The bright side of life - revisited

“When you’re chewing on life’s gristle

Don’t grumble, give a whistle”

Eric Idle

I am in the process of reworking a lot of my material, looking to see if I could ever make a book out of it all, trying to see what, if any, threads of thought might hold it all together. This is a rough draft of some of the reworkings. Thank you for your patience. DS

David Seaton's News Links

Things are looking pretty dismal at the moment. The economic situation is the worst in my lifetime, and I was born at the end of WWII.  The bad news comes fast and furious. When I am subjected to an information overload, I occasionally experience some sort of intuitive flash connected to images, a sudden understanding/epiphany/gestalt.

The other day the Tea Party movement revealed itself to me in a poetic metaphor that put them into a different perspective. Something that although just as grotesque, is at the same time touchingly human in its vulnerability.

It came to me that the Tea Party movement with their confused and confusing agenda, the open carrying of fire arms in Starbucks, the birthers, the militias, the “Last Days” crowd, the Limbaughs, the Becks, and all the assorted, foxy, incoherent mishegoss that goes with them is one and the same thing as collagen lip injections, faces paralyzed with botox or toupees and comb overs: a self-deceiving escape from the inevitable. Fooling the mirror perhaps, but nobody else, certainly not Father Time or the Grim Reaper or the great undercurrents of events. This escapism from the simplest of realities is one of the hallmarks of our era.

The Tea Baggers, like the botox zombies, are just whistling past the graveyard.

Everything we are living right now, from global warming to the juking and jiving of the financial system, from exploding population in poor countries, to aging populations in the rich ones, is crying out for more regulation, more control, more transparency and more taxes to pay for it. This is either going to happen or our world is going to disintegrate into a devil’s stew of famine, pollution, explosively intolerable inequality and endless war… not necessarily in that order.

The world of the future will be a world of control or it wont be.

The world of the future will be a world of iron rules and regulations and with all the privacy of a nudist camp, or it will be a nightmare beyond our powers to imagine.

This process is as inevitable as aging leading to dying.

People do some some weird stuff when staring down the one that the Spanish call “the bald lady”… death.

Just as an aging woman who has had her lips blown up like Donald Duck fools herself into thinking she is still desirable, someone who walks into Starbucks with a pitiful little pistol on his hip fools himself into thinking he has power over his life and future. He sips his latte made from coffee grown in an impoverished third-world narco-state and sits there worrying about a dark skinned “socialist” coming and taking his little gun away.

The word “socialism” is thrown about with so much abandon. The word is used as an automatic disqualification, something both strange and sinister, touched with the “Mark of the Beast”.

However, the world we are fast approaching would be fortunate if it were somehow connected to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, somehow an expression of international solidarity. Because the alternative, at best, would be a global version of a huge Indian slum, a human ant’s nest crossed by open sewers, filled with hunger, anger and disease or living skeletons listlessly wasting away in starved apathy: the world’s misery huddled at the feet of a few gated communities, heavily guarded by… Predator drones.

Even before our Friedmanite economy showed us its athlete’s feet of clay, we could see that fossil fuels were a finite source and that their continued use might make it difficult for our species to survive.

And if the economy does pick up again, the Chinese and the Indians imitating the American Way of Life with its phenomenal waste of fossil fuel energy could lead to God knows what kind of terminal ecological collapse.

Of course the problem is that to sustain itself our economy must grow constantly, like a bicycle that will fall over if it ever stops. The fact is that we may “running out of road”, reaching some sort of limit, a sort of musical chairs, where the few chairs left have already been taken by the rich while the great mass of the world’s population mills around with nowhere to sit and little to eat after the music stops.

It would seem obvious to me that if we are not going to see the world entirely degenerated into some Hobbesian dystopia, we are going to have to create and run a very tightly organized, strictly regulated and equitable order of society. If the trends we see today continue, I believe that will be inevitable, so fast becoming inevitable, that even a person like me, in their mid 60s, might live to see it.

The question, will be how to preserve the republican trinity, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in such a tightly ordered society.

These three things often don’t go together or are mixed in very weighted proportions.

Lets look at Germany before the collapse of Communism:

In East Germany, for example, you had a very sinister secret police and steady repression of all dissent. You had very few consumer goods and no freedom to travel. However, you also had total job security, a good free school system (Angela Merkel is a product of that system) and subsidized housing and free health care.

