags it misspelled--in connection with a series of essays in honor of my major professor, but I think after that, no more. 
• I ate too much when I was there. I always do because I have yet to come across convincing evidence that there exists anywhere in the world better food than there. One treat I enjoyed was soft shell crab, which is a seasonal dish you cannot get all the time. Then there was shrimp ettoufee at my sister-in-law's place. It doesn't take me long to feel like I'm "home" when I'm there. Oddly--or don't know whether it's odd or not--Louisiana seems more important and special to me the older I get, in ways it didn't before. I've been gone a long time, but it's still home.
• Susan's family (and a portion of mine, too, I suppose)  is so violently anti-Obama that I no longer discuss anything remotely connected with political events. My sister-in-law has Fox News on 24 hours a day. I makes me think of Orwell's 1984 with the endless propaganda spewing from the loudspeakers all the time. Have you ever seen Fox News? It's really disturbing to me. A constant stream of propaganda. The misinformation and blatant disregard from the basic truth, much less the nuances of things, is something Fox simply does not regard as important. It's sole purpose is to stir up opposition to the White House. No Fox News, no Tea Party movement. I'm convinced of it.
• Didn't mention it above, but the continuation of the Deep Delta Symposium series is in serious doubt. The cuts to higher education in Louisiana have been drastic and deep. Indeed, they were telling me that the administration tried to squeeze the life out of this past one, and it was only preserved in its present form (i.e., with honorarium and expenses paid for the speakers) with great effort. Honestly, I don't think it will survive. The one just finished was the 22nd, I think.
• Air travel still sucks.

Some Awful Amorphous Moby Dick Full of Malice

Here's James Kuntsler this week on the oil spill in the Gulf. And I wrote a poem about the situation there today. Him first, then me. And if you want to be cheered up. Don't read either.

     Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America -- or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn't go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.

*******************************

Fiddler Crab: Uca Pugnax Reflects on the Gulf Oil Spill 

Capricious and rapacious,
humans are a pain in the carapace
for any self-respecting crustacean.
Would we could stop fiddling
around with them altogether.
They mean to kill us all. 

Alas, decapods are cursed by God.
Quite catchable he made us.
Numerous, too, and tasty.
Every last one of us.
Humans shell out big bucks
for my lobster cousins.
Crazy Cajuns
boil our crawfish relatives,
eat ‘em by the bushel.
And our shrimp brethren,
well, you know what happens to them.
Two thousand species, and somebody’s
eating every one. 

Bad enough: all this chomping up
on us and our family.
We are tough. Foul our sands
with your mounds of rubbish,
cast  your crap into our surf,
trawl us by the trillion . . .
we survive. 

But spew gushers of foul black poison
into our homes, into the cracks and crevices
of our crabby lives . . .
no way we claw our way back: 
that's Auschwitz without ovens. 

Achtung! You've Been Selected

Civil liberties simply don't matter anymore. We don't have any that the police are bound to respect. We don't have any that can't be set aside in the name of protecting us against terrorism. A few weeks back I wrote about Gore Vidal's reminding us of the true nature of American society, to wit, a police state basically. The possibility of running afoul of some gendarme with a chip on his (or her) shoulder 0grows increasingly more likely if you are a person, like me, likely to be self-assertive when dealing with these people. I can tell you, the thought of being hassled by cops is not far from my mind every time I see either a cop or a pseudo cop. Have you noticed how many of the latter seem to be around? Next time you're out and about just notice how many uniformed dudes, most packing 9 mm, are out there. It's not just the official police departments, but all the miscellaneous security guards and semi-official officials. Hell, here in Oklahoma, the frigging park rangers carry weapons!

But to the point. Two stories caught my attention lately in this area. First, this one from the NY Times. The Obama administration is supporting the crack-brained, dangerous idea endorsed by such worthies as John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and most of the rest of the Republican party that terrorism suspects be deprived of their Miranda rights. The exception is required because "interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions." What a crock! This is the administration, once again in the flame of its courage, bending over for the rabid right. Listen, you make one exception to the Miranda rule, you will have to allow a hundred exceptions. Since when is a person's right to be informed of their rights determined by the nature of their offense? Well, brothers and sisters, since now. (I have to note here that Glenn Beck, of all people, is in favor of the Constitution in this matter. He actually opposes the idea.) I'll have more to say about this later.