That system was defeated because Western Germany had strong labor unions, good free schools and health and subsidies… and also freedom of speech, assembly, travel and abundant consumer goods… No contest. Obviously West Germany’s “Social Market Society” came closer to “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” than “Real Existing Socialism” did.

However in the future, because of the need to husband fossil fuels and other natural resources, we will probably find ourselves stripping out the abundant consumer goods from the mix and certainly mass tourism to the four corners of the earth, with its frivolous burning of ever scarcer oil, will be a fairy tale that today’s children will tell their grandchildren about.

If we are going to be moving toward a world of limited energy use, zero growth sustainability, less possibility to travel and fewer consumer goods and so forth, about the best we could hope for would be East Germany without the Stasi and with free speech, assembly and habeas corpus.

Right now the dynamic of our system seems to be to “Friedmanize” the world and break down social democracy wherever it is found, impoverish people and make their lives precarious.

This sort of society where the majority is impoverished, while a minority becomes amazingly rich, has been proven to only work with a military dictatorship and police state repression… and even then hunger and precariousness cannot go on beyond a certain point without engendering revolutionary movements.

Admittedly the human animal can continue to flourish in conditions where any other self-respecting mammal would stop breeding and go extinct, but even so, if you oppress them enough, they turn and bite.

Certainly if you increase the percentage of the poor and precarious beyond a certain level the word “freedom” begins to take on different nuances: freedom from what? freedom to do what? That is when some version of Equality, Fraternity, without Liberty, a version of East Germany “uncut” might seem very attractive to many desperately poor and insecure people.

If any young person is looking for something useful to do with their lives, helping to organize and build a world where free people live in brotherhood, sharing out the world’s limited resources equitably, would certainly fill the bill. DS

Rafting down shit creek under "Matthew's Rules"

Matthew's Rules:
"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." Matthew 3:12

"Them that's got shall get/Them that's not shall lose/So the Bible said and it still is news." Billie Holiday

David Seaton's News Links

I'm always on the lookout for the right metaphor, the one that sums something up with one image, and "rafting" came to me as one that describes the economic, soon to be social, crisis we are all living through right now.

Rafting isn't like sailing a boat, where, taking into account the direction of the wind and ocean currents, you chart a a course and sail to it with the possibility of changing your mind and sailing back. In rafting, once you are in the river there is no turning back; all you can do is hold on tight and try to keep your boat from hitting rocks, or turning over. This can be exciting when led by an expert guide who makes the descent several times a week or even several times a day, but no fun at all when the river's depth, speed, approaching rocks or waterfalls are unknown.

That is the case of the crisis we are living through now, nobody really understands what is going on or what is waiting around the bend.

Matthew's Rules:

We may not know where we are going, but we do know where we have been. A tiny group of men and women (almost all of them men, really) have created a speculative bubble and burst it, and those who created the mess made enormous fortunes blowing the bubble up, made enormous fortunes betting against their own bubble, received enormous bailouts of taxpayer's money when the bubble burst and are making enormous fortunes while you read this. And all of this is something which is creating untold pain and hardship for most of the world's population and may be the beginning of a historical period as dark as the 1930s.

Here is how William Pfaff puts things into perspective:

A feature of modern capitalism, in which the United States seems currently the leader, is that the country where corporations are effectively headquartered have impoverished schools, rotting, rusting infrastructure, and third world social and health facilities, while billions are paid to corporate and banking executives. This is a moral scandal even though economic elites promoting the dominant economic theory prevailing until now in the leading free-market countries have identified morality as a source of market distortion and economic inefficiencies. Self-admittedly profligate Greece did not invent the world crisis, nor did Portugal, Spain nor Italy. The guilt lies with the United States, source of modern intellectual global leadership and exemplar of democracy. It did not even have a serious reason. Americans did it to make money gambling with other people’s money.

That's pretty cold stuff, but, as usual, Pfaff has nailed it. The frivolity of the whole thing adds insult to injury.

Perhaps the only bright spot in the whole mess is that the crisis has finally eviscerated what the French call neo-liberal "pensée unique", the intellectual structure of this particular chapter of capitalism, which Pfaff calls, "the Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, School of Chicago fantasy".