The second item was this narrative I read a little while ago by one Marcia Alesan Dawkins. Here it is:


“You’ve been randomly selected for a search.” These are the words I heard as I was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection upon my return from a recent trip to Canada. The hourlong experience was harrowing—I was asked questions about where I was born, whether English was my first language, whether I had credit cards or cash, what I do for a living, why I was traveling, where I had gone, how my traveling companion and I knew each other, and what I was carrying in my pockets, purse and luggage. I was forbidden to stand, place my hands in my pockets, make phone calls and use the restroom without asking for permission. All of this I took in stride because I figured that it was being done in the interest of national security. Certainly, an hour of my time is well spent in helping to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens.


Does this bother you as much as it does me? An hour? "Randomly selected?" I mean WTF? I really don't think comparisons being made with Nazi Germany's routines are overdrawn. I can guarantee you "the interest of national security" would hardly motivate me to take a gross violation of my civil liberties "in stride." Yep. I don't know at what point I'd become "uncooperative," but it would be well before an hour had elapsed. Why should I have to answer a bunch of questions for some uniform as the result of a "random search"? Where the justification for a violation of civil liberties this blatant? Show me in black and white. Yep. This is why I would have been arrested.

Three Ring Blame Game

Even if events are predictable, it doesn't make them any less irritating when they actually happen. Take, for example, the farce in three acts played out in the hearings before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. There for a grilling before the senators were the CEOs of the three companies who have visited the fragile planet with what is fast becoming a truly terrible environmental catastrophe. That would be BP, the company that leased the oil rig from Transocean, and our old friend Halliburton, which was responsible for encasing the well pipe in cement and plugging it in anticipation of future production.Naturally, people were trying to find out what happened and who was responsible. It will come as absolutely no surprise to you to learn that according to the bosses, BP is not responsible. Transocean is not responsible. And Halliburton. Hey, they were just a subcontractor. All of these guys are pointing fingers at the other guys.

And you won't be surprised to learn that the roots of this disaster can be found in the energy company lapdogs of the Bush administration. The oversight agency of the government, the Minerals Management Service, was riddled with corruption during the Bush years, as this piece by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. makes clear.

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

There is only one thing good that can come out of this disaster: that offshore oil drilling will be set back for years. Years, I say. Maybe long enough to ensure we don't drill anymore of these things.

Don't hold your breath waiting for any real justice to transpire. As in, the guilty being punished or being made to pay through their frigging noses for destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people and besmirching the Gulf coast with massive pollution for the next 40 or 50 years. Justice just doesn't happen anymore, no matter who controls the White House.

Spill, Baby, Spill

The horror of the oil spill out in the Gulf of Mexico is now becoming fully apparent. What's incontestable is that this accident is going to be a environmental catastrophe that will be a benchmark for our despoliation of the planet in the same class as the Exxon Valdez and Santa Barbara spills of storied memory. The early estimates--and where did these come from, one wonders? Could it have been BP? Or the government?--the early estimates could not have been more mistaken. (And lest we forget, 11 guys who worked out on that rig died.)

It really doesn't matter who put out the first word, it's clear that the initial estimates which minimized the extent of the spill, and hence the difficulty of containing the spread of the oil, the danger to the coastal environment, the amount of time it would take to contain the spill, and the resources that would be needed, these estimates were pretty far off base. Remember the initial announcements? They said nothing about any oil spilling at all. In fact, they led you to believe that the well had been capped off. Well, it was not long before we got disabused of that notion. But up until late yesterday, the reporting did not seem to have any sense of urgency about it. Well, that's gone. Oh, it's urgent now, alright. This oil spill has the potential to be the worst that's ever happened on the globe.

How bad is this? It's frigging off the chart, that's how bad:

Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery, said there may already be more than 9 million gallons of oil floating in the Gulf now, based on his estimate of a 25,000 barrel-a-day leak rate. That's compared to 12 million gallons spilled in the Valdez accident.

Interior Department officials said it may take 90 days to cap the leaking well. If the 25,000 barrels a day is accurate and it leaks for 90 days, that's 2.25 million barrels or 94.5 million gallons.