With the Soviet Union's brand of "real existent socialism" and Milton Friedman's version of "real existent capitalism" both now in smoking ruins, maybe some serious new thinking may arise.

What is obvious, at least to me, is that things like human rights and financial regulation have to be packaged together so tightly that no daylight appears between them. I don't think this is going to happen in China, I'm sorry to say that I don't think it is going to happen in the USA, in any foreseeable future, either.

The historically unique crisis that is transpiring around the euro, may have the seeds of this human rights and multinational regulation model, that is surely the only path forward if globalization is going to be anything but a raft to hell. DS

Tiptoe on the tightrope

David Seaton's News Links
A couple of days ago I uploaded a post about the idea that the "productivity revolution" was the starting point for today's economic fright. Among several interesting comments, I got these questions from News Links reader, Steve Crawley:

I would like to hear the rest of the story from you about the post-collapse era. Here are a few prompting questions to hopefully get you started. Assuming technology and advanced communications continue be with us, will they contribute to improving our national economic or is something else needed? Do you agree social instability has not yet arrived, but is just around the corner? Or is there another path that is necessary for some sort of economic and possibly social stability to return?

To begin to answer Steve's questions, I would have to start with Yogi Berra's famous caveat, that it is difficult to make predictions... especially about the future. Yuck, yuck.

Talking to people that are supposed to know about this stuff, they seem to agree that the most orthodox way out this mess is to devalue ones currency, up productivity and cut wages...

If my idea is correct that upping productivity has already cut jobs and stagnated or lowered the salaries of many if not most remaining jobs and made it necessary to lend money to people with little hope of paying it back just to keep the whole mishagoss in motion, then you can see that the last two items on the list -- upping productivity and lowering wages -- would eventually only lead to more unhappiness.

This assumes of course that I am right and that the absolutely amazing gains made in productivity since the personal computer and the Internet were wedded to industry are what is behind all of this mess.

As to what the contributions technology and advanced communications might make to improving our national economy. I've just read Fareed Zakaria's recent and quickly outdated book, "The Post American World", where Zakaria writes about advances in nanotechnology:

At some point in the future, or so I'm told, households will construct products out of raw materials, and businesses will simply create the formulas that turn atoms into goods.

The idea is that you put some powder you order on the Internet into a washtub, add water and out walks a TV set, thus putting millions of Chinese people out of work.

Whether this ever happens or not, the fact that somebody might think it was a good idea and that a lot of money was being invested in making it happen would have to put you on your guard a bit: it's the thought that counts.

So as to "social instability" being just around the corner, that all depends where the corner is. Is this crisis the turning of that corner?

I think the real "corner turner" will be the crisis that comes from the remedies that are being applied in this present crisis.

This particular crisis is about a vacuum in credibility. It isn't exactly America's "fall of the wall" moment... yet, but it is moving in that direction. Think what it means when a whole ideology crashes.

When I was a young fellow many people truly believed, and had made huge personal sacrifices all their long lives in the belief that history's inevitable march was toward socialism and that the Soviet Union was the genuine vanguard in that march. Many were still believing it right up till the moment when Gorbachev pulled down the Red Flag on the Kremlin.

It is impossible to exaggerate what an intellectual and political hole that left... a hole big enough for people like Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush to walk through.

The Madoff scandal is the quintessential caricature of the whole moment. The idea that people had around the world had was that American Jewish people were the only people intelligent enough to really understand advanced financial products and it turns out that America's richest, therefore smartest, Jewish people were as stupid as it was possible to be, even Madoff himself to ever think he could get away with it, all this destroying centuries of malignant stereotypes of preternatural craftiness at the worst possible and inopportune moment.

The bottom line is: If America's richest Jews are just as stupid as the rest of the world's goyim, then... who is minding the store?

Substitute "American" for "Jewish" and you've got the whole idea of this crisis's implications.

So, with the deflation of Real-Existing Socialism and now Pensée Unique we are now going to have to fake it.

Digging through the ruins of Marxism, we can probably find some useful and recyclable refuse. One idea that people are going to be rolling around again is that capitalism is a historical "phase" like feudalism with a beginning, middle and end.

I don't think it is ending now or anything like it, but people are now going to take seriously the idea that it will end at some point and if nothing else table talk is going to be more interesting. DS