Listen, I'm from South Louisiana. I grew up in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The oil business was always offshore, where you could not see it. But what you could see was the incredible bounty of the Gulf waters and the tidelands: oysters, crawfish, shrimp, crab, redfish, flounder. These creatures and all the wonderful birds and other swampland creatures were always there, too. They defined the state, and to a certain extent they defined everybody who was bred and raised in south Louisiana. Which is why, I think that this oil spill which is now certain to wreck unspeakable havoc on the Louisiana coast  has hit me here in Oklahoma much harder than I could have ever imagined. This thing is just so outrageous; it makes me furious with the Fates that decreed this. It makes me furious at the mindless idiots screaming "Drill, baby, drill" during the presidential election.  It makes me furious at Obama and his caving to the goddamn oil companies. It makes me furious that we industrial sophisticates are apparently helpless to prevent what's going to happen to the Gulf coast from happening. All that, but at the same time I want to cry. I want to weep out loud because of the profound ugliness of this mess, because of humankind's cruelty to this earth and to its creatures who sustain us. Because the fragile and threatened coastal wetlands of my home state are going to be irreparably damaged. Just because of the death this spill deals and represents. Death. Who would not cry?

The Lingering Odor of Betrayal

In connection with yesterday's report of Obama's decision to all oil exploration of offshore areas, there's been a good deal of outcry from the environmentally aware as well as committed progressives who have felt stomped on by Obama ever since they voted for "change" back in those ancient days of 2008. One of the respondents to the Obama speech, which was published in TPM, ran down the litany of Obama flip-flops (or betrayals, if you favor harsher language). He calls himself oleeb, and he writes a blog--strongly anti-war, from all appearances--in response to TPM postings.

Why Barrack Obama is as Republican as any Republican

(according to ooleb & in his words)

• Open ended continuation of two pointless and costly wars that are bankrupting our nation.
• 100% Adoption of the Republican bailout plan for Wall Street.
• 100% adoption of illegal Republican domestic spying policies, torture, refusal even to investigate known war crimes, continuation of illegal indefinite detainment policies and wholesale abandonment of the rule of law in favor of a metastasizing national security state.
• Enactment nationally of the Republican Mitt Romney Healthcare Plan from Massachusetts except it isn't as good as the plan Romney got passed in Massachusetts.
• Support for the Republican wet dream of more reliance on nuclear power which will require massive public subsidies for private utility companies.
• More militarism and an open ended promise to continue real growth of 3-4% for the military for the foreseeable future even though we spend more on "defense" than all the other nations on earth combined.
• Another Republican wet dream: a special commission tasked with devising a politically acceptable scheme to dismantle and destroy Social Security. [Baysage observes: I have not heard about this one.]
• Republican offshore oil drilling policies accompanied by bullshit rhetoric about how this will reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Lest anyone get the idea that because I blast the Republican party frequently and vigorously, I am any great fan of Barack Obama and the Democrats, please disabuse yourself of that notion. The list above is a pretty good start on the list of reasons why.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

I'm wondering if we elected a closet Republican in 2008. Barrack Obama claims to be a progressive Democrat, but he's giving an excellent job of mimicking a GOP president. Latest is the news this morning that he has decided to permit offshore oil drilling along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts--from Delaware to Florida. And more Alaskan coastline, too. This decision, of course, runs contrary to what he said during the presidential campaign. But then Obama the president has hardly resembled Obama the candidate for president.

This move appears to be yet another overture to the Republican party, a strategy that for the entire length of Obama's presidency has proven singularly barren. If there's any silver lining to this decision, it's that right on cue, the Republican party goes ballistic. John Boehner blasted the plan as not going far enough. You know, the GOP might be something to worry about if it ever grew a brain. Remember the rallying cry during the campaign from the McCain crowds: Drill, baby, drill! Well, Obama is saying to the oil barons here's 167 million acres of ocean you can drill, babies, drill . . . and it ain't enough for the Republicans. Good. Let them holler and scream some more about this latest Obama cave to the right. It just makes them look ridiculous to oppose their own ideas.

Deadly Disparity

Maybe because it's Monday, I don't know, but I'm really not bubbly today. I think, though, the real reason is this piece that was referenced in a Buzz entry earlier today. What really brings me down is realizing to my chagrin that I pretty much agreed with the overall contention in this article, just as did the original Buzz poster. Neither of us liked how it made us feel, but there's nothing really to be done about it. In a nutshell, it's this: the dreadful problems confronting humankind, and especially the portion of it that lives here in the U.S., are virtually insoluble. Here's the key idea:

. . . it’s more honest, and potentially effective, to acknowledge how massive the obstacles that need to be overcome really are. We must not only recognize that the world’s resources distributed in a profoundly unjust way and the systems in which we live are fundamentally unsustainable ecologically, but also understand there’s no guarantee that this state of affairs can be reversed or even substantially slowed down. There are, in fact, lots of reasons to suspect that many of our fundamental problems have no solutions, at least no solutions in any framework we currently understand.

What it all boils down to, I think, is just a crushing, unsustainable burden of disparities. Salvation for us all lies in the wisdom of the ancients: moderation in all things. Emphasis on the ALL. Because what the course of our history as a species has revealed is that unless there's moderation in everything, there will not be moderation in anything. But there is no cure for the greed and blindness of humans. We have so aggressively ignored this wisdom that we have, I greatly fear, passed the point of no return.

Disparity, not moderation, in all things; that's what we have. Start with the obvious. Too many mouths to feed. Disparity between population and ability of planet to sustain it. We live on a planet that groans under the ravages of too many people. Way too many. All these people must eat, and that elemental fact is helping destroy us. Let's face it: we're raping Mother Earth every day. Clear cutting rain forests for timber and crop land, dumping our shit--literal and figurative--into the oceans and rivers and streams till they choke. How many species of fish have now arrived at the point where their very survival, much less their ability to help sustain human life, is in question? Our industry, so bloated, rapacious, and destructive, extends to every corner of the globe, spews waste into the air that affects the weather of the entire globe and all its ecosystems. There's fundamental disparity between rich nations and poor, and little inclination by the former to understand how their fates are inextricably bound. Disparity of power keeps the military of the strongest constantly beating up on the weak. Thus it has ever been, but now in the state of his evolution, man has come to the point where it's possible for him to destroy not only himself but the world he lives in. Where war has become a permanent condition . . . the Beast must be fed.

We seem well on our way to assuring the demise of civilization as we know it. The signs of coming catastrophe are everywhere: a small number of sinfully rich, vast numbers of poor and hopeless; waste on colossal scale: of resources; of raw materials, of potential for billions; of lives, so many lives. The rule of violence. The rule of ignorance. The rule of death.

You have no idea how profoundly sad this makes me. I think of my children, my grandchildren, all the wonderful young people in my family, all the young ones I know. None of them deserve what we're leaving them with.

Comatose

Here's a snippet from Frank Rich's column in the New York Times today.

"The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit."

Think about it. The country is entering the fourth decade. Since 1980 when the affable nimwit Reagan took office, the United States Congress has done nothing about anything important: hell, medicare funding and social security shortfalls in the near future are not secrets. And they weren't secrets 30-40 years ago. The leadership of the U.S. simply ignored any problem that was fixable easier then and for far less money than today, when all these buzzards are coming home to roost on our scalps. Our national leadership was basically comatose when it came to tackling substantive major problems. We chose to eat out our substance with war and the frivolities of Wall Street.  It's not as if smart people were not saying years and years ago that certain things were going to be serious problems that would only get worse by not doing something about it then, whenever "then" was then. The list of major problems the Congress simply ignored is staggering in its implications for us right now, today. All of these problems should have been attacked decades ago. Now while the country crumbles around us, those of us paying attention are seeing the folly of our ways. I'm not even going to look stuff up. All this off the top of my head:

1. Energy: No national effort to produce green energy; no national energy policy.
2. Pollution: worse than ever, especially in water bodies, er, like the oceans.
3. Infrastructure: you name it: bridges, roads, sewers, water mains, etc. Don't forget publich schools.  A lot of this infrastructure is rotten or rotting away. 
4. National mass transit rail system: Duh! We used to have one of these and tore it up.
5. Affordable healthcare for everybody.
6. Influence of big money in elections.
7. New state-of-the-art air traffic control radar system
8. Substantive tax reform 
9. [Add your own: I can't think of any more, but I'm sure there are.]